Tobin
Eight days to the winter ship. Morning.
I woke with my face on a table and a bell going somewhere outside my head, though it took me a while to be sure.
The kitchen range had gone cold. My coat was on the back of the chair where I'd hung it, and I put a hand inside it before I'd got my eyes open, the way a man pats his pocket for his purse in a crowd. The letter was where I'd left it. Left side, against the lining. I'd slept the whole night eighteen inches from the woman the letter wants, with the letter flat against my ribs, neither of us had said a word about it, and I'd dreamed about a blue horse.
"Boat's in!" a Guild boy was shouting up the passage. "Last boat! Chief Auditor's on it!"
Odile was already gone from the table. Her cup was there, and her ledger, shut. I put on my coat and went down to the stair with my hair on end, and a taste in my mouth like the bottom of a bucket.
I'd never seen the Chief Auditor of the Guild of Tasters. Nobody in the port of Vessel had, much; she sends people. She came up the green steps from the boat in a grey cloak with her skirts in one gloved hand, tall and thin and straight, mid-fifties, with a face like a well-kept ledger, every column ruled and added. She didn't hold the rope. A Guild clerk went up ahead of her carrying her satchel as you'd carry the Host.
Odile stood at the top of the stair with her cap on straight, and Haverill beside her with his spectacles in his fist and his hat under his arm. He was sweating a little. He'd been up since four, with the knee.
"Chief Auditor," said Haverill.
"Captain." Lorn looked at the harbour, and the quay, and the black hull at Ruddock's wharf, with the same look for all three. "Taster."
"Chief Auditor," said Odile.
"You'll have had my letter."
"I've had your letter, and I've written you twice. The second will have passed you in the night."
"Then we'll save the postage," said Lorn, and that was all the greeting she ever gave anyone.
The second person off the boat came up between two Guild guards with her hands in front of her, not in irons. I'll give the Guild that. A wide woman in a lighterwoman's coat gone green at the seams, with forearms like two mooring-posts and a cap with a fish-hook through the brim. She looked at the town as if she'd bought it, and found it a little small. She saw me.
"Hello, duck," said Wenna Coyle.
"Wenna."
"Look at you. You've lost your eyebrows." She'd come to a stop on the top step with the guards bumping into her back. "Rosie's with your Pet. She wrote me. She says she's been put on the accounts."
I'd known it the way you know where the rocks are. It was a different thing to have Wenna say it to my face, with her hands in front of her and her big sorry grin.
"Is she eating?"
"She eats like a horse and corrects your sister's sums." She put her tongue in her cheek. "I'm a witness, duck. I'm to be held as one. I'll have it said I came willing."
"Willing," said Lorn, without turning her head, "is an unusual word for it. Captain, she'll go in your lock-up. She's the Guild's, and you'll feed her, and no one will put a question to her but me."
The guards moved her on. She went past me towards the passage and the cells below it, and she said, in a voice that carried perfectly well, "I'd like a window, if there's a window." One of the guards said there was a grating. Wenna said that would do, and the whole of the island came up that stair behind her like a smell.
Haverill's front room is a good room to be told things in. It has a desk, and a stove, and the Packet Company's big brass clock, and nowhere to put your hands. Lorn took Haverill's chair without being offered it. Haverill stood. Odile stood. I stood against the wall by the stove and was the furniture.
"You asked me, in your letter of the sixth day, to lift the exemption," said Lorn. "It found me on the island before I sailed. I've had your reasons. They are good ones. The answer is no."
"Chief Auditor—"
"There are five of us sworn. The Captain. Master Esk. You. Master Quennell. Myself." She said it like a woman reading the names on a monument. "I wrote the exemption, Taster, and you'll have been told it was convenience. If my officers must prove themselves to each other, I have no Guild. I have five people watching one another across a table, each with a tongue and a grudge."
"One sentence from every mouth in the house," said Odile. "That's all I'm asking."
"And if none of them tastes of tin?"
Odile opened her mouth, and shut it.
"Then you'll know nothing you didn't know before," said Lorn, "and I'll have lost five officers' standing for the pleasure. You will have my plain no, Taster. It's the one answer in the room that's final." She took her gloves off one finger at a time. "Bring me something I can taste, and I'll lift whatever you like. Bring me a mouth."
"I've brought you twenty years of ink," said Odile. "It tastes of paper."
"Then bring me something that doesn't." Lorn looked at the stove, which was the nearest thing to hand. "Master Mayhew's five hundred marks I declined by the boat before last. In terms he will have found warm."
"He'll ask again," said Haverill.
"He asks as a man breathes. I find it restful." Her face didn't change at all, and I decided, there against the stove, that I would never try to lie to her. It would have been like lying to weather.
I'd been watching Haverill, because I read boats. A man on a mooring who thinks the weather's going to turn will stand with his weight on the rope. Haverill had been standing with his weight on the edge of his own desk since the Chief Auditor first said exemption, with his fist white on the wood, and when her no came it went out of him like air out of a bladder. He sat down. He hadn't been asked to. He asked Lorn if she'd take tea, and she said no, and then he asked her again, as though it might have changed.
I put that away. I had enough on the shelf.
"And now Mister Vane," said Lorn.
It was the first time she'd looked at me.
I want to say it was a bad look. It wasn't, and that was the worst of it. It was the look you give a good hammer you've picked up in a strange shop. She looked at the grip, and the weight, and whether it was going to turn in her hand. She went over me from my eyebrows to my boots and she didn't find me wanting, and I'd never in my life been so frightened of being found right.
"I'm told he's been useful," said Lorn, to Odile.
Odile's mouth went into a line. I didn't ask. I looked at the Chief Auditor's gloves.
"The Proprietor writes to you," said Lorn to me. "He's written once. The Captain holds that one. I have no doubt he's written again, or will. I want every letter that comes to you from now on in my hand before it's in anybody else's. And I want everything you've had since the landing."
"No," I said.
"I beg your pardon?"
I didn't know my mouth was going to. It's usually the other way about. "They've got my name on," I said. "They're my letters, ma'am. I don't know what he wants, or why he wants it, and I'm not going to hand it to someone who looks at me like something she's picked up in a shop."
Not even a one. It was the truest thing I'd ever said in the Guild office. Nobody in the room moved.
"Captain," said Lorn, "does the boy know who I am?"
"He knows, Chief Auditor."
"Then he's a braver fool than I was told." She laid her gloves on the desk, one on the other. "Think about it, Mister Vane. The Guild isn't asking."
She dismissed us with a flick of the fingers and I walked out of the room, and I got as far as the passage before my legs went. They didn't go all the way. They just made the offer.
The Guild's back yard is nothing to look at: a square of wet cobbles with a pump and a water-butt, and a wall to keep the harbour out. The washing hangs there. Wenna's grating looked out on it. There was a pair of big hands round the bars and a cap with a fish-hook through it, and I raised my hand to them, and they raised one back.
I got the letter out of my coat.
Odile had come out after me. She didn't speak. She'd put her cap on, and she stood by the pump with her arms folded, with that long mouth of hers shut tight.
I held it out.
"That's all of it," I said. "The Captain's got the fire one. This is the other. It came two nights ago, under the water-door at the dye-works, and I should have told you, and I didn't. I'd have said by dinner. It says—"
"I know what it says."
I stopped.
"I read it last night," she said. "After you'd put your head down. I went through your coat."
I've been called a lot of things. I've been called a liar by a magistrate, a fool by Ruddock, and a thief by a woman whose lamb I'd only borrowed. I've been caught in more lies than a net's got knots. None of them had ever gone in so far. It went in under the ribs, where the letter had been.
"You asked me if there was anything in it," I said. "I said there wasn't."
"You said there was nothing in your coat you'd want me to see."
"It's true."
"I know it's true. I tasted it." She didn't unfold her arms. "That's why I looked."
There isn't a vat in the port deep enough to stand in when someone says that to you. I'd been so pleased with myself. I'd found a sentence that couldn't be called, and I'd thought of it as a coat of my own, and I'd put it on in the kitchen, and she'd looked at me wearing it and known exactly which of us had cut it.
"That's the worst thing anyone's ever said to me," I said.
"Is it?"
"Look. I've had worse said to me. It's the worst anyone's ever said to me that was right." I got my tinderbox out and struck it, and the spark jumped and died. "I was going to tell you."
"When?"
"The first time I could find the front of it."
"Why didn't you?"
I'll say what I said, because it's the thing I'm proudest of that day, and it was no good to anybody. "Because it's you for the summer," I said. "That's the offer. It says it plain. And I wanted to see what I'd do."
She took that. She didn't say tin. She looked at it from the one side and then the other, like a stone.
"And?"
"I'm standing in a yard handing it to you, aren't I?"
"Every letter?"
"Every one." I put it in her hand. It was cold. "And I told that terrible woman no, and I'd tell her again, and I'm not clever enough to know why, so don't ask. You read them. You tell her what's in them. You decide. I don't want the Chief Auditor holding anything of mine, and I don't want you not to."
She didn't say anything for a time. The pump dripped.
"Then here's what we'll do," she said. "Everything that comes to either of us by water, the other sees first, before anyone. Before Lorn. Before the Captain."
"Done."
"And nobody goes through anybody's coat."
"I'd never have thought of it," I said, and she laughed. It came out of her short and surprised, a bark, as mine does, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth.
"Everything," I said. "Both ways. That's the terms."
"Both ways," said Odile.
It came half a beat late.
I'd made a trade of half a beat. It's the little gap in front of a sentence when somebody's checking their pockets, and I'd heard it ten thousand times from my own mouth. I put it down as a two. Maybe a one. She'd had a morning of Lorn.
I didn't pick it up again. At the grating, the big hands let go of the bars. Over our heads the washing flapped, a Guild clerk's shirt and a pair of Haverill's long stockings, and Odile took her hand away from her mouth, and we went in.