Night In The Inner Harbour
She could not sleep. She had tried. She had lain for two hours on the cot in the Cordwain and listened to the watchman striking the half-hours down in the street, and to the settling of the house, and to a dog somewhere in the yards at the back of the chandler's that barked at irregular intervals and was not answered, and at last she had got up and put on the sailor's coat and gone out.
She had told herself, going down the stair, that she would walk only to the end of the lane and back. At the end of the lane she had told herself she would walk only to the bridge. At the bridge she had told herself she would walk as far as the cistern and then turn. She had walked past the cistern. She had known she would.
She went down through the Cordwain to the customs house, and skirted it on the inland side, and came out on the little quay above the inner harbour where the cable-layers kept their coils. It was past midnight. A thin rain had begun, not cold, the kind of rain that gave itself to the air before it fell and was half mist when it arrived. The harbour lay below her in a dark water so still it held the lamps of the anchored ships the way a cloth holds pins, each light double, each doubling very slightly disturbed by the tide. The *Gull of Asperin* was down there somewhere. She did not look for it. She looked instead at the old sea-gate, the iron-shod inner gate, whose left leaf