The Order to Sail

Sogmarsh Wireless Presents — The Late Line: being what is said on the string after the children's cups come down.

A harbour office over the customs house at Saltgate. A waxed string comes in at the window and down to a tin cup on a ledger-strewn desk. Below, the tide works at the piles. Somewhere a boat knocks its fenders. A child's smaller cup hangs by the door on its own hook. Rain.

ANNOUNCER. Sogmarsh Wireless presents The Order to Sail; in which the fleet of Saltgate — nineteen open boats, and not a line cast off among them in the memory of any man living — receives, by pigeon and by bell, an order to put to sea; and the whole town, which has grown fat and content on never once doing so, sits up past the children's bedtime to see the order safely drowned.

Interior. The office. HARBOUR-MASTER MORDECAI CLEAT stands at the cup in a coat too good for him, mid-broadcast to nobody. NATE SACKETT slouches in the window. The boy SPRAT is on the floor, awake, ears out.

CLEAT. (into the cup, sonorous) Saltgate Harbour Office to the realm. The fleet reports all sound, all provisioned, all — (searches) — all magnificently ready. Standing by. As ever. Cleat, Harbour-Master, ends.

NATE. (not turning) You know there's no one down the other end this hour, Cleat. Cups came down at the Arms an hour since.

CLEAT. (loftily) A station of consequence keeps the watch regardless, Nathaniel. Readiness is not a thing one performs only when observed.

NATE. Readiness is the only thing we do. Nineteen boats kept sweet as a bride and not one of 'em's smelt open water since your grandfer's day.

SFX: the string thrums, hard and quick — a real message, urgent, from up the line.

CLEAT. (brightening — an audience at last) Aha. The realm calls. (cup to ear; his face falls, then falls further) ...Say again? (a pause) ...No.

NATE. What.

CLEAT. (cup to ear, colour going) Murkminster night-string. An Inspector of the Muster. Coming down on the dawn tide. To view the fleet — (the word is ash in his mouth) — at sea.

NATE. (beat) ...Come again?

CLEAT. He is to stand upon the quay at Saltgate and watch the whole fleet of nineteen put to sea, Nathaniel, in good order, that the Exchequer may see what its harbour rate has bought.

Long pause. The tide works at the piles. Then, from the floor, the boy.

SPRAT. (small, delighted) Are we going to sail?

NATE and CLEAT. (together, appalled) No.

NATE. (recovering) Bed, Sprat. Cup down. Go on — this is grown talk now.

SFX: SPRAT gets up, unhooks his little cup from its peg by the door, hangs it lower, drags off. A door.

CLEAT. (the pomp draining, a frightened man under it) Nathaniel. If nineteen boats go off that wall at dawn, half of 'em founder in the roads before the Inspector's had his breakfast. We've men aboard who've never untied a line. Old Griggs weeps if you move his boat to scrub the weed. And if they don't go — if the fleet's seen to be what it is —

NATE. — then the harbour rate goes. And the rate's the town, Cleat. Every widow's lodging-house up Anchor Steps lives off men who never sail and drink like they did. The Arms, the chandlers, the net-lofts, the — everything. We're a whole town making a fat living off a fleet that stops still. He sees that plain, and Murkminster stops paying to keep us ready for a war nobody's coming to.

CLEAT. (quietly) We are ruined by dawn either way. Sailed or not.

SFX: the office door. A wet coat. LOVEDAY SACKETT — she runs the real book — and behind her, LOOMIS SKERRY, who runs the other one.

LOVEDAY. (dry, unhurried, shaking rain off) Nobody's ruined. Sit down before you fall, Mordecai, you've gone the colour of a gutted hake.

LOOMIS. (easy, a man who's never once hurried in his life) Heard it at the Arms. Whole taproom heard it. There's fourteen men down there already drunk with the fright of being asked to do their jobs.

NATE. Ma. There's no way through it. He wants to see it sail.

LOVEDAY. (hanging her coat) Then he'll see it sail. (beat) What he'll not do is see it go anywhere.

CLEAT. (lost) ...I don't —

LOVEDAY. (to Loomis) What's the tide at dawn?

LOOMIS. Making. High and slack about the seventh bell. Full up under the wall.

LOVEDAY. And the fog off the Slough this three mornings running?

LOOMIS. (a slow grin arriving) ...Thick as a wet blanket by the sixth bell. You can't see the end of the quay for it.

LOVEDAY. (to Cleat, patient, as to a child) Mordecai. What is it, to put to sea?

CLEAT. (automatically, the one thing he knows) To — to cast off, slip the moorings, and stand out from the —

LOVEDAY. That's Murkminster's word for it. What's ours?

Pause. CLEAT does not know. He never knows the Saltgate word for anything; he only knows the grand one.

NAN'S VOICE. (from the doorway — NAN SACKETT, come up the stair slow on her bad knees, frank as a slap) Ours is: every boat off her berth and swum to her mooring-buoy on the slack, forty foot out, riding to the tide with a man aboard. That's "the fleet at sea," son, and it's been "the fleet at sea" since before your Inspector's grandmother dropped him. Forty foot. In the fog. He'll not see the buoys. He'll see nineteen boats leave the wall and vanish into the murk, magnificent, and he'll hear 'em working the water — (she thumps her stick) — and by the time it lifts they'll all be swum back and made fast and the men ashore drying out, and he'll write down that Saltgate sailed.

LOOMIS. (admiring) Forty foot of "at sea." I could weep.

CLEAT. (a drowning man clutching) But — the Inspector. He'll want to come aboard. To inspect. Below.

LOOMIS. (comfortable) Then he'll come aboard the Patience, Harbour-Master. She's the one boat kept nose-to-the-water, rigged and ready, spotless below — Loveday sees to that. He'll go over her stem to stern and find her the finest-kept vessel in the realm. (beat) And he'll not go below on any of the others, because —

LOVEDAY. (flat) — because the others have my winter stock below decks, Mordecai, and half of Loomis's "officially empty" cargo besides, and if a King's man puts his nose in the Kittiwake's hold he'll find enough undeclared Isle-brandy to float himself home on.

CLEAT. (faintly scandalised, mostly terrified) I did not — as Harbour-Master I could not possibly be seen to know —

LOVEDAY. (over him) You've never known a thing in your life, Mordecai, it's your great gift, don't spoil it now.

SFX: below, the tide. A fender knocks. LOOMIS pours three cups of something from a flat bottle; the fourth he leaves at the stair-turn without a word — the house lays a place for the ones it can't quite see.

NATE. (quieter, the real worry) And Griggs? And the men who've genuine never handled a boat? Someone's got to swim nineteen boats out on the slack in a fog without losing one, with a crew that cries if you untie 'em.

LOVEDAY. (simply) You are. You and Cassie.

NATE. (stiffens) ...Cassie Pell doesn't set foot on a Sackett deck. Nor I on a Pell's. Hundred years, Ma.

NAN. (snorts) Hundred years of your families racing each other in and out of that harbour, boy, and you're telling me between the two houses there's not the hands to move nineteen boats forty foot? The Pells can bring a boat off a wall in the dark drunk and singing — I've watched 'em do it, and worse, and I'll not say what else I've watched a Pell do in a net-loft, but it wasn't sailing. (NATE goes red) You want the town to eat next winter, you'll take Cassie Pell's hand across a gunwale at the sixth bell and be glad of it.

LOVEDAY. (gentler, to Nate) It's one morning, love. One fog. Nineteen boats out and back, and the feud can go on hating comfortable all the years after. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow we're one crew, or we're no town.

Pause. NATE looks at the floor. Somewhere, far, the first bell of the small hours.

NATE. (low) ...She'll take the tiller of the Patience, then. She's the best hand in the harbour and it galls me to say it.

LOOMIS. (raising his cup) There's the Sackett-Pell peace. Lasted a whole sentence.

Interior. The quay. Dawn. Fog, thick and white, pressing the lamps down to smears. SFX: nineteen boats coming off the wall — a great slow business of lines and oars and low voices, swallowed almost at once by the murk. Cold. Wet. Then, muffled, the sounds of boats working, forty foot out and no further. On the quay: CLEAT, in his best coat, and the INSPECTOR — a dry, precise Murkminster voice, an official who is somehow never quite the same official twice.

INSPECTOR. (peering, seeing nothing) Harbour-Master, I can see... I confess I can see very little.

CLEAT. (magnificent now the peril's passed, in his element at last) The Saltgate Roads, Inspector. Notoriously thick of a dawn. (gesturing grandly at the blank fog) But you hear her, sir. The whole fleet, stood out from the wall and working the tide. Nineteen sail. Listen to it.

SFX: from the fog, the creak and slap of boats riding to their buoys; a man coughing; Nan's voice somewhere calling a count; the deeply convincing noise of a fleet doing absolutely nothing, forty foot away.

INSPECTOR. (moved despite himself) ...Remarkable. One had heard the Saltgate fleet was — that is, there were reports it did not —

CLEAT. (smoothly, wounded) Reports, Inspector. From Murkminster men who have never stood a dawn watch in their lives. (a hand on the Inspector's shoulder, steering him) You'll take something hot against the fog before you write your report. The Arms has a fire and a widow who keeps a cellar that would embarrass the Exchequer. Come away from the edge, sir, we lose an Inspector off that stringer most years —

INSPECTOR. (going, gratefully, into the warmth) — most kind — yes — I shall write that the fleet mustered in good order and put to sea in difficult conditions —

CLEAT. (gravely) Difficult conditions. Write that. It is no less than the truth.

SFX: their steps fade toward the Arms. A gull. And out in the fog, the moment the quay's clear, a great collective easing — oars, laughter kept low, nineteen boats already swimming back to the wall.

Interior. The office, that night. SPRAT abed, his cup down. LOVEDAY at the desk with the real book; NAN by the small fire; the flat bottle out. Below, the tide.

NAN. (frank, warm, the day's mask off) He wrote it down, then. "Put to sea in difficult conditions." A whole navy that's never wet a keel, and it's in the Exchequer's book as a fighting fleet, and the rate's safe another year, and not one soul told a lie. We only ever said "at sea." We know what our words mean. That's not lying, that's housekeeping.

LOVEDAY. (not looking up from the ledger) Nate and the Pell girl brought all nineteen back without a scratch. Stood on the Patience deck together the whole slack tide, the two of 'em, hundred-year feud, thick as thieves in the fog where no one could see 'em be civil.

NAN. (dry) Civil. I'll wager.

LOVEDAY. (a rare small smile, gone quick) ...She left her shawl aboard the Patience. He's not brought it back yet.

Pause. The fire. NAN watches her daughter-in-law keep the book by the one lamp.

NAN. (quietly, the true thing coming, as it only does after the cups are down) You could stop keeping her ready, you know. The Patience. Nose to the water, provisioned, sweet below, forty years. There's no sailing coming, Loveday. There never was. The one she was kept for's not coming back off the Hem, and you were a girl when you started keeping her and you're grey now.

LOVEDAY. (a long moment; the pen stops) ...I know there's no sailing coming, Nan. (evenly) That was never what she was for. (she sets the pen down) A town that keeps one boat always ready to go is a town that hasn't given up. That's all she is. Not a boat that'll sail. A boat that could. You take that light out of the window and it's not a boat you've lost. (beat) Frightened men slept easier the whole winter for a light they never once meant to follow. So she stops ready. And I'll grieve nothing I can help, and keep the one thing I can — a lamp, and a swept deck, and the town not giving up. (picks the pen back up) It's the cheapest kindness in the realm, a boat you never sail. I can afford that much.

SFX: NAN says nothing. The tide. LOVEDAY writes. Out the window, forty foot off, the fleet rides at its buoys in the dark, magnificently, going nowhere.

ANNOUNCER. (gently) Sogmarsh Wireless has been broadcasting The Order to Sail, and now hangs its cup on the hook till morning. Sleep, the coast. The fleet is at sea, in the only sense that ever kept anybody fed — and the light's in the window, for the boat that never comes, and never has to.

SFX: the string goes slack. The tide. Out.