No Further Record: A Novel

A body comes out of the Rowley marsh in the autumn of 1741, fifty years after it went into it.The minister sends for Patience Hartwell. She is thirty-eight, unmarried, the daughter of the last minister, and the only person left in the parish who can read the old hands. He asks her to search the church records for a name.She finds a page that was never bound in. A cabinet that appears on no inventory. Twelve ruled pages scraped clean of the signatures they once carried. And at the foot of the matter, in a careful hand, the words this parish has used for fifty years to close a thing forever: no further record required.The town understands what she is doing before she does. A door that has stood open every day of her life is closed. A deacon does not return her greeting on the road. A letter arrives that can take her house.And an eighty-four-year-old woman walks four hundred yards in the cold to tell her what she saw on a night in 1691, because she is the last one living who saw it.Patience Hartwell cannot prove the half of it. She sets it down anyway, and says in the paper itself exactly how far it can be trusted, and no further.Grounded in the record. Rowley is a real town, settled in 1639 by families who followed Ezekiel Rogers out of Yorkshire, and the salt marsh at its edge is a real marsh. So is the haying of it, and so is the long argument in the Essex County towns over what was held in common and what was held by a man and his heirs. England and her colonies kept the Julian calendar until 1752, and every weekday named in this novel has been checked against it.A literary historical novel of colonial New England, for readers drawn to the quiet machinery of institutions and to the people who will not let a thing be closed.David S. Morgan is the author of The Observatory, In Her Own Hand, and The Company Safe.