The Doorway
[POV: BRANNOC]
Brannoc got home at the second hour and took his boots off on the landing, which was the rule.
The room was one room. It had a curtain across the corner where the bed was, and a range that worked, which was worth eleven marks a week on its own, and a window that looked at the wall of the tannery, and four feet of floor between the table and the door which was, according to Ailie, the largest single luxury of their married life.
The two eldest were asleep across the bed with their heads at opposite ends. Tam was in the box by the range, because Tam had the chest, and the range was warm, and they had worked out in the winter that he slept four hours instead of two if you put him there.
Ailie was up, with the mending on her knees.
"You said you'd be back at the tenth."
"Overdraw," Brannoc said.
She put the mending down.
"Whose?"
"Caulker on the Salt Stair. Ostrow." He sat down on the stool and rubbed his face with both hands. "Two months and twenty-one days on the sheet. Took the lot."
"God rest him."
"Aye."
Ailie got up and put the pan on and did not say anything else about it, which was one of the eleven thousand reasons he had married her. Brannoc sat and listened to Tam breathing in the box — the little catch at the top of it, the bit that sounded like a door not quite shutting — and counted the breaths for a while without meaning to, because he counted everything now, that was what the job did to you eventually, it got into your hands.
"Rent," Ailie said, to the pan.
"I know."
"Eleven behind."
"I know. There's the quarter in Sedge."
"Sedge is nine weeks." She turned round. "Brannoc."
"I know, Ailie."
She let it go. She always let it go one sentence before he would have deserved it.
Nineteen years he had stood in doorways.
That was the trade, when you came down to it. There were two men on a collection: the one who read the count, and the one in the doorway. The one in the doorway did nothing, most days, for years at a time. He stood with one shoulder on the frame and his hands loose and he watched the room and the lane at the same time, and he was the reason the brother-in-law upstairs did not come down with a gutting knife, and he was the reason nobody in the lane got brave, and about once every two years he earned his entire wage in four seconds.
Rook went in first. Every house. Every time. Nineteen years.
Brannoc had thought about that a great deal more than he had ever said. If a man had a knife behind the door, it went into Rook. If a floor gave, Rook went through it. Rook had a scar on his forearm from a woman in the Weaver's District in the year twenty-nine who had come at him with a boning knife while her husband was still in the chair, and Brannoc had got to her in two steps and put her on the floor, and Rook had said, afterwards, in the lane, don't put that in your statement, put that she was distressed, and had gone back in and finished the count with his sleeve wrapped in a rag.
They had never discussed the arrangement. Not once, in nineteen years. It had simply been the shape of the work, like the rod being a handle.
And Brannoc knew — he had known for years, in the way you know a thing you have decided not to look at — that it was not courage. Rook was not a brave man; Brannoc had seen him frightened plenty. It was that Rook had made an arrangement with himself about what he was for, and the arrangement required him to be the one in the room.
He's got nobody, Ailie had said once, early on, when Brannoc brought him home for a meal and Rook had sat very straight for an hour and a half and left at the first decent opportunity. That's what that is. He's got nobody and he's built a whole man out of having nobody, and you want to be careful how much you admire it.
There was a thing Brannoc had not told her, and was not going to tell her, and had already decided he was not going to tell anybody.
In the room on the Salt Stair, after the clerk had gone, he had come back up for the rod and had stopped on the stair because the door was ajar.
And through the gap he had watched Anselm Rook kneel down beside a dead man and take the tally-ring off his wrist, and turn it over, and hold it up close to read the stamp inside the band.
And then put it in his coat pocket.
Brannoc had gone back down four steps very quietly and come up again loudly, and Rook had been standing by the table with his ledger under his arm looking at nothing, and neither of them had said a word about it.
And two hours later Brannoc had stood at the Reconciliations counter three feet behind him and heard him tell Pellam the ring went in the canal.
Nineteen years. Four hundred houses. Not one lie, not one shortcut, not one blank column. The man was tiresome about it — he had once spent forty minutes of a wet afternoon correcting a clerk's addition on a form that had already been filed and could not be changed.
And now a ring in a pocket and a lie at the counter, on the same morning that he came into the yard grey to the lips and coughing rust into his glove.
Brannoc knew what rust in a glove meant. Everyone in the trade knew. There were four men in the yard who had it and two of them were pretending they didn't.
He sat in his own room at the second hour of the morning with his boots off and did the arithmetic he did not want to do, and it came out the same way every time: he's dying, and he's started taking things, and the Assay does not lose an instrument without asking where it went.
"You're not eating that," Ailie said.
"No. Sorry."
"What is it?"
Brannoc looked at his hands.
There was a version of the next five minutes where he told her, and she was frightened, and they lay awake, and in the morning it was a thing they both knew and could be asked about.
And there was a version where he did not.
"Long day," he said.
Ailie looked at him for slightly too long.
Then she took the plate away and put it on the shelf under a cloth for the morning, and said, "Come to bed. You'll wake Tam sitting there sighing."
He lay awake anyway, listening to the catch at the top of his son's breath.
Two months and twenty-one days on the sheet. Took the lot.
The House said it was the instrument. The Assay spun the instruments. Nobody in the yard would talk about it above a mutter and Halloway had shut Kessel down at the stove this morning like a man putting a lid on a pot.
Second this quarter.
Brannoc turned over.
He had three children and a room with a range and eleven marks of arrears, and he had a friend of nineteen years who had lied at a counter today for the first time in his life, and somewhere in between those two facts there was going to be, sooner or later, a morning where he had to choose which one he was.
He hoped it would be later.
He was fairly sure it would not be.