The Guildmaster's Ledger

Halden waited until her steps were off the stairs before he set down the pen and unlocked the shallow drawer beneath his correspondence.

The letter he took from it was thirty years old and he did not need to read it; he read it anyway, as he had read it perhaps once a season for thirty years, the way a man tongues a cracked tooth. The seal at its foot showed a swan with a crown around its neck. The hand was very fine. The instruction it contained was one sentence long, and the annuity that had accompanied it had rebuilt the chart-house roof, endowed two apprenticeships, and paid for the glass in the vault.

The waters north-northeast of the Anselm shoals are to be surveyed as open sea.

He had been younger than Voss when old Guildmaster Terce had shown him the letter, and he had asked — of course he had asked; the good ones always asked — what was actually out there. Terce had poured him wine the color of harbor water and said: a rock, some birds, and the graves of the men who anchored there. Draw the sea, take the swan's money, and be glad you make maps for a living and not history.

Terce had been dead twenty years and Halden still did not know if he had been lied to. That was the elegant thing about the arrangement, he had come to understand. Every guildmaster inherited the letter, the annuity, and the not knowing. Ignorance was part of the payment.

The Voss girl wore gloves, kept the register properly, and had found in one wet afternoon what it had taken him four years to find. He should tear up her indenture in the morning. Sixty years of custom said exactly that, and custom had kept the roof on.

Halden folded the letter away and sat for a long time watching the harbor lights, doing the thing he was worst at in all the world, which was arithmetic with things that were not numbers.

In the morning he did not tear up her indenture. He assigned her the tide tables instead — the dullest work in the house, the far corner desk, the one with sight-lines to nothing.

The one, though it would be a week before he admitted to himself that he had thought of it, nearest the door to the launch stairs.