Chapter 5

The strongroom under the fish market was three doors past the ice house, and the ice house ran its brine down the wall in a skin of frost, so the door was easy to find by the cold.

The key turned like it had been waiting.

Inside was one room, one lamp, one sea chest, and the smell of tar and old paper. The chest had a ship painted on the lid, badly, by a child. I sat down on the floor and opened it with my hands shaking in a way I told myself was cold.

A woman's hair comb. A brass button off a master's coat. A child's dress, blue wool, hand-sewn, small enough for a baby. And under it, wrapped in oilcloth, a sheaf of letters tied with tarred twine.

The top one was addressed in a hard, slanted hand. Ilsa, it said. Under the door, by the ice.

I read it standing up, and I read it twice.

The harbor-master wrote like a man who had run out of time. He wrote that the Vantree ships had come in light this season and gone out heavy, taking grain out of Kellbridge at night when the manifest said they were unloading salt. He wrote that the regent's office had ordered him to sign tidal certificates for days he had not measured, and that he'd refused, and that he'd kept his own log and hidden it with Maren Voss, and that if anything happened to him she was to keep it, and the fork was to go to the child.

He wrote: If the water comes, it will not be weather. Take the baby and go up the hill. Do not trust the office.

He wrote: I am sorry I gave you a harbor instead of a life.

Somewhere above me, boots crossed the floor of the fish market.

Not one man. Four or five, moving careful, and a voice that didn't belong to the docks, a clean voice, saying something about the ice house in a way that meant the speaker had never carried ice in his life.

I put the letter inside my sweater, next to the fork. I put the baby dress back in the chest because I couldn't make myself take it, and then I changed my mind and took it, and jammed it down inside my coat.

The strongroom had a drain chute at the back, the old ice chute that ran down to the quay, big enough for a person who didn't mind being a fish. I went into it headfirst.

I came out on the quay in a slick of brine and fish scales, and I got up, and a lantern swung around and lit me full in the face.

A man stood ten feet away with a lantern in one hand and nothing in the other, dressed like a clerk, with soft hands. He looked at me the way you look at a fish that's flopped out of the barrel.

He didn't shout. He didn't chase me. He just stood there in the lamplight and looked at my face until he'd memorized it, and then he turned and walked quickly up the quay toward the waterfront.

I ran the other way, and I ran until my ribs hurt.

I found out later that the clerk was Factor Sloane's secretary. Which meant that by the time the harbor bells rang six, the man who owned the grain fleet of Kellbridge knew exactly what the harbor-master's daughter looked like.