The Violet Whale for Chapter Twelve

Ilex read with a ruler.

She laid it flat under the line she was reading, and when she had finished that line she slid the ruler down to the next. That way her eyes could not run ahead to the bottom of the page and find out what happened before it had happened. She checked the harbour’s loads the same way: one line at a time, and then all of it again. Ilex checked every load twice. Books she read only once, so she read them carefully.

She had read eleven chapters of The Heir of Gullstone Light like this, at her desk in the Chart Room, after the last basket of the day was tallied. The chapters came up from below the cloud in paper packets, one a month. Pell bought each one, read it at the patching bench in about an hour, and lent it to Ilex, who took a week. Under her desk was a dry box where Pell’s novels were kept safe. Eleven packets stood in it, in order. There was room for one more.

The last chapter had come up on the noon ship. By three o’clock half the quays had read it. At four, a rigger on the stair outside said to another rigger, “And then the cook,” and Ilex put her fingers in her ears and stood in the corner until they had gone.

Tonight was the midwinter supper. There would be long tables down the quay and hot paper packets and the good bread. At some point between the soup and the pudding, somebody would lean across and tell Ilex how the book ended. She was as sure of this as she was of the day’s tally. So she meant to read it first, and she had until the supper bell.

The trouble was that Pell had the chapter, and had already read it, and wanted something for it.

* * *

Pell came up the stair at dusk, when the ships were hanging their lamps from their lowest lines for the supper. From the Chart Room window Ilex could watch them going down one after another, gold lamps on long ropes, until the quay below had a roof of lights.

Pell stood in the doorway with a paper packet in one hand and a rag of old cloth in the other, holding up both.

“Chapter Twelve,” said Pell. “It’s the best one. You’ll cry.”

“You cried,” said Ilex. “Whether I cry is an inference.”

“And this,” said Pell, waving the cloth, “is the inside of the Bellflower’s envelope. Look at it.”

Ilex looked. It was a soft, worn violet, the colour of the sky over the harbour just after the lamps are lit.

“Some patcher lined that whole envelope in violet forty years ago and never told a soul,” said Pell. “It’s been flying about with that inside it all this time. And now there’s a hole in it the size of a door, and nothing on my shelves comes near the colour. I promised it back tomorrow. That was before I’d looked inside.”

“You want my Whale,” said Ilex.

“I want your Whale.” Pell set the packet on the desk, though not very near her. “Here are the terms. The chapter for the Whale. I pin it over my bench and match the patch to it. I know what it is to you, and I’m asking anyway. That’s the trade.”

Ilex took the Whale out of her deck and laid it on the desk.

It was a Moonlit Whale, the same as anybody’s, except that the keeper before her had drawn it in violet ink instead of black. Every stroke was violet, down to the old keeper’s mark under the last one. In the margin, in the same violet, was a note: opens well, closes better. Ilex had opened every game with it for years. It had never once let her down.

She thought about it for as long as she would think about a load that came up short. Then she said, “One condition.”

“Go on.”

“One last game with it in my deck. Then it’s yours.”

“Done,” said Pell, and sat down on the other side of the desk, and pushed the Bellflower’s lining into a pigeonhole marked WEST MOORING, QUERIES.

* * *

They laid the board out on the desk among the ledgers, which is not where cards belong. Ilex knew it, and moved the open books to the floor first. Pell dealt the way Pell did everything that wasn’t patching: fast, happily, and with one card on the floor.

“Wait till you get to the goose,” said Pell, fishing it out from under the desk.

“Stop,” said Ilex, without looking up.

“That’s nothing. There’s a goose in every chapter.”

“Stop anyway.”

Morning went quietly. Ilex did not open with the Whale, and Pell noticed at once, because Pell noticed everything about that card.

“You always open with it.”

“It says it closes better,” said Ilex. “I’ve never checked.”

This was a remarkable thing for Ilex to say. She checked everything. She checked the loads going down on the ropes and the loads coming up, and then she checked them again, and the harbour ran a little more smoothly for it. But the Whale had always opened so well that she had never liked to risk it on the other half of the note. Tonight was the night to find out.

In the Afternoon, Pell played a Rain Cloud. It rose off the board, grey and round and very pleased with itself, and drifted across to rain on Ilex’s lanterns. Ilex slid the day’s tally out from underneath it with two fingers, and the cloud rained on the blotter instead.

Pell was losing, and Pell talked when losing. Ilex’s Kind Gust blew Pell’s Sunbeam Squire clean off the edge of the board. He landed on the damp blotter and lay down there for a nap.

“Oh,” said Pell, “that’s exactly what the cook does to the—”

“Stop,” said Ilex, without looking up.

Then it was Night. Ilex had two lanterns left and Pell had one. Ilex counted her sunlight twice, and played the Whale.

It came up off the board slowly, the way big things do. It rose past the inkwell and the stacked ledgers and the pigeonholes, until its back nearly touched the beams and its tail curled down beside the window. It was violet all through. The lamplight went into it and came out the other side softer, and the whole Chart Room turned the colour of the sky outside. The Whale rolled once in the air, very slowly. Every loose paper on the desk lifted a little and settled again. On the far side of the board, Pell’s last lantern went out, as gently as a lamp turned down at bedtime.

The note in the margin was right. It closed better.

“Stop,” said Ilex, out of habit.

Nobody had said anything. That was what made her look up.

Pell was holding the Bellflower’s lining in both hands against the Whale’s great side. The two were the same violet. They were so exactly the same that where the cloth crossed the Whale, the cloth seemed to vanish.

“I don’t want the card,” said Pell.

“You’ve asked for that card every midwinter since you came to the quays.”

“I wanted it over my bench so I could hold silk up to it for a month and squint. I don’t want to squint. I want that.” Pell pointed at the Whale, which was sinking back down to the board like a ship coming in to moor. “I want the colour. In a pot. With a brush in it.”

Ilex watched the Whale until it had folded itself back into a card. Then she bent down and opened the bottom drawer of her desk.

The bottom drawer was where Ilex kept things that were not wanted but could not be thrown away: a pen-knife with no blade, a spare tally board, forty-one pencil stubs, counted. At the very back, in a ring of old dust, stood a small square bottle of ink. Its label said NOT FOR LEDGERS, in Ilex’s own exact hand.

She set it on the desk beside the Whale.

“Oh,” said Pell.

“My predecessor drew the Whale with this,” said Ilex. “She also kept one whole week of the harbour’s loads in it. I still have that week. Nobody can read it by lamplight, and lamplight is when people come asking.” She turned the bottle so the label faced Pell. “I wrote that on my first morning. I have never once wanted it.”

Pell held the bottle up to the lamp and made a small sound that Ilex had only ever heard Pell make about linings.

“New terms,” said Ilex.

“New terms,” said Pell. “The chapter for the ink.”

“The chapter for the ink. The Whale stays in my deck.”

“The Whale stays in your deck. And you stop opening with it, now you know.”

“I’ll consider it,” said Ilex.

She wrote the trade on a slip of paper, one line for what went out and one for what came in, and read it back twice. Then Pell slid the packet across the desk, and Ilex slid the ink across the other way, and they shook on it over the board. Ilex thought she had the better end of the bargain. Pell was sure it was the other way round. Both of them were right, and that is what a fair trade looks like.

* * *

There was still most of an hour before the supper bell. Ilex laid Chapter Twelve flat on the desk and put the ruler under the first line.

At the far end of the desk, Pell spread the lining on the blotter, unstoppered the ink, and began to test the violet on one corner with a brush no thicker than a whisker.

The ruler went down the page a line at a time. Outside, the last lamps went down on their ropes, and on the quay below somebody began setting out bowls and arguing about how many.

Once, Pell laughed out loud.

“Stop,” said Ilex, without looking up.

“It’s the lining,” said Pell. “It matches. I’m laughing at the lining.”

“Then carry on,” said Ilex, and moved the ruler down.

How The Heir of Gullstone Light ends will not be told here. Ilex would not have liked it. But when she slid the ruler off the bottom of the very last page, she sat back in her chair and said, “Oh.”

“I know,” said Pell.

Ilex put Chapter Twelve back in its packet, and the packet in the dry box with the other eleven, and the box was full.

* * *

The midwinter supper ran the whole length of the west quay that night. There were two long tables on the timber decks, with the cloud lying white and still beyond the rail and the ships’ lamps hung low over everybody’s heads. There were hot paper packets of something with onions in it, and more bowls than people. And there was the good bread, which is dear at Cloudbreak, so it went along the table with great care.

Pell was at the far end, showing a scrap of violet lining to everyone who would look, and to several who wouldn’t.

Ilex sat across from a deckhand off the Bellflower, a young man called Hollis, who had been bursting to say something since the soup. He had read Chapter Twelve at noon. He had been trying to talk about it all afternoon, and everybody he tried had either talked it over already or put their fingers in their ears. At last he could not hold it in any longer.

“Ilex,” said Hollis. “Did you get to the bit where—”

“Yes,” said Ilex, and passed him the bread.

Hollis’s whole face lit up. “The cook,” he said.

“I know,” said Ilex. “And the goose.”

So they talked about the cook and the goose all through the onions and the bread and the pudding, and Ilex enjoyed every word, because none of it was news. When the ships drew their lamps back up their lines at midnight, Hollis was still talking, and Ilex was still saying yes.

She had her ending. Pell had a colour. The violet Whale was still in her deck, where it belonged. Nobody had spoiled a single thing. And Ilex, who checked everything twice, did not need to check whether she was happy. She knew it the first time.