Free Turning the Stones by Debra Daley

those parts. Were they French? I wonder. I might have asked the stranger to step aside so that I could go past, but I did not. I was very taken by his presence.
    I heard him say in an unfamiliar accent, ‘What an awkward business. The punt goes at that barge like a drunken partner in a longways dance.’ The fisherman sucked on his pipe and said, ‘Aye, we are often troubled to bring cargo ashore. We have no quay here, sir, for we are not deep enough.’
    I remember the stranger’s hair hung down in a long, wrapped queue, which seemed somehow soldierly. Standing at his back, I felt as protected as a defender behind a battlement and it seemed to me that he bore out my theory that people somehow project invisibly the essence of their nature. Just as the master had about him a rather sad little threadbare aura, this stranger shimmered with strength, and although I had not the slightest idea who he was, I felt drawn to him – or, should I say, charmedby him in the sense of an operation of magic. To be near him aroused such interest in me that when he moved a little further down the strand, away from the general focus of the barge, I found myself at once trailing him.
    I had the impression there was something definite on his mind that he meant to accomplish and that he was acting against the grain of the scene, which was something that appealed terribly to me. He struck me as an individualist. Perhaps I found that attractive because of my disposition to aloneness. In any case, I remember blushing violently as he turned. It seemed for a second as if he might notice me. Even now in the recollection my cheek feels heated. He seemed to be someone of experience, but I suppose he was not yet thirty years of age, perhaps even younger. He was somewhat dark in the face, like a man who spends his time outdoors – and he had not shaved that day. I hardly need to mention that he gave no sign at all of remarking the short, scrawny girl lingering in his wake. He was looking towards the southern end of the strand.
    I watched him intently: the way he lifted his head with dawning interest to meet the puff of a breeze as it came off the waves, as if a useful idea had struck him. He had a gamesome aspect about him and at the same time he brought to mind stillness, not moribund haberdashery-stillness but a well of calm, while all else, the master, the frustrated passengers, the labouring cargo boats, was under pressure. Is that why I was drawn to him so?
    A burst of applause sounded as the punt managed at last to clinch with the barge, the crew putting out grappling hooks to steady the two craft alongside one another. The masterattended closely as the boatmen went at their work handing chests from the barge to the punt. I suppose I was vaguely aware of rumours that the master’s business had become scattered and was not up to much, but I was too young at the time for them to signify, for I believed the Waterlands to be of infinite means. My gaze searched for the stranger again and found him in conference with the fisherman beside a skiff pulled up on the tide-line. The stranger then bent to the boat and helped the fisherman to haul a net from it.
    All at once I felt a chill – something was amiss – and I cast a speculative glance around me. I expected to see trouble approaching. And there it was.
    At the southern end of the strand I spied a trio on horseback and my keen eye recognised them even at that long reach. My immediate impulse was to warn the stranger of the approach of the customs man and his constables. I divined that this intelligence would concern him, but he was already absorbed in a course of action, making a beckoning gesture in the direction of the gawkers.
    As the fisherman pulled up the hood of his holey jersey and stole away across the sand, I heard a shout of warning on the wind. Three men detached themselves from the crowd, which was still riveted by the fraught transfer of the cargo on the big swell, and ran to the