by Rod Duncan
Elizabeth built a fire while he worked. When the wind was wrong, it brought smoke back down the chimney. But today it was drawing well and the flames grew quickly. When a bed of glowing embers had formed, he put a soldering spike into the heart of it and began burning dots into the faces of the bone dice. The smoke smelled bitter, like burning hair.
Soon his work would be finished and he’d walk from the inn. She might never see him again. She had tried being superior, searching for his arrogance. This time she decided to turn it around and present herself as ignorant.
“Why do you gamble?” she asked.
“I don’t.”
“You had cards. Now you’re making dice.”
“Others will use them. Not me.”
“Are you a bookmaker, then?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m curious.”
Those clear blue eyes turned back to his work. He began burning a line of holes in the bone.
“Why is it you’re making three dice?” she asked. “Most men gamble with two.”
“Look,” he said. “Thanks for your help. But I’ll make these marks and then I’ll be gone.”
The chance was slipping away from her. It might never come again. Smoke spiralled from the bone gripped between his toes.
“How did you get away?” she asked. “When they outlawed you, I mean.”
He fixed her with those pale eyes. “Do you admire my work?”
After Elias had gone, Elizabeth felt a hollowness in the pit of her stomach. In all the time of her hiding, his story had offered the first possibility of escape. He wouldn’t return, she thought. Even if he did, Maria Rosa had forbidden her to speak with him. The mistress of the Salt Ray Inn was indebted to her. And yet, there were limits to how far Elizabeth could push. In risking herself, she would also be risking the people around her.
When he did return that night, and began to play his tricks with the dice, all she could do was watch. It was the mistress who confronted him, calling him to the storeroom behind the bar. It was there that he made his impossible request, to borrow the mistress’s credit and thereby get his message to Short Harbour.
Knowing it would be the last chance, she pressed her case, which again came to nothing. Except that Maria Rosa berated her afterwards for foolishness and disobedience.
“I told you not to speak with him!”
“I did no harm. And it was you who brought him to me.”
“That was for fairness’ sake,” the mistress said. “But now he knows of your interest.”
“Yet he still doesn’t know why.”
On the third day, the boy, Tinker, came running, clattering into a chair as he skidded to a stop in the cold saloon.
“It’s him!”
“Who?”
“Him with the hands!”
Maria Rosa swore when she saw him through the window, sitting on the rocks behind the stable block. “See what you’ve done!” she cried.
“This isn’t my doing. It’s your credit he wants. He’s using your fear as a lever.”
“How can I make him go away?”
Elizabeth hesitated before answering. She didn’t want him to leave. But nor could she lie to the woman who’d risked so much to help her. “Ignore him,” she said. “Wait for long enough and he’ll have to go.”
But as the morning wore on the mistress became increasingly agitated, returning to the window twenty minutes later and then again a quarter of an hour after that. Eventually all she could do was stand watching, though there was nothing to see.
“Put him out of your mind,” Elizabeth said.
But at last the man with no thumbs defeated the mistress of the Salt Ray Inn, through his patience and through her lack of it.
“You’re making a mistake,” Elizabeth told her.
She might have been able to argue it, to explain the ways of gambling and the importance of the bluff. But there came a point where Elizabeth knew she was arguing against the outcome that she wanted for herself. At last she gave in and the mistress devised her disastrous plan, setting one of the servants, who was entirely devoted, to threaten him with a bill hook.
But Elizabeth had watched Elias as he worked in the saloon. Even with no thumbs, there had been a kind of grace to his movements. Not a dancer. Not on Newfoundland. A trained fighter. Even with mutilated hands, he would never be beaten by a working man.
And so it proved.
It seemed they’d been moving towards this moment from the first time he stepped into the Salt Ray Inn: a confrontation of vulnerabilities.
“Her oath-marks are fake,” he said.
And she responded: “You’ve been cheating at cards.”
They could have walked away from each other. It was the perfect stalemate. They could have gone to opposite coasts and vowed to never see each other again. For each of them held knowledge that would have destroyed the other. But fate can make allies of the strangest kinds.
“I think we can help each other,” she said.
Chapter 11
On the day of Elias’s dozen, his twelfth birthday, they took him to the oath-wright to have the words of the law tattooed across his chest. He turned his face away while they were doing it, so his father wouldn’t see the tears. It wasn’t so much the pain that made him cry, but the fear of it, and of crossing the threshold into manhood.
Afterwards his head swam. His father gave him a horn of whisky. He still remembered the catch of it in his throat, the heat as it seared down into his belly. Then his older brothers and his best friend, Fitz, had taken him off to do what young men do.
By the time he was twenty, his shoulders had grown broad. His chest widened, stretching the letters on his skin. But they’d been written large, to be clear throughout all his life, however long or short that might be.
As it is inked, so shall your oaths and bindings be.
This is the fullness of the law. Death to those who seek another.
Those twenty-four words had been Newfoundland’s cry of freedom. They were its constitution and all of its legal code. The idea was simple. And beautiful. If an oath was sworn, it would also be inked. Staying true to it was the highest duty of the oath-bound. To read a man’s skin was to know who owned his promise. No lawyer was needed and no contract.
Elias woke with daylight glowing red through his eyelids and a hand stroking his chest. They had stacked the kitchen stove with peat the night before and closed it down for a long, slow burn. The heat of it drifted up to the loft. They’d lain together naked, without even a cover.
He blinked to clear the blurriness of sleep. Charity was looking at him, her head propped on one hand. Dawn’s light softened her. She stroked his chest again. As she moved, her nipple brushed against his ribs. But it wasn’t sexual. Not this time. She seemed lost in thought.
“You should write a book,” she said.
“About what?”
“Everything. You’ve been places. Seen things.”
“What would it be called?”
She didn’t answer, but started writing on his skin with the tip of her finger, following the words of the law. Her touch tickled like the legs of an insect. He wanted to push her away. But it seemed as if that might reveal something he didn’t want to share. The closeness hadn’t troubled him before. Not even when she was riding him.
“When will your husband get here?” he asked.
She rolled away to lie on her back.
“You’re safe till midday. Can’t say beyond that.”
“He won’t guess?”
“I could wash the sheets,” she said. “And change the straw. Where will you go?” There was a slight catch in her voice.
“I’ll find a place. At the inn, maybe.”
“The Salt Ray?”
“A couple of days. Then I’ll be gone.”
“And the pretty barmaid?”
“I’ll be sleeping in the stables.”
“Call it Confessions of a Bad Man,” she said.
It took him a moment to figure out that she was talking about the book again. “They taught me to read,” he said. “But there were people who did the writing. I never learned it for myself. And now…”
He held up his hands and turned them in the grey light for her to see. They seemed like hands made from clay, the thumbs pinched off while it was soft. That would have been a gentle change, he thought.
She took one in hers, brought it to her lips, put a kiss on each finger, soft as breath. Then she guided it across her body, having him touch her there and there and there, and then making him roll towards her.
“It’s not me you want,” he said.
“And how do you figure that?”
“A woman like you…” He wanted to say that she was wholesome, but that sounded like another way of saying plain. Ink is ink, she’d said. It was the truth of a good person. “You deserve better. Better than me.”
She was slow this time. A different kind of hunger. And when he opened his eyes to see if she was almost done, he caught the brittle pain in hers.
After he was dressed and washed, he put a finger to his neck to feel the beats of his pulse. For once they came strong and even. He unstoppered the green glass pot and put it to his nose, filling himself with the smell of it. Once that smell had made him feel sick. Now he felt sick without it. But today, perhaps he could miss the morning dose. He could always take some later if things went badly.
“What was that?” Charity asked, as he slipped it back into the pocket at his belt.
He hadn’t heard her climbing to the loft.
“Nothing,” he said. And then, “It’s medicine.”
“You’re sick?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I brought you this.” She held out a package of brown paper tied in twine. “It’s dried cod. And there’s some bread. It’ll last you a day or two.”
He took it. Smelled it. “Thank you.”
“You’ve no fat on you, Elias. How can you live if you’ve no fat?”
He climbed down the ladder ahead of her. When they were both in the kitchen, he nodded towards the back door. “I’ll keep low along the wall. When I get to the track there might be no one looking.”
“Thanks,” she said. “But this is New Whitby. Someone always sees.”
“Will you be in trouble?”
The words hit her strangely, he thought. Then she seemed to get the sense of them and shook her head. “You’d better be along.”
A boat sailed into the bay. Or it could have been called a ship. Afterwards, people argued about that. It had one mast and one triangular sail of brown canvas. But it was bigger than what you’d call a boat. On another day, it might have taken a crew of five. But only two men got off when it tied up at the eastern jetty: a captain and an old man with milky eyes.
The powder dogs jumped aboard and went sniffing round the cargo: wheat flour from Ontario, sacks of apples, four barrels of tar, lengths of good timber, a load of coffee, bales of hash and tobacco. Nothing to worry anyone.
The dogs jumped out, work done. But the chief inspector still wasn’t happy. There was wealth in the cargo. The goods were to go to several different clans. Why, he wanted to know, hadn’t such a cargo been put in the care of a full crew?
He sent the powder dogs back to try again. They found nothing. He had the sacks and bales laid out on the jetty. Then came the timber and the barrels. It was the barrels that worried him most. He had them opened. The tar was solid. He demanded a fire be built so it could be melted.
“You can inspect my cargo,” the captain said. “But you can’t destroy it.”
He was a free man. Unaligned. So there were limits to what the inspector could do. A rider was dispatched, who brought back a young man of the Blood from the Wattlington clan.
The captain had no choice but to back down. The tar was melted. But it was merely tar. The chief probed the barrel with a wooden stave but found none of the guns he’d thought might be there. The captain demanded payment for the damage. The young man of the Blood began to panic, offered money. The boat captain agreed. But he hadn’t haggled.
The inspection team left and onlookers drifted away. That would have been an end to it. No one would afterwards have bothered to argue whether it had been a boat or a ship. But the inspector still felt the wrongness. Boat or ship, the captain should have haggled.
The moon set three hours before dawn. That was another cause for suspicion: the timing of it. There were stars, but only in the gaps between the clouds. They gave so little light that the chief inspector couldn’t have walked to the jetty. But from his hiding place, he saw shapes moving and heard a tapping noise approach. The old man with the milky eyes led the way. The tapping was his stick on the ground. The captain followed behind, one hand on the old man’s shoulder.
Out along the jetty they walked. The secret cargo was not in the boat. It was outside, secured along the keel. The captain stripped off, lowered himself into the icy water, came back a few seconds later with the first bundle. After each dive he had to climb to the deck and warm himself. It took an hour and a half to finish the job.
The blindness of the old man would have been another clue, had anyone picked up on it. Night or day made no difference to him. It was he who went off to fetch a packhorse. When it was led back and the bundles had been loaded, the two men began their journey away from the jetty. They ran, when they heard the inspector shout, abandoning the horse. When dawn came, riders galloped off to track the smugglers down.
The bundles were guns, wrapped in tarred canvas: ten precision rifles mounted with optical sights, weapons of assassination. The blacksmith saw to them, in front of witnesses, hammering each to uselessness.
They found the old man with the milky eyes hiding in a ditch on the edge of town. The dark had made him powerful. But once the sun was up he was just a blind old man. The dogs scented him out and he was hauled away, whimpering. The captain had got further. They caught him a day later, trying to escape along the north road.
Neither man had family. That’s why they’d risked it, people said. There were only the two of them to be killed. But the Patrons would make it last.
Alone in the kitchen of the Salt Ray Inn, Elizabeth stared through the window glass which ran with condensation. Earlier she’d gone to stand and watch as the smugglers were laid out on the beach, tied to stakes so the waves would first reach their heads. It would be another five hours before the high tide drowned them. And that, slowly. To have not gone would have marked her out as strange, something she couldn’t afford.
She wept for them. And she wept for her friends, Julia and Tinker, trapped on Newfoundland. Or perhaps it was for herself.
Tinker had managed to blend in with perfect ease. He was a quiet boy by nature, speaking little, and most of that in grunts. No one could have caught the temperate hills of England in his voice. He also seemed younger than his age, small from years of malnutrition. As such, the lack of oath-marks were easy to explain. Not that anyone asked. He was just the lad who groomed the horses at the inn. That made him almost invisible. But most of all, he seemed to fit because he carried no cares, having complete faith that she, Elizabeth, would work things out.
Julia had been the other member of their party, beached unwontedly. She was the opposite of Tinker. Her accent could not be hidden and her fair hair drew men’s eyes. She couldn’t have lived at the inn. Yet Elizabeth wished for those comforts above all things: her dearest friend to confide in, someone to test her thoughts and plans, someone to hold.
In the time of their separation, all that she’d seen of Julia had been letters. And those could not contain anything of substance, since they were passed through the hands of many messengers.
Julia was well, though. At least Elizabeth knew that. She was living with Maria Rosa’s mother, in a remote cottage. When travellers passed, Julia hid indoors. This happened seldom. But on washing days her clothes had to be hung inside to dry, just in case. Her letters described the
wildflowers that grew in the hills. She drew them. And the moths, which she’d learned to trap at night with a lamp and a sheet. So did Julia bide her time.
It was to Elizabeth that the task had fallen, to find the means of their escape. If she did not manage it, then no one could. And thus she wept.
Chapter 12
The reply from Short Harbour came on Friday, one day earlier than predicted. The mistress handed the paper to Elias, who broke the wax and read. Elizabeth watched, waiting for the verdict. At last he nodded.
“He’ll do it,” he said. “There are conditions. But he’ll do it.”
Elias had fascinated Elizabeth from the first time she saw him in the saloon. He was a gambler and a trickster. Every conversation with him had been a game of hidden motives. Hers and his. She seldom knew whether the feelings he displayed were real or part of the game. But this time she felt certain that his relief was true. Elias really had doubted that the message sender would agree.
“Now you’ll be wanting to send a message to Jago,” the mistress said.
But Elias wouldn’t have it. “I’ll see him face to face. He’s not going to like the conditions. If I put them on paper, he’ll come to find me anyway. But if I speak it to him direct, it might go better for me. For us.”
“Well, he can’t come here!” the mistress snapped. “He did enough damage the first time. And I’ll not risk Elizabeth.”
“You want me to go to his court, then?” Elias asked.
“Meet him where you like. But I want you gone.”
Through this exchange, Elizabeth had kept quiet. Over the previous days, with the messenger dispatched to Short Harbour, waiting for a reply, she’d been thinking through the twists of the argument. Since beaching on Newfoundland she’d been trapped at the inn, held there by the relative safety that Maria Rosa could provide. Every time she wanted to venture out or ask someone a question about boats and cargo and travelling to Labrador, the mistress would warn her of danger.