A Spoonful of Someone Else

The eleventh page lay between two fish crates, held flat by a spoon and a stone. Celia had chosen the stone. Mira had supplied the spoon.

“It was clean,” Mira said.

“There is salt in the bowl.”

“There’s salt on the quay. You’ll have to ban the quay.”

Celia moved the spoon by its handle. A wet shine showed beneath it, no wider than a fingernail. She stopped. Yesterday she had lost an hour with her hand against a page. An hour that had left no useful note and no clear edge in her mind, only the smell of a room she had never entered.

Mira caught the change in her face. She pulled her hands back and tucked them under her arms.

“We need something dry between us and it,” Celia said.

“Besides good intentions?”

“Especially besides those.”

Brenda had left the page with them at first light and gone to see about her boat. The tide would return before dark. Celia had planned to copy as much as she could before the writing dulled, but the first patch of moisture had made that plan look foolish.

She tore a strip from the blank end of her survey paper and folded it twice. With it she lifted the spoon clear. A little salt clung to the metal.

“Your fine instrument has failed inspection,” she said.

Mira leaned over the crates, keeping her sleeves clear. “That’s what comes of hiring kitchen staff for scholarly work.”

“You hired it.”

“And I’m prepared to dismiss it without a reference.”

The joke bought them enough time to work. Celia fetched her ruler and the flat wooden board from her survey case. Mira found a length of clean cloth in a crate of sail scraps and spread it across the boards where they could set down a tool without setting it in brine. They used folded paper to turn the page and the ruler to hold its corners. When the paper darkened, they threw it away.

The wind kept trying to take their clean scraps into the harbor. Mira set a pebble on each one.

“A very costly system,” Celia said. “Four stones and half my paper.”

“Five stones. You’re still holding one.”

Celia put it down. Her fingertips were dry. She checked them twice.

The sheet was thin enough to let pale light through its edges, though its center had hardened into white ridges. Lines crossed it at angles Celia had begun to recognize. The strokes were not the whole of it. Places that looked blank from above held shallow marks when she tilted the board toward the light.

She took a dry sheet and laid it over the least damaged corner. A soft pass of pencil caught two straight lines and part of a curved one. No scent of another life rose from the paper. No strange voice pressed behind her own words.

Mira watched the pencil move. “Does it work?”

“It takes the raised marks.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

Celia lifted the paper. A small corner of the route showed on it, clean and gray. “It hasn’t done me harm so far. That is a narrower claim.”

“Fine. I’ll put it in the dock ledger. ‘Miss Marrow remains herself after one corner.’”

“It would be the most honest entry in a dock ledger.”

Mira gave a quiet laugh, then leaned close to the original again. She had the better ear for the cramped household script. Celia could match shapes and spacing, but Mira found words inside them, sometimes before Celia could decide where one ended.

They tried two minutes of reading and five minutes away from the page. Celia set her watch on the cloth, far from the wet edge. At the end of the first two minutes, Mira was still sounding out a line.

“Stop,” Celia said.

“I’ve nearly got it.”

“The line will wait.”

Mira sat back with a sharp breath. “You sound like Dr. Sable.”

“Then we should both be grateful I’ve stopped talking.”

They spent the five minutes copying what they had already taken down. Celia drew a small square beside each uncertain word rather than guessing. Mira walked to the end of the quay and back, rubbing her palms against her apron. When the watch allowed them another look, she brought a fresh piece of paper.

The page did not describe a gate or a death. Its first legible line gave directions from the missing street to a place where goods could be bought. Below that, the writing changed hand.

“Six eggs,” Mira read.

Celia checked the marks. “Six. Yes.”

“Lamp wick. The narrow kind.” Mira traced the air above the sheet, careful not to touch. “And onions.”

“Two onions?”

“A bunch. You’ve made the loop too round.”

Celia corrected her copy. The word was indeed bunch. A person had written quickly, perhaps with someone waiting to carry the list away. There was no room on the page to show the hand holding the pencil or the hand that would take the goods home. Only the marks remained.

At the next interval, Mira found soap, a heel of cheese, and a spoon.

She sat up. “There. Mine belongs after all.”

“Unless the household was buying one because it had lost the last.”

“Or someone bent it opening a tin. Happens every week on a boat.”

Celia looked at the spoon lying beside her case. Its handle bore a shallow twist. Mira followed her gaze and slid it farther from the page.

“Not evidence,” Mira said. “Before you draw it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You had your measuring face on.”

“I have only one face.”

“You could measure that claim.”

Celia put a neat square around spoon on her copy. Not because the word was in doubt. Because she wanted to return to it after they had read the rest. People had gone down those erased lines needing wick for a lamp and soap for their hands. A spoon had worn out or gone missing. The route on her rubbing led to a household, not an empty square on a chart.

Mira’s voice faltered over the last entry. Celia looked up from her pencil.

“Time,” she said.

“I know.” Mira leaned away, but her eyes stayed on the page. “It says pears, I think.”

“Then pears can survive five minutes without us.”

“They might be soft ones.”

“We can note that as an unproved risk.”

Mira smiled, though she took the walk to the end of the quay again. Celia copied the clear words while she was gone. Her own handwriting stayed firm. That was something. It was not proof the limits would hold on a worse page, or on this one if they grew careless.

When Mira returned, they gave the last word its two minutes. It was pears. Beneath it, in smaller script, sat an added request for a little extra if the price was fair.

Celia wrote the words without a square.

The page went into its dry wrapping, with the rubbing laid apart from it. Mira gathered the used paper by its clean corners and put it where no one would mistake it for scrap. They still had to wash the ruler and find a better way to keep the wind off the watch tomorrow.

Mira picked up the spoon by its handle. “You can have this one for your supper.”

“It failed inspection.”

“It’s dry now.”

Celia ran a thumb along the twist in the handle. “So it is.”