Bryony
One day to the weld. Evening. High water.
They'd had boats out all day. I'd heard them from my bed, and then from my window, and then from the roof. Guild oars going up and down under the quays. Constables shouting into every lighter on the moorings. Somebody's dog going mad on a barge. All day, and by the afternoon they'd stopped shouting and were only rowing.
She wasn't on the harbour. The bag wasn't on the harbour.
So it was somewhere a boat couldn't search.
I sat on the sailmaker's roof with my knees up and the ketch out past the tower, and I thought about it like a lock. Where do you put a thing nobody can get at? Not a hole. Not a cellar. Any fool can dig. You put it behind a door that takes the dearest thing you've got, and you go in at the back.
She had nine hatch keys. She'd had them since the spring.
Hollin's ledger had door nine's hatch on the porters' culvert under the Bank. Perpetua had said it plain over the oilcloth: a high sill and a low roof, water to float a skiff only at the top of the tide, and not a minute either side. High water at dawn. High water at dusk. Then the ebb, and a ketch going out on it.
She'd put it in at dawn. She'd have it out at dusk.
I got off the roof.
I had no boots. Mine were in the grating hole with the Steps' eels. I had the sailmaker's boy's, a size over, with a rag in each toe. I had my roll across my chest. I didn't have a boat.
Tobin had one. Tobin has one of everything that belongs to somebody else.
"A skiff," I said. He was at his vats on the Blue Stair, blue to the shoulder, with a paddle in his hands like an oar. "Toward the Bank. I'll have it back by dark."
"Where toward the Bank?"
"Under it."
He put the paddle down. "The porters' culvert."
"I didn't say."
"You did, you said under." He wiped his hands on his front, which made them bluer. "I'll row you."
"I'll go myself."
"You'll go with me or you'll not go, because it's my friend's skiff and I'll not lend it." He was already undoing his apron. "I know the culvert. I was a bottle-works boy. We took the Bank's empties in that way, at the top of the tide, lying flat on the crates. You don't know where the roof comes down."
"Fine."
"Fine," said Tobin. "I'll just tell Colm."
"Don't."
He looked at me with his long face, and he didn't say he wouldn't. He went off up the Stair at a run with his apron in his fist, and I stood in the dye-yard and didn't stop him.
The culvert mouth is an arch in the Bank's sea wall, low and black, with the top of the tide just lapping in over its sill. Iron rings in the stone either side. A dead gull rocking on the sill. There was an hour of daylight left on the water and none at all in the arch.
Tobin brought us in. He rows like a man who learned on somebody else's boat and never asked. Nothing like Wenna.
"Down," he said. "Right down. In the bottom. It comes lower."
I lay in the bilge on my back with the roll under my head, and the arch went over, and then the dark. Brick. Wet brick, a foot over my face, then less. I put my hand up flat on it and walked us along it, one palm and the next, as you'd feel along a wall in a house with no candles. Good brick. Old. Somebody'd pointed it once with care and the water had had the pointing out since. My fingers went into the joints.
"Left," said Tobin, breathing. "There's a pier."
There was a pier. I pushed us off it.
Then a light.
Ahead, round a bend in the brick, low, yellow, on the water. And under it a little flat punt, the kind a lighter carries on its stern, and a woman in it on her knees, with a square of iron open in the culvert wall beside her and her arm in it to the shoulder.
She brought her arm out with a canvas bag in her fist.
She didn't jump. She looked round at our skiff sliding up out of the dark with me flat in the bottom of it, and she sat back on her heels.
"Duck," said Wenna. "You never could leave a thing alone."
I sat up. My head was a hand off the roof.
She'd the bag in her lap. Behind her, through the open hatch, was the inside of it in the lamplight: not a little sleeve like the others, a recess in the stone, deep, with the green of a glass at the back of it and room in front for a bag of bottles and a good deal more. Hollin's deepest. I'd never seen one with room behind it.
Out past her, where the culvert bent back toward the sea, there was another light. Steady. A ship's lantern, at the mouth, in a boat that wasn't moving.
"That's him," I said. "Your purser."
"That's him."
"You give him that and they'll have your girl anyway. Next year. The year after. A note's a key that fits for ever. They don't burn a key that works."
"I know what it is, duck."
"Then don't turn it."
"It's the one I've got." She tied the neck of the bag tighter with her teeth. "You're good with locks. I'll give you that. You're no good at all with people. You've never once had anybody hanging off your neck that you'd sell a port for."
I had nothing for that. I had a culvert roof a hand off my head and a mouth full of the next argument, about the pins in it, and it was no good before I'd opened it.
Somewhere back behind us, in the dark, there was a bump. Then another. Then a very large voice saying, "Sorry," to a wall.
He came round the pier on his back.
There's no other way to say it. A Guild dinghy, the little one off the yard steps, with a man in the bottom of it who was most of the dinghy, flat out with his knees up against one side and his boots up against the other, pushing himself along the roof with both hands. He'd a lantern lashed on the thwart by his ear. It swung, and every time it swung he hit another bit of the wall.
"Bryony," said Gannet. "Wenna. Tobin." He bumped. "Sorry."
"Colm," said Tobin, "you came."
"You told me."
"I did, didn't I." Tobin sounded pleased about it.
Gannet got a hand on the culvert wall, flat, and stopped himself alongside Wenna's punt. He couldn't sit up. He lay there under the roof with his face in the lamplight and his hand on the wall, and he looked at her, as he'd looked at her on the Steps when she'd said it to my ear.
"Your note's void," he said.
Wenna didn't move.
"The Bank sold it itself." He got his other hand into his shirt. It took a while. "I've the Guild's paper on it. With the stamp."
"You'd say anything," said Wenna. "To get the bag. You'd say anything at all."
"You know I wouldn't."
She looked at him.
"You know I can't lie to you," said Gannet. "It's the one thing you know about me."
The water knocked under the punt. Out at the mouth the purser's lantern hadn't moved.
Wenna put out her hand. He gave her the paper. She unfolded it on her knee in the lamplight, and she read it twice, and the second time her lips moved.
She folded it back up. She put it in her coat.
Then she leaned across the black water between her punt and our skiff, and put the bag in my hands. Not dropped. Put. She held on to it for a moment after I had it, both of us holding it, and then she let go.
"Take it," said Wenna.
The purser's lantern moved.
It came in under the arch, low and fast, and there were oars behind it, four, and a voice that said something short in a language I didn't have. They'd seen.
"Down," said Tobin.
They came round the bend. A ship's boat, too big for the culvert, the oar-looms scraping the roof, two men in the bow with their heads down and their hands out, and the first of them had my wrist before I knew where his hand was. He pulled. I pulled. The skiff came over on its side, all of it, and the culvert came in over the gunwale black and cold, and the bag was half in the water and half in my fist.
The neck had torn. They went, little hard things, one and another, out past my fingers into the water. Corks. Glass. I had the bottom of the bag in both hands and I held it, and things went out of the top of it like a lock spilling its pins.
Then the skiff stopped going over.
It stopped against something huge. Gannet had got his arm over our gunwale from his dinghy, and his other hand on an iron ring in the wall, and he held our skiff there, half over, against the brick, with his whole weight. His face was a foot from mine. He didn't say anything. He held it.
Tobin stood up in the stern with his head on the roof and hit the man who had my wrist across the side of the head with an oar. A flat hard sound. The man let go and went over backwards into his own boat.
"Get off her," said Tobin.
The second man came on. Wenna was gone.
I hadn't seen her go. Her punt was gone from beside the hatch and her lamp with it. She'd have gone out along the wall, flat, under their oars, while they had their hands on me. There was just the dark, and the ship's boat jammed in the bend with its men shouting.
Then, from out at the mouth, a noise like a barn coming down.
We got out on the slack. Tobin rowed and I bailed with my hands, with the bag in my lap, and Gannet came after us on his back, apologising to the walls.
At the mouth of the culvert there was a lighter. Broad and black and tarred, with a washing line over the cuddy. The ship's boat had got itself backed out of the bend as far as the arch and no further, and the lighter's bow was in it. Not against it. In it. She'd brought it across the arch on the sweeps with all the weight of it, and stoved the ship's boat in at the quarter and pinned it to the wall. The purser was in the water holding a ring. The men from the culvert were climbing out over their own wreck. Wenna stood on the bow of her lighter with the boathook in her two hands and the lamp at her feet, looking at what she'd done.
Then there were more lights. Guild oars, a dozen, and a gig coming round from the Bank steps with Captain Haverill in the stern.
She didn't run. She put the boathook down on the deck. When they brought the gig alongside she held her hands out to the constable, both of them, as if she was handing him a coil of rope.
She didn't look at us. She looked at the town. Up the hill, toward the Lane.
Haverill had the purser fished out and put back in what was left of his boat, and let his own men tow it out to the ketch, because the man was foreign, and it's a free port. I watched the ketch take him aboard. Her sails went up, grey on grey, and filled, and leaned. She went out past the tower on the ebb with her lamps lit and nothing in her hold that was ours.
They took Wenna round to the yard in the gig. They took the purser's men in another boat. Tobin went with them, to tell it, and to get the skiff back to his friend, and to be thanked, which he likes.
That left the stair. The Bank's water stair, beside the culvert mouth, green steps going up into the dark under the Bank, and the two of us on them with the water at our boots and the lantern from his dinghy.
I opened the bag.
I counted the bottles in the wet straw at the bottom, corked, whole. There'd been seven. I'd counted the corks in her lamp before she tied the neck.
"Three," I said.
"Which?" said Gannet.
"I'll look in the light."
He was sat on the step below me, soaked to the neck from holding our skiff. His hair was flat and dark and dripping in his eyes, and his hands were on his knees, and they'd been cut on the wall, both of them, across the knuckles.
"It wasn't a tap," I said. "What I said. I said that so it'd cut."
"It was mean, what I said back."
"It was true."
"It was mean as well," said Gannet. "I said it so it'd go in. I knew where to put it. I never did it on purpose before."
"It went in."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"I'm sorry," I said.
We sat on the stair. The ebb was starting to go out of the culvert behind us, a low suck in the dark, and the light was gone off the harbour except where the town had its lamps.
He turned round on the step. He was below me, so for once we were the one height, his face and mine, a hand apart. He didn't move closer. He was asking, with all of his face, and I could feel it on my mouth like heat off a forge.
I stopped it. I put my hand flat on his chest, on the wet shirt, where the paper had been.
"You've still got it," I said. "I haven't."
He looked at me. Then he sat back.
I had the bag in my lap. The three bottles. I held it a moment more. My fingers didn't want to let go of it, and I made them.
I held it out to him.
"Hold this for me."
He took it in both hands like something asleep.