Tobin
Fifteen days to the winter ship.
The tide was making, and the whole of Vessel harbour was leaning the same way, every hull swung round on her mooring with her nose to the sea like a row of dogs at a door. That's the hour to row anything heavy. The water does half your work and doesn't ask for thanks.
My skiff isn't heavy. She's a dyer's skiff, eleven foot, and the inside of her is every blue there is, from the first dip to the ninth, because I've carried wet cloth in her for five years. Miss Strake sat in the stern with her knees together and her hands in her lap and the cap she'd borrowed off a Guild clerk down over her ears. She looked like a heron that had been told to wait.
"Round the far side of the ship," she said. "Slowly."
"I can do slowly."
"You can't do anything slowly. You haven't the face for it."
I took her down the line of the glass-works quay, past Ruddock's cone with the smoke standing off it, and out round the bow of the winter ship. She's big, the winter ship. Black-sided, high-sterned, with her name worn off her quarter by twenty years of the same crossing. Men on staging all down her flank with caulking irons, going tap, tap, tap, like a wet clock. The smell of hot pitch came off her across the water, and Miss Strake's mouth turned down at it, and I was sorry, a bit, about her room.
She was loading. Salt fish going in forward, in nets. Tallow aft. And there was one hatch, the little one abaft the mainmast, that had nothing going in or out of it at all, and a lighterman sitting on it with his legs crossed and his hands in his armpits, as if he'd been put there and told to grow.
A man doesn't sit on salt fish all morning. Nobody's going to steal it.
"Lot eleven forty-seven," I said, before I could stop myself.
"What?"
"Nothing. A number. I count hatches."
That was a two, and she didn't even turn her head for it. She'd gone back to watching the man on the hatch, and her mouth had gone into a line I was starting to know.
We were halfway down the seaward side when the lighters came.
There were three of them, and they came out from under the ship's quarter, where they'd been lying in the shadow so close to her side you'd have taken them for fenders. They came easy, no hurry, one each side of us and one ahead, and the one ahead turned broadside across my bow and the man in her shipped his oars across the gap, one, two, as neat as laying a table. The other two closed in till their gunwales were a hand off mine. Nobody raised his voice. Nobody had to.
The man across my bow was Fenn. Thin, hatless, red-faced from shouting at fires. He'd a pipe in his teeth with nothing in it.
"Morning, Tobin," said Fenn.
"Morning, Fenn."
"Lovely skiff. Lovely colour."
"Thank you."
"You'll want to take her round the other way, though." He took the pipe out and pointed back up the harbour with it. "That way. Nice and wide."
"I'm only showing the lady the ship."
"And now she's seen it." He smiled at Miss Strake, quite pleasant. He had a gap where his eyeteeth should be. "Ma'am."
I tried another way in. Lightermen are a trade. You get at them through the trade, the same way you get at a cloth through the mordant, and if you get the mordant wrong the colour never takes. "Where's Sallow these days?" I said. "I've not seen him on the water since the spring."
"Gone upriver," said the man on my left, an old fellow with no teeth at all. "Since the audit. Fenn's got his trade now."
"Has he."
"I have," said Fenn. "The letters. Anything wants carrying, and no questions. Same as Sallow." He put the pipe back in his teeth. "So I'll say it nice, Tobin, for old times. Round the other way."
"Who do you row for?" said Miss Strake, from the stern.
"Master Mayhew, ma'am. And anybody with a coin."
She let that one go by. It went past her without a mark on it.
"Then what's the harm in looking?" she said.
Fenn took the pipe out again. "No harm, ma'am. Master Mayhew's particular, that's all. All this is just keeping the paint nice."
She didn't so much as blink. "Tin," she said.
Fenn looked at me. I looked at Fenn. Every lighterman in Vessel harbour knows what the Guild's tasters do. Not one of them has ever had one sat in a skiff in front of him calling his lies like a fishwife calling herring.
"Round the other way," he said, and he wasn't smiling now. The old fellow on my left stood up in his boat and leaned on his oar, which is a thing you can do to a lighter and not a skiff, and the two of them came in that last hand's width till our gunwales ground together. The lighter's bulge went under mine like a shoulder. My skiff heeled. Green water came over the rail in one slop, into my boots and down the back of Miss Strake's neck, and for a breath I had eleven foot of boat standing on its edge and nothing under my feet I trusted. I didn't know if she could swim. I'd never wanted less to find out. She hung on to the thwart with both hands and said nothing at all, and I backed water, and took us round the other way. Nice and wide.
I've been sworn at on the water. I've been rammed, once, by a coal barge with nobody steering. I'd never been turned round before, not by men I've drunk with. It put a colour in my face I couldn't have named, and I've named a few hundred.
We'd got as far as the mouth of Tallow Lane before she said anything.
Tallow Lane runs downhill to the harbour and stops at a slip, and the lock shop is the last house before the water. The sign was out. The door was open. Pet was in it, shaking a duster, with her sleeves up and her hair tied in a cloth. She lifted a hand when she saw the skiff. I lifted an oar.
"Who's that?" said Miss Strake.
"A locksmith."
She looked at me a long while. There was nothing to call. Pet is a locksmith.
"Here's what we'll do," she said. "For one day, you'll tell me no lies."
"None?"
"Not a weather one. Not a rent one. Not a hatch-counting one. If you can't say it true, say nothing. I'm tired, Mister Vane. My tongue's tired. It's been a mouthful of you for two days."
"A whole day."
"A whole day."
I said yes, and she looked at me sharp, and then she didn't call it, because it wasn't a lie when I said it. I meant to.
I managed an hour.
Look, an hour's longer than you'd think. It's about three hundred things, if you're me. She asked me how long I'd had the skiff, and I said five years, and she asked me if I was a good dyer, and I said no, middling, I lose a vat a month because I go off and forget it, and she asked if I'd eaten, and I said no, and that I don't eat when I'm worried and I'd been worried since I first set eyes on her coming up the Guild stair. All of that came out of me like water out of a split bucket, and every bit of it was true, and I'd never felt so naked in a boat in my life.
She didn't say anything for a while. The bell on the customs house went for the hour while we were tying up at the Guild water-stair, and she looked up at it.
"That's an hour," she said.
"It is."
"I'd have put money on ten minutes."
"So would I."
"Well," she said, and she looked at me with her mouth not doing anything, not the twist and not the line, just a mouth, resting. "Well. That was tolerable."
Then a Guild clerk leaned out of a window over the stair and asked if we'd seen the Captain's boat, and I said I'd sunk it, and she winced as if I'd trodden on her foot.
The Guild office was full of lightermen.
Two of Fenn's mates off the morning's lighters were standing in the middle of Haverill's front room with their caps in their hands, and Haverill was behind his desk, on his feet, giving it to them. A Guild clerk had already run to him, it turned out, from the customs house steps, where he'd watched the whole business through a glass and enjoyed it very much.
"You shipped oars across a Guild officer's bow," Haverill was saying. "In my harbour. In front of the customs house."
"Island charter, Captain," said the bigger one.
"I know the charter, I was reading it before your mother was weaned." Haverill put his spectacles on to look at them, which is what he does instead of hitting. "It keeps your master's hold shut. It doesn't let you lay a lighter across my officer's bow. Next time it's the cells, and your charter can come and fetch you out itself."
Miss Strake had gone straight past them all and up the stairs to write her report. I'd stayed in the door to enjoy it, the same as the clerk.
Another clerk came at me sideways with an armful. "You're with the taster? She sent for this. The trial file, the old Governor's. The Auditor sealed the testimony pages; you'll not get into those without her. The rest's the accounts." He put it in my arms. It was the size of a feather mattress and twice as heavy, all tied with tape. "Take it up to her and don't drop it."
I didn't drop it. I stood there with it, the lightermen on one side and the Captain on the other, and because I can't hold a thing that heavy without talking, I asked the whole room.
"Who tasted the old Governor's books, anyway? All those years?"
Three people answered me at once.
"Everyone and his dog," said the clerk.
"Ask the Guild," said Haverill, without taking his eyes off the lightermen.
And from the stairs, where a small neat old man in Guild grey was coming down one step at a time with a hand on the rail and a teacup in the other, a voice said, "Mind that file, young man, it's in order, and I'd like it to stay in order. Don't put your blue hands on the accounts. I tasted the old Governor's ledger every year after it was bottled, and I never once found a face in it, and I'll not have it come apart now over a dyer."
He got to the bottom and went past me down the passage towards the back, telling a clerk that the tea in this building was a disgrace, and the clerk said yes, Master Quennell.
Haverill had got to the end of the lightermen, or the end of his patience. He sent them off with a word I'll not repeat and looked at me and the file.
"And you can tell the taster," he said, "that if she's looking in there for the Proprietor's face, she'll not find it. Nobody ever has. The ledger was drawn the night before the winter ship sailed. Every year, the one night."
He said it like a man telling you where the coal's kept. I stood in his door with twenty years of the old Governor's accounts in my arms.
The night before the winter ship sails, she lies at Ruddock's quay with her master aboard. Every year. I've watched her go out since I was small enough to be held up. Saul Mayhew stands on the quarterdeck the night before in his velvet coat with the lights on, and drinks with the harbour clerks, and goes out on the morning tide like a church leaving.
I took the file up. She was at the table in the Captain's back room, writing in a small square hand, very fast, with ink up one finger.
I put the file down in front of her, and she put her hand flat on it as if it might get up.
"Mayhew's in port the night they drew the ledger," I said. "Every year. I'd swear to it."
"Would you." She looked up. "That's a first."
"It's true."
"I know it's true," she said. "That's what's so unsettling."
"You'll read all that tonight?"
"All of it."
"It's twenty years of sums."
"Sums are easy. Sums don't lie. It's what people write in the margin beside them." She pulled at the knot in the tape with her inky finger, and it didn't give, and she pulled harder. "Guild clerks. They tie a knot as if the Auditor were going to grade it."
She looked at the file. I looked out of the window, down the harbour to the black side of the winter ship at Ruddock's quay, and the little hatch abaft the mainmast with a lighterman sat on it.
"They'll not let us near her," she said. "You saw."
"I saw three lighters," I said. "In broad daylight, with the tide making. I know where every one of those men drinks, and who he owes, and what time his wife locks the door."
I got my tinderbox out and struck it, once, and put it away.
"There's always a way past a lighterman," I said. "You just have to be one."