Gannet
Sixteen days to the weld. Evening.
"What did it take, Sergeant? Say it plain."
"A day of mine, sir."
The captain stood on the top step with the last of the light on one side of his face. The gate had shut at the bell. The gulls were up on the roof, the clerk was at the bottom of the steps holding his chest, and a smith was stood about with a bucket, as smiths are. The same yard and the same question, the way he's had it off me every night for a fortnight.
"Door eight," said Haverill.
"Paid by Pask, sir."
"And it took a day of yours."
"A day of mine, sir."
He looked at me. I looked at the second button of his coat, which was hanging by a thread, and I thought about whether to tell him so, and he put his glasses on and took them off again.
"Selby's keep is empty," he said. "The housekeeper took me down to look at it. Not a bead. It'll have been the storm, the one night I'd nobody on it." He said that last as if it was somebody else's fault and he'd been told whose. "Door seven tomorrow. The Weigh House water-gate, at the low. Pask opens."
"Yes, sir."
"The clerk's chest is no better."
"No, sir," said the clerk, and coughed, to prove it.
"Dismissed."
I told nearly everybody a day of mine, which was true, and which I'd never have managed a month ago. I felt like I'd stolen something. The clerk had had it that morning on the stair. The constable on the gate had had it round an apple, and Esk's note-boy, who wanted to know if it was a good one, and I'd said it was, which was true as well. Tobin had it on the Row at noon, with a twist of whelks, and said that's a good one, and didn't ask whose. Hardly anybody had said a day of whose. I'd have told them the lot, down to the colour of the light. They only had to ask it the next way round, and nearly all of them were too polite, or too tired, or too used to me.
It's a very comfortable gap.
She was on the wrong side of the gate with her tool roll across her chest and her hands up her sleeves, and she'd the look of someone who's waited exactly as long as she meant to and not a minute over.
"Ice-house," she said. "Tonight."
"Five's counted. It's empty, you know it is."
"I'm not watching the glass." She was off down the quay and I fell in beside her, because I'm larger and it's only polite. "Somebody's got a key to nine hatches. I can't sit on nine hatches. I can sit on one man who struck a light at a plate and has been asking me ever since which door's next."
"Tobin asks."
"He does."
"He asks me what everything took because he can't help it, and because—" I didn't know the end of that. I knew his face. It's the sort of face that goes on telling jokes while somebody's hitting it. "He's frightened, Bryony."
"So's a thief."
"Not of the same thing."
She walked on with her mouth shut, and the harbour went by on our left, slate and pewter, with a wind getting up that smelled of rain being thought about.
"Come or don't," she said.
"I'm coming."
"I didn't ask."
"I know. If it's him I'd rather it was me that was there."
"That's not a reason."
"It's the one I've got."
We went up the Row in the dusk with about a yard of wet air between us that hadn't been there at breakfast. I could feel it down my whole left side. It was like carrying a bowl of broth full to the brim through a market, so that every cart that came round a corner I thought, the bowl.
"Stop looking at me," said Bryony.
"I'm not."
"You're looking at where I'm going to be."
I looked at a fishwife instead.
She did something to the trapdoor's padlock with two bits of wire from her roll, and it fell open in her hand like a boiled egg. I'd the spare wedge in my belt, signed out in my head, and we went down the forty steps in the dark with the hood on the lantern shut to a slit.
The cold had a night's worth of patience in it. The water ran down the walls with its tea-pouring noise, and the sawdust underfoot was sodden through, and we went along the cut lane between the stacks with our breath going up in front of us in grey flags. We got behind a stack, in the one dry corner there was, and breathed into our sleeves so it wouldn't show.
Door five was twenty strides off, with the lantern slit just touching the frost on the plate. At the foot of it, on the stone, the saucer.
It was full to the rim. Fresh. Not a skin on it.
"Five o'clock this morning," I whispered. "The ice-man said."
"It's not five o'clock this morning."
"No."
"Don't tell me what you think."
"I'm not thinking. I'm looking at milk."
We waited. It's a long wait in a cold you can't do anything about. I thought about Tobin's hands coming out of his pockets every day with something in them. I counted the drips from the stack opposite and got to four hundred and eleven. Bryony had tucked in against the ice with her cheek on her knees, and she'd not made a sound in an hour, and she might have been asleep, but her eyes were open.
"Was it any good?" she said.
She said it to the ice. It was very low, and flat, and she hadn't moved her head.
I'm sworn. I've cursed it often enough. I've never in my life been less sorry.
"Yes," I said.
She didn't say anything. The drips went on. After a time she breathed out, a long grey flag of it going up past the lantern slit, and she put her face down on her knees. I didn't give her a single thing she hadn't asked for.
I heard him before the lantern. He can't come down a stair quiet either. It's the one thing we've in common apart from bread.
A boot on the forty steps, and a stumble, and a very small, very sincere swearword. Then a light, swinging, yellow, much too bright, and the long thin shadow of him going up the ice, and I knew it by the shape of the elbows before I saw the rest.
Tobin came along the lane with his lantern held up in front of him like a man looking for a cat. He was blue to the elbows. He'd rolled his sleeves up past the burn-scars, the white ones from the bottle-works, and he wasn't whistling, which I'd never known him not to be. He stopped at the saucer.
"Oh, you're joking," he said, to nobody. "Who puts milk in an ice-house?"
He crouched. He put out one finger, and then he didn't, and stood up and rubbed his hands on his front.
"I didn't bring that," he said. "Just so we're clear. Nobody's to say I brought that."
"Tobin," I said.
I'll say this for him, he didn't scream. His whole long body went up like a startled gull, and his face went through about six things and came out at the seventh, which was a grin.
"Colm," he said. "And — is that Bryony? Lovely. A party. Nobody's brought any cake."
"Tinder," said Bryony, coming out from behind the stack. She was up and stood. She'd her hands out of her sleeves. "You were here. Three nights ago. You burnt your thumb."
"I did. It's a lot better, thanks for asking."
"And you told us the vats."
"I'm always at the vats. That's what makes it a good lie." He put the lantern down on a slab and looked at the pair of us, and the grin came off the front of his face and left it very young. "It's no good, is it. You'd see through me if I was glass. Ask me. Go on, Colm. You'll want to ask me. I'm not sworn but I'll do my best."
"What are you doing here, Tobin?"
"I'm going to pay it."
It's a dreadful thing, to know a man's telling you the truth when you'd have given a week's bread for a lie. "Why?" I said.
"Because somebody's emptying the glasses, and Pet's summer's in a glass, and I want whoever it is." It came out quick and in a heap, worn smooth with saying in the dark. "I've asked you every day what it took, Colm, so I'd know what was going into the glasses, and who'd come for them. It's a bad plan. I only ever have the one." He took a breath. "And I've never been through one. Pet paid. You pay. She pays. Every day somebody comes up those stairs short a bit of themselves, and I say, that's a good one, and go home. I'd like to know what it weighs."
"It'll take the best thing you carry," said Bryony.
"I know what it is." He didn't look at either of us. "I've been carrying it long enough."
"Tobin, don't," I said.
I said it, and I moved. I've the reach, and I'd have had him round the middle before he'd got his sleeve down, but he's twenty and he's been dodging buckets since he was nine. He went past my arm like a fish through a hand. Three strides, and he'd slapped his palm flat on the plate with a noise like a man killing a wasp.
"Evening," he said, to the door. "Don't get up."
The joke goes first. You can hear it go, out of the voice like air out of a bladder, and what's left is what the voice was for.
"It's a Tuesday," said Tobin. "It's March. It's not even a good one, it's — it's raining, it's been raining since Sunday, there's a drip over the stove that Father's never fixed. He's at the stove. He's got the big black pan, and he's doing pancakes, and he can't, he's never been able to, nobody's allowed to say. And the fat catches. It goes up like a hat." His voice went high. "And he doesn't move it. He stands there with the slice in his hand and he laughs. The whole of his back goes. You can see it through his shirt. And I think, I'll help, and I've the flour, and I've got it the wrong way up, and it goes across the table and the floor, and the cat's on the table, which it's not allowed, and it's got the lot. White to the ears. And I say it wanted to help. I say it for a month. I'm fourteen and all elbows and I say the cat wanted to help, and Father's got to sit down. He's got to sit on the floor. And Pet's at the window with a book she's not reading, and she's not laughing, she's trying not to, she's got her hand over her mouth, and then she is. The pancakes are black. We eat them. Nobody minds. There isn't anywhere—there isn't anywhere that anybody—"
He stopped.
His face went smooth. He was looking at the door, and his hand was flat on it, and I don't think he knew whose hand it was.
The plate gave. The door went in on its pins with a push of cold that put Tobin's lantern out, and the whole dark lane rang with the sound of it. Bryony was already there with her shoulder to it, and I got my boot in and the wedge under before it could think of coming back.
When I looked up, Tobin was sitting on the wet sawdust with his knees up, looking at his hand.
"Well," he said. "That was rubbish."
Nobody said anything.
"I feel exactly the same. Do I look different? I thought I'd look different." His voice cracked on different. "Colm."
"Tobin."
"What did it take?" He'd got his grin back, the little one, the one he does for the ones who've been kind. "Go on."
So I told him.
I sat down on the sodden sawdust beside him with my knees up and told him the whole of it in order, the rain, the drip, the pan, the flour, the cat, his father sat on the floor. It took a lot less time than the living of it had, and that's a hard thing to see on a man. When I got to the cat he laughed, and then he put the back of his wrist against his mouth and stopped.
"That's a good one," he said.
"It was."
"It's not mine now, is it. It's yours. You've got a better one than me."
"I've not got it. I've heard it."
"That's the same." He looked at his hand again. "Thank you, Colm. I mean it. You're an awful man."
Bryony had gone in.
She was stood in the door's mouth with the hooded lantern, which she'd taken off me without asking, and I got up in stages and went to look. I'm no judge of glass but I can count to one. The keep was a green column in the iron behind the plate, and the lantern went through it and came out the colour of a pond. In the bottom of it, one bead. Round, dull, the colour of old butter.
"That's his," said Bryony.
"The only one."
"The only one." She put her face against the glass, and moved the light down the whole length of it, and she looked as if she were reading a very small notice. "It's been emptied. The door's been shut since your wedge came out. Nobody's paid it, so nobody came through the plate. It was done at the hatch. Somebody put a key in, took the lot, shut up, went home." She straightened. "Whoever it is doesn't need the doors."
"Then why come to the plate?"
"They don't come to the plate. They've got keys."
Tobin had got up. He'd come to stand at my elbow, which is a long way up, and he looked into his own glass with his mouth shut.
"That's mine in there," he said.
"It's the Guild's till the weld," I said. "And then it's in the iron for good."
"And if somebody took it out."
"They'd be in the cells."
"Lovely." He tipped his head at the bead. "Then I'll not ask you to be a thief, Colm. It's bad enough you being honest."
It was kind, and I'd no way to hand it back.
Her boots came before her light.
The trapdoor went, forty steps up, and a boot came down it that was quicker and smaller than ours, and a voice came after it, getting bigger, in the tone you'd use on a dog that's got into the larder.
"Tobin Vane!"
He shut his eyes. "Oh no."
"I know you're down here. I counted the trapdoors. There are three, and I tried the first two."
She came along the lane with a lantern held high and her hair coming down on one side where a pencil was meant to be holding it, and her coat buttoned one hole out. She was a head shorter than her brother, and he stepped back from her anyway. She looked at the three of us and the open door and the wedge. She counted them, you could see her do it. Me, Bryony, Tobin, the door, the wedge. And she looked at Tobin's hand, and then at the glass, and she'd the whole of it before anyone had said.
"Pet," said Tobin. "I was keeping it for you. I said I would. Any time, I said, you've only to ask and I'll tell it from the start. I've lost the cat, Pet, and the pan, and the rain. I've lost the lot."
Perpetua Vane put her lantern down on the sawdust. She took her brother's face in both hands, which she had to reach for, and she turned it to the light and looked at it as she'd look at a lock somebody had been at, and then she said, in a perfectly level voice:
"You kept it for me. I've got your telling. The pan. The rain. The cat."
"It's not the same."
"No. It's what there is." She let go of him. "You told me you were at the vats. Idris said they tasted of tin."
"I'm always at the vats."
"I know you are. That's why I knew." She looked at the door, and the keep, and the one bead, and her mouth went small. "Whose key?"
"Somebody with a hatch key," said Bryony. "Not a pick. Not at the plate. It's somebody who's had one."
"Hollin's ledger," said Perpetua. "Door four. Second hatch key to my journeyman, I. D."
"Ivo," said Bryony, and this time Perpetua didn't argue.
Perpetua took her brother's sleeve between finger and thumb and led him away up the lane like a parcel. He looked back once, long and blue, with his hair on end, and I raised a hand and didn't know what for. Then the two lanterns went off together between the stacks.
"A Tuesday in March," she was saying, on about the tenth step. "It was raining."