The Errand

"Two coppers," said Mr. Pocock, "and the note, and a Watertide bun, because it is Watertide, and you will not be able to think on an empty stomach. Do not eat the bun until after you have been given the book. A librarian can smell a bun at forty feet, and they hold it against one."

"Thank you, Mr. Pocock," said Isa.

"Do not thank me. Count." He pushed the two coppers across the counter with one finger, as one pushes a counter, and watched her do it.

She counted them aloud. It was a habit. She had counted everything aloud for eleven days: the coppers in her purse, the stairs to the attic, the number of days to the end of the month. The coppers were two. They lay in the palm of her glove, one on top of the other, as small and brown and entirely sufficient as a pair of ladybirds; and the note, which she unfolded and read for the third time, said in Mr. Pocock's square patient hand, To the Great Library, Reading Room. The Hours of the Harbour, the EBB. Fair copy of the third chapter, one leaf to a page, ink not pencil. Do NOT let them give you the Flood. They give everyone the Flood. It is on the front shelf and it is the wrong half.

"The Ebb," said Isa.

"The Ebb."

"And not the Flood."

"The Flood is a perfectly good book. I do not say that it is not a good book. It is only that my customer has already got it, and has now taken it into her head to want the other; and since she is the kind of lady who tells one in the first sentence that she will not pay for the wrong thing, I should be very much obliged if you would bring her the right one." Mr. Pocock folded his hands on the counter. He was a short, round, pale, careful man of fifty in a brown coat with ink on the cuff, and he had a way of speaking to the world that was extremely patient, in a particular tone of voice, as one speaks to a horse that has once bitten. "By Moonglow."

"By Moonglow," said Isa.

It was the sixteenth of Thawing, which was a Watertide, and it was raining.

It had been raining since the first. It was the grey, soft, thorough rain of a Bridgeport spring, which does not fall so much as stand about in the air and wait to be walked into; the gutters of Thread and Needle Lane ran with it, the awnings of the cloth-sellers dripped on one another in a long soft chain, and in the window of Mr. Pocock's shop, whose painted sign, a hand holding a pen, said THE STEADY HAND, behind a barricade of stacked volumes smelling of glue and old leather, a card that said READER AND COPYIST WANTED. A STEADY HAND had begun, at the corners, to curl. It had been in the window for a month. Isa had answered it on the eighth day after she arrived. She had sat in the chair by the stove with her second-best gown drying on her back and a sample of her handwriting in her hand, and Mr. Pocock had looked at it for a very long time, and then at her, and had said, You are very young. She had said, I am nineteen. He had said, You are very thin. She had said, I am aware of both. He had said, You will do.

She was in Bridgeport because her family could no longer afford her to be anywhere else.

That was not how it had been put. It had been put, at Vellamara, in the kitchen, by her mother over a letter and a cup of tea gone cold, in the kindest and most dreadful voice in the world: We must think, my love, of what is to be done. There was the house, with its good name and its roof. There was the valley that had once been theirs. There was a library with eleven books in it, one of which was about cheese. There was Isa, who read, and wrote a clear fast fair hand, and had never been much use for anything else; and there was a great city, three days away, with a great library, where she might at least be poor in a useful way. She had gone. She had a bed in an attic in Chandler's Row, in a boarding-house for respectable women clerks, with a cold bath on the landing and a landlady who read her letters upside down; and she had a trunk with her second-best gown in it, and her best, which was green and of velvet and which she did not intend to wear until somebody asked her; and she had, from this moment, a bun.

She put the bun in her satchel, and the two coppers in her glove, and the note in her bodice, and turned up her collar.

"Miss Bartoli," said Mr. Pocock.

"Yes?"

"You will wait for them, if they are slow. The librarians are very young and very busy and the older ones go off to the Guild. It is nothing personal. They do not give anything to anyone for the first hour." He considered her over his folded hands. "If it is a very long time, you are permitted to be a little cross."

"I shall not be cross," said Isa. "I shall be extremely civil."

"I was afraid so," said Mr. Pocock.

The Guild of Cartographers, Mapmakers and Scribes kept its copying-room above a printer's in the lower part of Pleasant Meadows, up three flights of stairs that smelled of ink and wet wool and hot lamp-oil, in a long cold room with nine slanting desks and nine stools and a stove that was lit, by rule, on the first of Deepfreeze and put out on the first of Thawing, regardless of the weather.

It was out. Evie Blackstone had been aware of it since half past eight.

She sat at the fourth desk with her feet tucked round the legs of her stool, in her grey wool dress with the darned elbows, and copied a harbour chart of the southern Mereway for a shipping-house that wanted six, at a copper the square foot. She was twenty-one. She was thin, and quiet, and upright in the way of a person who has learned that it is the cheapest sort of dignity; she had a flat coil of dark hair, a long pale composed face with a freckled nose, and a pair of warm brown eyes that were at present fixed, with the utmost attention, on a point where a sandbank met a quay. She did not look up. She was a girl who did not look up when she was busy, and the copying-mistress, a broad grim woman called Orme, who went up and down behind the stools with her arms folded, had long ago stopped trying to catch her at it.

At twelve the mistress said, "Blackstone."

"Yes, Mistress Orme."

"You've finished the Mereway."

"Yes."

"And the soundings, in the margin, which I did not ask for."

"I thought that they were wanted."

"They were," said Mistress Orme. She examined the chart, with her mouth shut tight. She was a woman who had been hard on girls for thirty years in order that they might not be soft on themselves, and her eyes, which were small and shrewd and not unkind, travelled along the neat dark ink to the corner of the sheet, where something very small had been drawn, in the margin, in the same fine upright hand: a line of glyphs. "What's that?"

"It is nothing. A habit." Evie put her pen down. "It is a Marian tide-mark. They used it to say that the water had been here. I always put one at the edge."

"Why?"

"I don't know," said Evie, quite truthfully. "It seems to be where it goes."

The mistress looked at her. Then she counted out eleven coppers from a small leather purse, and added a twelfth, and put the whole of it on the corner of the desk without ceremony. "You'll want your afternoon," she said. "I'll not have you reading in my room. Go and read in somebody else's."

It was the nearest thing to a kindness that Mistress Orme had ever been known to commit. Evie said, "Thank you," in her low steady voice, and gathered up her satchel, and went down the three flights into the rain.

She had a hat for it, a flat brown felt thing that did not keep out the wet, and a shawl that did not either. She had boots. They were good boots, once, and had been resoled, and let in the damp at the left toe in a steady and companionable manner that she had ceased to remark on. On a black ribbon at her throat, tied in a small flat bow at the nape, there hung a very small silver bell, no bigger than a hazelnut; it ticked gently against her collarbone at every step, as a clock does in another room. She did not hear it. She had worn it since she was nineteen. She would have noticed its absence, she thought, as one notices a tooth, but not before.

She walked up through the Meadows with her head down. The streets were full of umbrellas. A line of pilgrims in white robes and little blue caps went by along the High Road with their faces turned up to the rain, singing something low and sweet in a tongue that nobody under sixty quite understood, on their way to Chapel Hill and the Temple of the Five; a baker's boy ran past with a tray of Watertide buns held over his head like a roof; a coach splashed her to the knee. She did not mind. She crossed the little square by the chandler's, and turned the corner, and there, rising out of the wet grey air like a great pale loaf of stone with a dome on top, stood the Great Library.

She had been coming here for four years. It had never once failed to make her catch her breath.

It was the oldest building in the city, and it had been there, as everyone said, before the city; the founders of Bridgeport had simply looked about them, one fine morning, at a ruin, and a library growing out of it, and said, well, that will do for a beginning. It had a hundred and twelve windows. It had a great round dome of dull green copper, streaked silver with rain. It had a flight of forty-four broad shallow steps, hollowed in the middle by a thousand years of readers, that ran down in the rain like a stream of pale water to the street; and at the top of them, under the porch, in a row, in their green and gold, stood three librarians in the doorway, taking in the umbrellas.

She climbed the steps. She counted them. It was a thing she did. Forty-four.

The reading room was a long, high, quiet, dim hall under the dome, with tall windows down one side and a gallery all round the other, and a great number of tables.

There were eighty. They were long and plain and scarred, of dark oak, set in rows with a lane between, each with a number cut in the end of it; and on every second table, in the exact middle, between its two neighbours, stood a lamp. They were lent. That was the rule. It was a very old rule, and a very sensible one, because lamps were dear and oil was dearer and a library burns down in an afternoon if it is allowed; and so the lamps lived on a long tray by the door, in the care of a very small, very old, entirely bald man in a leather apron called Dibble, who lent them to readers by the hour at a copper a time, one to every two tables, and did not take sides.

"Number twenty-two," said Evie. "By the window. One hour."

"Twenty-two." Old Dibble put his head on one side. He had a face like a walnut. He had watched her take that table every afternoon of the working week for four years, and had said, in all that time, perhaps three hundred words to her; and she had never known whether he liked her or merely approved of the regularity. "One hour. And you'll not be wanting the second."

"I will not."

"The gentleman at twenty-three has the other side. He's paid till half past."

"Then we shall share the light."

"You will," said old Dibble. "He is asleep."

She took the lamp. She carried it down the lane in both hands, and set it in the middle of the table, and lit it with a spill from the porter's candle; and it stood there, a small round steady yellow flame in a glass chimney, a warm island of brightness in the long grey hall. The gentleman at twenty-three, who was asleep, was an old scholar with a white beard on his chest; he did not mind. She sat down. She took her half-codex out of her satchel, in its cloth, and unwrapped it, and laid it flat before her.

It was the half of a book. It was a Marian codex, the lower half, split along the spine by a flood three hundred years ago, in boards of dark wood bound in grey leather gone as soft as a glove, and on the corner of the cover, where a bookmark might have been tied, there was the small hard knot of a ribbon's end. She did not read it. She had read it. She had read it, over the last two years, forty times, with her finger on the line; it was a book of the Salt Coast, a table of the salt-works, a list of the beacon-fires and a poem about the sea, and it stopped in the middle of a sentence. The other half had been lost. It had been lost for three hundred years. She did not ask for it. She had stopped asking in her first year, when a librarian with a kind face had told her gently that it was probably in the water.

So she copied. It was the one thing she could do. She took out a clean sheet, and her pen, and a bottle of the Guild's thin ink that she was not supposed to take away, and began, at the top of the page, to copy out the first line of the table in a plain upright hand: At the new moon of the sixth month the pans are to be flooded to the second step. It was not for anyone. It was not for Mr. Pocock, who had given her the book, or the Guild, or the shipping-house. It was for the hand. She liked to feel the glyphs go through her pen, one at a time, in their old firm slanting order, like footprints in wet sand; and she did, and the world went quiet, and the rain on the high windows fell away like a curtain, and she forgot where she was.

She was therefore not looking when, at twenty minutes to two, the door at the far end of the hall opened on the grey light, and a very small, very wet young woman came in, and stood quite still on the threshold, and shook out her skirt.

Isa had never seen so many tables.

She stood on the mat with her satchel in her arms and the rain dripping off the end of her hat, and she looked at the hall. It was enormous. It went up and up, to a dim gold roof; it went away down a long aisle of scarred oak to a high window at the far end that was a bright grey square, like a door into weather; and on every side, at every table, bent over a book or a leaf or a candle, in long quiet rows, sat people who did not look up. They were old, mostly. They were the ghosts of what she had meant to be. She felt, for a moment, the whole weight of the building come down upon her, like a very large hand laid gently on top of her head; and she drew a long breath, and took the pencil from behind her ear, and put it back, and went forward to the desk.

It was a long desk of black wood, with a brass rail, and behind it, on a high stool, sat a young man in green.

He was perhaps twenty-three. He was thin, spectacled, anxious, with ink on his fingers and a green-and-gold vest that was a size too big for him, and an air of a person who has been told something very important by a senior and has not quite been able to keep hold of what it was; and when Isa put her note on the desk he picked it up, and read it with his lips moving, and looked up at her over the top of his spectacles with an expression of the deepest and most sincere regret.

"Oh," he said. "The Hours."

"The Ebb," said Isa.

"Yes. I was afraid it would be the Hours. It's, um. It's a very popular one. We have it in two bindings. It is the, it is the tide-table of the Marian harbours, you see, the Flood and the Ebb, bound separately, and so there is a great deal of, of confusion, as to which."

"I am aware. I should like the Ebb, please. The Flood, I'm told, is the wrong half."

"Quite. Quite." He slid down from his stool. "If you will wait. I shall fetch it."

He went away into the stacks. She stood at the desk with her hands on the brass rail and counted. She got to a hundred and forty. In the middle of the hundred and forty-first he came back, walking rather fast, with something in his arms wrapped in a grey linen cloth, and put it on the desk, and unwrapped it with an air of triumph and a good deal of relief.

"There," he said. "The Hours of the Harbour. I do hope that's the one."

It was a large, heavy, dark-bound book, in boards of oak covered with grey leather, with a faded gold line round the edge. On the cover, in letters that had once been gilt, someone had stamped a single word in Marian glyphs. Isa opened it. She could not read Marian. She could read a clear hand, and the shape of a table; and she turned the first leaf, and the second, and it was only on the third that she saw, with a small and dreadful certainty like the first drop of a cold bath, that the numbers at the head of the columns were rising.

It was the Flood.

"I'm afraid that this is the Flood," she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The numbers go up. In the Ebb they come down. It's in the note." She turned it, quite calmly, so that he could see. "I have been told by Mr. Pocock, in writing, that it is the Flood that everyone is given. I had hoped that it might be different here."

The young man looked at the page. A slow painful blush rose up out of his collar, and went all the way to his ears, and settled in them like a pair of small red lamps. "Oh dear," said Mr. Wren. "Oh dear. Oh, I am so sorry. It is, it is the same cloth. It was in the same cloth. They are in the same, I was told that they were, shelved together, and I took the, I took the one on the left." He put his hand over his mouth. "I shall go back."

"Thank you."

He went. She stood at the desk. This time she got to two hundred and sixty before he returned, and when he did he was empty-handed, and the colour had gone out of his face and left it the shade of tallow.

"It isn't there," said Mr. Wren.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Ebb. It isn't on the shelf. It should be. It is, it is at the left end of the shelf, in the cloth, beside the Flood, and, and there's a gap. There is a very small gap about the width of a, of a book." He took off his spectacles, and polished them on his vest, and put them on again, and looked at her with watery despair. "It has been mislaid. It happens. It is a very large library. It is, it has been known for a volume to be, to be taken to the wrong stack, by a, by a person, and put back in the wrong place, and not be found for, for a year."

"A year."

"Sometimes two. But I am sure that it will, I shall ask Mistress Halloran. She is the senior librarian. She would know the way to go about, to go about finding it. She will have a notion of which, which stack." He swallowed. "Only she is at the Guild."

"At the Guild."

"For the Reckoning. Until five o'clock." He had begun, in the helpless way of a young man at the end of his resources, to wring his hands. "And I cannot amend the slip myself. It is the rule. If you wish to have another book, you must have a, a chit, signed by the senior, and I cannot sign it, and I cannot, I really cannot let you take this one away, because nothing leaves the building, and in any case it is the wrong one." He stopped. "I am so very sorry. I could give you the Flood to read. It is a very fine book."

Isa looked at the Flood. It lay between them on the desk, in its grey cloth, a large dark innocent object with its numbers going up.

She was nineteen. She had two coppers. She had a note in her bodice, and a bun in her satchel, and a lady who would not pay for the wrong thing, and a bed in an attic for which she owed three days; and it was three hours to five. She thought, with perfect clearness, of Mr. Pocock's patient voice. If it is a very long time, you are permitted to be a little cross.

"I shall wait," said Isa.

"You will?"

"I shall wait until five. I shall be extremely civil. If you will be so kind as to show me a table, and tell me what a lamp costs."

It cost a copper an hour, which was exactly half of what she had, and she had a candle.

It was a short fat one, about the size of her thumb, which she had taken, that morning, from the box on the landing outside her attic, and which she had meant to use for writing letters; and she put it in a saucer, which the old porter lent her, scowling slightly, without charge, and lit it with a spill. It burned with a small round low steady flame. It would last, she judged, perhaps two hours. She had put herself at table thirty-one, in the corner, under the gallery, where nobody would be annoyed by her; and she sat down at it in the damp, and unpacked her notebook and her pencil and her copy of Mr. Pocock's note, and set them in a row, and folded her hands.

She had three hours to be civil in.

At the far end of the hall, by the tall window, in the full light of the lamp at table twenty-two, a thin girl in a grey dress with her hair in a flat coil sat with her head bent over a long sheet of paper, copying something in a fine upright hand, quite lost. She had a small silver bell on a black ribbon at her throat. She did not look up. She had not looked up, Isa noticed, when the door opened, or when the young man in green had gone running up and down the stacks like a hen, or when the whole hall, for the length of a quarter of an hour, had been quietly and unobtrusively listening to a very small person from Vellamara learn that she would have to wait.

That is a person, thought Isa, with a sudden fierce envy, who has somewhere to be.

She did not know that she was looking at the rest of her life. She took the pencil from her hair. She opened the notebook. And with the whole of her careful, civil, iron nineteen-year-old dignity, she began to write, at the top of a clean white page, in her small upright hand, the first line of the first chapter of the wrong half of a book.