Chương 102: The Account

She had asked him on Tuesday night, at the end of the table with a notebook in each hand, and then she had gone to bed. On Wednesday morning she passed him the milk and left the question alone. On Wednesday night she did her homework at the same table and left it alone again, and each time she left it alone, he heard it anyway. On Thursday he tried once more, on the way down the hill, to count how old he was. October, the road, the water.

He lost it somewhere around Christmas, the same as every time, and stopped at the top of the Corn Road and looked at the shop. Riddell did not want to know anything about him, and today that was a relief. The box had come on Tuesday, and Riddell had not opened it.

"It's under the counter," he said, before Abe had the door shut.

"Where it's been since the delivery man put it down. I signed for it and I haven't touched it, because it isn't mine, and I'd like that noted."

"Noted."

"Well, get it out, then. I've had two days of looking at the end of a box." Abe came around the counter. His arm was out of its strapping and it still did not like being asked for things. He had asked it for an hour up at the Crofts' yard already. So he got the box out one-handed, put it on the bench under the good light, and stood back from it.

It was a long plain wooden box with his name on a label and the school's address under it, because the school was the only address he had left that a man in Leeds would trust with something worth five hundred and sixty marks.

"School's address," said Riddell.

"It's where we are."

"I know where you are." He did not move.

"Open it, then."

"It's yours."

"It's yours. I said I'd like to see one, I never said I'd open it." Riddell wiped his hands, which were already clean, down his apron.

"Go on." So Abe opened it. He had held it once, in Leeds, in a hall full of noise, while the smith measured his reach and moved Abe's elbow around to see where his hand sat. Here it was finished, in a shop that smelled of stone and oil, with Riddell standing four feet off with his arms folded so hard his knuckles went white. Riddell was the only person in Calder who would know what he was looking at.

It had still been in Leeds, six weeks from finished, on the day he stood in the shallows with the scrap one in both hands. The grip was plain leather, dark, wrapped tight. The guard was a straight bar of steel with nothing on it. The blade was the color of the underside of a cloud and it had been ground slowly and well. Riddell breathed out through his nose.

"Right," he said, and came to the bench. He picked it up by the flat and turned it under the light and sighted down it from the point with one eye shut. He put his thumb across the edge sideways. He balanced it on one finger just in front of the guard and it sat there level, and he made a noise Abe had heard him make once before, over a chisel.

"He's put the weight where your hand is."

"Is that good?"

"It's good for you. It'd be no good for me." He handed it over hilt first, and watched Abe's hand close on it, and moved Abe's thumb a quarter of an inch, and then took his own hand away and said the rest of it was Abe's to work out.

"Hold it out. Straight out, arm's length. Now hold it there." Abe held it there. His arm hurt, but the point did not move.

"Five hundred and sixty marks," said Riddell, to the sword, in a voice Abe had never heard him use about money, "and that's what it bought. The end of it doesn't move. That's everything you paid for." He shook his head.

"I've had men in here spend that on a table saw that couldn't cut butter." He was pleased right through. He wanted to know about the tang next, the part of the blade that runs up inside the grip, and whether the end of it was hammered over or screwed on. Abe did not know. Riddell gave him thirty seconds to find out before he took it apart himself. Abe found the hammered end. Riddell said good.

"He knows his business, your man in Leeds," he said.

"And you're not to tell him a shopkeeper on the Corn Road said so." Then he said the edge was fine and would want touching in a month and Abe was not to let anybody with a grinding wheel near it, and that included Abe.

"There's a man in Ormskirk. He's slow and he's not cheap and he's the only one."

"You could do it."

"I could. I'd be showing off." He set it down on the cloth.

"I do chisels and I do hatchets and I do a hundred and nine kitchen knives a year for women who bring them in a bag. I'm not putting a wheel to that. Now-" A van came into the yard at the back, and the pleased look went off Riddell's face. The man who came in through the yard door was ordinary. He was about fifty, in a jacket that had been good once, with a clipboard he did not look at, and he nodded at Abe as if Abe were a shelf.

"Afternoon."

"Afternoon," said Riddell. The man's eyes went to the bench and stopped there. Riddell picked up the cloth and put it over the sword, not fast, and with no fuss.

"That's not mine," he said.

"And it's not for sale, so don't look at it."

"I wasn't looking at it."

"You were. Everybody would." Riddell went to the till and opened it and took out what was in it. It was not a lot. He counted it onto the counter in front of the man without hurrying, and said nothing while he did it. The man counted it again.

"I'll take what's there," he said, and did.

"You're sixty short."

"I know what I'm short."

"I'm not saying it to be hard on you." He put the bills in an inside pocket and wrote something on the clipboard at last.

"I've got two shops on Nether Street I can't even find. Their front doors are lying in the road." He looked around the shop, at the bins and the counter and the rack by the window.

"Nobody's buying a hatchet when they've got no door to put it behind." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"No."

"Next Thursday it's all of it, though. All of it and this sixty." He clicked the pen and did not look at Riddell while he said the rest.

"After that the truck doesn't come. I'm sorry, but that's how it is."

"I know how it is." The man nodded and turned to go, and then he stopped, because he had looked at Abe properly for the first time.

"That's the kid from the harbor, isn't it. The one off the video everybody's got on their phone." Riddell's hand came up off the counter. It came up flat and slow, the way he stopped a customer who wanted to put a hatchet on his stone, and it stayed up until the man had finished looking.

"He sharpens for me," said Riddell.

"Thursdays. That's what I know about him and it's all I want to. Mind the step." The man looked at the hand, and at Riddell, and at Abe, and looked back down at his clipboard without asking.

"Thursday," he said, and went out through the yard. The van started. It went up the Corn Road and changed gear at the top, and they both stood and listened to it do it.

"Two hundred and eleven marks a week goes out of this shop to people it owes," said Riddell, to the counter.

"I told you that in January. It didn't stop when the sea came in." Abe had heard him say it. It had been in this shop, in the dark, on a Tuesday in January, and it had gone out of his head like everything went now. A man had just walked in through the yard door and reminded him.

"Since the twelfth," said Riddell, "I've sold four saws, a hatchet and a pair of shears. And the shears came back." He shut the till.

"There was a boy in Tuesday as well. Polite. Tall. Asked me about February and who'd been in the shop, and I told him I sell tools." Abe's stomach turned over.

"I told him I sell tools," said Riddell again, and picked the rag up, and did not use it.

"Go and do the sharpening. It's all in the back." Every blade the low city had brought in since the water was in the back room, in two crates, and they were the worst he had ever seen come through that shop. Half of them had been under salt water. There was silt dried into the handles and rust coming up out of the pins like something growing. One of them had a small white shell stuck to it, the kind of thing you would step on at Nether Street and never look at. He set the stone up and started. He did not go fast.

He had never gone fast in this room, though, because it was one of the last places left in his life where nobody wanted him to go fast. The silt came off. The rust came off. Under the rust the steel was mostly still steel, and the ones that were not went in the fish box by the stone. He worked through the first crate with everything else in his head. A man's voice saying the truck doesn't come. A polite tall boy whose name he did not have to guess.

The sword under its cloth on the bench behind him, and Riddell out there at the counter, not moving and not saying anything. And under all of it, his sister's question from Tuesday night, which he still could not answer. It was somewhere in the second crate that his hands changed. He was working a wide skinning blade with a belly on it, a curved edge that would not sit flat on the stone. He shifted his wrist without deciding to and it sat.

He did the next one and his wrist did it again on its own, and he stopped and looked at his hand as if it had said something. Sharpening · Novice Lv 8 (0 / 3, 200) Every level that skill had ever given him had come off other people's ruined blades, and never off a blade of his own. He put the skinning blade in the good pile and picked up the next one, and did not stop until the crate was empty. Riddell had not moved from the counter.

Abe came out of the back with his hands smelling of the stone and stood on the other side of it from him, and got his bag off his shoulder, and took the money out. He put it on the counter. It was Gault's money, the scout who paid him to compete. It had come through her contract as wages and it had his name on the top of the sheet, and it was the first money he had ever had that nobody was going to arrest him over. That mattered more to him than the amount.

He had a core under a cot at the school that nobody in Calder could buy. The last time he took a big one out of town, two men had walked him up Salt Row for it in front of the whole street, and Riddell had heard about that before his shutter was up. So it had to be money with his name on a sheet, and that kind came in a little at a time, and this was all of it so far. Riddell looked at the bills.

"No," he said.

"You don't know what it's-""I know exactly what it's for. I've just had a man in here telling me what it's for." He did not touch the bills. He pushed them back across the counter with two fingers, without hurrying.

"No."

"He said the truck doesn't come."

"I heard him."

"Then-""Then no." Riddell looked at him.

"Two hundred and eleven marks a week goes out of this shop to people it owes, and for two years you weren't one of them. You walked in here at fifteen and I gave you the till to count, and you counted it twice, because you thought I wouldn't believe you the first time, and after that nobody in this shop ever wanted a thing off you, and I did that on purpose." He put both hands flat on the counter.

"The day you pay my rent you're one of them, and then I owe you too. I'd rather the truck didn't come." Abe stood there with the money on the counter between them and could not think of one thing to say that was true.

"I can't watch it shut," he said. That one was true.

"Then don't watch."

"That's not-""It's a bad month. It'll be better by April." Riddell picked the rag up again.

"Put your money away before I get annoyed about it." Abe did not put his money away. He stood and looked at it, and at the cloth over the sword, and at the clock over the till. That clock had stopped ticking for him once in this room, back in October, when he sat on the floor behind the counter with a sword he could never have paid for across his knees, doing nothing with it for an hour.

"I'm not giving you anything," he said.

"Good."

"I'm bringing you somebody. There's a survey unit out of Manchester. I go in the water for them one day a month from now on." Riddell had stopped wiping.

"They're working the drowned streets down here," said Abe.

"They've got people going into buildings that have been under salt water for three weeks. Their kit's ruined. All of it. Line and lamps and hooks and blades that go in silt and come out like that." He pointed at the back room, where the fish box was.

"They've got to buy it from somewhere."

"A survey unit."

"Small. Out of Manchester. I'm on their books."

"And they'd take a call from a shop on the Corn Road because-""Because I'll tell them to." Abe heard how that sounded as he said it, and did not take it back.

"Ainsworth, the woman who runs it. She wants something from me and she hasn't got it yet. She'll ring you if I ask her to." Riddell looked at him.

"You've got a hard little head on you," he said at last, and kicked a crate out from under the counter.

"Sit down." Abe sat down. And then it was trade, and Riddell got fast and sure about it.

"Line first," he said, and got a pencil and the back of an envelope.

"I don't stock line."

"I know you don't."

"I know a man." He wrote.

"The man is my brother-in-law and you haven't heard that."

"I haven't heard it."

"Lamps. Blades." He wrote both down without asking.

"And who's doing their blades every week?"

"Me. Here. They pay you, and you pay me my Thursday, same as always." Riddell put the pencil down.

"No. I'm not paying you to do their kit on my stone so I can send them a bill for it."

"Why not?"

"Because it's my stone. If their blades come in here, I do them myself, and they pay me for it." He picked the pencil back up.

"A fifth off, because it's a standing order, which means they keep coming back and I keep knowing it's coming. Not a mark more, and don't ask."

"I wasn't going to ask."

"You were. I could see it coming." He wrote.

"Terms." He underlined it twice.

"Thirty days. Not sixty, I don't care who they are. Thirty days from delivery, and I want it in writing from this Ainsworth with her name on it and not yours."

"She'll sign it."

"She'll sign it," said Riddell, and wrote that down too, and underlined it. It went on until the shop was dark outside and neither of them had put the light on. Then he reached under the counter, past the empty box the sword had come in, and took out the account book. It was a hardback ledger with a band around it and the corners gone soft, and Abe had seen it come out before, always for a big customer. Riddell took the band off.

He turned past the pages that were used, and there were only a few of them, which Abe did not like seeing, and stopped on a clean one. He wrote at the top of it, in the block capitals he used for people who owed him money. SURVEY UNIT · MANCHESTER"Right," he said, and turned the book around on the counter so Abe could read it. June had done the same thing to him two nights ago, with a notebook.

"You've brought me a customer. Good. Now tell me the one thing I need to know, because I'll have paid out for the stock two weeks before I see a mark of theirs." He put the pen down on the clean page.

"When do these people of yours pay their bills?"