Bryony
Fifteen days to the weld. Morning. The low.
The clerk sent his basket by a boy, and the boy brought it to the foot of my stair at first light with a note pinned to the lid. Draw gently. Pour back bottom first. Do not let the sergeant eat over it.
"He wants an answer," said the boy.
"Tell him fine."
The sergeant was at the bottom of the Salt Steps when I got there, with the basket on his knees, holding it like a baby he'd been left with. Wenna had the lighter in against the weed. I stopped on the last dry step.
"I was wrong about you, Wenna," I said. "What I said."
"Get in, duck. It won't wait."
I got in.
She rowed us round the point on the last of the ebb. The harbour had been drawn off like water out of a tub, and the weed hung down the stones in long wet hanks, and there was a smell of mud and old rope and something dead a good way off. The sergeant sat in the bow with the basket. He didn't talk. He looked at the water, and then at me, and then at the water, and I'd have said he knew. He doesn't know things. He hears them. I wasn't going to give him anything to hear.
The Weigh House came up on our left.
Black to the second storey, and above that sky, where the roof had gone. I'd looked at my boots going past it last time. I looked now. A stone arch on the harbour face. A stair going down inside the arch into the water, and at the low it stood clear: nine steps, ten, green to the sixth, then black. The lowest were still running. At the side of the arch, a hand above the weed, a square of iron set in the wall.
"Take us along," I said.
Wenna took us along without a word. I leaned out and looked at the hatch. Tar round it, black and hard, weathered over. No bright metal on the ward. Nobody had put a key to it in weeks. Seven was clean, and I took that out of the look and put it away.
"Out you get, ducks," said Wenna, and dug an oar in. "Mind the third step."
There'd been a door at the head of the stair once. The frame still stood: two uprights and a lintel, charcoal all through, with the grain gone to a crust like the skin on a roast. I put two fingers on it going in. It came off on them black. I wiped them on my trousers and kept going, with the sergeant behind me ducking and the basket held against his chest.
A passage, stone-walled, under the burnt house. Thirty strides. I counted them. Fallen beams across it, black, and glass fused on the floor in brown puddles, and every step crunched. The air was cold and wet and smelled of old smoke, a smell that doesn't go; it gets in the stone.
My mother came down here with a clerk on her shoulder. Thirty strides, with the roof on fire.
The door was at the end.
It had stood. Hollin built them to. Iron, the frame cut into the passage stone, the plate at hand height. But the fire had been at it. The colour had run. Where the iron should be black it was blue and brown in bands like oil on a puddle, and the temper had gone out of the corners, and his mark was a smear. I put my thumb against it. Soft. Not soft; softer than it should be. A good door that had been somewhere hot and held.
"Hello, you," I said.
"Bryony," said the sergeant.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to say not to."
"Then what?"
He didn't say. I turned round and he was stood in the passage with the basket against his chest and his face doing something I didn't have a name for, and I turned back. I put my right hand on the plate. The blister had healed to a shine. It was cold, and then it wasn't.
The teeth came in.
I don't mind them now. That's the worst thing I can tell you. They went across my palm and into the creases, quick and careful, and I thought of nothing, as I always do, and they went round nothing and on down, and they found it. A boat. Rain.
"The lighter," I said. "Under the tower. The wind's got the oilcloth and it's cracking like a bad sail. There's one blanket. It smells of fish. He's got it round the two of us because there's the one, and he's as warm as a banked stove. He says, let me pay eight. I say no. He says it again. He says it eleven times, I count, and every time he says it a bit different, like he's trying keys. I say no. And I tell him about her. I don't know why. The end of it. All of it. And he doesn't say sorry. He doesn't say anything. He pulls the blanket up on the side where it's going, and he holds the corner there with his hand so it won't, and the light's coming off the water, I can see every freckle he's got, and he's near, and I think—"
It went.
It didn't go like the others. It went like a hand coming out of a glove. I stood with my palm on the iron and my tongue going round my mouth, and there was a boat in it, and a night, and a storm. I knew they'd happened. I couldn't have told you what was in them.
The door went in. The cold came out of it in one push and it smelled of wet slate and nothing at all. The sergeant got the wedge in with his boot, the Guild's wedge, which he'd had in his belt, and he put his shoulder in the gap, and he didn't look at me.
"It's the storm," he said, to the door. "It took the storm. Do you want me to—"
"No."
He had every word of it ready in his mouth for anybody who asked. I didn't ask. I put my hand in my pocket and went in past him.
The keep was where they always are: in the frame, a green glass column in a brass collar, with a cap on the top the size of a coat button. The sergeant got the clerk's key from the basket and undid it. He took out the glass straw and drew the first bead up with his tongue between his teeth, like a man threading a needle, and he put it in a bottle and corked it.
"Mine," I said.
"Yes. Slate colour. With a bit of bright in it."
"Next."
He drew the second.
I'd seen forty beads by now, and none like it. It was pale. A milk colour with green at the edges, clear in the middle, and as he held it up to the lantern the light went through it and came out the other side warm. He let it run into the second bottle. His hand didn't shake. He put the cork in with his thumb.
Then he looked at the bottle, and at me.
It was a minute. I counted it, because I count. There was the drip off the lintel, and my own pulse in my hand, and the sergeant with the bottle held in his palm as if it were an egg that was somebody else's.
"That's hers," he said.
"I know whose it is."
"It's against the writ," he said. "Bryony."
I'd not asked him for it. I want that set down. I didn't hold my hand out and I didn't say give. I took it from the sergeant's palm, which was open, which he'd left open, and he knew it as well as I did. He didn't close it. I pulled the cork with my teeth.
His hand came up. It came up off his knee and out over the bottle, over my wrist, and stopped an inch from my sleeve, and it stayed there in the lantern light. It was a big hand. It wasn't shaking either.
"Count the rest," I said.
I tipped it.
It's a drop. That's all a bead is, a drop, dull, with no more weight than a bit of spit. It went on my tongue and it tasted of nothing. Then salt. Then weed.
I wasn't in the passage.
I was cold. Not my cold. The cold of somebody who'd been in the harbour long enough to stop feeling it. Water to the chest, and a skirt dragging, and the stone under my boots slick as soap. Weed. The Weigh House wall above me, green and black and enormous, and a sky the colour of a pan. And there was a weight on my arm.
A child. A small hard child with her arms round my neck so tight it hurt, and her heels kicking my ribs, and her hair in my mouth, salt and wet. A breath going in and out against my ear, fast, in little bits. I knew the back of that head. I'd have known it in a crowd. It was mine.
Mam, she said. Mam. Mam.
I had her. I'd got my hip under her and my hand in the middle of her back, and I felt the step under my boot, the first one, with the weed on it, and I got my weight on it and pushed. She came up. All of her came up out of the water at once, the whole wet heavy small weight of her, onto my arm, onto my shoulder, up against my face. She was shaking. I was shaking. And I turned my mouth to her ear and I took a breath for it, a long one, the way you do before you say a thing you've said a hundred times, and—
Nothing.
There's a rack in a clock, a toothed strip, and if you file a run of teeth off it the pinion goes across the gap with no sound at all, and drops, and catches again, and goes on. It was that. There wasn't a hole in the shape of a word. There was a stretch of her, as long as a line, as long as a breath that had been drawn for something, and in it, nothing. Her mouth was working on it. My mother's mouth, at my ear, going on and on over the shape of what it said. And nothing came out of it, and nothing came in.
And the child laughed.
A snort, wet, startled. She'd been told something she liked. Her arms went tighter. And I took the second step, and the third, with her heels going against my ribs, and the water running off the pair of us down the stone, and up and up the steps of the Weigh House with the whole harbour behind me and the child on my arm.
I came back with my back against the wall.
I'd gone down it. I was sat on the passage floor with my knees up and the bottle in my fist, empty, and the lantern shaking in my other hand, and I didn't know I was holding it. The sergeant had hold of my elbow. His hand was very large and very careful.
"I'm here," he said. "Bryony. Bryony, can you—"
"I had her."
"I know."
"All of her. She was cold. She'd got me round the neck." I put my hand on my own ribs. "And there's a bit where she says a thing, and it's not there."
"What did she say?"
"I know what she always said."
He didn't ask again. I looked at the empty bottle. I turned it to the lantern and looked into it for the bead's dry bit of shine, and there was none, and I thought about it the way I'd have thought about a lock that wouldn't open.
A toll goes in whole. Hollin cut his doors clean. A bead doesn't come with a bar missing. This one did, a bar of her filed clean away, and the teeth either side of it still good. That's not a door's work. That's somebody who'd put a tongue to her.
Somebody had drunk a drop of my mother and kept what she said to me.
The tar on seven's hatch was hard. Nobody had been at it since the writ began. So it was done before that. Before the notice. Before anyone was looking.
Ivo. He'd said the word. In the boat, at the pier, with his key in his fist. Go on, then. He'd said it like a man handing me something. He'd had it off the workshop door, I'd told myself that, I'd said it twice. It didn't take. He'd had my mother on his tongue, and he'd given me her word across the water to see my face.
My face was doing something.
I put my hand up to see what. It came away wet, and then the rest of me went as well.
I'm not going to tell it. It wasn't long. It wasn't loud. It was a great deal of water through a very small hole, and the sergeant put his arms round me.
I let him.
It's a lot of man. It's like a vice that's been told to be careful. He didn't say anything for a good while, and after a time I put my forehead against his chest where the buttons were and stayed there.
"If Haverill asks me," he said, at last, into my hair, "I'll tell him. I'll have to. You know I will."
"Don't let him ask."
"I'll try."
"Don't try." I pulled back and looked at him, which I hadn't meant to. I wiped my nose on his sleeve. "Count the rest. Pour them back bottom first. Put your own down in the book."
"What'll I put?"
"What you like."
He looked at me, and I looked at the lintel.
"I had her," I said. "All of her but what she said."
He didn't answer that. He took the basket and went in to the glass, and I sat where I was, and out on the harbour behind me the low went off the last step with a small sound, and the first of the water came back over the stone.