Odile
Nine days to the winter ship.
I woke with my tongue against my teeth, which is where it goes on bad nights, to find the edge. It had gone there out of habit. I lay in the whitewashed room with the water slapping at the stair and found a different taste in the way: salt, wet wool, a dyer's collar. The edge was where it always was. It was only a good deal quieter.
I'll rule on that and be done. It isn't tenderness. It's the kind of tiredness that comes from being kissed by a man who talks, and being obliged to find out how it feels when he stops.
Then the clerks came, and I had no more time to be foolish in.
There were two of them, from the Bank's archive, and a handcart, and they brought the cart in by the Guild's front door at ten in the morning with the air of men bringing a coffin to the wrong house. On the cart were twenty bundles of paper, tied in grey tape, a bundle to the year. The elder clerk put a letter into my hand before he'd said good morning.
It was from Cassia Lorn, in her own square hand, on the island's paper, and dated eleven days ago, before I had so much as landed. To Captain Haverill and Taster Strake. The Bank's private shelf, taken from the old Governor at the audit, is to be opened to Taster Strake on her asking and read by her alone. The first part of the sealed testimony, the part marked Carrow, may be read by her and not copied. Cassia Lorn.
"She sends it in her own time," I said.
"She sends everything in her own time, miss," said the elder clerk, which I thought showed spirit. He unloaded the bundles on the long table in Haverill's back room, and went away with the younger, and left me with twenty years of the Proprietor.
Tobin came in at eleven with tea he had stolen from the kitchen, and stopped in the doorway at the sight of the table.
"Is that him?"
"That's his hand. It leans neither way. The island's reader has pinned a slip to the first bundle that says disguised." I held up the slip. "Somebody wrote twenty years of letters in a hand they'd made up."
"Can I help?"
"You can read me the dates, and keep your blue thumbs off the paper."
He sat down on the other side of the table with his tea and untied the first bundle, very carefully, as you'd undo a bandage, and said, "Year one," and we began.
I'll tell you what I'd expected, and it will show you what a fool I am. I'd expected to put my tongue to the Proprietor's own ink and taste him. A lie tastes of tin to me whether it's spoken in my hearing or written in the liar's own ink, and a man who does what he's done has told a lie in twenty years. I'd find a thin cold coin of it in a margin, and I'd have his measure.
I read the first letter and put the corner of it to my tongue.
Paper. Gall ink, a little vinegar in it. The cold of the Bank's archive. Nothing else.
Move the glasses for the quarter to the lower vault before the tide.
An order. An order can't taste of anything. It doesn't say that a thing is so. It says do it, and there's nothing in it to be false.
I did the second, and the third. Tobin read me the dates off the backs and tied the bundles up behind me, and by noon I had gone through four years of the man and the tea had gone cold in both our cups. Send the glasses unopened. Hold the lot. Let the Governor sign. Now and again, between them, a plain statement of account. The account stands at nine thousand four hundred marks. I put my tongue to that one and held it there longer than I needed to.
Clean. It stood at nine thousand four hundred marks.
"Well?" said Tobin.
"It's true."
"How true?"
"To the mark."
He whistled, low, through his teeth. "He's careful."
"He's more than careful." I put the letter down. "A man who writes twenty years of orders and statements and never once a lie. In ink, to a man he's paying. A man like that has no reason to lie, and he knows it. He's saving it."
"For what?"
"For when it's needed. For the one question that matters." I reached for the next bundle. "I've known liars who couldn't open their mouths without a lie in it, and I've known the other kind, who tell you the truth for nineteen years and are never wrong. The other kind don't give you a place to stand."
Tobin went quiet. He tied a bundle with a bow, and it was the best-tied bundle in the harbour, and he looked at it.
"I've never told anyone a true thing for nineteen years in a row," he said.
"No."
"I've not got it in me."
"I know. It's what I like," I said, before I could stop it, and bent my head down over the table, and didn't look at his mouth.
By evening I'd finished. Twenty bundles, perhaps four hundred letters, and a dozen statements of account, and nothing in any of them but a clean and level paper-taste, dry and a little sweet, like a drawer in which something once was.
The thing I'd been given to catch had not got a tongue. He'd got orders.
"There's the testimony," said Tobin.
He'd laid it by the lamp: three sheets under a band of the green ribbon, Lorn's seal broken at the first. The part marked Carrow.
I'd not meant to read it with him in the room. He'd never asked me to leave and I'd never offered. It was a Guild clerk's fair copy, in brown ink, and I tasted the corner of it first from habit and got a clerk's good faith. It's not the witness's own ink; it's no use to me. I read it aloud.
"Carrow, Idris, counter-clerk of the Penny Cellar, sworn. I was sent up to the old Governor's private room with a lamp on the night the ledger was drawn. There was a high-backed chair set with its back to the door. A man sat in it in a velvet coat, gone dusty at the shoulder. I put the lamp on the table and I was sent out. I'd not know him if I fell over him. Question: A man? Answer: A man's coat, a man's voice. A man."
Tobin had stopped tying anything.
"Idris never told Pet that," he said. "He told her it was a room."
"It's a good deal of room." I put the sheet down. "A chair with its back to the door, and a velvet coat. And dust in the pile."
"Mayhew's coat."
"I put my hand on it, Tobin. On the fourth morning. I knew it blind."
"It's an island coat. Half the factors on the quay wear them."
"Half of them don't have a ship in the harbour on the night the ledger's drawn."
He took that. He didn't argue it. He looked at the green ribbon, and the broken seal, and then at me, and his mouth decided something and put it away again, quickly, as a man puts away a knife he's picked up by mistake.
I got my ledger out then and wrote it up as I always do, in columns, as I have since I was twenty-two.
Never lied in my hearing. That one I headed in a small, flat hand. And under it I wrote Mayhew, who had told me nothing but true sentences from the moment I climbed his ladder. And Ruddock, who had said not one false word, in the counting-house or the furnace, for all the things he hadn't said.
Has lied in my hearing. Tobin, a great many, and it gave me a bad turn to write his name in that column. Haverill, over his flask. Master Quennell, on the boat, for fun. Under the third heading I wrote, Cannot be put to the test: Haverill. Esk. Master Quennell. The Chief Auditor's standing order, five officers exempt, which meant any one of them might say it to my face and I would never know if I could trust it. I had men who never lied, and a column of men who had, and a column I couldn't test. I could cross a man out by tin. I could never cross one in.
I'd built the whole proud thing on tin. It had never occurred to me what a man might do who didn't need any.
"What's the matter?" said Tobin.
"Nothing." I tasted that as I said it. It was tin. "I'll write to Lorn again," I said. "I asked her once, on the sixth day, and she hasn't troubled to answer. She can lift the exemption, and I'll have the five of them say it to my face. A plain no, from every mouth in this house. Then I'll know."
"She'll say no."
"Then I'll ask again."
I wrote the letter. It took four lines, and the Guild's night boat took it down to the island at the turn of the tide.
It was gone midnight by the time we'd finished with the kitchen.
Tobin was dead on his feet. I could have told him so by the look of his mouth, which had gone loose and a little sorrowful. He hadn't been to his own bed in two nights for the lighter. He sat down at the kitchen table across from me with the black range ticking behind him and his coat hung on the chair, and he said something about Pet that ended in the middle, and put his arms on the table.
I'd known since the stair. I had not said it.
When I'd kissed him on the stair, his coat had crackled. It was not a good coat, and it hadn't any lining to speak of, so whatever was in it had been loud. Paper, folded small, against my hand for as long as it takes to say a name. He'd heard me hear it.
"Tobin."
"Mm."
"Is there anything in your coat I should see?"
He lifted his head. I'll say for him that he did it plainly. He looked at me, with the dye in the creases of his eyes, and he considered it.
"There's nothing in my coat I'd want you to see," he said.
I waited for the tin.
It did not come. Not a thread of it. It was a true sentence, sound all through. There was, in his coat, nothing he'd want me to see. I could have taken it to the island and sworn to it.
"Thank you," I said.
"S'all right." He put his head down on his arms. "I'd tell you a thing, but I've forgotten what it was."
He was asleep before I'd got my tongue back in order.
I sat a good while. I'll tell you what I thought, because I'm not proud of it. I thought: that sentence was true, and it told me nothing. I thought: this is what it tastes like. A kitchen, a man whose words I'd trust with my life, no tin in any of them, and everything I wanted to know gone round the back of it like water round a stone. I'd tasted that once. I'd been nineteen. A sound love, whole. I'd put it at a house.
I don't trust a sentence that tastes of nothing. I've had the practice.
I got up and went round the table and put my hand into his coat.
It took no looking. Inside, left side, where a man keeps what he doesn't want to lose, a single paper folded small. Red wax, broken. No crest, and the rim torn round it, as it had been on the chandler's door. His name on the outside in a hand that leans neither way.
I read it standing by the range, where the light was.
Bring her aboard at the last tide, and the summer comes home.
I put the corner to my tongue. It was paper, and gall ink, and nothing else. Of course it was. An order, and a promise, and a man who never lies in ink. I stood there and tasted it for a long time, the way you hold on to a cold spoon in your mouth, long after you ought to have taken it out.
Eight days, now that midnight had gone. He'd been given the thing he wanted most in the world, and the price of it was me, and he'd stood on a stair and let me kiss him with it against his ribs.
Then I folded it along its creases and put it back where it had been, left side, under the lining, flat. I took my hand out of his coat as carefully as I'd have taken it out of a trap.
Tobin Vane slept on at the table, with his cheek on his blue wrist and his mouth a little open. I sat down across from him again and watched it, because that is what I watch. It wasn't lying. It wasn't doing anything at all.
I didn't wake him.