Perpetua
Eight days before the audit. Dawn.
The queue for the Collateral Office started at the Bank steps and went round the corner into Hook Street, and nobody in it was talking. That's how you know a queue is for selling and not for buying.
I'd been in it since the lamplighters came down with their snuffers, in the good dress I'd slept in, creased across the lap like a letter somebody had read too often. The violet bottle was in my stocking, held flat to my thigh by the garter. Every time the queue moved up a step, it knocked against me, cold, like a knuckle on a door.
Eight days. I'd said it to myself all night in different voices, and in none of them did it get any longer. The wedding was at noon.
A boy of about eight stood in front of me with his mother's hand flat on his shoulder, the way you'd hold down a letter in the wind. When the doors opened we all went in together, shuffling.
The Collateral Office is the only room in the Reliquary the Bank lets the whole port into, and it's built to make sure you know it. Pillars you couldn't get your arms round. Twelve counter windows behind brass grilles, and along the back wall twelve stools behind green baize curtains, where the needle-men sat with their silver out.
Above the counters somebody had chalked the penalty in letters a hand high, and somebody else touched it up every week so nobody could say they hadn't been told: For theft of memory from the Bank: drawn blank, and the quiet ward.
Drawn blank is what the Bank calls emptied. They take everything out of you and leave you breathing. The quiet ward is the long room behind the infirmary where they keep what's left, in rows, and feed it with a spoon. I'd read that wall every quarter for three years, like a psalm over a church door. It's only at dawn on your wedding day, with a stolen bottle in your stocking, that the letters get bigger.
The boy's mother reached the window. "Next," said the clerk, and she said, "His seventh birthday. It had a cake," and the clerk wrote cake in the margin as if cake were worth an extra mark.
It was. I know the rates.
The boy went off behind the baize with a needle-man, very upright, holding his cap. His mother didn't go with him. I counted what I had in my pocket, seventeen marks and a button, and I didn't count it again. Counting doesn't make it grow.
"Next."
My clerk was young and thin, with a cold, and a pen he kept wiping on a rag as if it had offended him. I pushed Tobin's paying-in book under the grille: three years of quarters, every one stamped green.
"Debtor?"
"Tobin Vane. I've come to pay the next quarter's interest now, in advance. And the one after, if you'll take part of it on account. And I want the forfeit put back to where it belongs. Somebody's made a mistake about the date."
He ran his finger down the great ledger and stopped.
"Tobin Vane," he read out. "Three hundred and forty marks outstanding, secured on forty-one memories. Note sold three months ago to a private holder, name sealed by charter."
"Sold," I said.
"Sold, miss. The Bank sells notes." He sniffed. "It's all above board. It's in the terms."
"Then I'll pay the holder. Who is it?"
"Sealed by charter."
"What does that mean?"
He wiped his pen. "It means you can't know, miss, and I can't tell you. If I did know, I'd lose my stool for saying."
"An extension, then. There's a form. The Bank has a form for sneezing."
"Not on a sold note. The holder sets the forfeit, and the holder set it for audit day." He turned the ledger a quarter-inch further away from me, which is what a Bank clerk does instead of shutting a door. "I'm sorry."
"Who do I appeal to? There has to be somebody."
"This is the court, miss." He glanced up at the chalk on the wall, and down again. "If the holder wants it drawn, it's drawn."
Behind me the queue moved its feet. I could feel them wanting my place at the window the way you feel rain coming, on the backs of your hands.
I took Tobin's book back. I left the seventeen marks where they were.
Outside, the sun had come up over the harbour, white and useless. Three months ago somebody had walked into that hall, paid the Bank whatever the Bank asks for a boy, and gone home with my brother in an envelope.
I stood on the Bank steps and did it as a sum, because a sum is the only thing that never lies to me. The Assessor had hunted the Linnet for two years and never caught her. He'd let me walk out of the Penny Cellar yesterday and called himself patient. He needed a wife by the audit, and he'd turned away nineteen. Maybe patience had a price, and he'd paid it, and I was what it bought.
It was a good sum. I just couldn't make it come out.
The Blue Stair runs up from the fish market in long crooked flights, and the gutters down both sides of it run blue: the blue of a cold lip, of the ink the Bank uses for forfeits. Tobin had lived at the top of it since the spring, in the drying loft over a dye-works, and I had never once climbed up to see it. He came down to me on Sundays, and that was how I liked it: my brother on my ground, where I could see what he was eating.
I knew the name over the yard gate before I got to it. H. Lune, Dyer. Tobin had talked about Mistress Lune like a weather report: she was cross, she was kind, she'd fed him, she'd shouted at a carter until the carter wept. That was all I knew.
The yard gate was open. Inside was a long low shed with its doors propped wide, six vats sunk into the floor, and lengths of wet cloth hung from the rafters like laundry for giants. A broad woman in a leather apron stood over the biggest vat with her sleeves pushed up past the elbow, working the cloth under with a pole, humming as she worked. Her hands were blue to the second knuckle, a plain iron band on the middle finger, a widow's.
She turned round, and she was the dyer from booth three.
I stopped in the doorway. So did she, pole in the air. Then she leaned it against the vat and wiped her hands down the apron, and came across the wet floor at me like a barge coming in to a quay.
"Well," she said. "You found us, then."
"You're Mistress Lune."
"Hesper, in my own shed." She looked at me hard, as she had in the Cellar, as if I were a batch come out streaky. "And you've had no breakfast, and you've been somewhere that made you look like that. Sit."
There was a table at the back of the shed, under the one window, scrubbed white and scarred with a hundred pots. She put me on the bench, and cut bread, and put a crock of butter by it, and a knife in my hand, all without asking, and then she sat down opposite with her blue hands folded on the table and said, "I'll tell you straight, because I'd want telling. I've been drinking your days since the spring."
I put the knife down.
"Through Esk," she said. "He keeps back the warm ones for me, and I pay him over the odds so he'll keep on keeping them. You sell good days, girl. Warm ones. Nobody sells days like yours, and sells them that fast, unless they've somebody to pay for. So I gave Esk two marks to tell me whose they were." She sniffed. "He told me for one."
She'd had afternoons of mine I'd never have again, and I didn't even know which ones. I didn't know whether to be robbed or flattered. I was both, and hungry, and the bread was still warm.
"And then," Hesper said, "I went looking for who you were paying for. And there he was, down the harbour, with his hands in his pockets and no work to put in them. So I took him on."
"You bought my brother," I said.
"I hired him. He eats more than he dyes, but he lifts." She pushed the butter an inch nearer. "I'm telling you because you'd have worked it out by the second slice, and then you'd have hated me for making you work."
I looked at her. She looked back, square as a wardrobe, and didn't blink, and after a moment I picked up the knife again. I'm not proud. When a woman gives you bread and the truth in the same breath, you take the bread.
"He's in the loft," she said, getting up. "He heard the gate. He'll be down in a minute pretending he wasn't asleep."
He was. He came down the loft ladder backwards with his hair on end, all nineteen years and six feet of him, his arms blue to the elbow over the old white burn-scars from the bottle-works, as if somebody had dipped him to see if he'd take the colour. In the day I'd sold yesterday he'd been floured to the eyebrows, and so had the cat. He still had the whole of it, our father laughing and the pan on fire. The warmth of it was in the woman cutting bread behind me. I had the list.
"Pet!" He got to the bottom and swung round and saw my face. "Oh. Oh, no. Who's died?"
"Nobody. Sit down and eat," said Hesper, and threw a heel of bread at him, which he caught. "I'm going out front to shout at a carter about woad. Don't let her leave without the rest of that loaf."
The yard gate banged behind her.
Tobin sat down on the bench beside me with the bread in his fist. I took Corvane's paper out of my bodice and unfolded it on the table between us, and he read it with his lips moving, as he's read since he was six, and by the end his ears had gone red.
"Forty-one," he said. "Do they say which?"
"They never say which."
"Right." He put the bread down. He picked it up again. "Right. Well, it's only audit day, isn't it? That's nine days."
"Eight."
"Eight." He laughed, too high, the laugh he's used for bad news since our father's funeral. "What's it come to now, Pet? The whole of it?"
"Enough."
He got up and went back to the big vat, because he can't stand still when he's frightened, and picked up Hesper's paddle and started pushing the cloth round, badly.
"So what do we do?" he said to the vat. "Tell me there's a thing we do."
I told him. Not all of it. I never tell Tobin all of anything. I told him there was a broker with a client, and the client would see his note paid off in full, and the price was one bottle out of the Reliquary before the audit. I told him the only way down to the level where that bottle lived was to be in the Assessor's household, and the only way into the Assessor's household was to marry it. I told him the banns had gone up on the chapel door last night, and the wedding was at noon.
"Married," said Tobin, pushing cloth. "To who?"
"The Assessor. Idris Carrow."
There was a splash. The paddle had gone into the vat, handle and all, and Tobin was standing with his empty hands in front of him, dripping.
"The Assessor?" he said. "You're marrying the man who's hunting you?"
"It's only for nine days."
"Eight. You said eight." He stared at me. Then his whole face gave way into the grin he's had since he was four, the one that gets him out of everything. "Brilliant. Can I come?"
"Get the paddle out before she comes back."
He got it out. He had to go in after it up to the shoulder, swearing, and he came up blue to the collarbone, with a stripe of indigo up one side of his neck like a bad joke about a noose. I laughed. I hadn't meant to. It came out of me all at once, as the warm day had come out of the dyer in the Cellar, and I had to put my head down on Hesper's scrubbed table while my brother dripped on me and asked what was so funny.
That was how Hesper found us, when the gate banged again.
"Why," she said, "is my best paddle blue to the grip?"
"Pet's getting married," Tobin said. "At noon. I'm giving her away. Can I have the morning?"
Hesper looked at him, and at me, and at the stripe up his neck.
"You can have the morning," she said, "if you wash that off. You're not giving anybody away looking like you've been hanged in a vat."
He went off to the pump in the yard, shirt over his head. Hesper wrapped the rest of the loaf in a cloth without a word and put it in my hands, and I stood there holding it like a parcel I'd been handed at the wrong door.
"Yesterday," I said. "In the Cellar. You said there was a torn edge in it. At the bottom of the day."
"I did."
"What did it taste of?"
She thought about it properly. She wiped her hands down the apron one after the other, slowly, looking at nothing, as though she were tasting it again.
"Like somebody waiting," she said.
Out in the yard the pump shrieked, and Tobin yelped at the cold. Hesper turned back to her vats.
"Go on," she said over her shoulder. "I'll shut these down and come and see you wed. Somebody should, that isn't paid to."
We walked up Chandler's Hill, and Tobin had his collar turned up over the last of the blue and talked the whole way, about a gull that had got into the drying loft and eaten a stocking, about how he'd always known I'd marry above myself. I let him talk. I had the loaf in one arm and the bottle in my stocking and the morning in my stomach like a stone.
Idris Carrow.
I kept going back to the Cellar, like a tongue to a broken tooth. His fingers on the row behind my ear, warm, when everything else the Bank owns is cold. Head to the side, Miss Tolley, if you'd be so kind. The pause behind his eyes when he tasted my very particular sentence and couldn't find the tin in it. And the last of it, the part I'd lain awake turning over: I'd told him I'd have remembered him, and he'd said that he'd have remembered me as well.
At the time I'd taken it for a threat. A hunter's line. I'd know your face again, Linnet, wherever you went.
Walking up Chandler's Hill with my brother, it didn't sound like a threat. It sounded like a price marked on a label in his own hand, a long while ago, that he'd never meant anybody to see.
"You've gone quiet," Tobin said.
"I'm saving it."
"For what?"
"Vows."
The Reliquary's chapel is round the side of the Bank, up its own short flight of steps, under a carved lintel of two hands holding a bottle between them. It's where the Bank marries its officers and buries its governors. The noon bell hadn't gone. Tellers in green were going in at the door in twos, and a sergeant on the top step, very large and very freckled, looked at us as if we might be the entertainment.
At the foot of the steps Tobin stopped me.
He'd washed his neck, mostly. He'd borrowed a coat from somewhere that was too short in the sleeve, and his wrists stuck out of it blue. He took the loaf out of my arms and tucked it under his own, and then he put both hands to my collar and straightened it, carefully, the way our father used to do his before school, frowning at it as though it were the most important job in the port.
"If he's kind to you, Pet," he said to the collar, "let him be."
I opened my mouth to tell him the Assessor had never been kind to anybody in his life, and that I'd be out of that house in eight days with a bottle in my pocket and his note in my hand. Then a door opened at the top of the steps and a little man in a black gown came down at a trot, with a paper in one hand and a pencil in the other.
"Miss Tolley? The bride? Good." He looked me over, the dress and the creases and the dust of the Blue Stair on my hem, and made a mark on his paper as if he were grading me. "I'm the chapel clerk. I'll give you the order of service, madam, so there's no confusion at the altar. The Governor will enter first. The Assessor—"
"I know what a wedding is," I said.
"Not this one, madam." He tapped the paper with the pencil. "By the Governor's order, before the vows, the Assessor will taste the bride. In the vestry. The Governor and a clerk of record will be present." He looked up at me over the top of the paper, and he was enjoying it, a little. "And whatever he finds, madam, he's bound to say."
Tobin's hand came off my collar.
"Taste," I said.
"It's in the charter." The clerk was already going back up the steps. "This way, madam. Your brother may wait with the guests."
I went up. My legs did it. The sergeant stood aside for me at the top, and the chapel was dark after the sun, and smelled of candle-wax and cold stone and the lilies somebody had put at the altar. To the left of the altar was a small door. The clerk went to it, and knocked twice, and opened it.
The violet bottle lay cold against my thigh. Inside the vestry, on a table covered with a square of white linen, the Assessor's spoon was waiting.