Tobin
Twelve days to the winter ship.
By ten o'clock Miss Strake had said "Are you the man they call the Proprietor?" thirty-one times, and I'd have said she was the most patient woman in the harbour if I hadn't been watching her mouth.
She sat at Haverill's back table with the silver spoon out on its cord and a plate of salt-cured parsley at her elbow, like a woman at a very long dinner. A Guild clerk named Pell kept the book beside her. Pell is thin, with a cold in his head that he has had since the spring and a pen he treats like a relation. Each person came in, stood on the square of oilcloth in front of her, and was told the rules, which were these: one question, one word. You say no, a plain no. You don't say certainly not, or don't be ridiculous, or I should think not. If there's tin in it she calls it, and if there isn't she says "True," and Pell makes a mark.
It's the oldest trick there is, and I couldn't see a way round it. A man can dress a lie in a true coat. He can't do much with one syllable.
I sat on the window seat and watched them come. A young clerk, who got as far as "Certainly not, ma'am, I—" and was told to start again. A porter, who said it so loud it set the cups jumping. A boy of sixteen who laughed all through the question and then said no, giggling, and went out pink to the hair.
Then the lad with ink on his lip, who said no, and added, "And my wife says so too."
She smiled at him. It wasn't much of a joke. It went across her whole face, long and sudden and a good deal warmer than the thing deserved, and I thought: I've known that woman six days, and nobody told me she could do that.
I was not jealous of a clerk. A four. Maybe a five.
After that they ran into each other. Forty-one by eleven, every one of them true, and Pell sent a boy for more paper. I was beginning to feel that the Proprietor had had the sense to be out.
"Who's left?" she said.
"The officers, miss," said Pell. He blew his nose. "Under the standing order."
"I know the order. I'm in it."
"No sworn officer of the Guild is to be put to a question by another, miss." He was reading it off the inside of the book cover. "On principle, it says."
"Then the principle can wait for the Chief Auditor," she said. "When Lorn lands, I'll put every officer in this house to it myself, the Captain first, and she can say her principle to my face. It's a delay, not a pardon."
The Captain, in any case, had been at the customs house since eight. I'd watched him put his hat on and go out the street door like a man who'd remembered a dentist.
There was a stick on the passage floor. Three taps, and the door opened, and the old palate stood in it with a teacup in one hand.
"I'll say it now," said Master Quennell, "if the taster allows it."
"Not today, Master Quennell," said Miss Strake.
"Then enter that I offered, Mister Pell." He looked down at the cup. "There's a leaf in this." And he turned in the door, with the stick going before him, and was gone along the passage.
Miss Strake looked after him. "He'd say it for fun," she said. "He told a whole boat he was sixty."
"He's an old man, miss," said Pell.
"Yes," she said, and put her pen down. "Mister Vane. Come here."
I got off the window seat. I stood on the oilcloth. It was a smaller square than it looks, and her mouth was nearer than I'd planned.
"Are you the man they call the Proprietor?"
"No," I said.
A silence. She looked at me with the spoon in her hand. And she smiled, a plain, long, unhurried one, that went the whole width of her face.
"True," she said.
Pell made a mark. I'd have given a good deal to know whether it was longer than the clerk's, and I'd counted it, and it was.
Mayhew refused at noon, on the quay, as an owner would.
He wouldn't come off his ship. He stood at the head of the gangway with his hands folded on the front of his velvet and let Miss Strake put her question to him from the cobbles. He'd that way of listening that made you feel you'd been entered in something.
"A master under island charter doesn't swear to a stranger's tongue, ma'am. It's the ninth clause. I believe Mister Pell has it in his bag."
"He has, miss," said Pell, very low, and blew his nose.
"One word," she said. "Master Mayhew. Any word that begins with an n."
"I decline."
"I can't taste that."
"No, ma'am," said Mayhew, quite kindly. "I don't suppose you can."
That was all. I'd have liked to hit him, and I couldn't have told you what for. He hadn't lied. He had put a ninth clause between himself and her tongue like a man putting down a good cloth to keep a table from being marked.
We walked to the glass-works gate, a black arch with the cone behind it and a smell of hot sand and soda that gets into your hair for a week. I got as far as the arch.
"I'll mind the clerk's boat," I said.
She looked at me.
"I'll not be a minute. I'll be here."
"Tin," she said. She didn't press it. She went in under the arch with Pell trailing, and I stood on the quay in the smoke with my hands in my coat, and I knew that yard like my own bad tooth. And I heard him from the gate.
"Speak up, woman!" he roared. "I've the furnace in that ear!"
She did, I suppose. I didn't hear it. What I heard, a minute after, the whole length of the yard, with a gather of glass hissing somewhere, was a voice I'd stood under at fourteen and not heard speak to me in five years, saying: "Not in my own yard."
She came out ten minutes later with a face like a locked drawer. She said nothing about the gate. I said nothing about the boat. She put her hand on my sleeve a moment, going past, and took it off again, and I'd have said that was nothing, except it was my right arm and I could feel it till supper.
The test sheets went to the evidence store. Haverill's rule: anything that's been tasted goes under a lock, and Pell, who thinks a lock is a kind of blessing, had a great box of them to carry down the passage, so I took the other end.
The store's at the back of the building, at the foot of three steps, behind a door with an iron plate on it. It was long and low and lit by a lamp that hadn't been trimmed: shelves, boxes with Lorn's seal on them, a row of tall chests along the end with a Guild crest on each lid. It smelled like a church that had been left a great deal of luggage. Pell set his box on the table and began on the cards, and the old palate had followed us down after all, because I could hear the stick on the steps.
"By the name, Mister Pell," he said from the door. "Not by the date. Cards face up, and square the boxes to the shelf edge. Whatever's waiting for its owner may as well wait tidily."
"Yes, Master Quennell," said Pell.
I put my end of the box down and got out of there.
Fenn drinks at the ropewalk.
Not in it. Behind it. There's a tar shed where the lightermen sit in the evenings with a jug between them, and he was in his place with the pipe in his teeth, splicing a bit of line with his thin red fingers, and he looked up and said, "Tobin," pleasant as milk.
"Fenn."
"Come to apologise for the skiff?"
"I've come about a kettle."
He went on splicing. A gull went off the roof. "Kettle fell over," he said. "Ask anybody."
"I went up that stair, Fenn."
"I know you did. I put the fire out, didn't I? I'd a bucket in each hand." He stopped. He took the pipe out. "Nobody was to be hurt. It said the room'd be empty."
My fist was half up before I knew it. I put it away.
"Said," I said.
"A letter." He took it out of his hat. Of course he did; a lighterman keeps the letter that pays him, as a sailor keeps a rope. "Came by water. Coin in it, twelve marks, and a second letter inside sealed, for the chandler's street door, with a caulking nail. Kettle on the slip at the third bell and the second pinned up after. Nobody on the stair." He handed it me. He wasn't afraid of it. "I carry letters, Tobin. That's all I've ever done. You pick up where it's left and you put down where it says. Sallow taught me that."
The hand was small and upright and leaned neither way. The seal on it was red, with a ragged ring in the wax and a flat middle, and I put my thumb to it without thinking, and it was a bottle neck.
"Where was it left?"
"Where it's always left."
"Fenn."
"A man's got a trade."
"Who gave it you?"
"Nobody gave it me. That's the whole of the trade. Never saw a face." He looked out at the water. "Who does?"
Fenn came up to the Guild with me at four, willing as a dog to a bone, because he knew what his charter was worth. He told it all again at the front-room table, easy as you like, and she tasted every word.
She shut her eyes. She opened them. "Clean," she said, to nobody. "All of it."
Haverill read the letter through with his knee up on a chair, and looked at the wall for a long moment.
"It names a quay and a kettle," he said. "He's under the winter ship's charter till she casts off. A man who lays a boat across my officer's bow, I can take in the act. A man who set a kettle on a slip five days since, under a letter, is about his master's errand as far as the charter knows, and I can't hold him unless somebody tells me who ordered it. And nobody's going to."
"He burned my room," she said.
"I know what he did."
"He's sitting in your front room with a clean tongue."
"I can see where he's sitting." Haverill didn't shout. He doesn't, when it's the worst of it. Fenn walked out at five, in his own time, with his hat on. At the door he turned and touched the brim to Miss Strake, as to a lady he'd wronged, and Haverill said a thing to the window that I'm not going to put down.
I walked. I'd got as far as Tallow Lane before I knew it, and the bakehouse was open, the one with the currant buns Pet likes best, with the glaze on them like a good varnish, and I bought one. It was still warm in the cloth. I stood in the lane across from the lock shop, where the lamp was lit at the back, and I looked at the window with the bun in my hand.
I didn't knock.
I ate it in four goes, standing up, with sugar on my thumbs, and it was a very good bun.