The Loud Bell

Anselm counted the watches on his fingers, and his fingers were blue with old ink to the second knuckle.

"Vespers. First watch at the ninth bell. Second at midnight." He folded down a third finger and held it there. "Third at the fourth hour. Roughly ten hours. Less, if Sister keeps a different clock from the rest of us."

"You're calling her Sister now," Ilse said.

"I'm calling her what she is. A novice in a grey veil. Somebody's sister." He looked at the finger. "Somebody's daughter, before that."

Ilse sat on the upturned grave-goods box and pulled the twine out of her hair. It had been the same twine for a year, greasy and knotted, and it came away in a clump with some hair in it. She dropped it on the candle. It smelled like a burning sheep.

The box held what the families didn't want back. A tin comb, a child's shoe, a rosary of dried peas. A grey headscarf that had belonged to a laundress Ilse had buried in the autumn, wool, with a darn at one corner. She shook it out, bound her hair flat under it and knotted it at the nape.

"How do I look?"

Anselm considered her. "Like a woman who has buried a laundress."

"Good."

"Your tooth," he said.

"I'll keep my mouth shut. People will think it's grief."

Tobit was on his knees on the shed floor. He had drawn the north wall in long strokes, the yard, the ditch, and then a low round mouth under the wall with wavy lines running out of it. A culvert. He had drawn himself crawling into it, and two taller figures crawling behind him, one with a headscarf, one with absurdly long legs folded like a grasshopper's.

He tapped the culvert, then the Mercy Gate further along. Over the gate he drew a cart with a little man on the box, grinning with half his teeth. Then he crossed the cart out.

Ilse looked at it for a long moment. She had not wanted to say it aloud. Haske's favour still sat on her wrist where his thumb had been. Another ride would be another favour, and she did not know yet what the first one weighed.

"You've used that," she said to Tobit. "That drain."

He didn't answer. He drew a rat beside the culvert, very small, with a wicked tail, and looked up at her as if daring her to doubt him.

"That," Anselm said, "is the most honest map I have seen in twenty years."

* * *

The water inside the culvert came to Ilse's knees and was colder than the air, which she had not thought possible. It was black, and thick at the bottom, and it moved. Rats went along the ledges at the height of her shoulder, unhurried, as if the three of them were weather.

Tobit carried the shuttered lantern and never once looked back to see if they followed. He knew where the roof dipped. He ducked before Ilse saw the need, and she ducked after him and still scraped her scalp on brick through the laundress's scarf.

Behind her, Anselm hit his head four times. He said nothing about it the first three.

"How old is this?" he asked after the fourth.

"Older than the Lantern," Ilse said. "Shut up and stoop."

The air thickened as they went. It took on the smell of the tallow-renderers by the Coopers' Basin, hot fat and bone, sweetish, clinging. By the time Tobit stopped under an iron grate with the last of the dusk falling through it in squares, Ilse's eyes were streaming.

The grate lifted. Tobit had known it would.

They came up in a yard of stacked staves behind a cooperage, and from the yard they could see the wharf.

There were watchmen on it. Five or six, with lanterns already lit, standing in that loose, bored ring that men make around a dead thing. On the barrel-wharf at the foot of Coopers' Bridge, laid on two planks over a pair of empty casks, was a body under a sheet. One bare foot had slipped out. It was grey with the cold-water grey, not the plague kind.

"Poor soul," a woman was saying at the edge of the ring, to anyone. She had an apron full of bungs. "They had him out this morning. Hal Sennet. Fished him off the starlings with a pole. He made my husband's hoops for nineteen years."

Ilse stood very still among the staves.

"Ten hours," Anselm said under his breath. "And we were already a day late."

"We need him."

"Yes." He was looking at the watchmen. Something went through his long face, a small, unpleasant decision. Then he pulled his hood back so his tonsure showed and walked out onto the wharf.

Ilse heard only half of it. Brother Anselm, struck off this afternoon, oh, they'd heard, had they? Good. Then they'd know he had nothing left to do but penance, and a struck brother doing penance might as well sit up with a drowned cooper as sit in a ditch. Let him pray the man to the cart. Let him take the cold watch so they could go and get a drink.

One of the watchmen laughed. Another said something about mad brothers and a cut head at the lamplighters' store. Anselm answered that if they wished to stand there and discuss his character until the cart came, he would find it very restful.

They went. All but one, an older man who walked slowly past the staves on his way up the bridge steps, and looked at Anselm over his shoulder, and said to nobody in particular, "They'll want to know at St. Barrow's who's walking the bridges tonight."

Then he was gone too.

Anselm turned toward the staves and lifted one hand, palm out, the way a man waves in a cart. Ilse came out with Tobit, and they carried Hal Sennet under the arch, where the river slapped at the stones and nobody on the bridge could see.

* * *

Hal was a big-shouldered man with oak dust still in the creases of his knuckles. His right hand was closed. Ilse opened it.

Saint Greta, with her muffled bell. Six yellow stitches. Pink at the edges.

She took her own worn copper out of her pocket. Anselm held the lantern and turned his face to the river, which she had not asked him to do.

Tobit sat on the wet step with his knees up and his chalk in his fist. He did not look away.

She put the coin on the cooper's tongue, and swallowed.

* * *

Hoops on his shoulder, four of them, iron, the weight digging. Sawdust in his collar. Late, and Hal pleased with himself, because a brewer had paid in coin and not in promises. The bridge lamps lit, every other one. The river loud below.

A woman in a grey cloak passed him going the other way and caught his hand, quick, as if she had stumbled. When she let go there was something cold in his palm.

He opened his fingers. A medal. A saint with a bell.

He turned to call after her. She had gone.

Then the bell.

It rang right over his head. Bright and loud, a handbell's clatter, close enough to feel. Hal looked up, the way anyone would.

Ilse looked up with his eyes.

On the parapet above the lamp, crouched like a gargoyle, was a small figure in a too-big coat. A boy. His arm swung, and the bell in his fist caught the lamplight, brass with a green lip, ringing and ringing. His face was white. His lips were cracked with cold and one crack had bled.

He was looking straight down at Hal, and he was crying.

Behind Hal, a gloved hand. The notched hook in the strap of the hoops. The pale mask with its seam of gold. The parapet tipped away and the black water came up, and the voice said Vigil against his ear, and the boy kept ringing all the way down.

* * *

Ilse spat the coin onto the step. It rang once on the stone. She heard herself make a sound like a cough.

"Ilse."

"Wait."

She sat back on her heels. The river slapped. Her mouth tasted of the canal and of copper. She ran her tongue over her front tooth, the way she did when she was thinking.

The chip was there. A little ledge of rough enamel.

She reached for it. For how. For the day, the place, the thing she had bitten, or the thing that had hit her. It was the kind of story you never tell because everyone who matters already knows it.

Nothing.

She pulled the notebook out of her coat. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. Entry seven, in her own blunt hand from two winters ago. The tooth. That was all. She had not written it out. She had thought there was no forgetting a thing you carried on your face.

She drew a line through it. Thirty-six.

"What was it?" Anselm asked.

She put the notebook away. "Nib rings the bell."

He did not move. The lantern did not move.

"On the parapet," she said. "Up there. With a handbell like Emil's. Not wrapped. He rang it, and Hal looked up, and while he looked up they took him." She heard her voice go on, flat as a spade. "He was crying. The whole time."

"The boy who brought you the news about Emil."

"He ran all the way out to the wall," Ilse said. "Two miles at first light. I gave him a copper."

Tobit had gone very still on the step. Then he bent over his knees and drew, fast, on the stone. Two bells. One with a rag tied over its mouth. One with lines coming off it, loud lines, the way children draw noise.

He set them side by side and looked up at her.

"A pair," Anselm said softly. "One to call, one to... what? Stand quiet? Answer?"

"Emil had the quiet one."

Neither of them said what that meant.

* * *

They split at the top of the bridge steps, under the dark lamp.

"Wick Steps," Anselm said. "Oda Corran. I'll find her, and I'll be very boring at her until she agrees to come indoors."

"You'll be noticed."

"I'm already noticed. I'm the brother who walks the bridges." He pulled his ledger out from under his arm and held it out to her. "In case."

"In case what?"

"In case I'm not there to read it to you."

She looked at the ledger. The cracked leather, the ink thumbed into the corners. Whatever he had written about her was in there.

"Keep it," she said. "Give me your coin."

He blinked. Then he dug in his sleeve and put the newer copper in her hand. It was warm from his arm.

"That's a worse trade for you," he said.

"I know what I'm buying."

He went off along the quay with his long stride and his hood up, and did not look back, which she liked him for.

* * *

St. Barrow's tower leaned a little, everyone said, though nobody could agree which way. The door at its foot was unlocked. Inside it smelled of pigeon and of mutton fat gone rancid.

The ladder went up through three trapdoors. On the second floor the great bell's rope came down through a hole in the boards, thick as Ilse's wrist, greasy at the height a man's hands would hold it. She climbed past it. Tobit climbed behind her and would not touch the rope either.

In the bell chamber the great bell hung black against the louvres. The wind came through the slats and made it hum, very faintly, a note under hearing. Sacks were heaped against the far wall, bell-grease by the stink, tallow and something like lard.

"Nib," Ilse said.

The sacks didn't move.

"I'm not the ward. I'm the gravedigger. You brought me bread once. No. I gave you a copper."

She did not know why she said it wrong. Her mouth was tired.

A sack shifted. A face came up over it, grey with grease, cracked lips bitten raw. His eyes went to her, and to her scarf, and then past her to Tobit, and his whole face changed.

"You." Nib scrambled up over the sacks. "You got out. They said you went in the river. Sister said..."

He reached out, the way a boy reaches for a boy he's missed, to rub his knuckles over Tobit's cropped head.

Tobit flinched so hard he hit the bell frame. The great bell answered with a low groan through the beams.

Nib's hand stayed in the air. Then he put it in his armpit as if it had been burned.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. I forgot you don't."

Ilse looked from one to the other. Tobit had both hands flat against the frame behind him. His eyes were on the floor.

"Don't what?" she said.

"Like hands near your head. In the long room. Under the eye." Nib chewed his lip and it bled again. He did not seem to notice. "He was always quickest. He never rang. He just ran."

"Rang for who?"

"Sister." It came out of him small. "She gives you the bell and tells you the bridge. You ring when she nods. That's all you do. You just ring."

"Hal Sennet," Ilse said. "Last night. Coopers' Bridge."

Nib's face folded up. He didn't cry. He'd done his crying on the parapet, she thought.

"And the Rushlight," she said. "Emil."

"I didn't know it was going to be him till he looked up." Nib's voice cracked down the middle. "He knew me. He smiled. So I ran and told you. I thought if somebody came..." He stopped.

"Your name is on her list," Ilse said. "Nib, St. Barrow's tower."

"That's how she writes the ringers." He wiped his nose on his wrist. "And that's how she writes the ones who stop ringing. It looks the same. Lukas wouldn't, at Midsummer. He went on the list. Somebody else rang for him."

He went back to the sacks and dug among them and came up holding a handbell.

It was brass, with a lip gone green, the twin of the one on her trestle at home. Only this one had no rag. Its clapper hung free, and when he lifted it, it gave a tiny bright knock against the brass, and both boys flinched.

"Wick Steps," Nib said. "Third watch. Oda Corran sells tapers there. She gives me the broken ones for free."

He held the bell out to Ilse with both hands. They were shaking so badly the clapper ticked.

"If I don't ring, Sister comes for me. And somebody else rings anyway, and Oda looks up anyway." He swallowed. "You can take me out. Down your drain. I'll go. Only then it's her and not me, and I won't even be there to see who."

Tobit made a sound in his throat, the first she had ever heard from him. Not a word. A refusal.

Ilse looked at the bell. At the boy who had run two miles at first light to tell her, because he could not stop his own arm.

Below them in the city, a watch-bell rang the first watch, nine strokes, slow.

She reached out, and her hand stopped an inch from the cold brass, and she had to decide which of them she was going to take down that ladder: the bell or the boy.