Bryony
Eighteen days to the weld. Morning.
Old Mister Selby wouldn't let anyone else pay his door.
He said so in his own hall, in a velvet cap and carpet slippers, with a stick in one hand. Chandler's Hill. A tall thin house, a scrubbed step, a brass knocker shaped like a fist, and a smell of beeswax and boiled cabbage. His housekeeper stood behind him with her arms folded, looking at me as if she'd been asked to mind a baby that wasn't hers.
"Thirty years I've paid it," said Selby. "Not a girl. Not the Guild. Mine."
"It may take your legs, sir," said the clerk, and sneezed.
"It's had my legs before."
An old man had just taken a door off me. My back came down from wherever it had been since Hook Street, like a spring let off its catch. The stair carpet was worn pale at every tread by thirty years of one pair of slippers. It was the first thing I'd liked in a week.
Selby turned his pockets out on the hall table to show us. A button. A length of string. A lozenge gone to fluff. "Carry nothing," he said. "That's the secret of it. The door takes the dearest thing you've got on you. So have nothing on you, and it takes a crumb."
It doesn't weigh pockets. It weighs you. I'd have told him so, but he'd been right for thirty years, and I kept my mouth shut.
He took a key off a ribbon round his neck. Long, black, plain. A four-lever, and a child could have lifted it. He unlocked the cellar door at the stair head and we went down after him in the dark, the clerk with his basket, the smith with the wedge, a constable with a lantern, Gannet stooping, me.
"Nobody else has had this key," said Selby, going first, one step and one stick. "Not in thirty years. Not my wife, when I had one. Coal cellar's through there, behind the slack." I didn't look. The captain had said no more hatches.
The door stood at the end of the passage. Hollin's hinges, Hollin's mark, no keyhole. A square of iron at chest height, the plate shining like a doorstep. Thirty years of one palm had rubbed the rust off it in an oval. He'd never grabbed at it. He'd laid his hand there as you lay a hand on a horse you've owned a long time.
I'd put mine on four of these, and I'd never once thought to be polite.
Selby set his hand in the oval. It fitted. Gannet stood a pace behind and to the left, with his hands behind his back and his face doing nothing, which costs him.
"Hello, old girl," said Selby.
Then he was talking, and it wasn't the hall voice. It had gone thin and quick. "It's a Tuesday, I think. There's a window. The sun's on the cloth. A cup, a saucer, I've put the spoon down. There's a crumb by the saucer, a bit of seed cake, and I'm looking at it. I don't know why I'm looking at it. I'm quite content. That's all there is. A crumb. I've my chin on my hand and I'm looking at a—"
His face went smooth and his mouth stayed a little open, like a man who's lost the end of a joke.
The door went in with no more fuss than a drawer. The smith had the wedge under it before it stopped.
"Was that all?" said Selby.
"A Tuesday," said Gannet, gently. "With a crumb."
"Which Tuesday?"
"You didn't say."
"No," said Selby. "I wouldn't have." And his legs went.
The housekeeper had come down after us with a candle. She got him round the middle before he reached the floor, a small hard woman holding an old man up like a sack of meal. The constable fetched a chair.
The clerk went in with the lantern and came out with bottles.
"Eleven," he said. "Ten old. One new. Pale as milk." He held it up. "Hardly worth the cork."
While he poured them back, bottom first, Selby talked. Old men do, after. It comes out of them like water out of a boot. His knee. The damp from next door's privy. His housekeeper's sister, who'd married a button-seller and never been right since. The glazier he'd had once, who came round the side through the coal-hole in the lane, regular as Lady Day, and never wiped his feet, and had stopped coming last summer, thank God, because of the mess.
I wasn't at the plate. I was at the frame, following the brass cradle sideways through the brick and counting courses. Forty-one. Forty-two. Forty-three.
A boot scraped behind me.
Ivo Dace stood in the passage beyond the lantern with his rule in his back pocket and his head on one side, listening to the iron.
"Out," I said.
"It's a passage," said Ivo.
"It's a Guild count."
"I'm allowed to listen." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the open door and the green glass beyond, with something in his face I'd have called appetite in anyone else. "Thirty years," he said. "That's a deep one."
"It's eleven crumbs."
"I can count, Pask."
The constable said, "Out, sir," and Ivo went, up the stair in the dark with a long look back at the glass. I hadn't heard him come down. It's not like me.
The smith knocked the wedge out. The door went to. They carried Selby up the stairs in his chair, saying he could walk, and he took to his bed, and the key went under his pillow on its ribbon. The housekeeper said so, loudly, at the front door, to the street.
At noon Chandler's Hill was bright and hot and full of carts. Gannet sat on the bottom step of Selby's house with the black book across his knee, and I stood over him and read it upside down.
Door six. Chandler's Hill. Paid by Mister Selby. A Tuesday he couldn't name.
"What did you put for four?" I said.
He didn't look up. "You know what four says."
"Say it."
"A hard night, and she was glad to lose it."
"Take it out."
"It's the Guild's book."
"It's got me in it."
"It's got what you lost. That's all it's for." He shut the pen in it and looked at me. "If it's drunk, it's drunk. This is the only place you'd still have it."
"I don't want it got. I want it mine. It's in a book the captain reads."
"He doesn't read it. He listens to me." He said it as if that would help.
"Then write paid. Nothing else. Every door, from now. And when he asks what it took, say a toll."
"I'm sworn, Bryony. I can't lie."
"I know you can't. I'm asking you not to be a thing that can't."
It sat on the step between us.
His ears had gone dark. "That's not asking me for a favour," he said. "That's asking me to be somebody else."
"Yes."
"Well. I'm not."
He opened the book again and wrote. I looked up the Hill so I wouldn't look at him.
"It's Ivo. He was down there. In the dark, listening at a door with a hole in it. He's tar to the elbows, with a face like a shut gate. He's after something in those keeps and he's not saying what."
"Ivo's after everything," said Gannet. "He's been after the whole port since breakfast."
"Or Tobin. Burnt tinder. Lied about the vats."
"Tobin was frightened. That's different."
"Then Wenna."
He looked up.
"She's on every water door," I said. "That lighter's tied at the Steps the nights the keeps go."
He laughed, big and startled, up at the sky, so that a woman with a basket crossed over. "They all ask! It's the port's good morning. And she hauled you out of a cellar by your collar."
"People who set fires pull people out of them."
"Do they?"
"I don't know. I've never met any."
He put his head down on his arm and shook. When he'd done he wiped his eyes and said, kindly, which was worse, "You're wrong about the lot of them, you know."
"I'm not wrong about Ivo."
"You might be wrong about Ivo."
A boy in a Guild cap came up the Hill at a run with a paper in his fist and stopped in front of us blowing like a bellows.
"From the captain. Both of you. Watch the front of Mister Selby's house tonight, from dusk. Nobody in, nobody out. The old man's the only key and he's gone to bed with it. Report in the morning." He took a breath. "He said please," he added, without much hope.
"He's never said that in his life," said Gannet.
"He said it with his face."
A hatter's doorway, across the street, with a deep step and a view of Selby's front steps, the brass fist of the knocker, and the three windows above it. We were in it by dusk.
He'd brought pies. Three mutton, wrapped in a cloth, and a flask of something that had been tea in the spring. He gave me one, and held out the second before I'd thought to want it, and I took that as well. He ate the third in three bites. Then a lamplighter came by and asked him the time, and he gave the man the flask.
"You're soft," I said.
"I'm not soft. I'm large. It's a different thing."
A candle burned in the top window till eleven. Then the Hill went dark. A cat. A drunk singing something with eleven verses. Two men with a ladder, whom I watched until they turned the corner.
By two it was cold. I'd my hands in my armpits and my teeth shut, and Gannet took his coat off without a word and held it open. I looked at it. Then I went in under it, and stood with my back against a man like a wall in a warm room, and my face went hot, which was cold's fault.
"Bryony," he said, down into my hair. "What you asked on the step. That was a rotten thing to ask. And I'd sooner you asked me rotten things than nothing."
"I've not asked you anything."
"No," said Gannet. "That's what I mean."
I had the start of a sentence about my mother, and my mouth open on the cold. Then a cart went by with a barrel on it and the noise filled the street, and I shut it again.
I must have slept. I woke with my head on his arm and my neck bent at an angle that would have broken a hinge, and the sky behind the chimneys the colour of dishwater. Selby's windows were blank. The step was as wet and clean as the evening before.
"Did anyone come?"
"No." He flexed an arm that had gone dead to the shoulder, and winced, and said nothing about it.
Report in the morning, the boy had said. I had nothing to report but a laugh.