“Under the floor,” Garrick said. “Now.”
Lucian looked at the floor. It was made of wide, warped planks, black with age and spilled gin, and one of them near the stove had a knothole big enough to fit a finger through.
“Under it how, exactly?”
Garrick hooked a finger in the knothole and heaved. The plank came up, and the two beside it with it, all three nailed to a crossbar underneath. Below was a gap perhaps a foot and a half deep, and below that, through cracks in the old ceiling of the glue works, a gray, bubbling glow and a smell that made Lucian’s eyes water instantly.
“The vats,” Garrick said. “They boil hides down there day and night. Nobody searches over the vats. Nobody can breathe over the vats.”
“That’s very reassuring.”
Downstairs, a fist pounded on a door. Two doors away. A voice said something official.
Lucian got in.
It was exactly as bad as it looked. He lay flat on his back on a pair of joists with the heat of the vats rising through the cracks beneath him, and Garrick dropped the planks back into place over his face. The light went away. The smell did not. It was a smell like rotten meat being cooked by someone who hated it.
He breathed through his mouth. Then he stopped, because it was worse through his mouth.
Footsteps on the stairs. Fourteen of them. Then a knock that rattled the planks an inch above his nose.
“Navy. Open up.”
The door creaked. Lucian heard Garrick’s weight shift on the boards, heard the slosh of the gin bucket being picked up.
“What.”
“We’re looking for this man.” Paper rustled. “Lucian. Wanted for treason against the Sovereign Empire and theft from the Admiralty. Have you seen him?”
There was a long pause. Long enough that Lucian started counting. He got to six.
“If I’d seen him,” Garrick said, in a voice like gravel being poured slowly down a chute, “he’d be in more pieces than that picture.”
Somebody laughed. Not the one asking questions. A second voice.
“You know him, then?”
“Sailed with him.” Lucian heard a wet sound, which he very much hoped was Garrick drinking from the bucket. “Two years ago he let my ship burn and walked away whistling. You find him, you tell me where. I’ll save the Empire the price of the rope.”
The planks creaked. Someone had stepped inside.
Lucian stopped breathing. Through a crack between the boards, he could see a thin stripe of gray light and, in it, the toe of a navy boot. Polished once. Mud to the ankle now. It stopped directly over his chest.
“What happened to your hands?”
“Held a wheel too long.”
The boot shifted. Lucian felt the plank flex against his nose. One more ounce, he thought. One more ounce and it would crack, and he’d be looking up at a marine with his face full of splinters, and that would be a very short and very stupid end to a very long plan.
“There’s mud on the stairs,” the marine said. “Fresh.”
“There’s mud on everything. It’s a tannery.”
“Wet footprints on the landing.”
“That’s gin.”
“Gin doesn’t make footprints.”
“Mine does,” said Garrick. “I spill it walking.”
There was a pause. Then the boot moved, one step, two, back toward the door. The plank over Lucian’s face eased.
“If he comes here,” the marine said.
“He won’t. He knows I’d kill him.” The bucket sloshed again. “Good day, Navy.”
The door shut. Fourteen steps, going down. A knock at the next house.
Lucian stayed exactly where he was for another two hundred heartbeats, until the voices had moved all the way down the row and around the corner. Then the planks lifted, and gray morning light poured in, and Garrick’s enormous silhouette blotted most of it out.
“Well,” Garrick said. “You smell worse than you did.”
“I didn’t think that was possible.” Lucian sat up. Something wet and fibrous was stuck to the back of his neck. He decided not to find out what. “Thank you.”
Garrick grunted and went to stand by the window.
The shirt Garrick threw at him was blue wool, patched at both elbows, and big enough to sail. Lucian put it on anyway. It was dry, and it smelled only of smoke and old tobacco, and after the night he’d had, that made it the finest garment he had ever owned.
He rolled the sleeves three times. They still came past his wrists.
“You look like a boy wearing his father’s coat,” Garrick said, without turning from the window.
“It’s a look. It’ll catch on.”
He took stock of the room while Garrick wasn’t watching. It didn’t take long. A hammock, slung corner to corner. A stove with no fire in it. Empty bottles in rows along every wall, arranged with a care that was almost military, labels facing out. A sea chest under the hammock with its lid nailed shut.
And on a nail above the stove, catching the window light: a bosun’s pipe.
It was silver, or had been plated with it once. Lucian knew it. He’d stood beside Garrick on the Oath’s deck a thousand mornings while that pipe called the watch, high and thin and carrying over the wind like a gull.
It was polished. Not a speck of tarnish on it. In a room where nothing else had been cleaned in two years, someone had been polishing that pipe.
Lucian didn’t say anything about it. Not yet.
“How long will they keep looking?” he asked instead.
“Navy?” Garrick shrugged. “The Commander? Forever. She doesn’t let go of things.” He finally turned. “You know that better than me.”
Lucian kept his face perfectly pleasant. “Do I?”
“Don’t.” It was the same word as in the yard, quieter now. “I said no jokes.”
“That wasn’t a joke. That was me avoiding a question. They’re very different.”
Garrick looked at him for a long moment. Then he pulled a stool out from under the window, sat on it heavily, and put his elbows on his knees.
“One day,” he said. “You stay one day. Till the posters go stale and the marines get bored. Then you go out that door and I never see you again, and this time I mean it.”
“That’s generous.”
“It’s not generous. If they find you here, they’ll hang me next to you.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’ve done plenty of stupid things for you, Luce. I’m not dying for you. Not anymore.”
Lucian nodded. He sat down on the floor with his back against the sea chest, because there was nowhere else to sit, and for a while neither of them said anything. Below them, the vats bubbled. Out in the yard, someone was arguing about the price of lime.
“I didn’t come,” Lucian said.
Garrick looked up.
“That night. When they took her. You were on the quarterdeck holding a burning wheel, and you were waiting for me to come up through the smoke, and I didn’t.” He kept his voice level, low. His hands were still. “I’m not going to tell you why. But I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen either. That’s mine. I’ll carry it.”
Garrick said nothing.
“I can’t give you back those two years,” Lucian went on. “I can’t give you back your hands. But the men who stood aside that night, the ones who opened the rail for thirty strangers, they were paid. Somebody bought them. And whoever bought them still has our ship.” He paused. “I’m going to find out who. And then I’m going to take her back.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’ll keep saying it until it’s true.”
Garrick’s gaze moved, just for a second. Up, over Lucian’s head. To the nail above the stove.
Lucian saw it.
“You polish it,” he said softly.
“What?”
“The pipe. Every day, by the look of it. Everything else in this room is dying, and that thing shines like it’s waiting for a watch to call.”
Garrick’s face went very red. Not angry red. Something else.
“It’s silver,” he said. “It tarnishes.”
“It’s plate. It’s half brass. You told me that yourself, the day you bought it off that drunk in Saltmarch, and you said it didn’t matter because it had a good voice.”
“Shut up, Luce.”
“You kept it because you thought you’d need it again.” Lucian leaned his head back against the sea chest and looked at the ceiling. “You thought someday somebody would climb those stairs and tell you there was a deck to stand on.”
The silence that followed was the longest yet.
Then Garrick got up. He crossed the room in three strides, and for a moment Lucian thought he was going to be hit again, and decided he would allow that too.
But Garrick only stopped at the stove and stood there with his back to him, looking up at the pipe on its nail.
His burned right hand came up slowly. It hovered an inch from the silver.
It didn’t touch it.
“One day,” Garrick said again, to the wall. His voice was rough. “I said one day.”
“I heard you.”
“Then shut up and sleep. You look like something the vats coughed up.”
Lucian closed his eyes. He was smiling. He made sure Garrick couldn’t see it.
Down in the yard, the foreman of the glue works stood in front of the tannery wall with his hands in his apron pockets, looking at the poster.
He had a long memory and a short temper, and he had been up before dawn, as he was every day, to light the fires under the vats. He had seen a man in a white shirt sitting at the bottom of Garrick’s stairs. He had seen Garrick’s big burned hand haul that man up by the collar like a drowned cat.
He looked at the drawing for a long time.
Then he read the number printed beneath it. He read it twice.
He reached up, peeled the poster carefully off the wall so as not to tear it, folded it into quarters, and tucked it inside his shirt.
He did not go back to the vats. He took off his apron, hung it on the gate, and walked out of the tannery yard toward the harbor, where the Navy had set up its new post beside the outer docks.
He did not hurry. A man with a long memory knew that the best things in life were worth walking to.