Tobin
Fourteen days to the winter ship. Evening.
The queue for the Penny Cellar went down the steps, along the sea wall, round the cooper's corner and halfway to the fish stalls, and it was the quietest crowd I've ever stood in. People who are about to sell don't talk. They hold their hats.
I'd only come that way because it was quicker, and I got stuck at the back of the line, and I stayed.
Fourteen days to the last tide. After that nothing goes to the island till spring, and everybody who had a day to spare, and plenty who hadn't, had come down to sell it while the winter ship's buyers were paying twenty-two marks and the Cellar's own counter was paying fourteen. The buyers sat at a trestle by the door, two island clerks in wine-dark coats with a ledger between them and a rack of black bottles in straw at their backs. At the end of the trestle, on a stool, with a basin and a needle case, sat Master Esk.
Esk is the Guild's needle-man. He's sworn to it, so every day drawn in that cellar is drawn under the Guild's eye, and he counts them out loud so nobody can say after that it was two. He's long and dry and stooped, with spectacles on a string, and he counts the way a clock does when it's got nothing against you.
"One," said Esk, and the needle went in behind the ear of a man in a fisherman's smock.
"Wedding," said the first island clerk, writing. "June. Sound."
The man got up. He thanked Esk. He thanked the clerk, and he took his marks and went up the steps with his hat in both hands, looking about him like somebody who's left his stick on a chair and can't think which chair.
A woman of about forty sat down next. She sold her mother's voice. Three days of it, the winter before the end, her mother singing at the range with the door open for the cold. The clerk said, "Sound," and wrote voice. She stood up afterwards and said she'd have to go and see about the stone, and she was crying and didn't seem to know why, and Esk handed her his handkerchief without looking up.
I looked at my boots.
After her came a lad of eighteen with a baby in a shawl on his arm, and he sold the first day of the baby. The baby slept through it. He asked the island clerk if it would hurt her, and the clerk said no, and Esk said, "It takes from you, lad. Not from her," which was the kindest thing said in that cellar all night, and Esk looked embarrassed to have said it.
Every one of them went in straw. A wedding, a mother's voice, a first child: bottled, stoppered, waxed, tagged with the name of an island house, and laid in the crate with the rest, and every hour a boy came with a handcart and took the crate down to Ruddock's quay. I stood and watched them go. Look, I've dyed for the whole harbour. I know what it is to watch a whole port's worth of colour run out of the vat and not be able to put a hand in.
A bottle slid off the rack as the clerk reached past it. It hit the step, and the neck snapped clean off at the shoulder and rolled to my boot.
"Mind the glass," said Esk. "You've the look of a man about to sell, Tobin."
"I haven't a thing worth it."
"Nobody has," said Esk, "till somebody names a figure," and he put the next man's head to the light.
I picked up the neck. I couldn't help it; it's what a bottle-works boy does, the same as a mother picks up a child. Black. Thick in the wall. A double ring under the lip, the second ring thinner than the first. Ruddock's Reserve glass. I'd have known it with my eyes shut and my thumb on the rim. It was empty. It hadn't been filled yet. I put it in my coat, and nobody said a word, because nobody counts glass.
Pet was in the lock shop, on her workbench with a padlock in her lap, the way she used to sit on the wall with a lapful of my bait. The lamp was lit. The shop smelled of oil and iron filings and the cold, and a row of keys hung on nails behind her like a row of small dead fish.
"Shut the door," she said, without looking up. "You're letting the lane in."
I shut it.
"Mistress Hobb saw you from the bakehouse window," Pet said. "Tallow lighter, six in the morning. A Guild woman under an oilskin. You whistling."
"I wasn't whistling."
"Mistress Hobb says whistling." She turned the padlock over. The shackle went click and click. She's got the quickest hands I know, my sister, and when she's about to say something she keeps them busy, so they won't get in front of it. "He's had it fifteen months, Tobin. All right."
I said nothing. There wasn't anything in my mouth.
"Is she decent to you?" said Pet. "The Guild woman."
"She's rude."
"Good." The shackle went click. "I've done my crying over it. It was a good summer and I had it, and I handed it over, and when you hand a thing over, it's theirs. That's the whole law about it. I'm not asking it back, and I'm not asking you to ask for me."
"I haven't," I said.
That was the first one. I said I'd let it go, that I'd only been showing the Guild woman round the harbour, that it was a fee, a good one, forty marks. There isn't a fee. I said I'd been going past and thought I'd look in. A four, a five, a six; I'd stopped counting by the end of it, and I'd never been so quick. And then I said I'd been meaning to come for supper all week, which was true, and it stood there in a row of liars with its hat on and nobody would've picked it out.
Pet put the padlock down. A customer's key lay on the bench with a ticket tied to it, Mistress Hobb, back door, and she's cut that kind of key ten thousand times and still read the ticket twice.
She looked at my hands. "You've got the tinderbox out."
I had. I'd had it in my fist since the door, the lid under my thumb. I put it away.
"Don't light anything in here. There's oil." She got up and went through to the back and came out with a heel of bread and dripping wrapped in a cloth, and held it out, and when I took it she didn't let go for a second. "I mean it, Tobin."
"I know you do," I said, and that was true as well, and it was the worst of the lot.
I carried the bread back to the harbour in my coat, next to the neck.
The Guild was dark except for the back room, where Haverill keeps the second-best lamp. Miss Strake was in it, asleep. She was asleep on the old Governor's accounts with her cheek flat on a page of quarterly sums and her cap off and her hair coming out of its scraping, and ink on her chin, and one hand still hooked round a pen. A cup of cold tea stood by her elbow. Next to the tea lay a card with the clerk's wax cast of my letter's seal on it, red and ragged. The letter itself was in Haverill's coat, where it had been since the first night, and she'd had to make do with the cast.
I should have gone. I told myself I'd put the file straight and go.
I stood there looking at the seal instead. The ragged ring of the wax. The ridge round it, and the middle of it flat as a pond. I'd looked at it a dozen times since the fire and seen only what she'd seen: a torn edge, a man's mark, the Proprietor's own. It's a trick, I've always said; you don't see what's in front of you, you see what the person who showed you wanted. But I had a bottle neck in my coat, and I'd had my thumb on a hundred of them before I was fifteen.
The Guild keeps a stick of red wax in the table drawer. I warmed it at her candle, quietly, and dripped a coin of it onto the saucer under the cup. I waited for it to skin. Then I took the black neck out of my coat and pressed it, rim down, and held it. And lifted.
A ring. The edge of it ragged where the glass had snapped. Nothing in the middle.
I put the saucer down beside the cast. The break was its own, as every break is. The rings were the same to the hair.
"Is that evidence," said Miss Strake, "or are you stealing my wax?"
She hadn't lifted her head. Her eye was open, though, a long grey one, looking at the saucer sideways with the cheek still on the sums.
"It's a saucer," I said.
"It's a seal."
"It's a bottle neck." I turned the saucer for her. "Snapped off at the shoulder and pressed in hot. See the ring? Two rings, under the lip, one thicker. That's black glass, the Reserve kind, the Bank's. Nobody blows it but Ruddock. The man who wrote you that letter didn't tear anything. He broke a bottle and used the neck for a stamp."
She sat up. She wiped her chin with the back of her hand and made it worse. She took the saucer in both hands and looked at it for a long time, and then at the cast, and then at me, and her mouth had no verdict in it at all.
"Ruddock," she said. "And the winter ship ties up at his quay. So it's Mayhew's man, or it's Mayhew."
"Or anybody who's picked a neck out of the cullet heap," I said. "Half the port's been through that yard for glass. If I wanted to leave my name off a letter, I'd stamp it with a bottle I could find in any gutter."
"Is that what you'd do?"
"I'd stamp it with a bottle and go home to my supper." It was a two, and she gave it back to me with an eyebrow.
"Ruddock's the master of the glass-works," I said. "He was mine. I was his bottle boy, before. I'd have carried a bucket across a furnace for him."
"Before what?"
"The fever."
Nothing. Her mouth did nothing.
"And you've not been back since."
"No."
"Why?"
"He couldn't bear the sight of me," I said. "From the fever on. Five years. I never asked him what I'd done. I was fourteen when he took me on, and I'd have done anything he asked, and he'd look at the wall."
She watched me say it, and it was true, and I had never said it to anybody.
"Then I'll want him," she said. "Not tonight. I want the clerks done first. I'll put every soul in this house to a plain question, and then Mayhew, and then your master. One word each. Nobody can cheat it, and nobody likes it." She turned the saucer in the lamplight. "You were quick."
"I picked up a bottle."
"You picked up a bottle." She held out her free hand. It was a good hand, bony, ink in the creases of the palm. "Give me the neck."
I gave it. Hand it over, and it's theirs. She weighed it a moment on her flat palm as though it weighed more than glass, and put it in the pocket of her grey. The saucer she kept, tucked under her arm like a book, the wax going dull in it. Then she laid her hand over mine, just for a second, warm and dry, with her thumb on the back of my knuckle. "That is the first useful thing anyone has put in my hand since I landed, Tobin Vane. Thank you."
I watched her mouth. I always do now. There was nothing in it. Not the twist, not the line. She'd said a kind thing, plainly, and it had gone out of her without a mark.
"Have you eaten?" she said.
"I've got bread," I said. It was true. It was in my coat.
"Go and eat it. And wash your wrists. You're still wearing Mayhew's tallow."
"It's a good tallow," I said, and she nearly smiled, and caught it, and put it back.
I said I'd see her in the morning, and I went out by the water-stair, and I stood at the bottom of it in the dark with my sister's bread in one hand and nothing in the other. The boats knocked together. A gull came and sat on the rail and looked at the cloth.
I fed it the lot.