Bryony
Two days to the weld. Night. The low.
Oars.
Not near. Down past the foot of the Steps, under the chandler's wall, where the dark was thick as grease. Two strokes. A knock of wood on stone. Two more.
Haverill had his flask halfway to his mouth. He stopped it there.
"Sergeant."
"I hear it, sir," said Gannet.
I had the lantern off the step before either of them was up. I went down with the hood open and the light jumping ahead of me on wet stone. Halfway the Steps went to weed. Then mud. The harbour had gone right out, and the smell came up off it, rot and salt and cold iron. The grating stood clear in the wall at the bottom with the brown water running out through its bars in strings.
Under the sill, the hatch.
Open. Hanging on its hinge like a mouth. The tar cut round in a clean line. I put the light in.
The glass was wet. Not one bead.
His was gone. The tower stair and me singing, whatever that was. He'd paid it after dinner and told the whole Steps by teatime.
Out on the water the oars went on. Not fast. Long, steady strokes. They went off toward the middle of the harbour with no light at all. I stood in the mud while they got smaller, till I couldn't tell them from the water.
Haverill came down slowly, one hand on the wall. He looked at the hatch. He sat down on the wet steps with his knees up and the flask between them, in the weed, in his good coat, and he stayed sat.
"Well," he said. "That's my test."
I'd had him at my elbow since the bell. I'd watched him drink. I'd watched him not drink, which was most of the night, with the flask in his fist and his eyes on the dark. Every boat the Guild owned was tied at the yard across the basin, with the clerk sat on the water-stair in a blanket counting them, on his own order, given at dusk in front of me. Tobin was on a stool outside Ivo's cell with a candle and a pack of cards, and he'd sworn he'd not shift till the gate opened, and Tobin keeps his word when it's stupid.
It wasn't the captain. It wasn't Ivo, and it wasn't Ivo's key in the captain's fist. I'd had them both. I'd said it on a skiff to Gannet as if it was cut in brass. Him, and Ivo's key.
I took them off. Like two pins off a bench. That left the bench.
"Nobody came down the Steps," said Gannet. He'd come down behind the captain. He was looking at the hatch, not at me. "Nobody. I was looking."
"They came by water."
"Every boat's tied up."
"Every Guild boat," I said.
There's three hundred lighters on this harbour that aren't the Guild's. Every eel-man. Every fool with a skiff and a rope.
Door two's keep goes the night it's told. Fine; the captain made him tell it. But the kiss. He'd never told anybody the kiss. And somebody had gone round to the seaward face of the tower at the big low and had keep eight's top bead off, wet, the one night it could be got. Somebody had known what was in it.
I hadn't asked him. I'd sat on his floor and not asked him. I'd said, I'll not use you like everyone else does, and I'd held to it like a vice holds, and it had cost us the kiss, and it had cost him the song.
"Colm."
He looked up. The lantern was under his chin and it made his face all wrong, shadows where there should be freckles.
"Who did you tell about the kiss?"
It went out of me flat. He didn't answer for about as long as it takes a drop to fall.
Then he answered. All of it. He'd been waiting to be asked.
"The captain. A day of mine. The clerk on the stair, a day of mine. The constable on the gate, and Esk's boy, and Tobin, after. A day of mine to all of them, and none of them asked whose." He stopped. He started again. "And Wenna. Rowing me over, after she'd put you off at the Steps. She didn't ask what it took. She asked what it took off you. And there wasn't a true thing to say but the true one." His voice went down to nothing. "Your first kiss."
I didn't say anything.
Haverill, on the step, said, "Coyle," to himself, like a name read off a list.
I'd had her once. I'd said her name to his face on Chandler's Hill, and he'd laughed, and I'd said sorry for it on these same Steps. I'm wrong loudly. I'd crossed her off over the storm night, and the storm night was never the night. The housekeeper's lid in the lane had been crooked since the morning after our watch. She'd gone in round the side, through the coal-hole, while we stood all night on the captain's order watching the front.
That's a lock, that. Not a person. I could do that.
A lamp came round the end of the quay.
Low on the water. Swinging. The creak of thole-pins I'd have known in my sleep, and a voice that went over the mud and up the Steps.
"Who's that sat on my Steps at this hour? Is that the sergeant? Duck, you'll catch your death." The lighter came on out of the dark, black and broad, with the washing line across the cuddy and the lamp on the bow. "Been after eels. Not a bite. Not a bloody bite all night."
She brought it in. The bow grounded soft on the weed at the foot of the Steps, beside the grating, three feet off the last stone.
I didn't look at her. I'd been wrong about her by looking.
I thought about the drop.
Somebody had drunk a drop of my mother before the writ. And what was on my mother's drop was a lift. Cold water, and a child on her arm, and the step under her boot, and her mouth at the child's ear with the line in it.
You don't find which pin's binding by staring at the man who cut the key. You turn the lock and you feel.
At the foot of the Steps, under the grating, the run-off out of the chandler's cellar has dug a hole in the mud. Every child on the Steps is told it before they can walk. Keep off the grating hole. It'll have your boots, and then it'll have you.
"Colm," I said. "Stay on the step."
"What?"
"Whatever I do. Don't come in after me."
"Why?"
"Because I'm asking you."
He looked at me. I'd never asked him for a thing. He stayed.
I put the lantern down on the stone. I walked to the end of the last step, beside the grating, with the lighter's bow a yard off and Wenna stood up in it with the oar.
"Mind, duck," said Wenna. "That's the hole."
I stepped off.
It had my boots. It had them before I'd gone in to the knee, soft and cold and sucking, and then the water came over the top of the mud and over my head, and I was in the black with my mouth shut and my ears roaring and nothing under me but more of it.
I didn't fight it. I let it have a look at me.
Then I put my arms up.
Not swimming. Up. Both arms, straight, over my head, out of the water.
Something dropped in the boat. The oar. Then two arms came round me under mine, round the whole of my body, and locked behind my back, and there was a broad wet chest against my face, and I was coming up out of the mud with a noise like a cork, all of me, my boots left in the hole, and up over the gunwale and against her shoulder, held, my feet off everything.
Her mouth was at my ear. I heard her take the breath for it.
"Up you come, chick."
The whole line. Her breath. Her pace. The little lift in the middle of it where you'd shift a weight on your arm. Out of a stranger's mouth, at my ear, smelling of tar and onions.
Wenna put me down in the bottom of the lighter, gently, on a coil of rope.
I sat there with the harbour running out of my sleeves.
On the stair above us, in the lantern, Gannet hadn't moved.
"Bryony?" he said. Only that. He was looking at my face, not hers.
Wenna looked at him. Then she looked down at me.
I don't read faces. I'll never read one. I read hers. It went from one thing to another as quick and as clean as a bolt shot home, and I'd have known that sound anywhere.
She had the boathook up before Gannet had got his foot off the step.
"Stop there."
He stopped. The point was a yard off his chest, iron, with a hook on it you'd haul a drowned man with. She had the lamp in her other hand. She swung it low over the thwart, so the light went under, and there was a bag there. Canvas. Tied at the neck. And through the neck, in the lamplight, the corks of little bottles, packed in straw.
"Come after me," said Wenna, "and that goes in the harbour. Every one of them. Hers and yours."
Haverill was on his feet on the step behind Gannet. "Coyle. In the Guild's name—"
"I know whose name, Captain. I row for it."
She leaned down without taking her eyes off the sergeant, and got a fist in my collar, and put me back on the Steps. Not lifted. Hauled, like a sack off a cart, as she'd hauled me through a grating once. I landed on my knees on the last stone. Then the boathook went down on the weed and shoved, and the lighter came off the mud, and there was black water between us.
A yard of it. Then two.
"Why?" I said.
The oars went in. She took one stroke and let it run.
"There's a note on my girl." Another stroke. "Private paper, they told me. Writ private, never the Bank's, so the Guild won't touch it. So they hold it, them that bought it, and they'll have it out of her the Bank's way. You know the Bank's way." Water off the blades. "Then the order come. A great love, whole, paid in pieces. Pay that and the note's burnt."
"Why us?" said Gannet. It came out of him hoarse.
She laughed. It was the same laugh. You could have heard it on the Bank steps.
"I picked you because you were kind, duck. Unkind people don't carry anything worth a house." A stroke. The lamp went small. "You paid for each other. Door two. I watched you."
"The storm," I said. "The blanket. That was you."
"One blanket. I'd dried it special." A stroke. "And the bead in your roll, and the letter to the yard. I'm sorry for those. I gave you a wall."
"The kiss."
"Went on the morning packet." The voice was coming off the water now, flat across it, as voices come at night. "This morning. He always drinks the first one." A stroke. "Ketch is in tomorrow. He wanted the song."
I was on my knees on the stone. I had no boots. I had no breath.
"You said chick," I said. "That's my mother's."
The oars stopped. For one stroke there was nothing at all, and the lamp sat on the black like a coal.
"I don't know where I got that," said Wenna. "I say it to Rosie."
Then the oars again. The lamp went out, or went round something.
Haverill went up the Steps. He went fast, for him, with one hand on the wall and his flask left behind on the weed, and at the top he was shouting for a light and a boy and the yard, every boat, now, and the shouting went off along the quay and got smaller like the oars.
That left the two of us. The lantern on the stone. The empty hatch.
I got up. My legs held. I was wet to the skin and black to the thigh with mud, and I'd one sock, and I was cold right down in the middle where the cold doesn't come out.
He was on the step above me. He hadn't moved from it. I'd told him not to.
"You told her," I said.
"She asked me."
"She asked what it took off me. Me. And you sat in her boat and told her it was my first kiss. While I was up my stair asleep."
"I'm sworn, Bryony."
"I know you're sworn. Everybody in Vessel knows you're sworn. That's what it's for." It was coming out of me the way a toll does, and I couldn't stop it either. "That's not honesty, Colm. That's a tap. Anybody turns you, it runs."
He sits down. When it comes up in him. I'd seen him do it on a stool and a trough and a pile of hot bricks. I waited for him to do it. There was a step behind his knees.
He didn't sit.
He came down onto my step instead, and he was a head and a half over me in the lantern, and his face was a colour I'd never seen on it, not red. White, round the mouth.
"And you," he said. "You'd pay every door alone so you'd never owe anybody. Every one. So nobody could ever hand you a thing back and say, there, now you owe me." His voice was quite quiet. That was the worst of it. "That's not brave. It's mean."
I stood there.
I'd nothing for it. Not a file, not a word. I had my hands at my sides, wet, and they didn't know what to do, and I let them not.
He put his hand inside his oilskin. The little black book came out of it, the one with the Steps' damp still in the cover and every door in it in his own hand. He looked at it as if it belonged to someone else.
Then he threw it.
Not far. He's no thrower. It went out over the mud, flapping open in the air, and landed on the black water past the grating, and lay there. The lantern found it. It floated with its pages spread, white, a square of white on the black, the ink on them going to smoke.
We both watched it.
It filled from the edges. It went grey, and then it went dark, and the water came up over the middle of it, and it went under.