Bryony
Twenty-seven days to the weld. Morning.
The clerk had a cold.
He sniffed all the way down the stair, and while he spread a cloth on the bottom tread and set out his little bottles on it in a row. Twelve. Corked. None of them bigger than my thumb. Then he looked at the door like it might have a go at him.
"Does it," he said. "Will it."
"No," I said. "It's paid. It's on the wedge. You could dance a jig in it."
He didn't look like a dancer. He looked like a man who'd been told the night before that he was the Guild's counting clerk on a writ and hadn't slept since.
The sergeant was on the stair behind me. All of him. He'd sat down three steps up with his knees round his ears again, and every time I moved he moved his head to keep my hands in sight. He wasn't sly about it. He just watched my hands like you'd watch for a pin you've dropped on a dark floor.
Door one stood in on its hinges, on the Guild's iron wedge, with the dark of the strongroom behind it. In daylight, what daylight got down that stair, you could see the work.
Rot it, Hollin.
Behind the plate, on the strongroom side of the frame, he'd let a glass into the iron. A column of it, thick as my wrist and a hand long, the green of an old bottle, standing upright in a collar of brass with a cap on top. The cap screwed down. The thread on it was so fine you'd want a lens to count it, and he'd cut it by hand, I'd swear to that, because the start of it was a hair off true where he always started a hair off true and caught it up on the second turn. I put my thumb on the cap and knew whose it was.
"What's that?" said the clerk.
"That's the keep," I said. "The glass where your toll ends up."
"Toll."
"What the door takes. It goes in there." I tapped the glass. "One bead for every time somebody pays. Newest on top."
He crouched. You could see them, if you got your eye low. Three beads, sat one on another in the bottom of the column like drops of oil on water, round and fat and not touching, not mixing, each with its own bit of colour in it. The bottom two were old and dull. Strangers'. Whoever came through Hook Street to the Bank's agency in the months it stood, and paid, and went in, and came out lighter.
The top one was clean. Yellowish. Linseed oil, about.
Mine.
"And they just," said the clerk. "Stay."
"Till somebody takes them."
"Who'd take them?"
"Nobody," I said. "That's what your wedge and your wax are for."
He got a glass straw out of his case, and I unscrewed the cap for him because he'd have stripped it. The thread went round sweet as you like. Second turn, caught up true. I put the cap down on the cloth thread up, out of the grit.
He drew the top bead. It went up the straw like a drop of syrup, slow, and into the first little bottle, and he corked it and held it up to the stair and squinted.
"What did it take?" he said.
"You wrote it down," said Gannet, from the stair. "Yesterday. Her journeyman's morning. Hot brass and the wax."
"So I did," said the clerk, and wrote one in his book.
I didn't look round. I looked at the little bottle on the cloth. Linseed yellow. Corked. Not much bigger than a pea, with my morning in it. I couldn't have told you one thing about that morning except what the sergeant had just said, and what he'd said was words. Brass. Wax. Words.
The clerk drew the second bead. Then the third. Three bottles in a row on the cloth. He had questions, I'll give him that.
"If I drank one," he said. "Just to try."
"Then it's yours. Even a drop. A taster can spit. You wouldn't know how. You'd keep whatever came off on your tongue for the rest of your life, and so would I."
"And if I had one in my pocket. And I went through a deep door."
"It'd weigh you. If the bottle's dearer than whatever's in your head, it has the bottle." I looked at him. "It weighs. It doesn't love. Not the thing you'd most hate to lose. The dearest. Not the same thing, mostly."
He wrote that down too. Then he looked at the open door.
"And when we've done?"
"Your smith knocks the wedge out, and it shuts, and it stays shut till they weld it. Open it after that and it's a new toll."
"It'd have something else off you," said the clerk, "if you opened it again."
"Yes," I said. "Thank you."
Boots on the stair. Somebody coming down whistling, which you don't do on a stair like that unless you've never been on one.
It was Tobin Vane.
I'd have known him in the dark. Long. Too long, like he'd been pulled. Hollin's boy, Perpetua's brother, the one who never wanted the trade and so never had to earn it. Blue to the elbows from the dye-works he'd got off the Guild, and scars up both forearms, shiny, old burns from the bottle-works before that. He had a round loaf under his arm, and he went straight past me and held it out to the sergeant.
"Breakfast," said Tobin. "Pet says you'll waste to a rail."
"I'll not," said Gannet. "There's too much of me to waste." But he took it.
Tobin looked at me then. Gave me a grin. Too many teeth in it. "Bryony Pask," he said. "You opened one of Father's. I heard. The whole of Tallow Lane's heard."
"I'm sure."
"What did it take?" he said, to Gannet, not to me, cheerful as a bell. "Go on. I'm asking for a friend. The friend's me."
And the sergeant told him. Sat on the stair with the loaf in his lap, and told Hollin Vane's son about Hollin Vane's thumb in the wax, and the bench, and the rust, every bit, kindly, like handing somebody a file across a bench.
"Do you tell everyone?" I said.
"Everyone who asks," said Gannet.
"He does," said Tobin. "It's awful. You'll get used to it."
I wouldn't get used to it. I turned back to the cloth.
The clerk had his head down, writing. Tobin was leaning in the door looking at the keep, saying "Father did that? With his hands?" Gannet was pulling the loaf apart.
My bottle was on the end of the row. Nearest me.
I've had my hands in other people's locks since I was nine. You don't learn that without learning the other thing. I put my palm down flat on the cloth beside the bottles, like I was steadying myself, and when I lifted it the end bottle came up with it, tucked in the crease where the heel of the hand meets the thumb. Nobody could have seen it. I couldn't have seen it, and I was looking.
A hand closed over mine.
Big. It covered my whole fist and the wrist besides. It didn't grip. It just closed, and stayed, and it was warm right through, warm like it'd been holding something hot, which it had, it had been holding the bread.
I didn't look up. Nobody else on that stair had hands that size.
"Put it back," said Gannet. Quiet. Not for the clerk.
"Bank's dog," I said.
"Guild's," he said. "And nobody's dog."
He didn't take it off me. He could have opened my fingers like a pair of pliers. He just kept his hand there, round mine, warm, till I opened them myself.
I put it back. End of the row. Corked. Linseed yellow.
He took his hand away, and my hand was cold where it'd been, colder than it had been before he put it there, which is a stupid thing for a hand to do, and I put it in my pocket and left it there.
The clerk looked up. "Three," he said. "That's right, isn't it? Three?"
"Three," said Gannet.
So that's how it'd go at door seven. Not the cells. Not the captain. Him, at my elbow, with his hand, telling the Guild yard every bit of it. If I wanted my mother's bead, I'd need him looking somewhere else.
Fine. Everybody looks somewhere else in the end.
The clerk poured them back. Bottom one first, so they'd sit in their order. He did it badly, and I didn't help. Mine went in last and sat on top. I screwed the cap down. Second turn, caught up true.
Then the smith came down with his maul and knocked the wedge out, two blows, and Hollin's door came round on its three pins, slow, heavy, glad, and shut with a sound like a full cask set down on a cellar floor.
That was door one. Mine, in there, till the weld.
I went up the stair first. Third step. Over it.
They'd loaded the tools for door two on a handcart in Hook Street, the Guild's crowbars and their lantern and a coil of rope and the second wedge, and the sergeant pushed it. Tobin went off to his vats. Good. I walked beside the cart with my roll across me and didn't talk. Neither did Gannet.
He's the size of a door himself, which is annoying, because I'd have liked to look down on him. In daylight he was freckles everywhere, even on his ears, and hair that had been cut by somebody who was angry with it, probably him. Guild coat let out twice and given up on. He ate the loaf going along in great tearing bites, like somebody might take it off him, and when he caught me looking he held out the last of it.
I didn't want it. I took it. Don't ask me why I do things. Ask a lock.
We came down Fish Row onto the quay. Gulls. Barrows. Nets out drying. A man in a good brown coat gone thin at the elbows was coming up from the Penny Cellar way with a basket on his arm, and he lifted his hat to the sergeant like they were old friends.
"Master Esk," said Gannet.
"Sergeant." Esk had a soft, worried sort of face. "Is it true there's one opened? What did it take?"
And Gannet told him. Walking. Pushing the cart. Hot brass, the thumb, the wax. Esk said, "Oh, dear," like he meant it, and lifted his hat to me too, and went on up the Row with his basket.
I walked faster. The cart came on behind me anyway. It's hard to get away from a man pushing a cart. He's got wheels.
The Salt Steps go down from the quay into the harbour in a long stone flight, worn to a dip in the middle by three hundred years of feet. At high water the bottom half's under. At the low you can walk down onto the weed and the mud. The chandler's shop sits up top with its cellar dug in under the Steps, and the cellar's flood grating is in the harbour wall at the foot: a great iron grid you could put your arm through. I live up over the sailmaker's on the other side, two windows and a vice on the sill. I'd been looking at that grating for three years and never once thought about what was behind it.
There was a lighter tied up at the foot. A big broad flat-bottomed thing, tarred black, with a little cuddy at the back with a stovepipe and a washing line, and a woman in the middle of it taking tools off a man on the step and stowing them under the thwarts. Wenna Coyle. Everybody on the Steps knows Wenna. She's broad and weather-red, with a laugh you can hear from the Bank. The Guild had hired her boat for the writ, for the doors that are on the water. She lives on it.
"That's the lot for tomorrow, ducks," she said, to the man on the step, and to Gannet, "Put that cart down before it puts you down. Rope, rope, lantern. Wedge. Who's having the wedge?"
"Me," said Gannet.
"Course you are."
He handed things down. She stowed them fast, without looking, and the lighter sat down a hand's breadth in the water with every load.
I stood on the Steps with my roll and the end of the loaf in my fist.
Wenna looked up at the two of us, him all freckles and shoulders on the step, me a head and a half lower with my mouth full, and she laughed.
"You two'll be wed by Lammas, ducks," she said.
"I'd sooner marry the harbour," I said.
"It's had a few," said Wenna, and slung the coil of rope into the bow.
Gannet's ears went dark.
"What's down there?" I said. I pointed at the grating. "Door two. What's it like?"
"A cellar," said Wenna. "Chandler's. You get in through that grating at the low and you've an hour before the tide comes back through it, if you're lucky, and you'll not be. It fills to the roof by high water." She tied off. She stood up in the boat and put her hands in the small of her back. "Bring a spare pair of legs."