The Smuggler's Inventory

Brenda had made two columns on the paper and drawn a hard line between them. Celia could read the headings from across the sail loft table: what Brenda had sold, and what she could prove she had sold.

“That gap is going to cause trouble,” Celia said.

“It ought to.” Brenda held the pencil between the fingers of her good hand. Her left wrist rested in a splint on a folded towel. “Trouble’s why I’m doing it.”

Jonah sat at the far end of the table, his notebook closed. He had not asked a question since Brenda began. That restraint seemed to cost him. Twice he had reached for his pencil and put it down again.

Outside, the harbor bell marked the evening watch. The eighty-third page had come in with the tide and lay drying under a screen near Celia’s workbench. Its edges were safe to copy now, but she kept glancing toward it anyway. A page could wait a few hours. Brenda’s hand could not keep moving all night.

“There was a list you gave Dr. Sable,” Celia said. “We can bring it here.”

“He got the buyers I knew might still be reading. This is the whole trade.” Brenda pressed the pencil tip to the paper. “Or as much of it as I can put my name to.”

She wrote slowly. A seller, a date, a sum paid. Then a buyer and a larger sum received. Where she lacked a date, she marked the season. Where a buyer had used a false name, she wrote the name and the reason she knew it was false. Celia had watched Brenda guide a boat through a black culvert with less care than she gave each word.

Jonah leaned forward when she reached the next entry. “That one came from the drowned archive?”

“Bought at the west steps.” Brenda did not look up. “That’s what I can swear to. The man who brought it said he’d taken it from the archive.”

“You believed him?”

“I paid archive price. Different thing.”

She crossed out the place of origin and wrote claimed by seller beside it. Jonah opened his notebook but made no mark.

The loft smelled of damp rope and lamp oil. Their temporary harbor lights had taken much of the oil they once kept there, leaving a shallow tin beside the door. Celia shifted it with her foot when Brenda needed room to spread another sheet. A simple inventory ought to fit on one table. This one had grown into three, with scraps of wrapping paper tucked beneath the corners to keep them flat.

Brenda turned to a fresh sheet. “There are recollections I can identify by what the seller told me. A wedding breakfast. A boy learning to swim. A woman’s last day at home. I’m not writing the people’s names here.”

Jonah’s pencil stopped above his notebook. “Why not?”

“Because I haven’t asked them.”

“Some may not be reachable.”

“Then you don’t get their names from me.” Brenda set her jaw. “You get what I handled, what I charged, who took it. If a person wants to say the rest, they can.”

Celia looked at the line between Brenda’s columns. It kept the limits of the record visible. There was more to learn from those who had lost the recollections, if they wished to speak. Brenda could account for her part without making that choice for them.

“You can describe what was sold without claiming the memory as yours,” Celia said.

“That’s the hope.” Brenda gave her a sideways glance. “I’m not asking you to mark my paper correct, Miss Marrow.”

“I was checking the boundary.”

“Of course you were.”

Jonah took the first completed sheet and held it by the dry edges. “Are you giving me this to print?”

“After the tide.” Brenda rubbed the base of her thumb, where the pencil had left a dark patch. “My part. The prices, the buyers, every sale I can back up. Not the names of people whose memories I moved. They decide whether their names go into your paper.”

“And if a buyer denies it?”

“Here’s who paid cash. Here’s who paid against cargo. There are receipts for some, and I’ve written where to find them.” She pushed a second sheet toward him. “Ask me again when you’ve checked it.”

Jonah read without speaking. Celia could tell where he reached the collector’s purchase. His hand paused on the page. Brenda had sold that duplicate to finance work she had called necessary, and its reader had ended up in Sable’s ward. Returning the money and recovering the page had not taken him out of the ward. He could converse now, on good days. It was a poor exchange, set down here in figures small enough to fit between ruled lines.

“I’ll check it,” Jonah said. “I won’t print the other names.”

Brenda picked up her pencil. “You’ll ask them. If there’s time and if they want asking.”

“Yes.”

“No clever detail that tells the whole quay who they are without using a name.”

His mouth tightened. He had made that mistake before with Mira. “No clever detail.”

Brenda nodded once and returned to her figures.

Celia brought her a cup of water. Brenda tried to take it without letting go of the pencil, failed, and laid the pencil down. The splint had a new strip of clean cloth where Sable had adjusted it that morning. She had complained that the wrap was too tight, then followed his order not to lift the water jug.

“Enough for tonight?” Celia asked.

“Not yet. I’m at the easy buyers.”

“An odd way to describe them.”

“The ones who kept books.” Brenda drank. “I’ll need you for the dates on the parcels we moved together. You kept them.”

“I kept tide dates.”

“You kept everything.”

Not everything. Celia had left people off maps because the commission had not asked for them. She drew a small square on the margin of Brenda’s draft for each date she could check, leaving the others blank. Neither of them filled a blank with a guess.

They worked until the harbor bell rang again. Jonah compared sums against the few receipts Brenda had brought in her coat. Celia checked tide tables and the notes from their earlier page recoveries. Brenda corrected one price downward when the receipt proved her memory wrong. She did not try to make the correction sound noble.

At last she signed every sheet. Her letters grew uneven near the end, and Celia slid the last page closer so she would not have to reach across the table.

Jonah stacked the papers without folding them. “I can leave these with you until there’s a safe place for them.”

“You’re the one who has to check them.” Brenda watched him tie the stack with plain string. “Make a copy. Keep the original somewhere Ash can’t take it off you on his way to breakfast.”

“I will.”

Through the loft window, Celia could see the harbor office lamps. Beyond them, the seized boat lay against the inner wall. Its deck had been cleared when Mira brought out the hidden pages, but the harbor seal still hung on its mooring rope. Brenda followed Celia’s glance.

“Has anyone told you when they’ll release it?” Jonah asked.

“No.” Brenda set the empty cup beside the splint. “I haven’t asked again.”

“They might, once they see what you’ve handed over.”

“Don’t put that in your sums.” She spoke without heat. “The boat stays where it is. I’ll answer for the sales when the tide’s done, whether they give her back or not.”

Jonah looked down at the ledger in his hands. “You mean before the magistrate.”

“Yes. I mean prosecution.” Brenda pulled the towel straight beneath her wrist. “You can write that too, when it’s time.”

The bell’s last note faded across the water. Celia turned the drying salt page beneath its screen, then checked that no damp edge touched the paper below it. At the table, Brenda kept her place with her good hand while Jonah read the first entry back to her. She corrected a buyer’s surname and waited for him to write it down.