by Rod Duncan
“Let him go. Please.”
This time Elias did. The old man staggered away, rubbing his shoulder. It might be sore for a day or two, but the real damage was to his pride. He seemed about to take up the bill hook, but the mistress shook her head. He stared hatefully at Elias as he backed into the stable-yard.
They were alone.
“I want you gone,” she said.
“I was happy where I was.”
“Those rocks, everything from here to the shore, it all belongs to me. You can’t sit there.”
“We’re neither of us aligned,” he said. “I can sit where I like, unless you want to make a challenge of combat.”
“He was only supposed to warn you. I can have someone mend the cloak, if you like.”
It was an offering of help. Little enough, to be sure. But it showed her weakness again.
“What about my shirt?” he asked.
“I’m sorry. They’ll mend that too.”
“And my skin?”
“Look – I’ll make it right. You wanted money. I can give you money. Compensation. For the misunderstanding.”
His nerves steadied. His heart beat strong and even. He wondered how much silver he could take her for, if he pressed his case. But it wasn’t her silver he needed. It was her credit.
“Send the message for me,” he said. “Then we’ll call it even. You’ll be shot of me. I won’t come back.”
She straightened to her full height. He hadn’t noticed a stoop before, but she’d added a couple of inches.
“Well?” he asked.
Another shadow blinked out the light in the doorway and the dark-haired barmaid stepped in from the courtyard.
“Is everything good, mistress?” she asked.
There it was again: the look passing between the two women.
“I can’t give you my credit,” said the mistress.
“Why not?”
“You’re snared with Jago. I don’t know how. But if I let you have my name for credit, I’ll be putting the Salt Ray in the same trap. Folk drink here because it’s safe. I can’t do it.”
“Then we have a problem,” Elias said. “Your credit’s the one thing I need.”
“I have friends,” she said. “If I put out the word, they’d come to drive you away. They won’t be gentle.”
If it had been the truth, she’d have done it already. The maid was an off-lander, and not yet owned. He felt sure of it now. The two women were staring at him. A horse stamped again in one of the stalls.
“Show me her oath-marks,” he said, pointing to the maid’s neck. “Do that and I’ll be gone.”
The mistress stiffened, but the maid began to unwind her neck cloth. After three turns it hung loose in her hand. Then she undid the top buttons of her bodice and spread the collar. Her pale skin seemed milky in the half-light of the stable. And there they were: blue-black letters where her neck met the shoulders. His heart threw in an extra beat. She had to be an off-lander. She turned. The letters ran all the way around, a necklace of writing.
“Are we done?” the mistress asked. There was a catch in her voice.
Thoughts swarmed in Elias’s mind. It couldn’t be! He’d gambled everything that the maid was unclaimed. I am bound to Maria Rosa. The line of writing ended with the design of two fish made to look like a circle.
“Maria Rosa.” He spoke the name aloud.
The mistress nodded. “That is me. Now go. Go to your fate, whatever it is. From this day, you’ll never be welcome here.”
Elias beat a palm against his forehead, as if a jolt to the brain might reveal a better truth. The mistress, Maria Rosa, strode out into the yard. The maid started to button up her bodice. But it wasn’t right. It couldn’t be right.
“Stop!” he said.
He caught the flicker of fear in her face.
“Turn!”
She didn’t move, so he stepped around her. “Who was the oath-wright? Whose mark is the two fish?”
He gripped her shoulder to keep her still then spat on the pad of his finger and rubbed at the back of her neck. The skin stretched and the mark stretched also. It didn’t fade. He dragged her towards the splash of daylight by the door. She tried to pull away. Desperate. He looped his arm around her. It couldn’t be right.
In the courtyard, the mistress was shouting for help. Servants came running from the inn. Catching the flash of steel blades, he turned the maid towards them, making a shield of her.
The old man held a crossbow.
Everything was going to hell. Elias brought his head behind the maid’s. It was then, with his eye close to her neck and the daylight on her, that he saw it. There was a sheen on her skin over the lettering. The blue-black pigment lay on the surface, not underneath it. It wasn’t a tattoo.
He let go of her and raised his hands. He stepped into the courtyard. The old man aimed the crossbow.
“You want I kill him?”
It was an empty threat. Elias had put himself in the open. The many eyes of New Whitby were surely watching. He’d be safe enough, so long as his hands were up.
“Away!” The mistress spat the word at him. But she was shaking and her face had drained of colour. Perhaps she’d seen the calm in his eyes.
“I don’t think you want me to go,” he said. “And I don’t think you want me to say why. Not out loud.”
They were standing in the storeroom behind the bar, the mistress, the maid and Elias. The door had been pulled closed, but thumbs or no thumbs, he would be more than a match for them if it came to a fight.
“Her oath-marks are false,” he said.
The mistress was crumpling. The maid gripped her hand, as if to give support. Strangely, the young woman had stood taller as her truth was brought to light. Her level gaze unnerved him.
Elias said, “I can tell Jago what I’ve found. Or you can lend me your credit so I can get my message to Short Harbour. There’s still time, if we do it now.”
All this he said to Maria Rosa, who nodded in response, her eyes on the earth floor, defeated.
But the maid folded her arms. “No,” she said.
“Do you understand what Jago would do if he found out you’re an off-lander?”
“I do.”
“I’m giving you a way out,” he said. “You can’t turn it down.”
“I don’t believe you’ll give up my secret,” said the maid.
“Why in hell’s name not?”
“Because if Jago put his mark on me, I’d have to tell him what I know about you. You’ve been cheating at cards. I watched you that night in the saloon. Before he marched in.”
“Those men played each with the other,” Elias said and tried to laugh. The sound stuck in his throat. His heart had caught that irregular beat. The glycer-fortis was in the pocket at his belt. He could feel it against his leg. He wanted to reach for it.
“You dealt the cards,” she said.
“I wasn’t gambling. They were.”
“You still dealt. What would happen if Jago found out that Elias No-Thumbs had been back to his old tricks? What do you get for cheating a second time?”
“No one would believe you!”
“You’d be outlawed again,” she said.
“It’d be your word against mine. And here are my witnesses.” He held up his mutilated hands. “No one would believe I could cheat.”
“What about this witness?” she said, reaching two fingers under her cuff and extracting a playing card from the sleeve. It was one of his. He snatched it away and was about to tear it to pieces.
“I have more,” she said. “Safely locked away. Trick cards, shaved narrow at one end. That’s why you came back. A few burned cards would be no use. But you had to get them. They prove you were cheating.”
The maid was right. But it was impossible that she could have seen it.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Elizabeth,” she said. “Elizabeth Barnabus. And I think we can help each other.”
Chapter 9
The longer Elizabeth Barnabus spent on Newfoundland, the less she seemed to understand it. It was the most brutal place she could imagine. And yet she’d witnessed kindness and generosity on a heroic scale. Many said they were proud to have so few laws, to be free. Yet she saw their fear at the casual violence of the lawless land.
It was the opposite of her home in England. Back across the waters, in what she’d thought of as the civilised world, the nations had long ago been bound together by a treaty of mutual security. It wasn’t an empire, because no single government ruled over it. Yet so tightly were they bound that it was described just so: the Gas-Lit Empire.
The waging of war had been banned, as well as technologies that might be detrimental to the wellbeing of the common man, which meant all new developments that might lead to weaponry. There’d been great advances in the science of medicine. Barriers to trade and travel had been dismantled. Goods and people could move without let or hindrance from Samarkand to Carlisle, from New York to Timbuktu.
The price of such freedoms had been the overbearing authority of a new legal system, with the International Patent Office at its centre, like a spider in the middle of a web. Patent Office judges decided which technologies were unseemly and should be blotted out. No one knew the number of its prison camps. Its agents were everywhere, gathering information about every aspect of life. The innocent had nothing to fear, they said.
Some fled in the early days: those with means, those who couldn’t abide the new laws. The 1830s saw a trickle of British, French and Americans arriving in Newfoundland. Their numbers swelled as the controls of the International Patent Office spread from nation to nation. No one had invited them. But hospitality was the way of things in old Newfoundland. Homesteads opened their doors as the boats arrived.
The Gas-Lit Empire reached out after them. The people of Newfoundland gathered to decide whether they, too, should join this new alliance and submit to its laws. The vote could have gone either way. The promised benefits were great. But it was the votes of the new arrivals that carried the day. They outnumbered the earlier settlers. And they would never submit to the things they’d so recently fled.
Amputation was the most visible evidence of the Newfoundland way. The peasants were less afflicted by it. But in the middle ranks it seemed almost universal.
“You mustn’t stare,” Maria Rosa had whispered, after Elizabeth had first ventured into the saloon of the Salt Ray Inn, carrying a tray of cold meats to men seated near the fire.
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Of what?”
“They… They’re all… That man – half his face is gone. And the others… Were they in a battle?”
The confusion on Maria Rosa’s face was replaced by understanding. She brushed a stray lock of hair from Elizabeth’s brow. “This is Newfoundland,” she said. “When an oath is made, it is marked onto some part of the body. For the oath to be broken, that part must be removed.”
After three months serving and hiding at the Salt Ray Inn, Elizabeth had become accustomed to the mutilations. They still appalled her, but her initial revulsion had been replaced by curiosity. A story lay behind each cut, if one had the knowledge to read it. Maria Rosa said she should put such things out of her mind. But that had never been Elizabeth’s way.
Elias had interested her from the moment he walked into the saloon, though not for his missing thumbs, which had been hidden at the time. It was his actions that marked him out. There were warmer seats he could have chosen. And brighter. Instead he placed himself in the settle next to the drip from the roof, which was also the least well lit. He paid for half a pint of bitter ale but asked her to pour it into a pint tankard – the sign of a sober man giving the appearance that he was drinking.
He’d been wearing gloves when he approached the tap. The thumbs must have been stuffed with something rigid. Picking up his drink, the grip had seemed almost natural. It takes one trickster to recognise another.
Not that he’d noticed her. She made a point of passing close to his booth on her way to pick up the empties and when carrying out plates of food. She was behind him when he brought out the matchbox and slipped off his gloves. He must have thought himself unseen.
Missing digits were common enough. But she’d never before seen a man who’d lost both his thumbs. Unusual though that was, it was his hiding of them that intrigued her.
He tipped out the matches onto the table and selected two from the heap, holding them between his first and second fingers. A clumsy grip. Deliberately clumsy, she thought. The deformity that he’d hidden before was now becoming the centre of his trick. But only for a select audience.
There’d been moments of terror during her time as a barmaid. The risk of discovery and its consequences could never be forgotten. But for the most part it had been a time of excruciating boredom. Watching the man with no thumbs and trying to guess his secrets presented her with a stimulating distraction.
It was a private show, for no one else in the bar would have the knowledge to decode his actions. As a connoisseur of misdirection, Elizabeth found particular satisfaction in seeing something new. She watched him as he watched the room, searching for a suitable mark, some gullible drinker with silver in their pocket. The missing thumbs put a novel twist on his work.
First, he performed a proposition bet: the placing of matches on top of each other. She’d seen it before, though by tricksters with fully functioning hands. She imagined that a demand for money might come next. But instead, he used the trick as bait, drawing in the mark’s friends from another table.
Elizabeth’s admiration grew. And her enjoyment.
With the three of them assembled, he brought out a pack of playing cards and dealt five to each man. Seeing it, she had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud, such was the elegance of his work. The trick was precisely that there could be no trick. He had no thumbs. The players knew that sleight of hand would be impossible. The dealing was clumsy but they trusted him. They gambled against each other. Only when their cards were balanced did he take the money on the table. They might have been irritated when it happened, but his money never stayed in view so they never had the sense of how much he was accumulating. Their eyes were on each other.
He wasn’t earning a fortune. But the risk was never his. She couldn’t keep count precisely, but he was earning a fair night’s pay. For a man with no thumbs. And the players saved their anger for each other.
“Be careful,” said Maria Rosa, when they passed each other in the storeroom. “Patron Jago’s ridden into town. The boy saw his men over at the High Rat. With luck he won’t come near us.”
Elizabeth had heard the story of Jago and his upstart family. His grandfather had been a fisherman, they said. And then a mercenary. But he’d bought a tract of seven hundred acres with a sliver of coast and a mountain in the middle. Then he’d got himself an oath-wright and set the family up as a clan. The old clans didn’t accept it, of course. Money wasn’t the same as Blood. They launched a few attacks, but the mountain was easy to defend. The others gave up trying to dislodge him. Two generations later, the feud still rumbled on. Everyone knew Jago was a Patron Protector, though the other clans hadn’t given him full rights at the Reckoning. He was “new power” to them. They still called him a little shit, but no longer to his face. None of them would have dared to ride into New Whitby without a small army to stand guard. In doing it himself, Jago mocked them.
“Be careful,” the mistress said again, as if a second warning were needed.
As she turned to leave, Elizabeth caught her arm. “There’s a man running a card game out there. Do you want me to stop him?”
“How do you read them?” Maria Rosa asked. “Are they fighting types?”
Elizabeth thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t see it that way.”
“Then let them play. So long as they’re buying drinks. But keep your eyes open. Tell me if anything
changes.”
When Elizabeth stepped across to clear the empties from the table, she asked if they wanted food brought. But the players were intent on the cards and waved her away without looking up. The dealer looked, though. He’d shifted his hands from the table as she approached.
After that she was careful to be more discreet, clearing the tables behind him, watching over the top of the settle, from which angle he couldn’t see her.
Tempers had started to wear thin. One of the players was winning more than the others. They were staring each other down when the dealer made his move. It might have seemed impossible for him to cheat. He still had the stub of a thumb on his left hand. But it was less than half an inch of the lower joint.
With his deformity, he was obliged to scoop the cards to the edge of the table to pick them up. The action seemed natural enough. But as he did it, Elizabeth caught him brushing the stub of his thumb along the side of the pack, stripping out a few cards from the middle and setting them on the top. It was done in a heartbeat. If she’d blinked she would have missed it.
Then he began to deal with that laborious two-fingered grip, placing in front of the men the very cards he’d just stripped. At first she was certain of what she’d seen. But when the cards were turned up at the end of the round, there was nothing special among them. King-high facing a pair of twos. A pair of sevens won the few coins on the table.
It was little enough. But all the small losses added up and one of the men had raised his voice. He thumped down a fist. Elizabeth glanced back to the storeroom. She knew she should be telling Maria Rosa. The men should be thrown out before it turned into a fight. But she didn’t move.
The thumbless man had started off as a bookmaker. But now he seemed to be pulling a confidence trick. Either way, he’d surely be trying to match risk with reward. He’d only choose to act if the laws of probability were in his favour. If the card players had seen his sleight of hand, all their anger and fight would have come his way. He’d be lucky to escape with his life. That was the risk. But there seemed to be no reward. No card sharp should act in such a way.
