The visitor book by the door is a ruled ledger with a pen on a chain, and people write their name, where they are from, and a line, and the churchwarden reads it on a Monday. Most mornings there is an entry dated the night before, in a copperplate hand, from a village that was cleared in the 1890s, and the ink has not dried.
I am the churchwarden who reads the visitor book, which I do because it is the nearest thing we have to knowing who found us.
How the book is kept.
A hardback ledger on the table by the door, a pen on a chain, and a card that says please sign. I read it on a Monday and copy the numbers into the parish return. When a book is full it goes in the vestry cupboard with the others, back to the fifties.
The church is locked at dusk.
Most mornings the last entry in the book is dated the night before and is in a hand none of the day's visitors have.
Copperplate. A proper trained hand, upright, with the long s in one word, which nobody has written since the eighteen hundreds, in the book's own pen, in the pen's own ink.
The name changes. The place does not. It is a village three miles from here that was on the old maps and is not on the new ones, because it was cleared when the reservoir went in, in the eighteen nineties, and its church went under the water.
The ink is wet at nine.
That is the detail that took it from a puzzle to something I have not told the vicar. A ballpoint dries in seconds. This entry, written, by the date, the previous evening, smudges under my thumb at nine in the morning, every time, the way ink does when it was written a minute ago.
What has been checked.
The door and the alarm, which show the church shut and quiet.
The pen. A ballpoint on a chain. I replaced it with a different make, and the copperplate carried on in the new pen's ink, and the entry was wet at nine.
The book. I have taken it home overnight, twice. Both mornings the entry was in it, on my kitchen table, wet, dated the night before, in a house where nobody had been up.
The names. Twenty six different ones over two years. I have found nineteen of them in the burial register of the drowned church, which the county holds, all of them buried there between 1850 and 1893, and I stopped looking after nineteen.
The line.
Everybody writes a line. Lovely church. Peaceful. Remembering my mother.
The copperplate entries write the same line, in every hand and under every name. It says, we are still here.
What is done about it.
The entries are in the book, because you do not tear a page out of a visitor book, and they are not in the parish return, because the return asks for visitors and I do not know that they are that.
The old books in the vestry cupboard, which I went through one afternoon, have the same hand in them, in ink that is dry now, back to the first book, with the same line, and a warden before me has written beside one of them, in pencil, in 1961, the word again.
What I do.
I read the book on a Monday.
The one thing I have changed is that I read it in the morning at nine, every day, rather than on a Monday, and I blot the entry with the blotting paper that is in the cupboard for the registers, and the blotting paper takes the ink, and I keep the sheets.
I started doing that after a morning in the spring when I came in at nine and the entry was there, wet, and as I looked at it the pen on its chain lifted off the table, an inch, and set itself down, the way a pen is put down when somebody has finished writing, and the entry on the page had changed under my eyes from the night before's to that morning's, dated, in the copperplate, and it said, thank you for reading them.