M. A. SHOREWELL

The White Cord

A novel

In the lake town of Lowmere, the words on the harbor stone are older than anyone’s grandmother: THE BOAT WILL COME. BE FOUND AT THE WATER. So every morning at first light the keepers come down the lane with their stools and sit along the shore wall, one to a post, facing the water, until the noon bell. At sixteen each of them has a white cord tied at the wrist.

Mara Venn is corded at sixteen and keeps her post for sixty-three years. When her dearest friend crosses the lake to marry and asks her to come too, she says no, and cannot say why. Her grandson Tam is never corded at all. He builds a landing out into the water from the end of the wall instead, and lights a lamp at the end of it. And Wren Marsh, a girl who would rather be out on the lake than beside it, has to choose for herself.

Now and then, years apart, a light is seen far out on the water. Nobody can say what it is.

The White Cord is a quiet novel about a town that waits, about the people who sit and the people who leave and the one who builds, and about what a life spent watching the water is made of.

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Paperback.