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I told her the witch does not take callers. She said she had a shell to sell, the one her Tom brought home from the Wrackhead wreck the year before he drowned, and she wanted it weighed against the debt on his boat. So I took her down to the shingle at the turn of the tide, where the water had gone glassy and lit from underneath like a lantern somebody had dropped. Up out of it came those purple arms, slow and curling, and above them the witch herself, grinning with more teeth than is decent, a gold crown sat on hair like wet wool.

She tapped the shell with one grey fingernail and said the boat was worth nothing and the shell was worth a great deal more, and then she laughed until the bubbles rose in sheets around us. Mrs Ferris did not flinch. She unhooked the shell from her neck, which I had never once seen her do, and held it out on its chain. The witch took it, turned it to the light, and hung it back round her own throat. Then she lifted that gold trident of hers and drew one bright line across the water, and the debt on the boat was gone from the ledger by morning.

Mrs Ferris walked home dry. I noticed she had left her Sunday gloves on the shingle, so I have hung them in the back room. Come and fetch them when you are down for the regatta. The tide is kinder to you than it is to most.