THE SECOND FEE

WHAT THE RIVER GAVE

The south bank at low tide is a place where the mud does the talking.

I went down the steps by the tannery at first light with my coat buttoned and my bag empty. The water was out and the flats were showing, grey and veined and stinking, and a line of men were walking them with poles and hooks, and the gulls were over them in a bad mood.

The second name on the list was a waterman called Sorrel. I asked at the tannery and a man pointed with his chin at a hut built on the wall above the flats, and I went up the steps and knocked.

He was old and hard and missing the last two fingers of his left hand. He had a pot on the fire and a bottle by the pot and he did not offer me either.

“You’re the hangman.”

“I am.”

“I know what you want before you say it.”

“Then say it back to me.”

He looked at me for a while.

“You want to know what I pulled out of the water in October.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because somebody wrote your name on a list and put it in my house.”

That got him. He turned the pot off the fire and set it down and sat on a stool with his elbows on his knees.

“Who wrote it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Then I don’t know anything.”

“Sorrel.” I sat down on the other stool, which put me lower than him, which was deliberate. “There was a woman hanged in October and her body did not go where it was supposed to go. You were on the flats the night it happened or the night after. I know that because you are always on the flats and because your name is on a list with three others on it and two of them are dead or will be.”

He looked at the fire.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say what you found.”

He got up and went to the back of the hut and moved a crate and took something out from behind it. It was wrapped in sacking. He put it on the table and unwrapped it and stepped back.

It was a rope.

Good hemp, boiled and dried and hung with weights for a month. Cut, not untied, and the cut was clean. Six turns at the eye and the tail down and to the left.

My rope. I could have told you that in the dark. I have made every rope in Halm for eleven years and there is nobody else in the county who whips an end the way I whip an end.

“Where did you get this?”

“Off her neck.”

The hut was quiet. The gulls were going mad outside and the pot was ticking as it cooled.

“Say that again.”

“Off her neck. She came in on the ebb by the second arch. I got her with the hook and she was face down and she had a rope on her and I cut it because I couldn’t lift her with it dragging.” He looked at me. “She was in the water before the cart crossed the bridge.”

I did not say anything for a while.

“That’s not possible.”

“It’s what happened.”

“I put her on the cart myself. I watched it go over the bridge.”

“Then you watched the wrong thing.” He sat back down. “I know what a body looks like that has been in the water an hour and I know what one looks like that has been in all night. She had been in all night. And there was no parish sheet on her and no tag on her foot and no cart had been anywhere near her, because the surgeons’ cart comes down on the north bank and she came in on the south side by the second arch, and the tide does not carry a thing from the north bank to the second arch in one night. Not that tide. Not that night.”

I sat there with my hands on my knees.

Then I did the arithmetic.

I weighed Isolde in the cells on the morning of the hanging. Nine stone two. I marked the beam. I checked the knot twice. I pulled the lever and I went down the steps and I got my coat and I went to the dead-house with the cart.

I never looked at her face. Not once. Not in eleven years have I ever looked at a face on that cart. I check the knot twice and I do not check the face, because the knot is the work and the face is not the work and the face is the thing that goes first.

“Sorrel. When you pulled her out. Was there anything else on her?”

“No hands.”

“No.”

“No hands,” he said, “and no tag, and the rope. And a hole in her sleeve where a pin had been.”

I stood up. I went to the door of the hut and stood in it and looked at the flats and the men with the poles.

“What did you do with her?”

He did not answer.

“Sorrel.”

“I sold her.”

“To who?”

“You know who.”

“Say it.”

“Balthazar.” He was not ashamed of it. That was the thing about him. He said it the way a man says he sold a horse. “He pays for the river. It is legal. There is a charter and it says the watermen may sell what the river gives them and it has said so for forty years.”

“Who came for her?”

“A man with a barrow and a paper note. And a man in a leather apron with him.”

“What did the man in the leather apron look like?”

“Thin. Grey coat. Did not say anything. Stood at the back and watched me load her and then gave the barrow man the note.”

I stood in the doorway and put it together, and it went together like a table of drops.

She never went to the surgeons on the cart. She went into the water. Somebody took her off the scaffold before I got my coat, or on the way, or the body on the cart was never her. The man in the leather apron paid a waterman for a corpse. The surgeons’ register said delivered. The register was rewritten. And the slot in the dead-house held a man I did not know.

“Sorrel. The body in the dead-house. In her slot. Did you pull that one out too?”

“No.”

“Do you know who did?”

“No.”

“Then somebody is filling slots.” I turned round. “Somebody is filling slots and rewriting registers and putting locks on doors and taking them off again, and I have been carrying bodies into that yard for eleven years and signing for them, and I have never once looked at a face.”

Sorrel looked at the fire.

“You want my advice,” he said, “you’ll go home and do your work and stop asking.”

“That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

“Then maybe you should.”

I wrapped the rope in the sacking myself and put it in my bag. He did not stop me.

At the door I said, “Who else knows you pulled her out?”

“The barrow man. Balthazar. The one in the leather apron.” He thought about it. “And a boy. There was a boy on the wall with a lamp. I don’t know his name. He was there when I came up the steps and he was gone before I had her on the barrow.”

“How old?”

“Thirteen, fourteen. Thin. Quick.”

I went down the steps and along the flats and did not look back.

---

Ferelith was at my gate when I got home.

She had been there a while. Her shawl was wet through and her hands were wrapped in it and she had the look of a woman who has been standing in one place for an hour deciding what to say.

“You went to the south bank,” she said.

“I did.”

“You found something.”

“I found something.”

“Tell me.”

I opened the door and let her in and put the bag on the table and unwrapped the sacking.

She looked at the rope for a long time without touching it.

“That’s your rope,” she said.

“It is.”

“Then she was hanged with it.”

“She was.”

“Then what’s wrong?”

I sat down.

“She was in the river before the cart crossed the bridge,” I said. “A waterman pulled her out at the second arch with that on her neck and cut it off her because he could not lift her with it dragging. He sold her to Balthazar. Balthazar sent a man with a barrow and a paper note and a man in a leather apron went with him.”

Ferelith did not move.

“Then the body on the cart,” she said.

“Was not your sister.”

“Then who was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You carried her,” she said. “You signed for her.”

“I did.”

“You looked at her.”

I did not answer.

“You looked at her,” Ferelith said again, and her voice had gone very quiet.

“No.”

She stood there in my kitchen with the rope in front of her.

“You hanged my sister,” she said, “and you carried her through the streets, and you never looked at her face.”

“No.”

She picked up the rope and held it in both hands and looked at the cut end and the six turns at the eye.

“Then where is she?” she said.

I had no answer for that. I have been in the trade eleven years and I have never once been asked a question I could not answer with a weight or a length, and I sat at my own table with my hands flat on the wood and had nothing to say to her.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She put the rope down and went out and did not shut the door.

I sat there for a long while. Then I got up and shut the door and locked it twice and went to the drawer and opened it and looked at the scratch on the front of it that somebody had made with a tool that was not a knife.

Somebody had been in this house. Somebody had written four names on my table. Somebody had taken my rope off a hanged woman and sold her to a body-broker and put a stranger in her slot.

And the man on the trap that morning had told me a clerk in a grey coat sold him a ship.

I put my coat on and went out.

If the court was buying bodies from the river to fill a quota, then the quota was short. If the quota was short, somebody was keeping a count. And in Halm, every count is kept in a book, and every book is kept by a clerk, and the clerk’s name was Pell.