MANUSCRIPT — the prose as a landing surface · every citation grounds, is excluded with provenance, or orphans loudly
the pane renders CitationLanding.pristine verbatim (1-based ¶ + match offsets) — click a note and the quote lands: scroll + a darkroom flash that settles to a quiet tone-coded underline · the ambiguous anchor grounds at two ¶s; the excluded candidate stays visible, dashed, with provenance (hover it: “excluded by you · undo” — never silently gone) · the tide-tables citation orphaned when its ¶ was cut — it reports in the red banner instead of disappearing · this is the open line target every Receipt cite has pointed at since widget 02
The letter had said six o’clock, and at six o’clock the tide obliged, drawing back from the flats until the pans stood ringed with their own salt like frost on a window.
Elspeth came up the cliff path with the deed key on its ribbon and the grey coat over her arm, though the evening was warm and she could not afterwards say why she had carried it.
In the study at Grayfriars the lamps were already lit. Tam had drawn the curtains against the last of the light, which was not his habit, and she noticed it the way one notices a clock that has stopped.
The will lay on the desk between them, folded once, the wren seal broken.
“You will want to read it,” Tam said, and did not look at her.
She read it twice. The first time for the words, the second for the hand — and it was on the second reading that the floor seemed to tilt a little, the way the deck of the Nellie had tilted the morning they cleared the harbor bar.
The third clause was not in her brother’s voice. The rest of it ran the way he had always talked, low water and plain dealing, and then the third clause stood up out of the page in borrowed clothes.
“It is his signature,” Tam said, to the curtains. “Witnessed. I saw it done.”
“So did I,” said Elspeth, which was not true, and both of them knew what it cost her to say it — since the will was changed, there was no one living who could say they had seen it whole.
The lamp guttered. Somewhere below the study window the grey coatcandidate ¶10 excluded by you · undo of the harbor watch went by on the quay, unhurried, as it went by every evening at this hour.
She folded the will along its old crease and set the deed key on it, so that the ribbon lay across the third clause like a strike-through, and asked him, very quietly, who had held the pen.