Odile
Thirteen days to the winter ship. Dusk.
"No," said Captain Haverill, and turned a page.
I had asked for two men. Two, for two hours, at dusk, to stand about in a harbour they already stood about in for a living. I had laid the saucer of red wax on his blotter, and he'd looked at it and said "Ruddock" before I could, and I had noted that and put it by.
"The Proprietor writes to the boy," I said. "He's put a letter in the boy's hand and a fire under my feet. Wherever the boy goes after dark, I'd like somebody walking behind him who isn't me."
"Where's the boy going?"
"The sea wall. The fourth lamp."
"What for?" said the Captain.
"To see what I'm hunting."
"The Guild's not a nursemaid, Strake." He said it to the blotter. "I've nine men and a harbour full of lightermen I may not lay a finger on. You'll go to your wall with the boy and your tongue, like a grown woman."
It went down plain, with nothing in it at all, like being handed a receipt. I'd have preferred tin. Tin tells you there is something to dig for. This told me only that a man had made up his mind, and I ruled on him then and there: a captain too short of men to say so.
"Then who minds the boy?"
"You do." He looked up at last. "It's in the order."
The Captain got up from his desk in two stages, knee first, and went to the door.
"Nine o'clock tomorrow," I said, to his back. "The clerks. All of them, one at a time, in your back room."
"They're yours." He stopped with a hand on the jamb and rubbed the knee through his breeches. From the landing a voice said, "Captain, if you're going to nurse that knee on my stairs, be so good as to do it at the bottom. My knees are older than yours, and I've forty steps to do before my supper."
"Master Quennell," said Haverill, and went out.
I took my saucer back off his blotter and went to find the boy.
He was on the water-stair, mending a net that didn't need it, with his tinderbox on the step beside him where he could keep an eye on it. He saw me in the doorway and did something quick with his mouth. I'd learned the quick thing by now: the smile going on over whatever had been there first.
"Miss Strake. Have you eaten? You look as if you haven't."
"I've read the Guild's index," I said. "Lot eleven forty-seven. The Vane lot. A third part, less one day."
The net stopped.
"It was six lines," I said. "Your sister sold a summer to pay for your fever, and the Bank cut it up and sold it by the yard, and a third of it sits in the winter ship's hold under an owner's seal. The day they kept back as a sample went to the island, and that's the wall. I'd like to see the wall."
"It's a wall."
"Tin."
"It's a cold wall," said Tobin. "It's no use to anybody. It's got gulls on it."
"Tin again. Is it cold or isn't it?" I waited. "That's your sister's casket and you're after it, and I'd like to know what you want, as it's me you're taking into the hold."
He put the net down, carefully.
"It's my sister's," he said. "That's all of it. I want it out of the box."
Not a mark on it. I'd braced my tongue for tin and it was like biting down on air.
"Then I want the wall," I said. "I'll not be the only one in this harbour who doesn't know what they're fighting over."
He said he'd show me in the morning, and I said no, and he said it would be raining, and I looked at the sky, which was clear to the horizon, and he got up. He put his coat on.
"Dusk," he said. "The lamplighter'll be at the fourth by then. You'd better wear something warmer than that."
"It's what I've got."
"Of course it is," he said.
I ruled on him on the way down, loudly, as I do, so that he could hear. He didn't want to go to that wall because there was something at it. A man he owed; a name scratched on a stone. A boy doesn't put off a visit for a wall.
"You're wrong," he said.
"I'm never wrong."
"You said Ruddock was Mayhew's man."
"I said it might be."
"Might, then. Might's all right. It's only that you say it like a magistrate."
We went the long way, by the ropewalk, so as to come on the wall from the Guild end. Tobin talked the whole way, about the lamplighter, who was called Dunnet and had buried three wives and a dog; about a bakehouse in Tallow Lane that did a currant bun he'd have walked to the island for. Five of it was tin. I counted. I didn't call it. It was a thing he did when he was frightened, and I'd begun to be able to tell the difference between his lying to me and his lying at the air.
The sea wall runs the whole length of the harbour on the town side, wide as a cart and the colour of a bruise, with the old landing steps going down it at every hundred yards, and the lamps along its top on iron posts. Half the port had courted there. You could tell by the stone, which was worn smooth in dips at the right height for two to sit in. I counted the lamps as we came to them. The first two were lit. Behind us a man was working along the wall with his pole and his little ladder, and we got to the fourth a minute before he did.
It was a post like the others. Iron, black, with a glass box on top and a ring of rust round the foot. I put my hand on the wall beside it, and the stone was cold enough to ache.
"Here," said Tobin.
He didn't sit. I did, in one of the dips, and put my back to the post. He stayed on his feet at the corner of the steps with his hands in his coat, and looked at the water and not at me.
"Right," he said. "So you've got a girl, and she's twenty-one, and she's got the loudest laugh in Tallow Lane, and there's a clerk with a lease for her to sign, and he's brought it himself, which is a thing clerks don't do. And he sits on the wall. Here. Where you are. And he's got a pen—"
"Slower," I said.
"I'm going slowly."
"You're going quickly and calling it slow. Say it again." I put the heel of my hand against the stone. "Slower. I want to taste the bit where you mean it."
He stopped.
It was a while before he started. The man with the pole reached the third lamp, and the flame went up in its glass box, small and yellow, thirty yards off.
"I was fifteen," he said.
There was no tin. There wasn't anything else, either. It was the plainest sentence I'd had from him.
"I was down there." He tipped his head at the steps. "Third step from the bottom, where the weed starts, with a bent pin and a crust of bread. You fish for what you can get. It was August. The stone was warm behind my back. You could lean on it and it kept the sun, so you'd have thought somebody had lit it from inside. And up above me, there, where you are, was Pet. And Idris. They'd got a lease to read."
The lamplighter was coming along the wall behind us. I heard the ladder.
"I never saw them," said Tobin. "I was under the wall. I only heard. They weren't saying anything. Whether it'd rain. Whose turn it was to carry the bread. Pet laughed at something and she laughed like something being spilled, and a gull took my crust, and I caught nothing. Nothing. Pet told me one thing about it, walking home. Idris had come straight from the counter with ink to the cuff, she said, and kept his arm down so nobody would see it, and only she did. I'd have been about three feet from the top and I never climbed up to see." He wasn't looking at me. "That's the whole of it. That's the day they kept. I've told you everything that happened, and nothing happened. I've the whole thing in about a minute."
I hadn't a word to put against it.
I'd come to the wall for a great love. I'd come with my tongue ready, and eleven years' worth of the edge in me, to see what the Proprietor would put a house on. And what there was was a stone, and a gull, and a boy with a pin, and two people who weren't saying anything at all. I thought of my parents on the island. They'd have had days like that, a hundred of them, and I'd never once asked what was in them.
"Does your sister know you're after it?" I said.
"She knows where I am," said Tobin.
True, and clean. I let it go.
"And when you've got it out of the box?" I said. "What then?"
"I give it her."
"She may not want it back. People don't, always. It's an odd thing to be handed."
"Everybody wants their own summer," said Tobin, and he said it with such flat certainty that there was nothing for my tongue to take hold of. It was true, in the way a man's own weather is true to him.
The lamplighter reached us. He said "Evening, miss" and "Evening, Tobin" in the same breath, and put the pole up under the glass, and the fourth lamp came on over my head. It laid a yellow ring on the stone round my hand. Tobin's face came up out of the dark in it, blue and tired, with his eyebrows still not grown back.
"Half the port's sat here," he said. "It's only a wall. I don't see what he wants with it."
"I don't either," I said. And that was true, and I had to chew the end of a sprig of parsley to get the taste of it out.
Thirteen days. I said it to the harbour, not him. The lamplighter went off along the wall towards the fifth.
I had the order on my tongue. I'd had it there since the island. Keep the boy close. He'll write to the boy. It was ready, whole, in the right order, and all I had to do was open my mouth and give it to him as he'd given me the wall, flat and plain and with nothing in front of it. He was standing under the lamp with his hands in his pockets, waiting, as if he knew there was something coming and had decided to be pleasant about it.
I held it there until it went flat.
"It's cold," I said.
It was true. He took his coat off. He didn't ask this time, and I didn't say no; I stood up and let him put it round my shoulders, and I put my arms in it. He did the top button himself.
That was the order I carried home. I walked up the quay in his coat with the sleeves hanging past my hands, and he walked on the water side.
That night I wrote my report. I put down that I had visited the sea wall at dusk, with the guide, and I stopped there. I left the page as it was.