The Three of Seven: Book Two - Brass Line: 2

A family says three words at a door. They have said them for four generations. Nobody knows what they mean, and the joke is that nobody has ever needed to. Kathleen O'Sullivan is twenty-seven and she says them the way you say a grace you stopped believing at eleven - fast, at the threshold, to make her mother laugh. Then on a January night a man she has never met says the same three words back to her, and he is not joking, and he does not know her family, and he has come a long way to find out where she got them. Two families have lived in the same small city for a hundred and thirty years and have never spoken. Both carry a fragment. Neither knows the other exists. *The Three of Seven* is the second volume of *The Brass Line*. It is about the specific dread of learning that a private family nonsense is a public fact - and about what happens when the decipherment actually works. Because it does work. That is the thing. The words go to a linguist. The linguist finds the language. The language is real, the grammar is sound, the transmission chain is intact and traceable and, when it is finally assembled, it says nothing at all: a frame with the load-bearing terms worn out of it by four hundred years of mouths that did not speak the language they were carrying. Behind it, in italic interludes, the route: a Cardiganshire parish, a Wexford quay in 1593, a quarantine shed, and a crossing that cost a family every word of its own tongue but three. The answer arrives on schedule. It is complete, it is correct, and it is empty. What the O'Sullivans do next is the rest of the series.