Caldmere was a market town with one street, a pound, and a lake at the foot of it. Women washed at the stone steps, boys filled pails where the stones held it still, and market accounts were settled on a plank table at the water. The reeve was Mert Cauldwell. He had kept that table eleven years and wrote every entry in his own hand. Old Ned Skell fished the lake and was eighty-one. He sat on the landing stage in the mornings with his hands round a mug, watching the water be still. The rule came from Ned in the first warm week, and he said it the one time. Isa was on the steps with her mother’s pails, and she stopped to listen.

“Still water holds a face as it is,” he said. “It starts at the thaw, and it counts from there. If you have said a thing that was not true, and have not said it back in front of the one you said it to, the water will not hold your face. It holds theirs instead, until the thing is said back. Not before, and not to somebody else.” Nobody argued with him about it. Isa thought that odd even then.

The marker was a post at the head of the common grazing. Two rods above it was Tenna Raup’s strip of bank and her line of eel baskets, which had her grandmother’s notch cut in them. In March the old post was put up again after the ice had taken it, and the line was walked with the market looking on. Tenna asked Mert where the old one had stood. The new one was thirty yards down the shore of where she remembered it, and a basket a day was worth having back. “That post was set by my father,” Mert said. “I have never touched it.”

And in the book he wrote that the mark stood where the mark had always stood, which came to the same place on the paper as the truth. That is why nobody checked it for four years.

In June Mert set the plank table at the water. The weirs answered to the height of the water, so before he wrote anything he put his hand on the plank and looked down the bank for the level. He looked a while. Then he did it again from the other side. Isa was in the crowd. She was twelve, and she knew that face, and it was not there. Silla Norn looked too, and saw Silla, exactly as she were, with the same chin she had been complaining about all winter. “The level, Mert,” Silla said. “I need to know the level.” “I saw it,” Mert said.

He said it to the plank and the grass and the crowd. Silla said there was nothing on the water at all, which was what she saw. He tried again that afternoon on his knees on the shingle, and again at first light before the stalls. The water did not move differently for him. That was the part that frightened Isa. Ned came down the stage and watched from a distance. “Cold water,” he said. Nobody wrote it down.

By the middle of July the town had a way of talking about it. The water had turned against Mert Cauldwell. It was the only explanation that fitted, and a person will take a bad explanation over none. Then it went past him. Silla had told the buyer from the crossroads she had no butter to sell him in the spring, when she had eleven barrels in her cold house. In June she looked on purpose every morning for a week. What came up for her was the buyer, an old man in a bad hat. Then three more inside a month, small things. Women washed at the far end, where the water was never still. The town said the lake was costing them.

It was in August that Mert Cauldwell made the custom of the table. Before he wrote an entry he said it out loud, and if the man’s face did not come up out of the water, he did not write it. A liar could not have his business settled at the table at all. Ned Skell said the water counts from the thaw. “He is an old man who fishes,” Mert said, to the market. And the market went along with him. They brought Gert Herrow in on the Friday, because her face had not come up since the thaw. Thirty-one years back she had borrowed four pound off her brother Abel and never said a word about it.

“Speak to your brother,” Mert said, “or go home with your geese unsold.” She said it out loud to Abel in front of everybody. Then Abel took the money off her. And when she looked down afterwards her own face came straight back up, because it was thirty-one years back and not since the thaw.

Isa’s face went in the same month. She had known it would. In March, at the washing steps, Tenna had counted the salt money twice and come up short, and said she would make the reeve open the drawer. And Isa had said, fast, that she had counted it out all right, and that her mother had counted it too. Her mother had not counted it. She had been three fields off with a sick cow. That lie was said in March, after the thaw, and nobody had ever said it back. Tenna washed at the far end now, at the broken water, where nothing came up at all.

Isa looked at the lake for six days and told nobody. On the seventh she filled a wooden bowl out of Silla’s wash tub, carried it up behind the pound and looked in it. Tenna Raup looked back at her. Grey hair, wet, the same straight mouth, the bit of skin under the left eye that had been there since Isa was small. And that was when Isa understood what had made the whole summer make sense. Everybody had been waiting for the lake to hand down a verdict on Mert Cauldwell. It was not holding up a judge. It was holding up the one that had been used. Every face that did not come up in June belonged to somebody owed something by the person looking down.

She told them on the Friday. She carried the bowl out into the middle of the market and set it down on the plank table in front of Mert Cauldwell and everybody, and said it was the same water, that she had filled it from the tub behind the pound. Then she put her face over it, and everybody in that square came to look. What came up out of it was Tenna Raup’s face, and every woman in that square knew it, and Isa did not explain it twice.

That was the end of the lake being angry, though the town took months to accept it. The bowl showed Isa two things. The water held up the person who had been used, not the one doing the using. And the words had to go back to that face, in front of the crowd. So she went to Tenna Raup’s cottage at the far end of the lake, with the bowl on her arm.

Mert Cauldwell had offered everything except the words: the staff, a hazel wand worth nothing, the book, eleven years of it, the key to the pound, and his house. “Nobody is asking you for any of that,” Ned Skell said. “The water has your face, not your money. You want it back, you say the thing to the one you said it to.” Mert said he would say it in a doorway at night, to Tenna alone. She was not having that, and that was why it took until October. She had been looked at once already, in a market, and it had cost her two baskets a day. Isa got her to come by saying her own words back first.

She said it standing in the yard at the washing steps, in front of the whole afternoon. She said the salt money was short, and that she had told Tenna her mother had counted it too when she had not counted it at all, and had said it to keep an old woman out of a court. “Say that again here,” Tenna said, “where the water is.”

So Isa said it again at the shallow stones where the water was still, in front of four women and Ned Skell and nobody else. When she lifted her head her own face came up out of the lake, sunburnt and exactly hers, and then Tenna Raup’s face was in it instead, and Isa stood up with wet knees and did not say a word. Tenna Raup looked a long time. Then she put her hand flat on Isa’s shoulder. “I’ll come on Thursday,” she said. “But I am not coming for him.”

Market day was the ninth of October and the sky was flat and cold. Isa stood by the pound, Silla Norn in the second row, Old Ned on the landing stage. The book lay open on the plank table and the eels were in the crate at its foot.

He read it out in order. He said the old post stood thirty yards above where the new one was, and that he moved it himself in the thaw four years back, because nobody in that market would have stood against the reeve on the question. He said he had told the market twice that the mark was where it had always been, the second time in the March of this year in front of all of them, and had gone three months with the water refusing him for the sake of it. “It is in your own hand,” Ned said. “It is,” Mert said. “Write it out. Put the thirty yards in, and the date, and put my name to it.”

And then he said the last of it to Tenna Raup, in front of the market, which was where he had said the other thing. “I moved your post and I said I never touched it, and you lost two baskets a day of ground, and I took a third of your eels off you on an entry I wrote myself. That was mine and it was not the post’s. You may write it down.” Tenna came up the bank to the table. “Take it out of the book in front of them,” she said. “Then take the fine off me and give the baskets back, and I will wash where I wash.”

They wrote it out. When he had finished, Silla put her hand on his arm and said, “Look at it, then.” He looked at it. It took him three goes to get his face square to the water, because he had not done it since March. What came up was a thin wet face, unshaven, with the sky all over it. Nobody cheered. It was a cold day and there was a queue.

The bowl went round the town with the nurse, because people wanted it, and it went on being a test long after the market had stopped it. But Tenna Raup had the last word, and she had it at the steps in November, when the water had gone to iron.

“I never said the water was angry on him,” she said. “That was us. He had carried that lie about for four years, and every one of us looked at the water for an excuse not to say the words. Then we looked at it long enough and it turned into a court, and the court took four pound off an old woman who had said nothing since the thaw. The water only ever held a face. It never held anybody up as a judge. It was us holding on to it.”