Tobin
Spring.
She was at the table by the window with the pen going, and I was on the bed with a net across my knees that didn't need mending, and the light was coming in off the water onto the new pine.
The room over the chandler's. They'd rebuilt it in the winter, and the Guild had taken it for its harbour palate, and the harbour palate had gone up the outside stair in January with her canvas bag and her ledger and my crowbar, and said she'd not lodge in the old man's rooms if they paid her. They'd offered to pay her. She'd said that was worse.
Lorn's paper was on the table under the crowbar, folded in three. It had been there twelve weeks. I'd never once asked her about it.
Her mother's letter had come in on the first island packet the day before. I'd carried it up from the Guild office myself, which was a three, because I'd told the boy I was going that way anyway. She'd read it standing up. Three lines about the weather, one about the house, and then: come home, the passage is open. She'd put it face down by the crowbar and said nothing. This morning she'd sat down and pulled a clean sheet towards her before she'd had her tea.
The pen stopped. She sat with it across the paper a long while. Then she held the sheet out to me without turning round.
"Read it," she said. "I want to know if it's true."
"You'd know better than me."
"I'd know if it's a lie. That isn't what I asked."
So I put the net down and read it.
It was all the old man had told her in the cell, put down in her small square hand. Her father's cold feet on her mother every night of the winter. The singing while he shaved, badly. The nine nights of the croup, and the ninth, when he fell asleep on the floor by the cot and her mother put her shawl over him and sat down beside him till morning rather than wake him. She'd written it plain, like a verdict. At the end she'd put: I don't have it. He did. This is what he said, and he said it true. I thought you should have it back, even like this.
And under that, after a space, as if she'd sat a long while before she wrote it: I'm staying in the port of Vessel.
I gave it back.
"It's true," I said.
She took it and looked at the paper, not at me.
"I've not signed Lorn's."
"No."
"You've not asked me."
"No."
"Why not?"
I'd had twelve weeks to think of something clever. I'd thought of several, and ranked them, and every one was a four or worse.
"Because you'd do it to please me," I said. "Or you'd not do it, to spite me. Either way it'd be mine. I'd like it to be yours."
She turned round on the chair then and looked at me, sitting on her bed with a net across my knees and tar on my fingers.
"Ask me something else, then," she said. "Something straight."
So I asked her one.
"Do you love me?"
She didn't answer it straight off. She sat with her mother's letter in her lap and ink up one finger, and her mouth did nothing at all for a while, and then it did.
"I love you," said Odile.
I'd have given the skiff, and every vat I ever had, and my two arms to the elbow, to taste it as she does. Just once. To know where it went down.
"I can't taste it," I said.
"No," she said. "You'll have to take my word."
I took it. I sat there on her bed and took it, with nothing to prove it by, and it was the easiest thing I've ever done, and I've been doing it every day since.
She got up and moved the crowbar off Lorn's paper and unfolded it, and dipped her pen, and signed it there, standing, small and square. She sanded it. She held it up to the window to dry, and looked at me over the top of it.
"Will you be here?" she said. "In the summer. And when the next winter ship comes in."
"Yes," I said.
That was all. I didn't put anything in front of it.
She held it on her tongue a good while. Then she said, "No tin," and laughed, and folded the paper in three again, and put it in her coat with the letter.
"The tide's at ten," she said. "Put your boots on."
Half of Vessel harbour was on Ruddock's quay to see her go.
It was a blowy blue morning, the kind the harbour gets about twice a year, with the water chopped white and every gull in the port shouting. The winter ship lay alongside where she'd lain on the last day of autumn, scraped and tarred, her topmasts up again, a winter's worth of weed off her. Mayhew was on the quarterdeck in the velvet, with his customs paid. The Penny Cellar queue had been round the cooper's corner on the first warm day, same as ever. You can strike a list. You can't strike people needing their rent.
They brought the old man down from the Guild office at a quarter past nine, Haverill on one side of him and Gannet on the other, with irons on his wrists. He walked at his own pace. He had his muffler on and no spoon on his collar. The crowd went quiet as he came, and stood back off the stones, and let him by as if he were a cart with a load on it that might tip. Nobody shouted. I'd thought somebody would.
At the foot of the gangway he stopped and told Haverill to mind his trunk, because it had his tea in it.
He didn't look at Odile. She didn't look at him. She was looking at the ship.
He went up. Mayhew met him at the top and stood aside without a word, as he had for twenty winters, and a Guild guard took him aft, and that was the last of him.
Lorn was at the foot of the gangway in her gloves, with Pell behind her holding a box of reopened writ cases and sneezing. She was taking him to the island court herself. Odile went to her through the crowd, and took the paper out of her coat, signed, and the letter with it, and held them out.
"The post," she said. "And that's for my mother. On the island. You'll be passing."
Lorn took them both. She looked at the signature, and then at Odile, for about as long as it takes to taste something.
"Taste well for me, Harbour Palate," said Lorn, and put them in her glove, and went up the gangway.
Wenna Coyle went up after her between two guards, without irons, as Lorn's witness, and stopped at the foot to bend down to Rosie and say, "Hello, duck. Mind your Aunt Pet," and went up laughing.
Then they took the gangway in.
We went to the end of the mole to watch her clear. Odile and me. Everybody else stayed on the quay.
There's an iron post at the end with a lantern on a hook, unlit in the daylight. I leaned on it. She stood with her arms folded and her spoon on her collar on its new cord, and watched the ship come off the quay on the ebb, slow, her topsails just filling.
"Forty," she said, very low.
"What?"
"Forty loves. In him. Going out on the tide in an old man in irons." She didn't take her eyes off the ship. "Nobody will ever have them back. Whatever they were. When he dies they'll go with him."
There wasn't anything to say to that which would have been true and also helped. I didn't say it.
"Her shawl's in there," said Odile.
I put my hand on the small of her back, through her coat, and kept it there, and she let me.
Down on the quay Gannet leaned to Bryony and said something, and she said something back, and he kissed her, quite carefully, there in front of half the harbour, as a man does a thing he's decided to have again. Bryony hit him on the arm when he'd done. Then she held on to it. Pet was shouting up the mole at me that supper was at six and I was to be on time for once in my life, and I shouted back that I'd never been late, and Odile said "Tin" without turning her head, and Pet heard her, and laughed, and it came all the way down the mole to us like something poured out.
The ship came abreast of us, close enough to see the men on her yards. Her sails filled with a crack. She leaned over to the wind, and the water went white along her side, and she went out past the harbour wall into the open sea.
I got my tinderbox out. I struck it once, out of habit, and the spark went off on the wind before it touched anything.
Then I put the box in my pocket, and took her hand instead, and we stood at the end of the mole with the empty lantern over us and watched the winter ship get small on the bright water, smaller, a sail, a mark, a gull's wing, until there was only the light where she'd been.