The Salt Registry

The lock-keeper would not sell his grief. He sat three hours in the receiving room of the House of the Weepers, refused the salt-water, would not give the name of his dead wife, and said he had come only to hear, to his face, why they believed they could take from him the last thing he had left of her. For two hundred years the salt-town of Sécheron-les-Vasières has sent its sorrow away. The salt must be got in. The fever rises off the marsh every August and takes the children first, and a town that stops to weep does not eat, so the bereaved pay their fee, have the grief drawn out of them, and go back to the drying-pans dry-eyed. What is taken is stoppered in glass and shelved in the cold cellar of the Salt Registry. Aurélie Sème is the finest weeper the house has ever had. She has carried the grief of hundreds. She can no longer find her own. Matthias Corvel is the first in twenty years to refuse her. And he wakes in her the one thing she is paid never to feel.