Small outline heart on a finger

Ada Pell kept the gates at Stourhythe lock the summer the river ran brown with clay. Her father was laid up with his chest, so she kept the lock book too, written in the iron-gall ink he mixed himself. One evening Tom Ransley tied his butty to the bollards and asked her to wed him before he took the Marigold down to Gloucester. She said yes before he finished. Then, to be contrary, she dipped a needle in that black ink and pricked a small heart on the side of her finger, drawn in one line, never lifting, so there would be no join to go wrong. Tom said it looked like a pen stroke that had thought better of itself. She said that was the point.

The Marigold did not come back that autumn. The flood came off the hills in October and jammed the bottom gates, and Ada worked the paddles three nights alone with a lantern clipped to her collar. When the water fell, a boat lay upturned in the reeds below the weir, and the lock book had a new entry in her careful hand, a line with no name beside it. She shut the book and did not open it for nine years.

Then one March a man in a brown coat came up the towpath with a limp and stood on the lock beam without a word. Ada held up the finger with the little heart. He laughed the way he always had, and said he had come to see whether the gates still opened. She took his hand, and below them the water ran on through the sluice, the way it always had.