Gannet
Seventeen days to the weld. Evening.
I was going to get a promise out of her, and I was going to do it before the rain.
I'd worked it out as I work out most things, overnight, in a doorway, with a stomach going. She'd paid four doors. I'd paid one, and it hadn't even taken what I'd braced to give. I'd been turning it over for two days like a loaf nobody's bought.
So I'd a speech. It was a good speech. I'd practised it on a gull.
Captain Haverill took my report at five that day, for once, because we'd be on the water when the gate shut. I stood at the bottom of his steps and told him nobody had come to Selby's front door, and the pie I'd had, and he listened to all of it.
"Selby's housekeeper turned my lad off the step this morning," he said. "The master's abed, the key's under his head, and she'd not wake him for the Guild itself. I'll go myself when the eight's done." He looked at the sky over the dockyard, which was the colour of a bruise going yellow, and said nothing about it, because he's a man who says nothing about weather and then blames it.
"Door eight's at the morning low tomorrow. The clerk and the smith will come out in the gig. Pask is to see that stair tonight, in her own time, and not find at dawn it's the wrong sort. Coyle takes you out at the low. Be back by the gate."
"Sir."
"Dismissed," said Haverill.
The tower's at the harbour mouth, on its own spur of rock, and I'd never been nearer to it than the quay. A squat round thing, black with weed to twice a man's height and the colour of a burnt pie crust above, with a few slits for windows and a flag-pole with no flag. Somebody had built it a very long time ago to look at the sea, and the sea had spent all the years since looking back.
Wenna brought us round its harbour side with the oars going long and slow. The water lay down flat and yellow in the low light, and the low itself had drawn the harbour right back off the rocks, so that the tower stood up out of a shelf of wet stone like a cake on a plate, with gulls quarrelling on every ledge.
"It's a short low, ducks," said Wenna. "An hour, and then she's back. So don't dawdle."
The stair went in at an arch on the harbour side, no wider than a coffin stood on end. Steps cut in the rock and gone green, down into the dark and the sound of water, and the plate set at the bottom, where Bryony said the stair gave out on a ledge. Only the one of us would go. The stair wouldn't hold two with any politeness, and she'd said so before I'd opened my mouth.
"I'll hold the lantern."
"You'll hold the landing."
"That's a lantern."
"That's a landing with a lantern on it," said Bryony, and took it off me, and went down.
I stood at the top and listened. I can't look at a lock and tell you a thing, but I can listen to somebody looking at one, and she does it aloud, in a low flat voice, all hello, you and what've you got and don't be clever, and now and then a silence where the lock was answering, and under the silence something that wasn't words, that I took for a draught. It's a courting sort of noise. I don't think she knows. The sound came up the stair and round the wet walls, and I stood in it with my hands behind me.
When she came up she'd a smear of green on her cheek and nothing to say about the plate.
"It's the same as the rest. It's the hatch that's the trouble." She jerked her head at the sea. "Seaward face. Round the other side, where the water is, and there's no boat in the port could lie to it today. It'll want a different sea."
"We've the one."
"We've got this one," said Bryony, and looked past me, and I turned.
In the time she'd been under the rock somebody had taken the yellow off the top of the world and pulled the lid over, and out past the mouth the sea had gone from slate to something that moved in lumps. A squall line was coming in across it, grey, with a white edge on it, and the rain was coming across it like a curtain drawn.
"In," said Wenna. She'd stood up in the lighter. "In, in. That's not a squall, ducks, that's the sky coming down."
We got out as far as the mouth. I'll say that for her. She rowed that boat out into the weather like she was cross with it, and for a minute or two there was hope. Then the first of the big grey lumps came in under the bow, and picked the lighter up, and put it down again about six feet further back than it had been, with a noise like a cart going over a bridge, and Wenna said a word.
"Not across the mouth," she said. "Not in this. The water coming in's going to meet the wind head on, and that's a washing-board."
"The captain said—" I said.
"The captain's not in a boat."
She turned us. It took a lot of language. She ran us back under the tower into the lee of it, on the harbour side, where the rock took the weather off us like a hand over a candle, and put a line through an iron ring in the wall. Another to the stern, to a second. She said we'd stay there until it had blown through, and when that would be was up to the sky.
By then it was proper rain. It came down in rods and bounced a hand high off the planks, and the tower's black wall ran with it, and the noise on the cuddy roof was a hundred frying pans.
"Cuddy," said Wenna. "In. Mind your head, there's a beam."
It's not much of a place. A cupboard with a window. A stove that had been lit when we left and had been put out since, because the wind was coming down the stovepipe and filling the place with smoke, and a bunk along one side, a shelf, with a blanket folded on the end. Grey wool, thick as a door. A smell of onions and rope. The washing line ran across the roof with nothing on it but a single sock, small enough for a child.
"One bunk," said Wenna, "and one blanket that's dry. The rest of my bedding's under the thwarts and swimming. Share it or freeze, ducks, I don't mind which, and I'll have the bow under the oilcloth. I've done it a hundred nights."
"We can't turn you out of your own—"
"You're not turning me out. I'm going. I'm deaf as a post asleep, I'll not hear a thing till the morning." She was already at the door with a lantern, and I said, "Who rows with you, as a rule? She's a lot of boat for one."
"My brother did. Lost him in the spring. Night, ducks," said Wenna, and pulled the door to.
You'll know already that I don't fit in a cuddy. I fit round it. I lay on my back on the shelf with my knees up against the roof and my boots sticking out of the door into the rain, and Bryony lay on her side against the wall with her back to me and a good three inches of grey wool between her and the end of the world, and there was room for all of her and about a third of me.
I'd put the blanket across both of us. It was that or watch her shake. She'd let me.
Rain on the roof, and the slap of the water on the planks, and the ring in the wall creaking on its bolt. I went through the speech in my head. It had been a good one on the quay. It seemed to have got wet.
"Right," I said. "I've a thing to ask you."
"No."
"You don't know what it is."
"It's eight."
"How do you know?"
"You've been breathing at it since the yard."
I turned my face to the roof. "I want you to promise I pay it."
"No."
"I've not given you my reasons."
"You've had them on your face for two days."
"Then you know them, and you'll know I'm right. It's started taking us, Bryony. Not your mam, not Hollin. It's gone from what's yours to what's between us. I stood there in the cold with a door at my mam and it gave me a kettle. And you laughing."
"It was a toll," said Bryony, to the wall.
"It was a very particular toll."
She didn't answer that.
"If it's going to take that sort of thing," I said, "then whoever's paying ought to be the one who's got least to lose, and that's me, I've got a mam and a book and a very low opinion of my own cooking. You've got a trade, and a master, and a mother, and a whole—"
"Stop."
"I'll give you anything," I said.
"I don't want anything."
"I'll carry your vice on my back."
"It's bolted to a sill."
"I'll not eat for a week."
"You'd be dead in a day."
"Then I'll not talk for a day."
"You'd be dead in an hour," said Bryony, and I heard her mouth go, in the dark, against the wall, just once.
"Ask me anything," I said. It was the last thing in the cupboard. "Anything at all. I'll tell you true. Everything I've ever—"
"No."
"It's all I've got."
"It's not yours to give. You gave it away on the Guild's book. It's everybody's." She turned over, then, with the blanket going with her, and I could feel her looking at me in the dark, though I couldn't see a thing. "I said I'd not use you. I meant that."
"You wouldn't be."
"I'd be using what's already in the road."
I lay with my boots out in the rain and thought about that.
"Then say yes, and break it," I said. "I'll forgive you. I'll know."
"I don't lie to you."
"You've not got to lie. You say yes, and later you change your mind, and I say all right."
"That's lying with a delay." Her voice had gone dry as a biscuit. "I'd go back on it the minute it was you. I know I would. So I'll not say it."
"It's seven you're keeping, isn't it," I said at last. "Eight's nothing to you. You'd have given me eight for a pie. It's seven."
Rain. Rain on the roof, and the ring in the wall, and a long time of nothing, so long I thought she'd gone to sleep and was cross with myself for being relieved.
"I wasn't there," said Bryony.
I didn't move.
"That's the whole of it, really. I was in Hollin's old back room, arguing with a spring. A little coiled devil out of a chandler's lock. It had lost its temper and I was trying to find it. And the runner came, and said the Weigh House was alight, and I put the spring down on the bench. So carefully. You'd think it was the thing that might break."
It was the flat voice. The one she does the doors in. But no door had her.
"There was a clerk shut in the strongroom behind the water-gate, and fire between. She put her hand on seven, and she paid it, and she went in and carried him out, and he never woke. Nobody heard what it took off her. She wasn't saying anything to anybody by then." The wool moved. "She went in the afternoon. Smoke. They said she hadn't a mark on her. I got there before noon, and she was sat on the steps in somebody's blanket, and she looked at me like a woman looking for her keys. It's still there, the spring, I expect. I've never been back for it."
"Bryony."
"She pulled me out of the harbour once, off the Weigh House steps. I was six. I don't remember it." She'd said it to the roof. "She did."
I went for the wrong word, as I do. I said, "You must have been angry."
"No."
"Frightened."
"No."
"Ashamed."
She said nothing at all, and that's how I knew I'd got one of them right, and I was so ashamed of how pleased I was about it that I felt around in my pocket for something to do with my hands. I had a bun. I'd had it since the yard and sat on it twice, and it had gone to something you could have put a stamp on. I broke it in half in the dark and held one half out, behind me, over my shoulder, with no idea where her face was.
She took it. She ate it in two bites; I could hear.
"It's flat," she said.
"I sat on it."
"It's flat all through."
"It's honest, anyway."
She laughed. A short one, dragged out of her, and then another that wasn't, and I felt the whole shelf go with it. I'd not heard that. Not the kettle one. That was a different thing, with no notes in it, and I lay and held my breath, like a man who's been left a bird.
Some time after, I said she ought to sleep.
"You first."
"I can't. I'm a head on a roof." That was true; I'd a ridge of the cuddy's beam in the back of my skull. "I think I may be a head on a roof till Michaelmas."
She'd turned, to hear me, and she hadn't turned back. We lay with the grey wool over the pair of us and our faces a hand's width apart. I couldn't see her. I could smell bun, and rain, and the green she'd got off the stair.
Her hand was against my chest. I don't know when it had got there. It was only lying, flat, over the middle button of my shirt, like somebody feeling for a pulse. She'd her thumb crooked in the edge of the cloth, the one with the file-scar. I felt it through the weave.
"Colm."
She's said it to me perhaps four times. I've counted.
I'd like to say I did the right thing. I've gone back over it and I still can't tell you what it was. I was a good deal nearer than a spoon to a bowl, and every part of me was leaning like a boat on a rope. And what came into my head, the whole of it at once, was the yard.
"If I do that," I said, "and the captain asks me tomorrow what I did on the water, I'll have to tell him."
There was a pause.
"What?"
"I'll have to tell him. And if the clerk asks. And if anyone does."
"Who would ask?"
"Everyone. The port. A gull." It was like trying to hold up a plate of soup with a fork. "I'm not saying I wouldn't. I'm saying I'd have to say."
Silence. Rain. A very long one.
And then she put her forehead down on my collarbone and began, with no sound at all, to shake. I thought she was crying. I said her name twice before I understood it was the other thing, and then it came out of her, all at once, a great helpless wheezing gasp of a laugh, and she laughed until the bunk went and the blanket went and she'd to put her fist in her mouth.
"A gull," said Bryony, into my neck. "A gull would."
"They've no discretion."
"Oh, you fool. Oh, you great fool."
"I did say."
"You did say." She was wiping her eyes on my shirt. "Go to sleep, Colm Gannet."
She went to sleep like that, with her hand still on my button and her breath going slow against my collar, and I lay on my back with my boots in the rain and a head full of every wrong thing I'd ever said, and I looked at the roof, and I didn't sleep. I'd had it, and I'd talked.
The rain didn't stop. It slackened about three, and began again, and slackened.
The cuddy door opened at first light, and cold came in, and a grey square of morning, with the rain running off the oilcloth hood of a head in it.
"Blown through," said Wenna. "Sea's laid down. Gig's coming round the point, I can see her oars, and your clerk's the colour of a pea. Bail's done. Well? What did I miss?"
I'm sworn.
"Nothing," I said. "Nearly."