Tidewater

Nell Garrow had kept him waiting twenty-four days.

It was a calculated insult, and Garrick had understood it as such from the first. A note had gone down to Wapping on the twenty-fourth of November in a boy's shirt. An answer had come back on the twenty-sixth: a scrap of tarred paper, torn from a cargo manifest, on which someone had scrawled in charcoal Not yet. A second note, a week later, had returned unopened. A third had produced a single line, in a different hand: She says you're a lord. She doesn't deal with lords.

He had written, after that, I am not a lord any longer.

There had been silence for three weeks.

Then, on the night of the eighteenth of December, an hour after the verdict, as he stood in the ruin of his library with a shaking hand on the desk and the Magister's words still ringing in his skull, Jory had burst through the area door, soaked and white, and said:

"She'll see you. Now. Tonight. And Captain, she says come alone."

…

They went down by the river.

It was a black night, with a sleet blowing, and the Thames ran high and yellow and loud between its walls. Garrick wore the oldest coat in the house, borrowed from Tobias, and a woolen cap pulled low. Jory went ahead with a dark lantern. They crossed London on foot by a way that avoided the lamps: down through the Strand, through the narrow court by St. Clement's, and east along the waterfront, where the great warehouses crouched on their pilings and the masts of a thousand ships made a drowned forest against the sky.

Wapping smelled of tar and gin and low tide.

He had been there before, on the Albatross's business. He had never seen it like this. The streets were narrow and slippery and almost without light. Doors stood open on dim taverns full of singing. A woman in a doorway laughed at them, a harsh unlovely laugh, and a man lay face down in the gutter with the rain running over his back. Jory did not slow. He turned from the main street into an alley, from the alley into a lane, from the lane into a stinking court roofed over with rotten timbers, and stopped at a low black door beneath a painted sign.

The Drowned Rat.

"It's here," said the boy. "You'll have to go on alone."

"Jory."

"I'll wait." He crouched in the shadow of the wall, and the lantern shut with a click. "If you ain't out in an hour, I'll fetch Dr. Pike."

Garrick laid a hand on his shoulder. Then he pushed open the door.

…

The room was a cellar.

It lay below the tavern proper, down a flight of slimy steps, a long low vault of brick with a floor of beaten earth. There was a fire at one end. There were barrels, and crates, and coils of tarry rope, and a heap of what looked like bolts of silk. A dozen men sat on benches along the walls, big weather-beaten men in oilskins, with knives in their belts and the sharp eyes of those who live by not being noticed. They did not rise. They did not speak. They watched him come down the steps, and the smoke from their pipes hung blue in the air.

At the far end, on an upturned cask, a woman sat with a tankard in her hand.

She was perhaps forty. She was broad and short and strong, with the heavy arms of a lighterman and a face the color of boiled brick. Her hair was red, going gray, tied up in a kerchief. There was a scar across her left cheek, from ear to chin, white against the red, and when she smiled, which she did not, he thought it would pull her mouth awry. She wore a man's shirt and a leather waistcoat and a pair of sea-boots, and across her knees lay a short heavy cutlass.

"Wynmore," she said.

"Mistress Garrow."

"You're thinner than I was told."

"I have been ill."

"You've been a fool. It ain't the same." She drank. "Sit."

There was a stool. He sat.

The silence went on for a long time. The fire hissed. Somewhere above, a muffled chorus of voices sang a song about a girl in Deptford. Nell Garrow looked at him with a flat appraising stare, and he made himself meet it. It was like being weighed on a butcher's scale.

"I'll tell you what I know," she said. "You can tell me where I'm wrong. You're a gentleman scholar of the Meridian lot. You took a stone from some island and put it in the Duke's cellar. You brought back a coloured woman who sees things, and the Lantern's got her. She's to burn on Sunday." She waved a hand. "Your house is taken, your name's in the gutter, and your sister's dying. You want to get the woman out and get the stone back. You can't do it alone. You need men, and boats, and holes in the ground. So you've come to Nell."

"That is correct."

"And you've got money."

"I have."

"How much?"

He had been preparing for this. He had worked out the figures on the walk, in the sleet, with the precision of a man doing sums to keep from screaming. "The Wynmore estates are in sequestration. I cannot touch the land. But the funds in the strongroom at Hartwell Square are not yet inventoried, and I have access to my private accounts at Hoare's. I make it eleven thousand pounds in coin and bills. There are jewels. My mother's, which were left to my sister. A set of plate. The Sable Albatross, which is registered in the name of a shipping company that exists only on paper, and cannot be seized." He drew a breath. "The lot is yours."

Nell's eyes narrowed.

"All of it?"

"All of it."

"You've not asked what I'll do for it."

"I assume you will tell me."

"You've not haggled." A hard note came into the husky voice. "No lord I ever met gave up a farthing without a lawyer. What's your game, Wynmore? What do you think you're buying?"

"A chance."

"Of what?"

"Of undoing something I did wrong."

She said nothing. She drank again, and wiped her mouth with the back of a thick hand, and set the tankard on the cask beside her. Then she leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, her scarred cheek turned to the firelight.

"I'll tell you about Wapping," she said.

"Mistress Garrow—"

"You'll hear it." She did not raise her voice. "My da was a lighterman. He worked the coal barges for thirty years. In the winter of 'sixty-six a Navy press came through at four in the morning and took every man in the parish above the age of fifteen. They took him. They took my brother Davy. I was twenty-three. I had two children and a husband with a bad chest." She looked at the fire. "Da came back after a year with one arm. Davy didn't. My husband died in the spring of a cough no doctor would come out to treat, because we couldn't pay. And I stood in this cellar, with a babe on my hip and a butcher's bill I couldn't meet, and I watched men in lace go by on the riverbank, laughing."

Her eyes came back to his.

"I started the Tidewater Men with eleven people and a boat. We take what we can. We carry what we can. We feed the widows and bury the drowned. We've fought the Navy, the customs, the Watch, the magistrates, and the Duke of Draymoor's man on the quay." The scar twisted. "And I've learned this, Wynmore. A gentleman will give you his coat, his cash, and his promise. He'll give it all to you with a bow. And at the first sign of the bailiffs, he'll take them back."

"I will not."

"Everyone says that."

"I know." Garrick leaned forward. "I know how it sounds. I know that I have no right to ask for your trust. I have been a fool and a thief and a coward. I have done a thing I cannot take back." His voice shook, and he steadied it. "But I do not ask you to believe in my honor. I ask you to take my money. Take all of it. Take it tonight, before I do anything, and put it in whatever fund you keep for the widows and the drowned. If I fail, you will have it anyway. If I succeed, you will have what you were owed. And if I betray you, God knows, you will have every man in this cellar to cut my throat."

There was a pause.

One of the big men on the bench grunted. Another spat into the fire.

"Hm," said Nell Garrow.

She stood up. She was shorter than he had thought, barely to his shoulder, but she took up the room like a ship in a harbor. She walked round the cask, looked him slowly up and down, and stopped before him with her hands on her hips.

"Why do you want her?"

"I love her."

"That's a daft reason."

"It is the only one I have."

"It's not the stone? Not the Duke? Not some noble crusade?"

"It is the stone, and the Duke, and a hundred things." He met her eyes. "But if I put them in a line, and asked which I'd walk through fire for, it would be her."

Nell looked at him a long time.

"My husband was a soft man," she said at last. "He cried at weddings. He was no use at all." She sniffed. "I've never met a better."

She turned to the room.

"Well, lads?"

There was a moment of silence. Then the big man on the bench stood up. He was enormous, bearded and bald, with a face like a ham.

"I say aye," he said. "Dammit. I've never liked the Lantern."

"Aye," said another.

"Aye."

"Aye."

They rose one by one, and the cellar rang with it, a low rumbling chorus of voices, until every man on the benches was on his feet and the fire danced on twelve scarred faces. Garrick sat motionless on the stool. He had not expected it. He had expected a haggle, a threat, a slow squeezing out of terms. He had not expected to be looked at, in a stinking vault in Wapping, by a dozen smugglers, as if he were a man.

"Right," said Nell. "Tell us what you've got."

…

They made the plan over two hours, on a table of barrels, by the light of a single lamp.

It was Pike's idea, in the beginning, that the Duke's vault and the Magister's cell were less than two miles apart, and that both lay above the course of two ancient rivers. Nell had known it for years. Under London ran a labyrinth of drains and buried streams: the Fleet, the Walbrook, the Tyburn, the Westbourne, old Roman culverts and medieval sewers and the dark brick veins of a thousand cellars. The Tidewater Men had been mapping them since Nell's grandfather's day. They used them for contraband. They used them to vanish.

"There's a way in under Blackfriars," said Nell, drawing in the spilled beer with her finger. "The Fleet Ditch. It comes out at the river, here, under the stairs, at low water. Goes up under Bridewell, and under the back of the priory, and there's a grating in the cellar of Lanternhold, they've got a store of coal in. It's been bricked up, but it's thin." She tapped. "We can be in their cellar in an hour. Out by the same road. Eight men, and a lamp, and a good strong crowbar."

"And the Hall?"

"That's harder." She frowned. "Meridian Hall's got a cellar-door on the east alley, but it's guarded, and the vault's below that, with iron. The Tyburn runs under the square." She drew a second line. "There's an old culvert, from the time of the Plague, comes in under the foundations. It's narrow. A man'd have to crawl. But if you was small, and quick, and had a good head for the dark..."

"Jory," said Garrick.

"The boy?"

"He can pick any lock in London."

"He's fourteen."

"He is the best I have." He turned to Pike. "Hollis, you'll take the Hall."

"With the lad."

"With the lad, and Nell's best, and a handcart. The stone weighs three pounds. You'll carry it out in a bag of meal."

"And you?"

"I will take Lanternhold." Garrick set his finger on the beer-stained drawing. "I will take Ixara. We shall meet at the river, and sail on the Albatross." He looked up. "On the night of the twentieth. The eve of the burning. The Order will expect us to move on the day itself, at the pyre. They'll have every brother in the priory out in the square. The night before, they'll be at their devotions. The cells will have a skeleton watch."

"You can't be sure."

"I can be reasonably sure. I have studied their routine." A faint, grim smile. "I have had a great deal of leisure."

Nell grunted. She scrubbed out her drawing with the heel of her hand.

"It's mad," she said. "It's the maddest thing I ever heard. It'll get half my men killed."

"Yes."

"I like it."

…

It was past two when they climbed out of the cellar into the bitter dark.

The sleet had turned to rain. The lanes ran with water. In the courtyard, Jory rose stiffly from his crouch against the wall, and looked up with a pinched pale face, and said, "Well, sir?"

"We have an alliance."

The boy let out a breath that smoked in the cold. Then he grinned.

Garrick walked him back through the rain, west along the quays. Neither spoke. He felt strangely light, drained and scoured, as if he had been ill and the fever had broken. He had a plan. It was a poor one, full of holes, and it would probably kill them all. But it was his. It was not the Duke's. It was not the Church's. It was a thing made of mud and courage and a woman's trust, and for the first time in a year, he could see the road.

He found Pike waiting in the study at Hartwell Square.

The physician had not gone to bed. He sat with a brandy in his hand and his face turned toward the dying fire. Mrs. Hatch had left a tray. Tobias slept in a chair by the door, his head fallen on his chest. And in the corner, in the shadows by the globe, with his arms folded and his beard on his chest, sat Silas Brandt.

Garrick stopped.

He had not seen the quartermaster in three weeks. Brandt had stayed aboard the Albatross, in the Pool, in a sort of sullen self-imposed exile. He had said he would not come ashore. He had said the house was haunted. He had said, to Pike, with a look in his small bloodshot eyes that Pike could not read, There's a smell on this place. Like a church where something's died.

"Silas."

"Captain."

"I did not expect you."

"Dr. Pike sent word." The quartermaster rose. He was a big, bent, ragged man of fifty with a gray beard and a mouth like a seam. He did not meet Garrick's eye. "Said there was talk of a plan."

"There is."

"Said you mean to break the lady out."

"I do."

"And take the stone."

"Yes. On the night of the twentieth. We go in by the old Fleet drain, under Blackfriars. Nell Garrow's boats will wait at the river stairs to carry us down to the Pool, and the Albatross will be under way by dawn." Garrick heard himself saying it, and did not know why he said so much. He was tired, and Brandt had been eleven years at his back. "Pike and the lad take the Hall by another road."

"The stairs," said Brandt. "At Blackfriars."

"Yes."

Brandt was silent. He stood twisting his cap in his hands, a huge, awkward, shamefaced shape in the lamplight, and Garrick saw that his knuckles were white and the cap was shredding. There was a look on his face that he had seen only once, in the first week of the voyage, when a sailor had fallen from the foretop and Brandt had knelt beside him, silently, and moved his lips.

He never prays, thought Garrick. That was always said of him.

But he looks as though he is praying now.

"Silas," he said gently. "If you do not wish to come, I shall understand. It is dangerous. It is against the law. I shall not think less of you."

"I'll come."

"You are certain?"

"I'm certain." Brandt's voice was thick. "I'll be on the ship. At the Pool. When you want me."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me, Captain." It was almost a whisper. "I ain't earned it."

He put on his cap. He bowed his head, once, stiffly, to Garrick, and once to Pike, and went out through the door and down the stair. They heard the area door open and shut. They heard his boots on the wet flags.

Garrick turned to the physician.

"He is very low," he said. "I should not have asked him."

Pike did not reply. He was staring at the door. His brandy glass hung forgotten from his fingers, and the firelight showed a line between his brows that Garrick had not seen there before.

"Hollis?"

"He's been strange since the voyage," said Pike slowly. "Since the lady came aboard. I thought it was grief. I thought it was the dead wife." He set the glass down. "But I was in the kitchen tonight. When he came in. He did not come by the area door."

"What do you mean?"

"He came from the east. From the river road." Pike's voice was very quiet. "And there was a mark on his collar. A little silver pin."

Garrick went cold.

"You're mistaken."

"I hope I am."

"You must be. It's Brandt. He's been with me eleven years."

"I know." Pike rose. He went to the window and put his hand on the curtain, and stood looking out into the dark. "I'm going to follow him."

"Hollis—"

"I'll be back within the hour."

He was gone before Garrick could speak.

…

He returned at half past four.

Garrick had not moved. He sat at the desk with his head in his hands and the dead fire at his back, listening to the clock. When the door opened, he lifted his eyes, and one look at the physician's face told him everything.

Pike was soaked to the skin. He stood in the doorway with the rain running from his coat and a gray, stunned, blank look on his face, like a man who has seen a ghost in his own mirror. His mouth worked. Nothing came.

"Say it," said Garrick.

"I lost him at Ludgate." Pike's voice was a croak. "But I saw where he was going. He didn't turn off. He went straight along Fleet Street, quite openly, with his head up, as if he had nothing to hide." He swallowed. "Garrick. I saw him go in at the gate of Lanternhold. And the porter opened to him without a word."