Thirteen Standing

At six in the morning the stable lamp was the only light on the wharf, and the breath of thirteen horses hung under the roof like smoke that could not get out. I broke the ice on the buckets with the heel of my hand. Then I went along the pegs to lift the tack clear of the feed, and the third collar from the end came down limp in my hands.

The other twelve were board-stiff, frozen into the shape they had been hung in. This one was wet through, and warm on the inside where the horse had been. I put it back on its peg and thought nothing more about it, because somebody was shouting up the row, and a man of sixty-one does not shout in that cold for nothing.

It was Silas Gospill, and he was on the wrong side of the warehouse yard gate. The padlock was on it. He had been up on the coal stage in the corner of that yard, where he climbs every morning to shout over the wall for his breakfast, and from the top of it you can see the whole row of buildings and down into the lock. Seeing is all you can do from up there. The drop on the far side of that wall is into the cut.

He's in the chamber. Hetty, he's in the chamber, he's laid in the bottom of it. Go and look. I've shouted myself hoarse and there's nobody come. Go and look.

I went. The lock had been run dry the night before and the chamber stood open and empty, and Jabez Crowle was lying along the bottom of it with his face turned into the stone and the back of his head broken open. There was frost in his whiskers. His ladder was where it always stood, and his ice-hook with it.

My name is Hesther Larke. I am twenty-two, and those thirteen horses have been mine to answer for since I was fourteen. There was nobody to send, so I went the two miles down the towing path myself, and at seven o'clock I came back up it with Constable Ordish, who is thirty-eight and had his trousers tied at the ankle with string against the ice. He stood at the coping a long while before he said anything.

Why is there no water in it?

Because he let it out, sir. A lock is a stone box with a gate at each end, and you run the water off to bring a boat down. He emptied it last night to chip the ice off the bottom gates, the way he has every night this week.

And that ledge he is laid on?

The cill. The bottom gates shut up against it. It is eleven foot down.

He went down the ladder himself and was five minutes over the body and came up with nothing in his hands. The lining of the right-hand pocket was hanging out of the coat, turned inside out, and the leather purse the tolls go in was not on him. It was not in the chamber either, and it was not in the cottage afterwards.

Tolls.

He keeps the lock and he takes the toll, sir. So much a ton on everything that passes through it. Twenty-two years. And he lent money the length of the cut besides, and kept what he lent on.

Kept what?

Whatever you put up against it. A watch. A pair of earrings. It goes in his tin box till you have paid him.

And the cut is what?

The canal, sir. Nobody here calls it the canal.

He wrote that down, which I did not expect. Then he went along the row, and I went with him, because he had been on the wharf twenty minutes and I have been on it eight years.

The smithy was the only warm door in the place. Esau Venn is forty-four and has a burn across the back of his right hand the shape of a horseshoe, and he did not stop working when we came in.

Mr Venn. Where were you in the night?

Down the cut. Ask Nabb.

He said it in the Boat on Wednesday, constable. Nine of us heard him say it. What he would do to the man that took his fire off him — his fire, that is, the forge, it stands on company ground and it is coming down at Lady Day so they can make the toll office bigger, and it was Crowle put the paper in for it himself. Coming down at Lady Day. Nine of us heard him.

He was still behind his gate. You could hear him the length of the wharf.

Bellows.

I pulled the bellows for him because there was nobody else to do it, and he turned his back on the pair of us and did not speak again.

The Providence lay frozen in above the lock with her chimney smoking. Abel Teale is thirty-nine and stood on his own counter in the cold with his cap on, and would not come off the boat.

You were heard at that cottage door last night with your voice up.

And what business is that of yours?

There is a man dead on the cill.

Then he has my papers on him, and I will have them back off him.

What papers?

Her registration. The boat's. That is the paper that says who she is and what she may carry, and without it in the cabin no wharf on this canal will put a load in her. Six days she has stood here froze up, and nothing come in, and he had it locked up in that kitchen and would not put it in my hand.

Below the lock the Sabrina lay with her cabin doors shut and her chimney going. Rhoda Brace is thirty-four and was up on the cabin top in a man's coat, chopping the ice away from her own step. Somebody small moved behind the glass and was pulled back out of it.

You were above this lock yesterday afternoon and you are below it now.

I brought her down at four o'clock behind the ice-boat, in the daylight.

Who worked the gates for you?

I did. I have worked gates since I was nine.

She waited to see whether there was another question, and when there was not she went down her steps and shut the doors behind her.

The police surgeon came up the towing path on a pony at half past eight and was ten minutes over the body. He put it between two o'clock and three. Then Ordish stood in the middle of the wharf and looked at the row of buildings the way you look at a page you cannot read.

I have been up here an hour and a half and I have been told four things I do not understand, and one of them three times. You will stop where I can reach you. I cannot tell a boat's paper from a pawn ticket and you can.

Yes, sir.

Then tell me what was written down on this wharf between two o'clock and three, and whose hand wrote it.