Pearl in a clam shell with ferns

The dredge came up heavy on Tuesday, and Skipper Ruddock swore it was a boulder until the net swung over the rail and the whole cod end split open on the deck. Weed everywhere, that feathery green stuff you used to pick off the pier posts when we were kids, tangled through the rope as if someone had tried to knit the sea. Among the stones and crabs there was a clam shell the size of my palm, lying open as though it had been caught mid-yawn, and sitting in the hollow of it, grey as a gull's egg, was a pearl.

Ruddock wanted it thrown back. He said a clam that size had been down there since before his father's boat, and that taking anything from the old beds brings the weather in. Jim Hale laughed and said the weather had been coming in for forty years regardless. I didn't laugh. I held the shell in both hands while the others went back to sorting, and it was cold in a way that put me in mind of Mum's kitchen the morning after she died, that particular quiet.

I kept it. Nobody asked me to give it back, which I suppose is its own sort of permission. It's in my bunk now, wrapped in one of your old jumpers, and the roots of weed have dried into fine brown threads that I keep meaning to brush away and never do.

The pearl is not for sale, whatever Hale says. I told him the shell had gone over the side in the night, and he believed me, because I have never once lied to him before. When we're in on Friday I'm taking the train up to Whitby to walk out to the end of the pier, and I'm going to put it back where the weed grows thickest. Come with me if you can get the time off. The sea will keep it better than I can.

Love, Nell