4134.314 · November 10, 1814 AD
Numbers Tell Stories
Six years have remade him. The frightened youth who stumbled down the Resolution's gangplank is gone—carved away by sun and labour and the particular education that survival demands. William Jeffries is twenty-nine now, a checker with a ticket of leave in his pocket, reading cargo manifests at Campbell Cove whilst the colony's commerce flows around him. He has learned to want nothing he cannot earn. Then a carriage arrives at Warehouse Three, and a woman with copper hair steps onto the dock.
She checks her own shipments.
That's what they say about Eliza Donnelly, the merchant's daughter who arrives at the docks in her black lacquer carriage and walks among the labourers as though she belongs there. She caught a clerk skimming last autumn. Had him dismissed before the week was out. Sharp as a tack, that one. And way out of your league, so don't go getting ideas.
William doesn't get ideas. He tallies cargo against manifests, spots discrepancies others miss, keeps his head down and his ambitions quiet. The ticket of leave in his pocket grants him freedoms most convicts dream of, but it doesn't erase what he is. What he was. What the colony will always see when it looks at him.
Then she's standing before him, asking about her father's tea shipment, and something in her gaze holds him fast. She doesn't look through him the way the quality usually do. She looks at him—at the mind working behind his eyes, at the patterns he's found in the numbers, at the man the courts declared worthless but the evidence contradicts.
Three crates short. Either the captain helped himself, or the count was falsified before loading.
The numbers tell stories, he says, if you know how to read them.
She reads him instead.
