Page 76 of Dark Tides
She had shocked him. “Ma, we always pay the Excise duty. What’re you saying?”
“Just that she insisted, this is a way of doing business that we don’t know—”
“I swear that we don’t!” he interrupted her. “Because it’s against the law, it’s criminal, Ma! If the Customs were to take an interest, we’re clearly in the wrong, we should’ve reported it as an import, and Captain Shore should’ve landed it at the legal quays or met the exciseman here. When I stood with you and she showed us the columns so proudly—I never knew! It’s as good as contraband. How could you let her do it?”
He broke off as another thought, a worse thought, struck him. “What did Captain Shore say about it?”
“Same as you,” she admitted, her voice very low.
“Why didn’t he take the crates to the legal quays straightaway?”
“As a favor to me,” she whispered. “I told him it was her furniture and he agreed to land it here.”
“You lied to him?”
Reluctantly, she nodded. “But anyway, Johnnie, we couldn’t have paid the Excise duties. You see for yourself how short we are this month.”
The young man looked horrified. “You didn’t declare because you knew you couldn’t pay?”
Her silence told him that he was right. “Why didn’t you make her pay for the shipping and the tax herself?” he asked more quietly. “They’re her own goods?”
“How could a lady like her go to Paton’s and hire a captain?” she demanded. “And anyway, she has no money till they’re sold.”
He stepped down from the high clerk’s chair and faced his mother. “This goes round and round,” he said flatly. “Down and down. If she can’t afford to ship her goods and pay the tax on them, then she can’t afford to be in business. You taught me that yourself. She should have borrowed the money from the goldsmith’s against the sales. She could have done that with a proper deed and a repayment time. But instead she’s just dipped her hand in the cashbox: our cashbox.”
His mother was white-faced, twisting the corner of her Sunday apron. “Johnnie, I couldn’t refuse her. Rob’s wife! And his baby in our house? I had to commission and pay Captain Shore, I had to lend her our wagon to take the goods to Avery House.”
The two of them were silent. Johnnie closed the ledger as if he could not bear to see the figures. He put his hand on it, as if it were a Bible and he might swear an oath.
“Ma, every single line in your books has always been right. You taught me yourself that everything’s got to be correct, everything must balance. Everything’s got to be accounted for and nothing,nothing, ever slipped under the table. No bribes, no backhanders, no tips, no cheats. No stone dust in the flour, no sand in the sugar, no water in the wine. No wine in the brandy. We load and we store and we ship—full measure. We pay our duties—full rate. That’s how we have the reputation of the best small sufferance wharf on this side of the river.”
Alys said nothing.
“That’s how we stay in business. We’re a tiny wharf but we’re honest. People trust us. That’s how you got into business with onlythruppence to your name. That’s how you’ve stayed in business for all these years, that’s how you’ve built this up from nothing.”
Alys nodded.
“So what’s changed, Ma?” he asked with his usual directness. “Why would you cheat for her?”
“Because she’s Rob’s widow,” his mother repeated. “With Rob’s baby in her arms. She has to be able to sell her own goods, her widow’s dower, to keep herself. Rob would’ve wanted us to help her. We’ve got no choice. And Johnnie… I feel so tender towards her.”
“I don’t remember my uncle very well,” Johnnie replied thoughtfully. “But would he have asked you to cheat for him?”
There was a silence. Reluctantly, Alys told her son the truth: “No. He would not.”
“So this is her way, and her idea.”
Alys said nothing, thinking how Livia had confessed that she was a liar, and promised to tell the truth only in their bedroom, in darkness, to Alys.
“She is honest with me,” she said quietly. “She does not lie to me.”
“You trust her.” It was an accusation and so he was surprised by the sudden illumination of his mother’s smile.
“Yes, I trust her,” she agreed. “I trust her.”
Alinor was pounding dried herbs in a little pestle at the round table in her bedroom, the window open to the frosty air. Below the turret the tide was starting to ebb. On the other side of the table Sarah was sewing a measured scoop of the mixture into tiny cheesecloth bags to sell as a tea to cure sickness in the notorious Bight of Benin off the fever coast of Africa. A quarter of the crews of the slave ships would die of the sickness that breathed hotly off the marshy River Niger. Alinor’s teas were a famous preventive.
Sarah was chatting as she worked, telling her grandmother of the week at the milliner’s shop, the departure of one of the girls who had found a protector and was going to be set up in a little house in theCity with her own black slave servant, and would never have to sweep her own floor ever again.
