The Tallow That Keeps the Hinges Silent

"One either partakes or goes hungry. And in this colony, hunger is a more pressing concern than principle."— Tobias Mercer

The dessert course arrived bearing a pudding of ambitious construction and questionable stability.

It was meant, William gathered from Mrs Whitmore's murmured explanation, to be a trifle in the English fashion—layers of sponge and custard and preserved fruits, crowned with whipped cream. What it actually resembled was rather more geological: the cream had begun to slide sideways, creating the impression of a small avalanche frozen mid-collapse, while the custard had developed a skin that caught the candlelight in ways that suggested it had been waiting rather longer than intended.

Elizabeth's expression as the dish was presented betrayed nothing, but William caught the slight tightening around her eyes that spoke of domestic catastrophe narrowly contained.

"Magnificent," Davey pronounced, loud enough for the entire table to hear. "It looks exactly like the colonial administration—grand ambitions undermined by fundamental instability, threatening to collapse at any moment, and yet somehow still being served to polite company."

The silence that followed was absolute. Then Thomas Whitmore snorted—a sound he attempted, too late, to disguise as a cough—and the tension broke. Laughter rippled around the table, genuine if carefully modulated, as guests permitted themselves to acknowledge what everyone had been thinking.

Even Harding's mouth twitched toward something that might, in better lighting, have been a smile.

"The Governor has a gift," Mercer observed quietly to William, "for saying things that would destroy anyone else's career. I've never quite determined whether it's courage or simply the privilege of having nothing left to lose."

"Perhaps they're the same thing."

"Now that," Mercer said, regarding William with renewed interest, "is a rather astute observation for a young man in borrowed clothes."

William felt heat rise to his face. "I didn't realise it was so obvious."

"Only to those who've worn borrowed clothes themselves." Mercer's smile held no mockery. "We recognise our own, Mr Jeffries. The colony is full of men pretending to be something they weren't born to. Some of us simply hide it better than others."

Before William could pursue this unexpected admission, Davey's voice cut across the table once more.

"Speaking of instability," the Lieutenant Governor announced, apparently addressing no one and everyone simultaneously, "I hear there's been some excitement down at the waterfront. Customs officers getting themselves into difficulties. Something about a warehouse that wasn't quite where the records said it should be, filled with goods that weren't quite what the manifests described."

The temperature in the room dropped several degrees.

William felt his stomach clench. Warehouses. Goods. Manifests. The words circled too close to territories he knew intimately—territories where Blackwood operated, where he himself had operated, where the line between legitimate commerce and something darker was drawn in shifting sand.

"A misunderstanding, I'm told," Bradshaw said smoothly, his voice betraying nothing of whatever he might actually know. "Clerical errors. The sort of thing that happens when paperwork crosses too many desks."

"Clerical errors." Davey's repetition dripped with amusement. "Yes, I've noticed how often our colony's irregularities turn out to be clerical errors. Remarkable, really, the havoc that can be wreaked by a misplaced digit or an illegible signature." He took a long drink of wine—his fourth glass, by William's count, though he showed no obvious signs of impairment. "One might almost think the clerks were doing it deliberately."

"Surely not," Fitzpatrick said drily. "Our colonial clerks are models of diligence and integrity. I'm certain any... irregularities... are entirely innocent."

The old man's tone made clear that he believed nothing of the sort, and that everyone at the table understood as much. It was, William realised, a kind of performance—an elaborate dance where everyone acknowledged the existence of impropriety while maintaining the fiction that it was merely administrative confusion.

"The name I heard mentioned," Davey continued, apparently oblivious to the discomfort spreading around him, "was Blackwood. Ezekiel Blackwood. Ring any bells?"

William's heart stopped.

Or felt as though it did—a moment of absolute stillness, of time suspended, while the name echoed in his ears like a gunshot. Blackwood. Spoken aloud at this table, among these people, in a context that connected to customs irregularities and warehouse discrepancies. Everything he had feared since accepting Silas's invitation seemed to crystallise in that single word.

He forced himself to breathe. Forced his hands to remain still on the tablecloth rather than clenching into fists. Forced his expression to remain neutral, interested but not alarmed—the face of a man hearing an unfamiliar name for the first time.

"Blackwood?" Harding's voice carried the tone of a man genuinely attempting to place the reference. "I don't believe I know the name."

"You wouldn't." Davey's smile had teeth in it now. "He's not the sort who gets invited to dinners like this. Small-time operator, mostly—rum and tobacco, some wool of questionable provenance, the occasional cargo that arrives without quite all its documentation in order. Useful, in his way, to certain people. But hardly significant."

"If he's hardly significant," Bradshaw said, his voice carrying an edge that hadn't been there before, "then why mention him at all?"

"Because insignificance is interesting, don't you think?" Davey leaned back in his chair, the picture of casual amusement. "The colony is full of men like Blackwood—men who operate in the gaps between what's legal and what's tolerated, who provide services that respectable people prefer not to acknowledge needing. They're the tallow that keeps the hinges silent, the men who do what must be done so that respectable folk can pretend it was never done at all."

He let his gaze drift around the table, pausing on each face in turn.

"I sometimes wonder what would happen if all the Blackwoods suddenly vanished. If every irregular transaction, every convenient arrangement, every useful blindness were suddenly exposed to the light." His smile broadened. "I suspect we'd discover that the respectable economy of Van Diemen's Land is rather smaller than anyone cares to admit."

The silence that followed was different from the earlier pauses—heavier, more charged. William watched faces around the table, cataloguing reactions: Bradshaw's careful blankness, Fitzpatrick's studied indifference, Thomas Whitmore's visible discomfort, his brother James's thoughtful frown. Everyone knew what Davey was implying. Everyone understood the accusation hidden within the observation.

And no one was going to acknowledge it directly.

"The Governor makes an interesting point," Harding said finally, his voice carrying the careful neutrality of a man choosing his words with extreme care. "Though I would suggest that the distinction between irregular and illegal is not always as clear as we might like it to be. Commerce, particularly in a young colony, often operates in territories that the law has not yet fully mapped."

"How diplomatic." Davey's laugh was sharp. "And how convenient, for those whose activities might benefit from unmapped territories." He raised his glass in a mock toast. "To the grey areas, gentlemen. May they remain forever grey, and may we all continue to prosper within them."

No one drank.

"Perhaps," Elizabeth said, her voice cutting through the tension with the same grace she had demonstrated all evening, "we might move to the drawing room? I believe the fire has been built up, and the gentlemen might appreciate port and cigars after such substantial fare."

The suggestion was a lifeline, and the table seized it with visible relief. Chairs scraped against the floor as guests rose, conversations resuming with the determined brightness of people pretending the last five minutes had not occurred.

William remained seated a moment longer, his mind racing through everything that had been said and not said.

Blackwood had been mentioned by name. His operations—the very operations William had participated in, had facilitated, had profited from—had been described to a room full of the colony's most powerful men. And the response had not been outrage or horror or calls for prosecution. The response had been... acknowledgment. Tacit acceptance. A shared understanding that such things happened, that everyone benefited, that the pretence of respectability was exactly that—pretence.

Davey's words echoed in his mind: "The tallow that keeps the hinges silent, so that respectable folk can pretend it was never done at all."

He had thought he understood the shadow economy. Had thought he grasped the relationship between Blackwood's world and the legitimate commerce that surrounded it. But sitting in this dining room, watching these men carefully not react to accusations that implicated all of them, William realised how naive that understanding had been.

Blackwood was not an aberration. He was not operating outside the system, exploiting its weaknesses. He was part of the system—a necessary component, tolerated and even protected because his services were useful. And the men who condemned him publicly, who spoke of law and order and proper commerce, were the same men who relied on his existence to smooth their own paths.

"Mr Jeffries?" Mercer's voice broke through his thoughts. "Are you coming? The port is apparently excellent, and I find myself in need of something to wash away the taste of the Governor's observations."

William rose, forcing his expression back to neutral pleasantness. "Of course. My apologies—I was merely contemplating the remarkable stability of the dessert course."

Mercer laughed—a genuine sound that suggested he understood exactly what William had actually been contemplating. "Yes, the trifle was quite something. Rather like the colony itself, wouldn't you say? Ambitious construction, questionable foundations, somehow still standing despite every indication it shouldn't be."

"And yet we all keep eating," William replied.

"What choice do we have?" Mercer's smile held something that might have been wisdom or might have been resignation. "It's the only pudding on offer. One either partakes or goes hungry. And in this colony, Mr Jeffries, hunger is a more pressing concern than principle."

They joined the general movement toward the drawing room, where the separation of the sexes would provide new configurations of conversation and new opportunities for manoeuvre. William caught Silas's eye across the room and saw his friend's small nod—acknowledgment that they had both heard what Davey said, that they would need to discuss it later, that the implications were significant.

But for now, there was port to drink and cigars to smoke and the elaborate performance of colonial respectability to continue.

William followed Mercer into the drawing room, leaving behind the ruins of the ambitious trifle and the even more ruined pretence that anyone in the colony operated with clean hands.