Chapter 96 The Coal Wharf

Chapter 96 The Coal Wharf
The lane broadened where the cobbles met the river wall, the narrow brick facades giving way to the low, tar-blackened timbers of the commercial wharves. Here, the river was not an ink-trough or a line drawn across a map; it was an immense, grey-green muscularity that smelled of rotted bladderwrack, bilge-water, and the sulfurous bite of open-hearth coal. The tide was running out, dropping away from the stone piers to reveal thick collars of green slime and clusters of small, grey barnacles that hissed as the air struck them.

Silas stopped near a massive iron mooring bollard that had been rubbed bright by the heavy hemp hawsers of the coal-barges. A three-masted schooner, the Mary of Goole, lay alongside the timber staging, her black hull streaked with white salt-crust and her rigging whistling in the raw easterly wind. Men in heavy moleskin trousers and blue jerseys were moving across her deck, their faces smudged with the fine black dust that rose from the open hatches like soot from an old flue.

"They're loading by the basket," Silas said. He leaned his hips against the river wall, his hands tucked deep into the pockets of his tunic, which was beginning to lose its stiffness under the damp salt-mist. "No chains. No sorting rakes. Just six men and a wooden derrick."

I looked down at my own fingers. The purple stain of the First Draft fluid was still there under the nails, but it had begun to dry into a dull, common grime that looked no different from the coal-dust on the sleeves of the laborers. The white needle-eye scar in my palm didn't throb anymore; the cold river air had numbed the skin until the flesh felt thick and ordinary, a hand meant for carrying water or holding a rope rather than registering the margins of a sector.

"The girl with the typewriter won't look for us here," I said, watching a heavy willow basket swing out from the ship’s hold, its bottom leaking small drops of black river water onto the stones. "She doesn't know the names of the ropes. In the core, she always called a boat a vessel and left the deck empty so she wouldn't have to describe the caulking."

"She didn't know about the mud, either," Silas murmured. He reached down and scooped up a small lump of wet silt from the base of the wall, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger until it formed a slick, grey marble. "In her book, the ground was always the track or the stone floor. This stuff has pieces of shell in it. It sticks to your skin because it belongs to the river, not the page."

A man came down the gangplank of the Mary of Goole, carrying a wooden tally-board under his arm. He wore an old beaver-skin hat that had lost most of its nap, and his spectacles were tied behind his ears with a greasy piece of twine. He stopped three feet from us, his boots sinking an inch into the wet coal-slack that littered the quay.

"You looking for the ferry-boat to the marsh-side?" he asked, his voice rough with tobacco smoke, his eyes squinting at Silas through the salt-filmed glass of his lenses. "If you are, you're a mile low. Old Thomas takes the skiff from the hard behind the maltings. Shilling a head if the wind stays fair, eighteen pence if he has to pull against the fresh."

"We're not crossing," Silas said, his voice falling naturally into the heavy, slow rhythm of the wharf-men. "We're just waiting for the tide to turn."

The tally-man spat a dark stream of tobacco juice against the iron bollard, where it ran down the metal like old ink. "The tide doesn't turn for three hours yet, young man. And if you're standing about in that linen coat when the rain comes off the spit, you'll be soaked through to the stays before the first basket's clear of the hatch. The girl from the lodging-house—the one that writes the long letters to London—she’s just gone into the counting-house yonder to see about her paper-shipment. You’re not with her company, are you?"

I drew back into the shadow of Silas’s shoulder, my heart giving a sudden, sharp knock against my ribs—the old, instinctive panic of the ninety-fourth sector returning before I could stop it. "What paper-shipment?" I asked.

"Two crates of fine rag-stock from the mills at Kendal," the tally-man said, tapping his wooden board with a stumpy lead pencil. "She uses it up faster than we can haul it from the station. God knows what she puts on it—she don't print bills or receipts, just rows of little black letters from morning till night until the room smells like a cobbler's shop from the lamp-oil. The master of the Mary won't take her crates on the next voyage; says her ink don't dry proper in the damp, and it smudges the other freight."

He nodded toward a low, brick building with a slate roof that stood at the corner of the wharf, its windows small and dark behind iron security bars. Through the leaded panes, a yellow light was burning—the same grease-lamp glow that had illuminated the brown willow-leaf wallpaper in the upper room.

"She’s in there now," the tally-man added, turning his back to us to shout an order to the men at the derrick. "Telling the clerk that the eighty-first section has to be printed on blue stock because the grey makes her characters look like they're caught in a cellar. Mad as a weaver, if you ask me."

Silas didn't move toward the lane, and he didn't look back toward the staircase we had descended. He looked at the ship, then down at the wide, dark ribbon of the river where the current was eddying around the timber piles in great, oily circles.

"She’s trying to rebuild the frame from the bottom up, Elara," he said softly, his hazel eyes dark under the brim of his wet hair. "She found the broken wire in the typewriter, so she’s going to buy a new font from the foundry. If she signs the manifest for those crates, the ninety-fifth chapter will start at the edge of the wharf before we can reach the bridge."

"She has no ink here, Silas," I said, my fingers finding the small brass latch-key I had carried from the sorting floor—the only piece of the old machine that hadn't dissolved in the grey water. It was small, cold, and heavy, its teeth cut to match a lock that no longer existed. "She has to use the common lampblack from the counting-house. It doesn't hold the names the way the First Draft did. If we get onto the boat, we're out of her vocabulary entirely."

"The skiff is a mile up," Silas said. "We won't make the maltings before she comes out with the clerk."

As he spoke, the door of the brick counting-house creaked open.

A young woman stepped out onto the timber staging. She didn't wear a visor, and her apron was made of ordinary blue cotton rather than the oil-skin of the binder’s girls, but her fingers were stained dark to the second knuckle, and she carried a small leather-bound ledger under her arm like a weapon. She stopped on the threshold, her head tilting as she looked down the wharf toward the Mary of Goole.

She didn't look at Silas, and she didn't look at me; her eyes were scanning the rows of coal-baskets, her lips moving silently as if she were counting the strokes of the derrick to see if they matched the rhythm of a line she had already conceived.

"The wind," she said aloud, her voice carrying clearly across the wet timber of the pier. It was a light, sharp voice, the voice of someone who had never spoken to a crowd or commanded a crew, but it had the absolute, terrifying clarity of a bell in an empty hall. "The wind is an adjective. It needs to be heavier near the bridge. The coal is too bright; it should be described as dull slag to match the tone of the third signature."

The tally-man didn't look up from his board. He was used to her grammar; he simply nodded and made another mark with his lead pencil.

I took the small brass latch-key from my apron pocket and dropped it into the river.

It didn't make a loud splash. The grey-green water simply opened and took it, a tiny circle of bubbles rising where the metal sank into the mud beside the barnacles. The moment the key hit the bottom, the yellow light in the counting-house window didn't go out, but it grew noticeably smaller, its oily glare shrinking into the ordinary, dull flame of a single tallow candle that had been left to burn down in an empty room.

The young woman with the ledger stopped her counting. She looked down at her ink-stained fingers, then at the sky, her brow furrowing as if a word she had been about to use had suddenly slipped between her teeth and vanished into the fog.

"Come on," Silas said, his hand closing around mine with a firm, real pressure that had nothing to do with a registry mark. "The tide is running hard now. If we walk along the mud-line, we'll be past the maltings before she finds the noun."

We turned away from the schooner and the brick counting-house, our boots leaving deep, irregular prints in the wet coal-slack that the next tide would wash away completely, leaving the margin clean for whoever came down to the water after the rain.