One Copper Between Us

"I am Isa Bartoli," said Isa.

"Evie Blackstone."

"Of Vellamara, which you will not have heard of."

"Of Pucket," said Evie, "which you will not either."

They looked at one another across the table in the dusk, each with her hands flat on the oak, like two people who have been introduced at a funeral and are not sure whether the occasion permits a smile. It was the whole of the ceremony. It was, Evie thought afterwards, a perfectly adequate one; nothing that anyone had said since had ever improved on it.

"Is it a village?" said Isa.

"A very small one. There is a harbour wall." She stopped. She had not meant to say that. "I learned the hand from it. The glyphs. With a wet cloth, on the stones."

"I see." Isa did not ask her anything more. She put her head very slightly on one side, as one does when a door has been opened a crack and one has decided to be extremely careful not to push it. "At Vellamara," she said, "we have a library with eleven books in it. One is about cheese."

"Is it any good?"

"It is the best of the eleven. It has pictures." The dark eyes did not smile, but something went across them like the shadow of a bird. "I read it eleven times."

That was all. Neither of them said any more, then or for a long time; and Evie, who had been asked a great many questions in her life by a great many people who wished to know about her mother, felt something in her chest, a small tight knot that she had carried for six years, loosen by the width of a single thread.

She did not ask.

At that moment a very small bald man in a leather apron arrived at the end of the table with a lamp.

"Thirty-one wants a light," said old Dibble.

He held it up. It was one of the tray lamps, a glass chimney on a brass foot, with the flame turned very low; he stood with it in his two hands like a priest with a relic and looked, not at either of them, but at a point about a foot above their heads. He had the air of a man who has been listening for a quarter of an hour and has no opinion.

"A copper," he said. "For the hour."

"I have a copper," said Isa, and put her hand to her glove.

"Mr. Dibble," said Evie.

"Miss Blackstone."

"I have the lamp at twenty-two paid until six. It is at the window. I propose that the lady and I move to twenty-two, with the book, and share it."

"Two readers at one table, one lamp," said old Dibble. He turned the thought over, slowly, with his head on one side, as if it were a coin of doubtful provenance. "That is not the rule."

"Is it forbidden?"

"It is not forbidden. It is, I should say, unprovided for." The walnut face did not change. "A table is a copper. A second reader at a table is a second copper. That is how it is written. I did not write it. I merely observe it."

"Then one copper between us," said Evie, "and I have paid mine."

"That is one," said old Dibble, with scrupulous accuracy. "That leaves the lady's."

"I have one," said Isa. She had it out. It lay in her glove, small and brown and perfectly round; she looked at it for a moment, and at the lamp, and at the long, quiet, honest face of the thin girl across the table in the grey dress, and she laid it on the oak. "It is the only one that I have left," she said, clearly. "I should like it to be spent on this."

Old Dibble took it. He turned it over, and bit it, with no particular emphasis, and put it in his apron; and then he did what, in four years, he had not once been known to do, and smiled. It was a small, dry, entirely private smile, like a crack in a very old plate.

"Table twenty-two," he said. "One lamp. Two readers. It's an irregularity. I shall enter it as such." He went away down the lane with his empty hands behind him. They heard him say to nobody, at the door, in a satisfied mutter, "Unprovided for. I knew that it would come."

They carried the Ebb between them to the window.

It was a heavy book. Isa had it by the spine, in both arms, against her chest, as one carries a child; and Evie walked beside her with a hand under its lower edge, not touching, merely there, in case. They passed the old scholar at twenty-three. They passed the young man with the ledger, who looked up for the first time in three hours with an expression of mild affront. They arrived at the long oak table by the tall window, with its lamp burning steady and gold in the last of the light, and Evie moved her own half-codex, in its cloth, from the head of the table to the foot, and drew out the bench; and Isa laid the Ebb down, and unwrapped it, and opened it under the lamp at the third chapter, and was silent.

It was a different hand.

Evie had known that it would be. The Flood was written in the clear round script of the later Marian court, with its tall regular signs; the Ebb was older. It was in the old slanting hand of the harbour-masters, a rough dark quick script written with a reed on a rougher paper by men who had had a tide to catch; its glyphs ran together, the hooks and the hairs and the little dots, in a swarming, crowded, difficult scrawl across the page like a flight of small birds. It was not a script that one could read. It was one that one could only be taught.

"I cannot read it," said Isa.

She said it flatly, without self-pity, as she had said everything that afternoon. She had pulled off her gloves, and laid her hands in her lap, and her small thin face in the lamplight was white, but her chin was up. "I am to copy the third chapter in a fair hand, one leaf to a page. I had hoped, I think, that the shapes would be sufficient. I have an eye for a shape. But this is, this is not shapes, this is weather." She breathed out. "I was told it would be a table of figures."

"It is."

"It is a flight of starlings."

"It is the harbour-masters' hand," said Evie. "It was written fast, in the dark, for people who knew what the signs were before they read them. It is very simple, once you have the first three hundred." She looked at the page. Something in her, the same small cool firm thing that had followed a bell along an aisle, moved over a little to make room. "May I?"

"What?"

"Read it. Aloud. If you will write."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You have a hand. I have the signs. I can't write a fair copy to save my life; I write like a hedge. I do it for the Guild by the inch and I hate it." She lifted her eyes. They were warm and brown, and rather shy. "But I can read that. I could read it with my eyes shut. If you would be so kind as to put down the figures as I say them."

Isa looked at her.

She looked for a long moment, in the lamplight, with her head a little on one side, and her pencil quite still in her fingers; and Evie, who was not accustomed to being looked at, found that she did not at all mind. It was not the look of a person who wanted something. It was the look of a very careful accountant, going down a column, and arriving at the foot, and finding that it came out.

"Yes," said Isa. "Thank you. I should like that."

She took a clean sheet from her notebook. She dipped her pen in the lamp-lit ink-pot that stood on the table, and held it above the page, in a small steady hand. "I'm ready."

"Chapter the Third," read Evie. "Of the Ebb at the Three Quays."

The pen moved.

It went like water. That was what she thought of it afterward: that for the first quarter of an hour she did not think of anything at all, but only read, in a low even voice, line by line, in the lamplight, the old rough dark crowded signs, and heard the little dry scratch of the pen keeping time. At the new moon of the third month the ebb at the Great Quay is the ninth hour and fourteen. At the Second, the ninth and sixteen. At the Third, which is the quay of the salt-boats, the tenth. Isa wrote them in a clear small upright hand. She did not hurry and she did not stop. She did not ask for a word to be repeated more than once. When they came to a column she ruled it, with a pencil and the edge of her glove, in a line as straight as a plumb; and when the names of the harbours came, long, tall, strange, ending in a vowel, Evie spelled them out, letter by letter, and Isa put them down in a firm phonetic script of her own, with the Marian stress marked, and read them back to her in a low voice, Vell-an-dor, Ess-ka-ra, the quay of Tar-sos, with so exact an ear that Evie's pen-hand twitched.

It was, she realised, the first time in four years that she had read aloud to anyone.

"Why is it so long?" said Isa, at the foot of the second leaf, shaking out her fingers. "I had thought a tide was a simple thing. It comes in; it goes out; it does so twice a day. I had it from my governess."

"On a world with one moon," said Evie. "Ours has two."

"I am aware that we have two."

"Then you will know that they do not agree." She laid her finger beside the column, not on it. "There is Amalthea, the great pale one, who comes round once to the month and drags the sea after her in long slow breaths. And there is Orrel. Orrel is small and dark-faced and quick, and runs round the sky in a little over ten days, so that she is never in step with the week; and she pulls the water her own way, a little before or a little behind. When they stand together at the turn of the month the springs come so high that the Great Quay is under; when they stand apart the sea scarcely troubles itself to move. A harbour-master does not ask what the tide is. He asks what each of them is doing to each quay, and adds the two."

"So that every figure," said Isa slowly, "is two figures."

"And a hook." Evie turned the leaf. "That is why it is bound in halves, and why no one has ever copied the whole in a season, and why ships' masters used to pay more for a good copy of the Hours than for the ship's lamps. If you send a salt-boat out over the bar on the wrong ebb, you do not lose an hour. You lose a boat. It sits on the sand with the water going away from it, and the next tide that finds it is not the one you meant."

Isa looked at the page with a new and a very much more respectful face, and wrote a little slower.

At a quarter past five they stopped over a sign.

It was a small one, in the middle of a column, a smudge of ink and a dot; it might have been a three and it might have been a seven. Evie bent over it. She was certain it was a seven. The ebb at the Third Quay on the new moon of the sixth month was at the seventh hour and, and the sign could be read in two ways, and she said, "Seven."

"It is three," said Isa.

"It is a seven. Look at the hook."

"I am looking at the column. The ebb is at the third hour and forty. It cannot be the seventh, because the one before it is the sixth and the one after is the eighth, and the sequence goes down." She laid her pencil along the edge. "It decreases, Evie. All the others in the row fall by about the same amount. If it were seven it would be an absurd leap. It is a three."

"The sign says seven."

"The sign is a smudge."

"It is a very old, very clear smudge. It has a hook."

"Then the harbour-master had a very peculiar hook," said Isa, "and he was wrong."

They looked at one another.

It was extremely irritating. It was also, Evie found, with great surprise, a distinct and unmistakable pleasure; it was the first time in four years that anyone had disagreed with her, with reasons, to her face, on the subject of a Marian sign. She felt her mouth begin to turn up at the corner. She turned the page. And there, on the next leaf, in the margin, in the same dark crowded hand, a small note that she had not yet reached said, in the reed-pen scrawl of a harbour-master who had evidently had to put up with this kind of thing before: Seven for the third month. Three for the sixth. The scribe's hook is false. I have had it corrected. T.

There was a silence.

"You are right," said Evie.

"So are you," said Isa. "It was the hook."

"I should never have found the correction. I'd have gone on to the end of the chapter."

"And I should not have read it. I should have copied a seven and said nothing." She stared at the margin with a kind of fascinated horror. "We are both right and we are both wrong. It is a very peculiar feeling."

"I believe that is what is meant by collaboration," said Evie.

She had not expected to say it. She had meant it as a joke, and had said it in the dry flat voice she used for jokes, so that nobody would know. But the girl across the table put her hand over her mouth, quite suddenly, and a small strangled sound came out between her fingers; and Evie, who had not, in all her twenty-one years, been responsible for such a noise, sat very still and felt something warm and astonishing go through her like a cup of tea.

In the stacks, a long way off, someone sneezed.

"Is that Mr. Wren?" said Isa, after a moment, wiping her eyes.

"I should think so. He's been in there for two hours."

"Poor creature."

"He is going to be extremely pleased."

He was.

He appeared at the end of the lane at ten minutes to six, white-faced, with a lamp in one hand and a chit of paper in the other and the helpless, hopeful look of a man who has made up his mind to commit a crime and is about to be told that it will not be necessary; and he stopped dead, at the sight of the two heads bent together under the window-lamp, and the open book, and the pen. He said, "Oh," in a voice so small and so full that the old scholar at twenty-three woke up and looked at him. He came on. He put the lamp down. He looked at the Ebb, at the page, at Isa's sheet of fair copy, which lay there in the circle of light, black on white, with its long clean columns and its strange ends of words; and the whole of his thin anxious face, from his chin to the roots of his hair, began to shine like a very small sun.

"You found it," said Mr. Wren.

"Miss Blackstone found it," said Isa.

"It was behind the odes."

"I looked behind the odes. I looked, I was, I was on my knees. I had a lamp. I put my arm right in, to the elbow, and there was nothing, there was an, an, a very large spider." He sat down on the bench, rather suddenly. "How?"

"I heard that it was missing," said Evie. "And I was passing."

"Passing."

"By the odes."

"Oh, bless you," said Mr. Wren. He took off his spectacles, and wiped them, and put them on again, with a very shaky hand. "I shall, I will, I shall sign it. I shall sign the slip. Mistress Halloran is not back until five and she is not, in point of fact, back at all, and it is the rule, but it is quite plainly, it is quite obviously, a case in which the, the spirit." He took out a pen. "May I have your name, madam?"

"Bartoli."

"Bartoli." He wrote it. He wrote, in the corner, in a neat anxious hand, Ebb recovered. Slip void. Reader assisted by Miss E. Blackstone, and stamped it with a small round green seal that said GREAT LIBRARY OF BRIDGEPORT, BY ORDER, and gave it to Isa with a bow so deep that he nearly struck his forehead on the table. "I am so very, very sorry," said Mr. Wren. "And so, so very grateful."

"I'm very much obliged to you," said Isa, with perfect gravity, "for the Flood."

The bell went at six.

It was the Library's own, a great low slow bronze bell high up in the dome, and it rolled down through the hall with a long soft sound like a hand laid on a great table; and all the readers, in all the rows, stirred and sighed and closed their books. It was the end of the afternoon. It was also, they discovered, with a faint shock, the end of the chapter. Isa laid down her pen. She had a sheaf of eleven leaves in front of her, in the lamp, written close and clean from the head to the foot of every page in a hand as even as print; and she held them up to the light, one at a time, and turned them over, and counted them aloud.

"Eleven," said Isa. "It would have taken three days."

"Would it?"

"Three at the least. I should have had to copy every sign by eye and guess at the sense. I should have got it wrong." She set the last leaf on the heap and squared them with the flat of her hand. "It would have been a very bad copy, and I should have taken it to Mr. Pocock and he would have said, you will do, in the voice in which he says it when he does not mean it." She looked up. "I shall be able to take him a good one. I do not think you know what you've done."

"It was only the reading."

"It was only the reading," said Isa, to the lamp.

She did not say anything else. She put the pages in a folder, and tied it with a bit of thread, and slid it into her bodice with the note; and then she took from her satchel, with some ceremony, a small round glazed object in a paper, rather the worse for wear, with a tongue of cream coming out of the top.

"I was told," said Isa, "that I was not to eat this until I had been given the book."

"I see."

"I have been given the book." She regarded it. "I have also been given a lamp, a reader, an introduction, and a correction. I think that on the whole it would be an insult to the circumstances to eat it by myself." She broke the bun in two, with some care, and held out the larger half across the table in a hand that was not quite steady. "It is a Watertide bun. It has cream. It is a little squashed."

Evie looked at it.

She had not had cream in a month. She had a roll in her satchel, which she had been going to eat at the window, and a handful of dried apple; she did not, as a rule, take things. It was a point of pride, and of arithmetic, and of a certain small bleak tidiness that she had taught herself in her first year in the city and had never since seen cause to revise. She said, quite mechanically, "I couldn't."

"It is a copper," said Isa. "One bun. Between us."

There was a very small pause.

"I had not thought of it that way," said Evie.

She took it. It was soft and warm from the satchel, a little flattened, with a sweet pale sticky cream along the broken edge; and she ate it, standing in the light of a lamp that was not hers, in the emptying hall, with the bell still going out like a slow tide in the dome overhead, and thought that it was the best thing she had ever tasted.

The rain had stopped.

They came out on the top of the forty-four steps in the last of the grey light, and the whole of the Meadows lay under them, in a clean wet gleam, with the lamps coming on one by one along the High Road and the rooftops steaming faintly in the cool air, as if the city had just got out of the bath. A pilgrim, late, hurried along under the wall with his little blue cap over one ear. Somewhere down towards the chandler's a baker was shouting, Watertide buns, last of the day. There was a thin pale smell of spring on the wind, wet earth, and coal-smoke, and something green.

Evie walked down beside her, counting. Forty. Forty-one. She did not know why. It was only that it seemed to be the thing to do on a staircase.

At the bottom Isa stopped.

"I turn left," she said. "For the Drapery. Mr. Pocock's is on Thread and Needle Lane; it's a quarter of an hour. I must take him the copy tonight. He will want it counted." She hesitated. "Where do you go?"

"Right," said Evie. "Towards Cornmarket. I have a room."

"Is it far?"

"It is up a great many stairs."

"I am in an attic in Chandler's Row," said Isa. "It is up a great many stairs as well."

They stood there on the bottom step in the lamplight, with the wet street shining round their feet, neither of them moving. It was an odd small awkward silence, like the silence at the end of a very good concert, when one has not yet decided whether to applaud. Isa, who was good at endings, said at last in her clear dry voice, "I should like to walk you a little of the way. Only as far as the corner. If that would not be a nuisance."

"It would not."

"Then I shall."

They walked. They walked together to the corner of the High Road, side by side, in step, with the little bell ticking quietly against Evie's collarbone as it had ticked ten thousand times; and at the corner Isa stopped, and turned, and said, with her hand on her satchel:

"Evie."

"Yes?"

"I heard a bell. When you came to the table. I was looking at the cloth, and I heard it, a very small high note, once; I thought it was a clock." She was looking not at her but at the ribbon. "It was yours."

"It is a very small one."

"It's very quiet for a bell."

"It generally is," said Evie.

She touched it. She did it without thinking, with one finger, as one touches a pocket to make sure of the key. It lay in the hollow of her throat, cool and round and mute. It did not ring. She stood in the wet lamp-light and felt it, and did not say anything else, and nor did Isa; and after a moment the small dark-eyed girl nodded, as if a point had been agreed, and said, in an altered voice:

"Will you be there tomorrow?"

"At the Library?"

"At twenty-two. Mr. Pocock will have another. He always has another." She drew a breath. "If I am to have it, it would be a very great deal quicker, I think, if I did not have to read it. I do not like to ask. I should pay, of course. A copper an hour."

"There's no need."

"A copper for the lamp, then. Between us."

Evie opened her mouth. It was a thing that she did when she was going to say I shall think about it. It was her habit; it was the shape in which she kept a yes until she was sure of it, and she felt the words rise, in the old dry flat grave voice, as she had said them to the Guild and to Mistress Orme and to a man who had once tried to sell her a share in a boat. She said, "I shall think about it."

Isa smiled.

It was the first time that day. It came slowly, from the corners of the mouth, and spread across the small pale face and lit it, so entirely, from within, that Evie forgot for a moment that she was standing in a street.

"Yes," said Isa. "I thought that you might."

She went away down the High Road in the dusk, a small straight figure in a damp blue dress, with her hat on the back of her head and her pencil through her hair, walking very fast; and at the turn she looked back, once, and lifted her hand; and Evie lifted hers. And then, for no reason that she could have given, she did not turn right at all, but went after her, two streets behind, through the lamplit wet as far as the mouth of Thread and Needle Lane, and stopped there, in the mist, to see her safe to a door.

Mr. Pocock was at his door when she came.

It was a quarter to seven. The lamps were lit in Thread and Needle Lane, and the cloth-sellers' awnings had been rolled up, and over the whole narrow street there lay a soft yellow mist of rain-smell and wet stone; and in the dark doorway of the bookshop, with a stub of candle in one hand and an air of having been there for some time, stood the bookseller, short, round and pale, in his ink-cuffed coat.

He took the folder. He untied it. He read the first leaf under the candle, with his lips moving, and then the second, and the third; and his round face, in the soft yellow light, went through a number of stages that she would have given a good deal to have recorded.

"Eleven leaves," said Mr. Pocock, at last.

"Yes."

"In a day."

"In four hours. It is the third chapter. It is, I think, correct. There was a sign that was doubtful, a three or a seven, and we found, there was a note in the margin." She stopped. "I had help."

"I imagine that you did." He looked at the sheets again. His patient voice had, for the first time in the eleven days that she had known him, a faint, distinct crack in it, like a plate in a warm oven. "This is not the writing of a person who has been struggling with a hand she cannot read, Miss Bartoli. This is the writing of a person who has had the sense read aloud to her by someone who knew." He raised his eyes. "Who was it?"

"A Miss Blackstone."

"Ah."

"You know her?"

"I gave her the other half of a book," said Mr. Pocock, "two years ago, for a month of copying that I could not afford. A girl who sits at the window of the reading room with a bell on a string and does not look up." He looked at Isa for a moment over the candle, thoughtfully, in the particular tone of voice that he kept for horses that had once bitten and were now, against all expectation, behaving; and then he smiled. It was a small shy rueful smile, quite unlike his professional one. "She does not come into my shop. She says that she cannot afford the temptation. You will have the next one, Miss Bartoli. And the next after that. If you will have her."

"I should like that," said Isa.

"I thought that you might."

"She said," said Isa, and her voice shook, "that she would think about it."

"Did she?" said Mr. Pocock.

He looked down the lane, to where, round the corner by the cloth-sellers, a lamp had just gone by and a small pale figure in a grey dress with a black ribbon at its throat had stopped, an instant, at the end of the street, in the mist, as if to make quite sure of something, and moved on.

"My dear young lady," said Mr. Pocock, with great satisfaction, "that means yes."

She was on her own stair by eight.

It was a very long one. It went up four flights from the cobbler's yard, in the dark, with a rope for a rail, and at the top of it there was a door, and behind the door a small cold room with a bed, a table, a stub of candle and a window on a wall; and Evie Blackstone, who had walked the whole way home with her hand on the little silver bell at her throat and her head full of something that had no name, stood on the threshold for some time before she went in.

The rain had come on again. It ran down the window in long slow lines. She lit the candle, and took off her damp hat, and her shawl, and unwrapped the half-codex, and laid it on the table in its grey cloth, and looked at it.

The other half.

It was a plain, scarred, grey-boarded thing. It had been in her hands for two years. It had a knot of black ribbon on its corner, where she had cut the bell away. She did not know why she looked at it. She turned back its cover, and passed her thumb along the long ragged edge of the spine where it had been torn by the water, and she thought, with a slow clear steady certainty that she did not at all understand, it was looking for something too.

She put her hand to her throat.

The bell lay quiet in its hollow. It was cool, and small, and silver, and entirely still; and she sat for some time at the table in the candlelight with her finger on it, as one sits with a finger on a pulse, and waited, and heard nothing at all.

Tomorrow, she thought. Twenty-two. One lamp.

She did not count her breath. She sat in the little cold room under the roof with the rain on the glass, and the candle burning down, and her hand at her throat, and did not once, in the whole of the evening, think of the harbour wall at Pucket, or a wet cloth, or a stone; and it was a long time before she noticed that she had been smiling since the bun.