Chapter 2: The Other Train

He stepped off the gangway and the wood underfoot changed.

On the Meridian side the slats had been every brown the Meridian had to hand, replaced one at a time over the years until the gangway was a patchwork of old planks that had never met. On the Calloway side the deck was painted. It had been red once, all over, and it was still red where it was not worn through, and where it was worn through somebody had gone over it by hand with a brush and a pot of red that was not quite the same red. The deck resolved, under his boots, into two reds in conversation, neither of them prepared to give way. It was the kind of thing you noticed when you had nothing more important to notice yet.

The noise noticed him next.

From the Meridian it had been a crowd. From inside it was a market three trains wide. Goods were going across both ways at once on every gangway he could see, and on the far side of the Calloway, through its open carriages, he could hear the same din coming back off the Vesper’s flank: hauliers shouting weights, children shouting for children, a man at a trestle selling hot something in paper and shouting what it was in a language that was nearly English and nearly not. Money changed hands so fast it seemed to be thrown. Somewhere a fiddle was going. Above it all, up a ladder against a board the size of a door, a boy in a cap was chalking a figure as big as his own head.

T + 0:05, said the board.

“Token, friend.”

A man in a dark red sash had stepped into his path, palm out, with the patient face of somebody who had been holding his palm out since dawn and would be holding it out at the bell. Elliot gave him the token. The man turned it over, looked at the seal, looked at the worn place on the back, and looked at Elliot’s face, and something in his own face rearranged itself by a quarter of an inch.

“Meridian,” he said. “Conductor’s.” He gave it back, warm. “Stay off the gangways unless you’re crossing, and stay off the rail unless you’re falling. Seventeen’s this way.”

He meant the carriage. A banner stood out above the open shutters beside them, gold, with 17 stitched on it in dark thread, and Elliot understood that the Calloway numbered its gangways by the carriage they came down at, and that the Meridian numbered its own by some other system entirely.

He put the token back in his inside pocket and went in off the deck.

The gold market was not a carriage. It was a street with the walls folded back.

The long shutters along its deck side stood open to the crossing, so that the light came in sideways on everything, and inside, under a ceiling hung with lamps in amber shades, there were alcoves on both sides as far as he could see. Each was a shop the width of a door and the depth of a cupboard, and each had somebody in it calling. Bolts of cloth. Brass. Knives. Little cakes stacked in pyramids under muslin. A woman selling nothing but buttons, sorted by colour into a hundred saucers, calling buttons, buttons as if it were a hymn. The banners went on overhead, gold after gold, vestibule after vestibule, and Elliot did what he did in every unfamiliar place, and looked for where it ended, and somewhere a long way aft the amber lamps simply got smaller and closer together until they were a single warm smear, and then he lost them in the crowd.

It smelled of spice. Not strongly, and not of any one spice, but of other people’s breakfasts, cooked to other people’s ideas. He had stopped smelling the Meridian within a week of arriving. He could smell it now, by its absence: oil and stove smoke and three thousand pairs of socks.

He went aft. Carriage 27 was aft, ten carriages by the banners, and the Conductor’s folder had not said anything about how crowded ten carriages could be.

At the second vestibule a girl went past him at speed going the other way, small and quick, reading the crowd for its gaps, and was through one before it closed and gone before he had properly seen her. He had the impression of somebody with a great deal to carry and nowhere to put it. Then the crowd closed again where she had been, and a porter with a crate on his shoulder said “Mind,” and Elliot minded.

“You’ve come from the Meridian.”

A young woman had fallen into step beside him. She was perhaps twenty, and she was wearing what the Meridian would have called overdressed and what the Calloway evidently called Tuesday: a jacket with more buttons than it needed, a scarf the colour of marigolds, three rings in one ear and none in the other. She had a canvas bag over her shoulder that ought to have sagged and didn’t.

“I have,” said Elliot.

“You walk like one.” She said it as you might tell somebody they had a smudge on their cheek, as a small public service. “Slow down. Hands lower. Look three paces ahead of you, not six. People will read you for a beggar otherwise. We have beggars. They walk the way you walk.”

“Thanks.”

“Two chits.”

“For what?”

“The advice.”

She looked at him with perfect serenity. Behind her a man was trying to sell a parrot that had very clearly not agreed to be sold.

“I’m not paying you for that.”

“Worth a try.” She was not in the least put out. “Good afternoon, by the way.”

“It’s a quarter past nine in the morning.”

“Not here it isn’t. We keep four hours on from you. Always have. You’re having breakfast, we’ve had our dinner.” She reached across and brushed something off his lapel with two fingers, quick and neat. “You’ve got straw on you. That’s Meridian, that is. Where are you going?”

“Carriage 27.”

“Long way, for a Meridian walk. Through the gold, into the green, keep on. Twenty minutes if you don’t stop.” She considered him. “You’ll stop. Friend or business?”

“Business.”

“Whose?”

“Mine.”

She grinned. It came and went in a moment, and for the moment she looked about twelve. “Mine. That’s better. You’ll do.” The grin folded away. “Mind the vestibule after Twenty-four. The plate sticks, and they all fall over it, and then they blame the Vesper.”

“Thank you.”

“One chit.”

“I said no.”

“Different advice,” she said. “And don’t thank me, friend. Don’t thank anybody on this train without you’ve worked out first what they did for you. Saves confusion.”

She dropped back half a pace, and when Elliot looked round she was not behind him, or beside him, or anywhere he could see.

The vestibule after Twenty-four had a floor plate that stuck. He did not fall over it, which he counted as a small victory and suspected she would have charged him for.

Just before it, in the last of the gold, there was a tea-bar.

He knew it for one before he knew it for anything else: an alcove with an L-shaped counter, an urn at one end, mismatched cups on a shelf, and a board on which somebody had chalked prices and the word VESH. Behind the counter a broad, bald man of about Elliot’s age was doing four things at once, quickly, and none of them seemed to be serving anybody. He was stacking cups and wiping the counter and turning the urn tap off and on again and refolding a cloth, and over his top lip there was a moustache that had been waxed at some point earlier in the morning and had since been allowed to make its own decisions.

“Tea, friend? Quick, if you are. Crossing day.” He did not look up. “Meridian cup’s two of yours, and don’t argue, I argue back and I’ve had the practice.”

Elliot put down two chits. A cup came across the counter before the second had stopped spinning. The tea was herbal and hot and tasted faintly of something like aniseed, and it was not Birdie’s, and he drank it standing up.

“Looking for somebody,” said the man. It was not a question. “You’ve put your money down without haggling, you haven’t sat, and you’ve got the cup in one hand. That’s a man drinking on his way somewhere. Who?”

The Conductor had said to be brief. Elliot was brief.

“Maren Toll.”

The man’s hands stopped. Only for a moment; then the cloth went round the counter again. But for a moment all four things had stopped at once, and his eyes had come up, and they were the eyes of a man who had heard a name recently and not expected to hear it again so soon.

“Maren,” he said. “What’s the Meridian want with Maren?”

“Business.”

“Whose?”

Elliot had learned that one ten minutes ago, at a cost of nothing. “His.”

The moustache considered this. Its owner turned the urn off again.

“Twenty-seven,” he said. “Far side, lower tier, eighth curtain from the forward door. He’ll be in. He doesn’t like a crowd. Crossing mornings he stops home and lets it all go past.” He picked up a cup that was already clean and cleaned it. “Comes by here every morning, other mornings. Nods. Never stops for tea. Seven years of nodding.” The cup went on to the shelf. “Lately he’s been coming by before I’ve the shutter up, at a run, and back past at all hours. Quiet man. Always was a quiet man. Was.”

“Was?”

“Is. Is.” His hand went up to the moustache and gave it the encouragement it had been failing to give itself. “Slip of the tongue. Tell him Vesh sent you, if it helps. It won’t. Maren’s not a man who needs introducing. But it’s manners.”

“You said was first.”

Vesh put both hands flat on his counter. For the first time since Elliot had arrived, he was doing nothing at all.

“He didn’t come by this morning,” he said. “Seven years he’s come by. It’s crossing day. Everybody’s off their pattern on a crossing day; I’ve had a woman in here who’s not missed her eight o’clock in thirty years and she’s not been in either.” He picked the cloth up again. “That’s all. That’s all it is. Another tea’s two chits, friend, and if you’re fine for now, don’t say fine for now. That’s what people say before they’re not. But it’s your tongue. I won’t lend you mine.” He jerked his chin at the corridor. “Go on. I’ve a queue.”

There was, Elliot saw, no queue.

He put the cup down. Vesh was already wiping the place where it had been.

The green began at the far side of the sticking plate, and it began quietly.

The banners went from gold to green over his head. The amber lamps gave way to plainer ones with green glass shades, and the alcoves ended, and the calling stopped, and the people in the corridor stopped strolling and began to walk with somewhere to be. Carriage 25 was a long hall with a sign above its inner doors that said RECORD HALL in faded gilt, and a smell of paper came out of it, and three clerks went in with armfuls of ledgers, arguing. Carriage 26 was berths. So was Carriage 27.

He had expected a corridor. He should have known better by now.

Carriage 27 was a barn. Its roof was high and ribbed and painted a green gone pale with smoke, and under it, from the forward door to a far end he could not see, ran berths. They stood two tiers high along both walls and in a double row down the middle, each one a wooden box the length of a man with a curtain across its open side, and the curtains were every colour the Calloway had ever had spare: green, mostly, but also red gone brown and gold gone grey, and stripes, and one in what looked very like a tablecloth. Every berth had a small wooden plaque beside it with a number painted on and a name written under. Washing hung from cords along the upper tier. Somewhere down the middle row a child was practising scales on a whistle, the same five notes up and the same five down, with a patience that suggested the rest of the carriage had stopped noticing years ago. A long way off, through a gap in the washing, a woman was frying onions, and the smell came the whole length of the carriage and arrived, like everything else on this train, slightly louder than he was used to.

It was home to a great many people. You could tell, because nobody looked up.

He went down the far side, counting. The plaques were in a careful, upright hand that had been repainted at intervals by a careless one. One, two, three. A man asleep with his boots outside his curtain, toes together. Five, six. A berth with its curtain looped back to show a hammer, a box of nails, and nothing else. Seven, its curtain drawn.

Eight. The plaque said M. TOLL, in the same plain, unornamented hand as the others, as if the name had been written because names had to be written and for no other reason. The curtain was dark green and drawn shut, and hung perfectly still.

Beside it, outside nine, a woman of about sixty sat on a low stool in the aisle with a basket of mending at her feet and a shirt across her knees. She had a needle in one hand and a reel of grey thread in the other, and she had stopped sewing when he stopped walking.

“You’ll be wanting Maren,” she said.

“I am. My name’s Elliot Marsh. I’m from the Meridian.”

“I can see that.” She looked at his coat. She did not say what she could see in it. “He’s not one for visitors.”

“Do you know him well?”

“I’ve lived three feet from him for seven years.” She drew the thread through, and bit it, and did not look at the green curtain. “Caro. Mending, if you’ve anything wants doing. I don’t do buttons on a crossing day; I’d never get them back.”

“Has he been in this morning, Mrs Caro?”

“Caro’ll do. And I couldn’t tell you.” She put the needle into the shirt and left it there. “I’ll tell you what I can tell you, which isn’t much, and then you can knock, and I’ll not listen. He’s a quiet man. He’s been quieter. I knock on his frame of a morning, on my way out with the basket. I say Morning, Maren, and he says Morning, Caro, and that’s us. Seven years. Then these last few weeks I’d knock and there’d be nobody. He’d be gone before the lamps were up. Back after I’d turned in. I’d hear the curtain go, late.”

“Where was he going?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.” She looked at him then, properly, with small dark eyes that had stayed sharp by refusing to do anything else. “The curtains are the only privacy any of us have, Mr Marsh. You don’t ask what’s behind one. Not if you want to keep yours.”

Elliot looked at the curtain. It was a heavy cotton, faded along its folds, and it hung straight down to within an inch of the boards. There was no light behind it that he could see. There was no sound behind it at all, which in a carriage like this one, with a whistle going and onions frying and a hundred people living their lives three feet apart, was its own kind of noise.

He knocked on the wooden frame beside it.

“Mr Toll? My name’s Elliot Marsh. I’m from the Meridian. The Conductor sent me.”

The whistle went up its five notes, and down. Nobody answered.

He knocked again. Behind him he heard Caro shift on her stool, and the basket creak, and then nothing, because she had stopped moving altogether.

“This morning,” she said, “I didn’t knock.”

He turned. She was looking at her own hands.

“I thought, he’ll have gone out early again. And if he hasn’t, it’s crossing day. He’s earned it.” She picked the needle up out of the shirt, and looked at it, and did not sew. “I thought I’d let him sleep.”