Six Spools

Tobit wanted the girl to have a name. Since nobody could give her one, he gave her a basket.

He knelt at the head of the grave with the marker board across his knees and chalked it while Ilse filled in. A round wicker basket, the weave done in criss-cross. Inside it, folded thirds of cloth, stacked. He was careful with the folds. He went over the edges twice.

"Bandages," Ilse said.

He didn't look up. He drew one more fold, and that was his answer.

The clay had frozen a hand's depth down, and she'd had to break it with the pick before the spade would take anything. Now it went back in clods that thudded on the shroud. Her shoulders burned. Her breath smoked. Somewhere behind the city wall a watchman called the fifth hour, which meant the cellar count was one hour off and the girl was one hour safe.

She tamped the last of it with the flat of the spade. Tobit pushed the board into the soft clay at the head and leaned on it until it stood.

Then he went to the hut for his scarf, and Ilse got out the notebook.

Thirty-eight entries. She turned past them to the blank pages at the back and licked the pencil.

A boy called Tobit lives in my yard. About twelve. Can't speak. Draws instead, and draws well. He holds the lantern where I need it before I know I need it. Last night I couldn't remember him and he didn't run.

She looked at it. It read like a note about a neighbour's dog. She added one more line.

He gave a dead girl a basket because she had no name. Whatever I was to him before, I'd like to be it again.

She didn't number it. Numbers were for things she had. She left a space underneath, wide enough for more.

The gate squealed. Ilse shut the book and had the spade up before she saw who it was.

Anselm came through at a lope, all knees and elbows, his ledger clamped under one arm and his cassock hem dark with mud to the shin. He had run from the city. She hadn't thought a man that shape could run.

"Bettany Hobb," he said.

"Who?"

"Storekeeper. Lamplighters' store, Wickmongers' Lane." He stopped to cough, bent double, one hand on his knee. "She issues the thread. C-counts it back. Every spool. She's dead."

Ilse lowered the spade. "Medal?"

"Plague. Real plague." He straightened. His face had the colour of old tallow. "Died in her chair yesterday evening. The ward's sealed the store, and there's a recount of the thread at noon, and every locker gets cleared and burned with her. Including your brother's."

The thread. Six yellow stitches in Emil's palm. Six in the girl's. Six lashes on an eye.

"The cart?" she said.

"Comes for her at the eleventh bell."

She was already untying her apron. Tobit came out of the hut with his scarf half on and stopped, looking from one of them to the other.

"Stay here," Ilse told him. "Mind the yard."

He walked past her, climbed onto the tail of Anselm's empty handcart, and sat down with his legs dangling. He put both hands flat on the boards beside him, the way you'd hold a table that someone was trying to take away.

Anselm looked at her.

"Apparently he's coming," Ilse said.

* * *

The lamplighters' store smelled of two things. Old tallow, thick and animal, from crates of candle-ends stacked to the beams. And under it, sweeter and worse, the sick-room smell of grey plague.

Brass hooks hung in racks along one wall, forty or fifty of them, catching the light from the high window. Below them, open crates of wick, coiled like pale worms. Behind the counter, rows of pigeonholes held spools of yellow waxed thread, each one tagged with a number.

Bettany Hobb sat at the counter in a high-backed chair. Someone had closed her eyes and nobody had closed her mouth.

The lay brother at the door was young and bored and cold, and he didn't like any of them. Anselm had got them past him with the ledger and a lot of words. Now he stood between the man and the counter, the ledger open across his forearm, and kept talking.

"The c-count of the hooks," he was saying. "We'll want the hooks reconciled against the issue b-book, not just the thread. The order was specific."

"Whose order?"

"The record room's."

"I've never heard of the record room giving orders." The lay brother shifted to see round him. "What's the woman doing?"

"Identifying the d-deceased."

"She's sat in her own shop. Who else would she be?"

Ilse stopped listening. She came round the counter. Tobit came after her, and she pointed at the doorway that led to the yard behind. He went and stood in it with his chalk in his fist and his eyes on the lane.

Hobb was small, seventy if she was a day, and her skin had gone the colour of wet slate. Grey to the lips. Grey in the creases of her knuckles. The real thing. Ilse tied her neckerchief up over her own nose and mouth, for what good it did, and looked at the counter.

A tally board lay flat in front of the body, notched pegs in rows, a peg still in Hobb's fingers. A chewed pencil. An ink pot gone dry. An empty cup.

She took out the copper.

Behind her, Anselm's voice climbed. "If you'd b-b-be so kind as to sh-show me the issue book itself."

"I'm not to touch anything till noon."

"Then t-tell me where it's k-kept."

Ilse pulled the neckerchief down, eased Hobb's jaw a little wider with her thumb, and laid the copper on the grey tongue beside the peg the dead woman had been trying to count with. She put her mouth to it.

She swallowed.

* * *

Cold. Cold in the bones and fire behind the eyes.

She is Bettany Hobb, and the tally board will not stay still. The pegs swim. Her hands shake so that the peg rattles in its hole, and she holds it there, because if she takes it out she will lose her place, and she has never once lost her place.

Thirty-one spools out this week to the lamplighters. Twenty-nine back, two used, that's right, that's right.

Her chest is tight as a laced boot. Every breath is a small effort, made on purpose.

The shop bell tinkles. Not the street bell. The little brass one on the door.

A girl in grey. Not a lamplighter. A novice of the Lantern, veil the colour of ash pulled down low. She smells of lye soap. She lays a slip of card on the counter with both hands, the way you'd lay down something holy.

The chit is stamped in red wax. A lantern. In the flame, an eye.

"For the hospice," the novice says. Soft voice. Northern vowels. "Six spools. For wicks."

Hobb looks at the girl's hands. The fingertips are black. Not dirty. Burned. Blistered dark to the first knuckle, the skin shiny, as though she has held them in ink that was boiling.

"Six," Hobb says. Her own voice is a long way off. "Six again."

"For wicks, Mother Hobb."

She takes six spools from the bottom row. She knows without looking. Her hands know. The novice puts them in a cloth bag and goes, and the brass bell tinkles, and Hobb sits with the chit in her shaking fingers.

"No lamp in Grael," she says to the empty shop, "burns six spools of wick a week. Not if it burned all night for a year."

Her eyes are hot. Her heart is going slow and heavy, like someone climbing stairs with a load.

She reaches under the tally board. Her fingers find the catch. The board lifts on a hinge, and beneath it lies a book bound in oilcloth. Her own book. Not the Lantern's. She opens it to a column she has kept for two years and writes, the letters wandering: 6. Hosp. Chit w/ eye.

She shuts the book. Lowers the board. Picks up her peg.

Twenty-nine back.

Her heart climbs one more stair, and stops on the landing, and does not go on.

* * *

Ilse came back with her cheek on the counter and the copper hot between her teeth.

She took it out and wrapped it in her fist. The shop swung, then steadied. Her hands were shaking. Not Hobb's tremor. Her own, the bad one that always came after.

There was a thing she did for that. She knew there was. You hummed. Something low and stupid with a bounce in it, and your hands remembered they were yours.

She opened her mouth to hum it.

Nothing came. She tried again, and her lips made the shape for the first note, and there was no first note. There was a place where a tune had been, and the place was smooth, like a socket after a tooth.

Their mother's pot-scrubbing tune. She knew its name. She knew Emil had whistled it on the canal path, walking home in his last hour, because she had been inside him and heard it. She could not have told anyone how it went. That made thirty-seven.

She looked up. Anselm was standing at the end of the counter.

The lay brother had gone out to the step. Through the window she could see his back, and the steam of him blowing into his hands. Anselm must have sent him for something. He had the ledger shut now, and he was holding it against his chest with both arms, and he was watching her mouth.

He had watched it try twice. She could see that in his face.

"What did that cost?" he said.

There was no stammer at all. That was the worst of it.

Ilse tied her neckerchief back up over her nose. It gave her hands a job.

"A novice," she said. "Grey veil. Northern voice. Her fingertips are burned black, like she's been dipping them in hot ink. She came in with a chit stamped with the lantern and the eye, and she drew six spools for the hospice. For wicks, she said. Six a week."

"Ilse."

"Hobb didn't believe it. She said no lamp in the city burns six spools a week." Her voice was going thin. She pushed it flat. "She kept count of it somewhere."

He was quiet. Then he opened the ledger against the counter, wet the pencil on his lip, and wrote. Not much. A line, maybe two. He angled the page away from her as he did it.

"What are you writing?"

"What I saw."

"Which was?"

He closed the book. "That you have a side of the agreement," he said, "and that it's heavier than you said."

She wanted to tell him to go to the Lantern and burn. She wanted to tell him the tune, so he could hum it back to her. She did neither. Outside, the lay brother stamped his feet.

"Eleventh bell's soon," Anselm said, and turned to go and stand in the door, between the step and the counter, where his long body blocked most of the window.

That was not pressing. That was something else, and she didn't have a name for it yet.

* * *

From the back doorway came a soft scratch. Tobit had drawn on the frame. A bell, quick and rough, with a cart under it. He jabbed the chalk at the lane.

She heard it then. The cart bell, two streets off, ringing the slow ring that meant the dead.

Ilse slid her hands under the tally board and felt for the catch where Hobb's fingers had found it. Wood. Wood. A little iron tongue. She pressed it, and the board rose on its hinge with a creak that went through her teeth.

Oilcloth. A book the size of a hymnal, its corners worn round.

The cart bell came nearer. On the step, the lay brother said something sharp, and Anselm answered him, the stammer climbing again, loud now, deliberately loud.

She opened the book. Rows and rows in Hobb's square hand. Dates. Numbers. On every page, a column headed Hosp. The figures in it were six, six, six, six, down and down, two years of sixes.

And beside the sixes, in another column, a name.

Not Hobb's. A cramped, slanting hand that ran uphill, that always ran uphill, because the boy who wrote it had never been able to keep a line straight on a slate. She had watched him write his letters at their mother's table. She had laughed at that slant, though she couldn't remember laughing.

Carried by E. Varn.

Week after week. Carried by E. Varn. Carried by E. Varn.

Emil had walked the hospice thread himself. All this time.

Her finger went down the column to the last line. The date was the night he drowned. Six spools. His name, sloping up toward the edge of the page.

And beneath it, squeezed in small, a second signature, neat and dutiful as a clerk's.

Witnessed. Br. Mattick.

The cart bell stopped outside the door.