Ambrose Nast

somewhat meek by nature rankins accepted my direction without much question though i had essentially requested he find a needle in a haystack as he went to the shelves brimming with ledgers and loosely bound volumes whose ciphers only he himself likely understood

I advised him to focus his energies first on the specific date of the 9th of September, in any year when De Lagoon Norden might have come, no matter how far back the customs records went.

This unusual proviso caused Rankins to slowly remove his spectacles and ask me to clarify.

I did so only tersely.

I offered to assist his search in order to speed the matter as much as possible.

In recovering himself, he gave me simple instructions on how to best isolate the desired volumes.

I fired another lamp to banish the musty gloom in which he had grown accustomed to laboring.

We went hunting.

Rankin seemed to sense that I was not willing to answer any more questions in this critical moment.

The only sound became the flipping of pages and the thumping of heavy books upon messy tabletops.

The indices referring to the contents of volumes more than ten years old I found to be maddeningly incomplete.

The minutes passed.

I was painfully aware of the ticking of the clock on the wall behind Rankin's head.

Here, he said finally from across the room.

I moved so swiftly towards him that I bumped a stack of ledgers off the table and swore angrily without stopping to write them.

De Lagoon Norden, docked 9 September 1814, Rankins reported, running the tip of a finger across a line of script.

No cargo given, no crew count given.

Odd.

I peered at the faded script that had been set down in the ledger, not by Rankin's predecessor, but the predecessor of his predecessor, a man neither of us had known, one Charles Poldrice.

It was likely Rankin's had never had cause to see this entry, lost among thousands in the distant past.