Rule 533 - Lie At The Roads - Part 3 of 3

What Bjorn saw, from four steps below Ellwood and two above the water, was an old man in a boat with his arms full.

The boat was moving under him, the way boats do at a wall on the last of a flood, and his hat was on the back of his head, and his hands were both under cheeses, and the folded letter was pinched against the top of the left-hand one by the ball of his thumb, and the bottom step was green with weed and wet to the edge. He had the steps to get up and nothing to hold. He was seventy if he was a day, and he was going to try it anyway, because the Chancellor had told him to stand on the Harbour and he had rowed forty minutes to do it.

Bjorn stuffed the goat form inside his coat and went down the last two steps.

“Mr Cleeve,” he said, and put his hand out. “Let me take one of those.”

Lemuel looked at Bjorn’s hand, and then at both of his own, which were occupied, and the boat went down six inches and came up again.

So Bjorn took the top cheese off him, with the letter still on it, and put it under his own arm. Then he took the second cheese, because Lemuel had begun to hand it over before anyone had agreed that he should, and stood there with a cheese under each arm and no hand free at all, and offered his elbow instead, the way you offer an arm to somebody coming off a gangway with a bag in each hand.

Lemuel took the elbow. He came up out of the boat onto the bottom step, one foot and then the other, and stood on the weed and held on to Bjorn’s arm while the boat knocked away behind him, and then he came up two more steps to where the stone was dry, and let go, and straightened his sash.

“Thank you, son,” he said.

On the third step, Barnaby Ellwood’s hand came away from his breastbone. He straightened up out of the bow he had not finished, and stood for a moment looking at nothing in particular, and breathed out.

At the head of the steps, Rolf had arrived without any of them noticing when.

“Mr Cleeve,” he said. “You’ll come up out of the wet.”

Lemuel came up. On the flat of the quay he turned round and looked at the water and at the island out in the roads, a low dark line with a boat beside it, and he looked like somebody who had just done a thing nobody in his family had ever done.

“Am I received?” he said.

“You’ve been helped out of a boat,” said Rolf.

“That’s what I thought,” said Lemuel, and seemed entirely content with it.

Rolf put out his hand, and Bjorn passed him the folded letter off the top of the left-hand cheese, and Rolf opened it, read it through where he stood, and folded it again.

“The Chancellor’s compliments,” he said. “The Realm is wherever a subject of the Realm stands, and it therefore now stands on the diplomatic quay. He asks for the berth.”

“I’m not to say a word about it,” said Lemuel. “Only to hand it over and be standing.”

“You’ve done both.” Rolf put the letter in his inside pocket. “Mr Ellwood. This is correspondence. It goes in the file, and the file says it was read.”

“Read,” said Ellwood, from the third step, with his eyes shut. “Not received.”

“Read.”

Warden Callow came along the quay without hurrying for anybody on it, stopped in front of Bjorn, and looked at the two cheeses.

“Those are off the Holm,” he said.

“Yes.”

“They’re ashore.”

“They’re not landed,” said Bjorn. “I haven’t put them down, Warden. They’ve not touched the stone.”

“On my quay, under my hold, without my say.” Callow got out his almanac, opened it, did not read it, and put it back. “Then don’t put them down. Not on the stone, not on that bollard, not on the step. Hold them.”

“For how long?”

“Until I’ve somewhere lawful to put them, which is a jar in my launch, and my launch is at the fish quay.” Callow was already moving. “Hold them.”

So Bjorn stood on the diplomatic quay in the middle of the afternoon with a round of somebody’s cheese under each arm and nowhere in the Harbour he was permitted to set either of them down, and in that condition he watched the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm come in for the last time.

* * *

A second boat came up the quay at ten minutes to four with one of the island’s lads at the oars and Septimus Muir in the stern, the Chair of State folded flat across his knees and the flag rolled round its boathook beside him. He had a co-op boat astern of him for some of the way, which had taken him in tow out of what Bjorn suspected was pure curiosity, and had cast him off well short of the steps to watch from a respectful distance.

He left the Chair of State and the rolled flag in the boat, because the Warden’s hold had been explained to him from the quay by somebody who had enjoyed explaining it, and came up the steps with nothing in his hands but his hat and the portfolio, and stopped four steps up from the water.

“Chancellor,” said Rolf.

“Harbour Master.” Muir took out his watch. “At four o’clock I am instructed by no one but myself, and I shall proclaim that the Realm is wherever the Chancellor stands. I would rather not wind the horn on your steps. The last time I did it, a person above the chandler’s asked me whose funeral it was.”

“Then don’t wind it.”

“It is announced by the anthem or it does not take effect,” said Muir, with the first crack of real feeling Bjorn had heard from him all day. “The Instrument is quite clear. His Excellency wrote it himself, in a fortnight, having read a book about it.”

He went down and wound the horn in the boat, and came back up. At four o’clock the eleven bars went off the quay wall and up the terrace, and two windows opened, and Muir stood four steps up from the water with his hat in his hand and proclaimed that the Sovereign Realm of Gorse Holm was wherever its Chancellor stood, and that it therefore stood, at this moment, upon the Harbour.

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The anthem wound down into its works. Muir put his hat back on.

“The Realm asks for the berth,” he said.

“There’s no berth in it,” said Rolf.

“On what ground?”

“On the ground that you’re a man on my steps in wet shoes.” Rolf came down one step, and they stood nearly level. “You’ll have this once, Mr Muir, and then I’ll have it written down, so you can take it home in your portfolio and it can stop being a matter of opinion on my quay.

“Rule 533 was invoked this morning on the arrival at the outer roads. The arrival is Gorse Holm. It’s too large to berth, so it lies at the roads, whatever it declares itself to be — whatever it declared itself to be at noon, and at one, and at two, and at three, and at four, and whatever it declares itself to be at five. The Harbour makes no finding on what Gorse Holm is. I’m not saying it’s a realm. I’m not saying it isn’t one. That’s not mine to say and it isn’t the Harbour’s to say, and anybody who tells you otherwise at any window along this quay is telling you what they’d like, not what they’ve got.

“What I do say is where things go. Anyone who comes ashore off that island comes ashore as a passenger, under the ordinary passenger rules, and is welcome, and is counted, and goes home again when he likes. Anything that comes ashore off it is cargo, and it’s declared by whoever owns it, and the duty is paid by whoever owns it, and the Warden passes it before it’s anybody’s at all. That’s all there is. That’s the whole of the Harbour’s business with the Holm. It was the whole of it at eleven o’clock this morning and none of your hours have moved it an inch.”

Muir stood where he was.

“The Realm’s produce is exported by the Realm,” he said, without much in it.

“Who made the cheese?”

“Mrs Cleeve makes most of it.”

“Then Mrs Cleeve declares it,” said Rolf, “and pays on it, and the stamp on the rind is between her and whoever inked it in the dark. My officer at the fish quay won’t take a rind that says Crown Produce, because he can’t find the crown. He can find Mrs Cleeve. She’s in her dairy with her sleeves up.”

“And the duty she will pay,” said Muir, “is a great deal more than the Realm would have paid.”

“It is.”

“Then the Harbour has cost these people money this afternoon.”

“The Harbour has charged them what it charges everybody,” said Rolf. “Your Proprietor’s the one that’s been costing them money, and he’s been doing it by post for three generations, and he’s sent you out here in a good coat to make it look like a country.” He said it at the level he had used all day, and the co-op boat astern was near enough to hear every word, and Bjorn saw the skipper in her stop coiling his line. “You write to him four times a year. Write to him tonight.”

Muir looked past Rolf at Lemuel Cleeve, who was standing on the quay in his sash with his hat in his hands, listening to a country being taken apart in front of him and following every word of it.

“There is no dishonesty in what I have done,” Muir said. “Every proclamation was lawful in its own terms, and made openly, on the hour.”

“I know,” said Rolf. “If one of them hadn’t been, I’d have been home by noon.”

* * *

Ellwood wrote the steps up himself, standing at the long table with the window open behind him and the quay going quiet below it.

“Met at the steps by the Liaison officer,” he read out, when he had got that far. “No letter accepted at the steps. Letter taken by the Harbour Master, above, and filed as correspondence, read.” He tapped the pencil on the page. “And I want the rest of it in, because it happened and because somebody in fifty years is going to want to know how we got out of it. The apprentice went down to the boat before the bow was completed and handed a passenger ashore.”

“Put it in,” said Rolf.

“What do I call it?”

“A courtesy,” said Rolf. “It’s what it was.”

Bjorn stood at the far end of the table with a round of cheese still under each arm, because the Warden had not yet found anywhere lawful to put either of them, and did not say anything, because he could not think of a way of saying that he had gone down those steps on account of the weed and the two cheeses and an old man’s shoulders and nothing else whatever, and that the Harbour’s diplomatic position had not entered into it at any point.

“I only thought he was going to go in,” he said, in the end.

“He was going to go in,” said Rolf. He squared the seven pages of the letter of credence and put them in the file with the eighth. “Mr Ellwood would have had to fish him out, mid-bow, which I’d have paid money to see and would have been reading about for the rest of my life.”

Muir left on the next morning’s packet with his portfolio and one trunk. The Three went back out to the Holm in the bottom of the boat with the Chair of State, and stood on its stand in the net store afterwards with a sack over it.

Before he went he gave Ellwood a letter to be forwarded to the Proprietor, and Ellwood, who had spent the evening writing the day up in the Liaison office’s book, took it as ordinary post, which it was.

Warden Callow passed the dairy at seven the next morning, having spent from dawn on the goats.

He passed the cheese, on conditions, and the conditions ran to most of a page: rinds brushed and washed at the dairy and not on the Harbour; crates new or scalded; every crate opened on the customs steps; no straw, no bracken, no gorse in any crate, because gorse seed had got into every seam of his own coat in an afternoon and he was not having it in the warehouse district. The goats stayed aboard. Bjorn wrote out the hold notice for them himself, under Callow’s eye, and read it back twice: sixty-seven head, foreign, unpenned, to remain on the arrival, not to be landed, the Warden to review weekly while the arrival lay in the roads.

“They’re nobody’s diplomatic anything,” Callow said, when Bjorn asked whether the Realm’s goat needed a separate line now. “They’re goats on an island. That’s the most dangerous thing on my list this week, and nothing anybody has ever written about livestock makes one of them a minister.”

Jenet Cleeve came in on the first of the ebb with twenty rounds in scalded crates and declared them at the fish-quay customs steps in her own name, as the maker, out of the dairy at Gorse Holm, at the outer roads, and paid the ordinary duty on soft cheese by weight, counted out in coin from a purse she kept inside her coat. It came to more than she had hoped and less than she had feared. The officer on the steps took every crate apart and put it back together again and found no gorse in any of them.

Bjorn was there with Callow’s certificate, because somebody had to carry it down, and because Callow had at last let him put the two sample rounds into a jar, which had taken a good deal of trimming and had been, on the whole, the most satisfying part of his day.

He had told her, on her own slope, to let the Harbour say what it was. He had just seen it say so, by weight.

“Twenty down, eighteen to come, and two of them in the Warden’s jar,” Jenet said. “And the rent goes up in the spring whatever any of us calls the place.” She watched the officer chalk her crates. “And I’d rather this. I’d rather come down those steps and say it’s mine and hear what it costs.”

She said it flatly. Bjorn had noticed that about people: the things they really meant, they said like that.

* * *

By late morning the ebb had turned the Holm’s dairy end back towards the Harbour, and the second boat came in.

Lemuel Cleeve rowed it. He had eighteen rounds in two scalded crates in the bottom of the boat, and he was still wearing the sash.

Nobody had taken it off him. Bjorn had heard, from a co-op skipper who had heard it from one of the lads, how the Chancellor had gone out to the Chancellery on his last evening and told the Minister of the Exterior that there was, upon a proper reading of the Instrument, no longer any Exterior for him to be Minister of; and that Lemuel had said that was a pity, and asked whether he should hand back the sash; and that Muir had looked at him and said that the sash had been paid for out of the Crown revenues, which no longer existed, and that a debt of a Crown that did not exist could hardly be called in, and that Mr Cleeve had better keep it.

He brought the boat alongside the customs steps, shipped his oars and stood up, and passed the rounds up one at a time, and the officer on the steps took each one and set it on the stone and chalked it and wrote it in his book.

The officer did not bow. He had a job of work on and eighteen rounds of cheese to get through before dinner, and he said “next” when he was ready for the next one, and that was all.

Lemuel bowed to him anyway. He did it for every round, hat in one hand, his other hand on the gunwale, a proper bow from the waist as far as a man can manage it standing in a boat.

Bjorn stood at the top of the steps with the day’s tally in his hand and counted the rounds up, because he had been sent down to count, and found towards the end that he had stopped writing and was counting something else.

Eighteen.

End of Part 3