Gannet
Two days to the weld. Morning.
I asked my captain if he was selling the doors, and I did it on his own steps at six in the morning with a bun in my fist, which is not a thing I'd advise.
I'd not slept. I'd lain on a bed that doesn't fit with a girl on the floor beside it breathing like a hinge, and gone over what she'd said on the rock, the window and the glass and the key in the sack, and I'd taken it to bits like a larder to find where the damp got in. I couldn't find the place.
She was out at the bollard by the gate, where she'd been told to be. She'd said she would wait. She'd not said she wouldn't listen.
Haverill looked as if he'd had even less sleep than me, which I'd not thought was possible, and he took my report standing, as he does, with his head down. Door eight's keep was empty. Then he said, quite level:
"A constable on the shed tells me you took my prisoner a supper at eleven, by the water-stair, with Pask. And went out again by the same road."
"Yes, sir."
"Where?"
"The tower, sir. Door eight's hatch."
He didn't say anything. A gull walked along the rail.
"It was open, sir. The tar was cut, and the scratch was bright, and the glass was empty and wet. She says it was done that low. We didn't touch it. She'd her hook out, and she didn't use it."
"And you didn't think to tell me."
"You didn't ask, sir."
That's a gap, and he knew it for one. I watched him know it. I stood there with the bun going cold in my hand, and I'd a long answer ready, and I'd the sense, thank God, to let it go.
"Captain," I said. "Are you selling the doors?"
He took his glasses in both hands.
"I think it's you," I said.
I've no idea what I'd expected. A shout, I think, the kind you could stand against. He didn't give me that. He stood on his top step in the grey light with his coat button hanging by a thread, and he looked at me for a long, long time, and I looked back, and I've never worked so hard at anything in my life. He's a face you can lean on, the captain, square as a door, and I looked into it for the soft place.
"Why?" he said.
"You said glad." I'd not known I'd say it. "You'd a pass written before I'd asked. You've given me everything I wanted this week, sir, and you never have. And you know which bed. And Pask says your window was dark."
"Does she?"
"She said it with great certainty."
"She would." Something went across his face that I'd not have called a smile. "No," said Haverill.
That was all. He said it as he says dismissed, and I stood and looked at it, and I believed him. I'd have believed Ivo. I'd have believed the bream.
"I've done things on this writ I'd not put in a book," said the captain. "That's not one. Somebody's been in your mouth for three weeks, Sergeant. Every night in this yard, every day in the street. You say it plain. You've no other way. Use it."
"Sir?"
"Let it be known. A last count at door two, this afternoon, after the low. The Guild wants one more before the weld, I'll say so, and I'll see it's noised. You pay it. Alone with me at the plate, nobody else down there. And then you tell every soul who asks what it took. All day. Tell it in the right order. Let them watch you tell it." He put his hand flat on the rail. "And tonight the three of us sit where we can see the Salt Steps. You, me, and Pask. If I'm selling, you'll have me beside you with my hands where you can see them. If I'm not, we'll see who comes for a glass with something in it."
"Why Pask?"
"Because she's the one who thinks it's me." He looked at the gate. "I can see it from here. It's in her shoulders. I'd sooner she watched me than anything else I've got." He looked at me. "I can't say I blame her."
I looked at the gulls. My ears had gone hot.
It was a cellar with a tide in it, just beginning to come back. That's all. The Salt Steps after dinner, with the weed still showing, and the chandler on the step with a face like a wet Monday, and the grating stood open on its chain. Nobody was in the water to the chest. Nobody was roaring. It came up to the ankle, and cold, and the vault smelled of old rope, and the lantern ran down the brick in long yellow stripes and it was entirely ordinary.
The captain went first. The clerk stayed at the top of the Steps with his basket, to count from there. Bryony had gone and sat on the sailmaker's stair with her roll on her knee. I'd looked up at her and she'd looked at the harbour.
He stood a pace behind me and to the left, where I stand when she pays. It's a very odd thing, to be watched from your own place.
The plate was cold. It was the same plate. I put my hand on it as you'd put a hand on the head of a dog you've a bad feeling about, and I said nothing, and I thought of my mother's face coming up like milk.
Colm, you've got so—
The door looked. A rough, quick, careful look, like a woman picking over a dish of beans. And it put her down. It put her down again, my mam, as it had at the ice, and it went on, across my palm, into the creases, past the Sunday and the sea and the wind, and past a great many things that I'd not have thought it'd want.
"She's on the tower stair," I said.
My voice had gone high and quick. It's not my voice for anything else.
"The forty-one steps. I'm at the top, in the arch, with my hands behind me, because I've been told. It's wet. She's gone down with the lantern. And she's talking to it, the lock. Hello, you. What've you got. It goes up the wall to me in bits. And in between, when she's listening, when it's answering her, she's singing. Under her breath. She doesn't know she's doing it. It's a lightermen's song, the one with the turn in it. Pull away, my bonny lads, the tide is on the turn. Only she sings tin. The tin is on the turn. She's never had the words in her life, she's going on the tune, and she's got the tune wrong as well. And the girl with the fiddle will be waiting at the stern. Only she sings file. I stand there with my hands behind me in the cold and I think, don't stop, don't anyone stop her, I'll stand here till the tide comes in and I'll—"
I'd to stop.
It's not like going to sleep. It's like a hand coming off the back of your neck. There was a stair in the middle of me, and a song, and somebody's voice, and then there was my own hand on a cold plate and a tide in the vault round my boots, and the door going in on its pins with no more noise than a cupboard.
The captain had the wedge under it before it stopped. He hadn't said a word. He stood looking at me, and he wasn't a man who'd come to see a thing. He was a man who'd heard it.
"Was that all?" I said.
"No," said Haverill.
He gave it to me. Standing in an ankle of seawater with the lantern running, he said it all back to me, the whole thing, in his own voice, the one he uses for orders. The arch. The hands behind. The wet. Hello, you. The song, with the tin for the tide and the file for the fiddle. He said it better than I had. He said it like a man reading off the inside of his head, and I stood and took it.
"You'll want it in order," he said. "All day. Say it as I've said it."
"Yes, sir," I said.
It was like putting your tongue where a tooth was. A stair, and a girl on it. I'd the captain's version of the best bit of my month in my mouth, and nobody to give it to but whoever asked.
They asked.
I stood on the bottom Step with my back to the harbour wall, my Guild badge on straight, and I said it to a fishwife with a basket of herring on her hip. She'd asked me what it took, because the whole Steps asks, and I'd said Bryony on the tower stair, singing under her breath, the wrong words to a lighterman's song, and she'd said, "Oh, my love, say it again, from the top," and I'd said it again, and she'd got a corner of her apron to her eye. The herring looked on.
I said it to Esk's boy, who wrote the first line on the back of his hand. I said it to two lightermen on the third landing, who were sorry and laughed and were sorry. I said it to a woman at a fish stall and a boy with a barrow and a man selling cups, who said, "Ah, that's a good one," and I'd have hit him if I'd been a different sort of person. I said it at the top of the Steps where anyone could stand and listen, and some of them did. I said it all afternoon and into the evening, in the right order, and by the fourth time it didn't hurt.
That was what hurt.
Tobin came about three. Tall, blue to the elbow, with his hair on end and his hands in his pockets, and a very sincere look. He stood in front of me on the Steps.
"Go on," he said. "What did it take?" He waited. "Colm. You look awful."
I told him. It took less time than usual, because I'd got it by heart. Tobin's a face that gives you everything, and it went through the tin and the file and the fiddle and ended up somewhere under his eyes.
"That's a good one," he said, low. "That's a very good one, Colm. That's the worst thing I've ever heard you say."
"It's the captain's," I said. "I haven't got it. I'm only telling you what I was told."
He shook his head. "I'll not ask again. You'll tell it and I'll hear it and that's two of us stood in a street being no use. Is she all right? Pask?"
"She's up on the sailmaker's stair, Tobin. She's been there since dinner."
"I'll leave her be."
"That's very wise," I said.
The captain was at the yard gate when I got back, at dusk. He'd a boy at his elbow with a list, and I stood by the trough and watched him give his orders in the voice I'd had my own toll in. Bryony had come up to the bollard outside the wicket, where she was allowed to be, and stood with her hands in her pockets while every word of it went past her. Every Guild boat to be tied up at the yard's water-stair, the gig, the two cutters, the dinghy, on the one rope, from the bell. The clerk to sit on the stair with his basket and a rug and count them at every hour, and write it down. The clerk looked at the boats as if they had given him the cold personally. A constable to the cells, and another at the water-gate, and a third on the gate.
"Tobin Vane," said Haverill.
Tobin had come in behind me with his hands in his pockets.
"Captain."
"You're not Guild."
"No, sir. I'm a dyer. I've the wrong sort of badge."
"Good. I want somebody not Guild. Dace is in the end cell. You'll sit in the passage with him all night, on a stool. You'll not sleep. You'll let nobody past the door, my own men included, and you'll send a boy to me at the first noise. Any noise."
"And if it's you?"
"Then you'll send a boy," said Haverill.
Tobin looked at me, and then at the captain, and then he laughed, a short, helpless one. "I've a record of being the prisoner," he said. "I'll bring a pack of cards and a candle-end. It's an honour, sir. Nobody's trusted me with a stool."
The head of the Salt Steps is a flat of old stone with an iron brazier on it, cold, and the chandler's wall going up on one side, and the dark running down on the other. The Steps go down from there to the water, a long slope of them, black and slick, with the harbour at the bottom. Where the chandler's wall comes out at the foot, the shadow's deep as a well. You can't see the grating. You can hear the sea against it. We sat in a row on the top step with our backs against the chandler's shutter, in the order we'd fallen into without discussion: the captain at one end, me in the middle, and Bryony at the other with her roll on her knees.
She had not said a word to him since the morning. He'd not said one to her. It was a quarter of a mile of silence, and I sat in the middle of it like the filling in a pie.
It was a clear night. A few stars, and the harbour going slowly out, and the smell of weed, and every window along the Steps gone dark. A lighterman's lamp somewhere, on the far side, going out. Behind us the bell on the dockyard struck eleven, and I counted it, as I'd been taught.
The captain took out his flask.
I'd never once seen him drink from it in public. It was a flat steel one with a dent, and he unscrewed it in the dark and drank with his head back and screwed it up, and a smell came across to me of something with apples in it. And at the far end of the row Bryony stopped moving.
She was watching his hands.
She did it for an hour. She didn't pretend she wasn't. Her eyes went from the flask to his hand to his sleeve and back to the flask, with her whole face fixed, the way she looks at a lock she hasn't made up her mind about. And he sat and let her. He sat with the steel flask on his knee and his hands out where she could see them, flat, and not once did he look round.
"Pask," he said, when the dockyard bell had done twelve. "You've a thing to say."
"No."
"You've a face on you."
"It's the only one I've got."
"Say it."
"You've a very good flask," said Bryony.
"It was my father's."
"It's got a dent."
"He used it as a hammer." He took a mouthful and put it away. "Watch it all you like. Watch my hands. That's what you're for."
Nobody said anything. The water went down the Steps with a small sound.
She moved. I'd not been looking. I'd my eyes on the dark where the grating was, and my hands in the pockets of my oilskin, where they'd been for an hour, because it was cold and I'd nothing else to do with them. And something came into the pocket beside mine.
Cold at first. Then not. It got in beside mine without any ceremony at all, as a cat gets in a drawer, and it stopped. It didn't take hold. It lay there, in the dark, a hand against a hand, with the oilskin round the pair of them and her shoulder against my arm. She'd her eyes on the water. She'd not turned her head.
I'd spent the day saying what I'd lost, in order, to anybody who asked. I said nothing at all.
The bell struck the half hour. The captain's breathing had gone slow. He'd got his head back against the shutter with his eyes shut, and I thought he'd gone to sleep, and he hadn't.
"Nobody's coming, Sergeant," said Haverill.
"Not yet, sir," I said. "The low's not come."