The Counting-House at Deepwater Stairs

Source written for Revision Library in a classic literary style (original, copyright-free).

The wherry had been an hour upon the river, and still the fog lay upon the water so thick and yellow that Thomas could not tell where the Thames ended and the sky began. He sat wrapped in his father's old greatcoat, too large for him by half, and watched the banks slide past in fragments: a crane here, a huddle of masts there, gone again before he could be certain he had seen them at all. The waterman, surly and uncommunicative from the moment Thomas had stepped into the boat, spoke only to name his fare, and left him to his own thoughts for the rest of the crossing. He had left Greenwich before first light, and the six weeks since his father's death had not prepared him for the strangeness of arriving, quite alone, in a city he had visited but twice before, to take up work among strangers who had never set eyes on him.

It was gone eight o'clock, and the fog no thinner for the daylight struggling somewhere above it, when the waterman set him down at a flight of green, slime-darkened steps and pointed, without a word, to a narrow lane climbing away from the water. Deepwater Stairs, when Thomas found it, proved to be less a street than a crevice between two rows of warehouses, so close together that a man might have touched both walls at once, and so overhung with sombre brick that little daylight reached the cobbles below. At the lane's end stood the counting-house of Pargiter & Vane, its brass plate green with age, its windows curtained in a fine sooty net that no amount of cleaning, Thomas would later learn, could ever wholly remove. He had been told the firm was a prosperous one, and he supposed it must be so; but nothing in the building's low, blackened frontage suggested prosperity to him now, only a kind of settled, patient gloom, as though the house had long ago given up any expectation of the sun.

The door was opened, before Thomas had properly raised the knocker, by a thin man of some sixty years, ink to the second knuckle of both hands, who looked him over with the peremptory briskness of one accustomed to weighing goods rather than persons. This was Mr Crick, senior clerk of the house these thirty years, whose manner, though never less than correct, carried an edge that put Thomas forcibly in mind of his father's old warning that some men grow, with long service, to resemble the ledgers they keep: exact, unyielding, and disinclined to waste a single unnecessary word. "You are Grey's boy," said he, not quite a question, already turning back into the passage. "Mr Pargiter is engaged until noon. You had better come through."

Thomas followed him down a passage floored in worn deal boards, past a counting-room where two clerks, one broad and red-faced, the other so slight and stooped that he seemed scarcely older than Thomas himself, bent low over their desks and did not look up, and came at last to a narrow office at the rear of the house, furnished with nothing but a black horsehair chair and an austere iron stove, unlit, and lit only by a single grimy skylight, through which a wan and grudging light fell into the room. Here Mr Crick paused before a door of stouter oak than the rest, bound with iron and firmly locked, and Thomas, following his gaze, saw painted above the lintel, in letters once gilt and now merely faded, the word STRONG-ROOM. "The Providence was due at the Pool six weeks since," said Mr Crick abruptly, as though continuing a conversation Thomas had not heard begun, "with two hundred bales of wool and Mr Vane's own consignment of tallow aboard her. She is not come, and no word of her neither." Thomas could not tell whether this was fact or mere conjecture on Mr Crick's part, and did not like to ask; he noticed only that his guide's eyes returned to the locked door twice before he moved on, and that his obdurate, businesslike manner had, for that one moment, faltered.

They passed, on the stair, a window that overlooked the river stairs below, where gulls wheeled and cried above the incoming barges, their bills flashing white against the fog each time they turned. Mr Crick did not pause to look, but Thomas lingered a moment, glad of anything in that sombre house that moved and cried out and seemed, however briefly, alive. "Mr Vane's portrait hangs in the counting-room," said Mr Crick, when Thomas caught him up, in a voice pitched carefully low, though there was no one near enough to overhear. "You will not ask about him. Mr Pargiter does not care to speak of his old partner, and the other clerks are forbidden it besides. A man may vanish from a house, Master Grey, and yet the house go on exactly as before, on the surface of things. You would do well to remember it." Something in Thomas quailed at these words, though he could not have named what precisely he feared; he said only that he would remember, and was rewarded with a long, appraising look, as though Mr Crick doubted whether so credulous a boy could be trusted to remember anything at all.

He was set to work before the clock struck nine, copying figures into a ledger so heavy he could scarcely lift it, and it was in turning its stiff pages that he came upon an old entry, some three years past, recording a bill for two casks of tallow, unpaid these three months, against which a clerk's hand, not Mr Crick's, had scored a single decisive line; and beneath the entry, in the same hand, the name J. Vane had been struck through so hard that the pen had all but torn the page. Thomas closed the ledger quickly, ashamed, though he could not have said of what, to have been discovered prying into another man's writing. By the time the short winter daylight had failed entirely, and the two other clerks had gone home to their suppers, Thomas found himself alone in the passage, gathering his coat to follow them, when he saw, quite distinctly, a thread of candlelight beneath the strong-room door: a door he had watched Mr Crick lock, not two hours before, with his own obdurate hands, and had heard no one, in all that time, unlock again.