Perpetua
Three days before the audit. The small hours.
The cork came out of eleven forty-seven with a dry little pop, like a knuckle, and I stood in the dark holding it and telling myself it was a lock.
A lock is a question with one answer. You ask it properly and it opens, and you don't ask what's behind it, because that isn't your department. This was my department. I'd carried other people's days for three years, and I have one rule I've never broken: you find out the weight of a thing before you pick it up.
So I put the satchel down by my boots with its flap open, because I'd wanted both hands, and I tipped the bottle against my lip and let one drop touch my tongue. Wall of black glass at my back. Husband somewhere down the aisle, doing whatever a husband does in a vault when he's told to watch. I braced for him. Five days of a husband whose hands I couldn't account for, and I was about to be handed the reason.
It wasn't a man. It wasn't a summer.
It was heat, first, before any picture: a close, wet, worried heat, the heat of a room with the windows shut on purpose. Then green. Curtains drawn round a bed, and the light coming through them the colour of the inside of a bottle, so that everything in that small drowned space had lost its shadow and I couldn't have told you the colour of my own hands. They were mine, in the memory. I looked down and there they were, red-raw across the knuckles, the skin split from lye, wringing a cloth out in a basin and shaking so hard the water slopped. They were also nobody's I'd ever met.
Under the heat there was a smell sharp enough to sting the nose, like a pickle jar. Vinegar, and yellow soap. On the floor, on the bed rail, on the cloth. The boards under her knees were scrubbed white, and she had done them herself, in the night, because there was nothing else to do with her hands.
And in the bed a boy, about ten, small for it, so hot the sheet stuck to him. His hair was dark with sweat and stuck in commas to his forehead. His eyes were half open and not seeing. His breath went in short, and out short, and I was counting it. The woman I was, the woman whose eyes I looked through, was counting every one, like marks, as if a number said often enough could be made to come out higher. Eleven. Twelve. Eleven.
Beyond the curtain someone coughed, and someone else was crying quietly, as a ward does at night.
She put the cloth on his head. She smoothed his hair off it with her whole hand, over and over. And she began to sing.
I knew the first verse. Everybody does. But she went on past it, into a second one I had never heard, low and a little flat, in the voice of someone who had never sung for anyone but one listener. It went down where the first goes up. It had a turn in the middle like a stair. At the end of it she said the last line twice, once sung and once not, and the second time it broke.
Sleep, my lamb, the lamps are lit.
My throat closed. It closed as if it were my child, and it was a stranger's, and the two feelings ran together so completely that I put my other hand flat on the shelf to hold myself up. Then the drop was gone. It goes fast, a drop. I was standing in a cage of iron and black glass with my mouth wet and a sliver of somebody's worst night sitting in me, where it would stay.
I took the bottle from my lip. My hand was steady. It's always steady, afterwards.
I put my other hand under my ribs, where the hollow is, and waited for it to move.
Nothing. It lay there as it had lain for four years, a pebble with a receipt. No man. No wall. No fourth of anything. Whatever was in that bottle, my summer wasn't in it, and the size of what I hadn't found had not changed by a grain.
I'd have said I'd be relieved. I was angry.
It had been labelled with my number. That was the thing that got under the nail. Somebody had gone to the trouble of writing eleven forty-seven on the card at the neck of a feverish boy, and sending me to fetch it, and let me spend two days believing I was going to steal my own heart. They hadn't lied with words. They'd lied with a piece of card.
And they'd known I'd take it. They'd known I'd take a job with my own summer on the hook, and with Tobin on the other side of the scale, without asking what else I might be carrying out.
I made myself think like a thief and not a mother, which took some effort, since for the last minute I had been the second.
Who could sing that verse?
There were three people in my week who might. The first I could put a name to. At the breakfast table in Chalice Row, a woman with lye-red hands had scrubbed the boards with vinegar and sung the first verse straight through, and then told me that nobody knew the second any more. She'd had a boy. The fever took my boy, she'd said in her kitchen at two in the morning, and hadn't said another word. Raw hands. Vinegar. Fever. Was that a housekeeper's grief, brought up out of the Bank's ledgers for a thief to steal back?
Then there was Corvane, in twenty years of black. I'd never asked what she wore it for. A woman doesn't dress a whole life in mourning for a hat.
And the third was the client, whom I'd never seen: a voice through a grille, and a note read in a kitchen. Anyone at all.
Vinegar didn't narrow it. Every housekeeper in Vessel scrubs with vinegar, and so does every fishwife who ever cleaned a slab. Raw knuckles and a scrubbed floor could be any woman in the port who worked for a living. I stood in the cold with the child's bottle in my fist and had more suspects than I'd had at breakfast, and less to hang any of them on.
Boots, coming up the aisle. Even boots, too even.
The Assessor stopped in front of me and I saw his face in the little light from the hooded lamp. It was the colour of the tally cards. He had one hand in the breast of his coat, flat, where he keeps the letter, and he didn't take it out.
"It isn't yours," said Idris.
"I know."
"You tasted it."
"One drop." I held the bottle up. "It's a child. A boy about ten, in a fever ward, and his mother singing to him. That's what your Reserve was keeping under my number." I waited for him to say something clever. "Did you know?"
"No."
Not a grain of tin in it. I hadn't expected any. I'd wanted to see his face while he said it, and I'd got that, and it told me nothing except that whatever he had found down that aisle, it had taken the colour out of him as thoroughly as the drop had taken it out of me.
"How did you know it wasn't mine?"
"I've tasted yours," he said. "I tasted the dose. A drop of a graft can't tell me what's in the bottle." He took a breath. "It can tell me what isn't."
That was a true sentence and a good one, and I filed it, and I let it go. There were eleven other things on the shelf that wanted doing before the night man came round.
The plan had two halves, and I'd only ever believed in one. Half one was the theft. Half two was that the theft mustn't look like one. The Governor counts his Reserve like a miser counts teeth, and if eleven forty-seven was gone from shelf eleven by morning, I'd be in the quiet ward by noon and Tobin's forty-one would go to auction to pay for the cleaning.
So I knelt on the flags with the lamp shuttered to a slit and put the child's bottle in my lap, and took out the other.
Tobin's glass was good, better than I'd have thought a boy of nineteen with a burnt wrist could do in an afternoon. Thumb-long, black as the real thing, weighted with lead shot till it sat in the hand like a full one, and the number painted on its shoulder in white lead, neat as a stitch, from my drawing. He'd done the same on the spare. It was the sort of thing he'd think of. The spare wore its black already, from my practice in the wash-house; this one I'd left bare, to seal down here with the real cuts in front of me. It had cost him a burn on the wrist and a morning's temper, and all it wanted now was black for its neck: the pot Hesper had matched at the vats, the black whose test chip had burned green for me on a pin. I'd lifted it off Merrow's cold hearth on my way out and carried it wrapped in wool.
I un-tied the tally card from the neck of the child's bottle and tied it, in the same knot, on the forgery. One third remaining. Then I lit the candle stub in its tin and warmed the pot over it till the wax was soft, and dipped the cork and neck of the false bottle in it as if glazing a tart. Black on black. It set almost at once. I took my finest pick and scored the wax, quickly, short parallel cuts across its shoulder, copying every one from the bottle in my lap. The Bank's razors had been thorough. I gave it a dozen. It looked as if a hundred tiny knives had been at it. It looked like a bottle the trade had been making money from for four years.
I set it on the shelf where the child's had stood. It fitted the gap as if it had grown there.
"The count will match," I said.
"Yes," said Idris. He hadn't moved. He was watching my hands, and there was something in his watching that I couldn't read. It wasn't approval. It was too careful.
I put the child's bottle in the inside pocket of my jacket, against my ribs, over the hollow. I re-corked it with a twist of my hanky. I buckled the satchel and slung it, and the whole of it weighed less than a loaf.
Then, far above us, a boot rang on iron.
Idris's hand closed on my wrist. He didn't need to say what it was. I'd seen the iron stair winding down the shaft wall on the way down, and it hadn't occurred to me that a stair could sound so much like a clock.
"Down," he said. "Between the cages."
We went to ground behind the end of the aisle in the crack between shelf twelve and the wall, which was a gap for a broom and not for two people, and there wasn't any question of one of us standing farther off. He put his back to the stone and I put mine to him. He shut the lamp entirely.
The night man came down the stair one slow ring at a time. At the bottom he stopped, and the Governor's great door gave a heavy shudder as the night man tried it, without much hope that it would. A yellow line lit up under the crack of the oak. The inspection slit in it opened. Light came down the aisle in a fan.
It went along the shelves like a hand. Every bottle it crossed swallowed it, black glass on black glass, so that the beam went dim and bigger with every rank, and my cheek was pressed to Idris's coat and I could smell the ink on it and the cold, and somewhere under the coat his heart was going hard enough to hear. I could count it. I counted it.
His hand had come up and closed round mine on the strap of the satchel. I didn't remember putting it there. He wasn't holding me. He was making sure I had it.
The light stopped on eleven. It stayed there the length of a long swallow.
Then the slit shut, the great door gave a last dry knock, and the boots went back up the iron, ring after ring. The Assessor breathed out against my hair.
"He counts the doors," he said, very low. "Not the shelves."
"You might have said before I had my face in your waistcoat."
"I did not think you'd mind."
"I don't." I stepped on his foot, on purpose, and stayed off it. "Come on."
The gate took a second toll.
I'd been dreading it since the first. A toll-lock takes its fee each time it opens, in or out, and my father used to say so cheerfully, because he never paid. I laid my palm on the plate and shut my eyes, and it was there behind my eyelids at once, as you can find the tune of a song you hate: the thing I could spare.
I hadn't got another father's kitchen. I hadn't much left that I'd have called mine. But I had something I'd been given free.
A bootlace snapping in a woman's hand, and her laughing, on the morning of a wedding.
It was a hundred and twelve years old and a stranger's, and it sat in me like a coin in a hem, the only thing I owned that I hadn't paid for. I held it up and offered it, and the silver teeth under the plate took hold with a small cold pull, and a bead formed in the glass, and the gate swung open.
It didn't hesitate. Nobody has ever priced anything lower, and the gate agreed.
"That was not yours," said Idris, behind me. His voice was odd.
"It is now." I went through. "That's the whole trouble with drinking."
The cage stood where we'd left it. He shut the gate on us, and leaned on the brake wheel, and let it off. The counterweight dropped down its shaft with a long stony hush, and we began to rise.
It's a curious kind of dark, a cage in a shaft, with a smell of oil and cold iron and a sound like a big animal breathing slowly out. We passed level three, a bar of yellow light and boiled cabbage. We passed two, and the smell of hot pitch came in through the bars, black and sweet. The lamp was shuttered. I couldn't see him at all, and I could feel exactly where he was, six inches off, with one hand on the brake wheel and the other flat against his coat.
Nobody was watching. There was no Gannet, no Governor, no Merrow at a door. There wasn't a spoon in the world to lift.
I'd had a night of being frightened for Tobin, and of a child's fever in my mouth, and of a husband who kept his hands where I could see them. I'd kissed him once, for the guards, and I'd been the one who started it, and I'd told myself it was for the spoon. I found the front of his coat with my fingers. I found the spoon, cold on his lapel, and I closed my hand round it, and I didn't lift it. It was the least interesting thing in the cage.
"Perpetua," he said. His breath was on my mouth.
"Are you going to tell me I shouldn't?"
"No."
"Are you going to tell me you shouldn't?"
There was a pause with a whole shaft in it.
"I have made a promise," said Idris carefully, "about what I may begin."
"Good. I'm beginning." I found his other hand in the dark, the one flat against his chest, and I took it and put it where I wanted it, at my waist, over the jacket and the child and the hard little shape of the bottle. "Hands. You have two."
I kissed him.
I want to say it was clever. It wasn't. It was clumsy for the first breath, because I was shaking, and I'd got the angle of his height wrong, and I had to go up on my toes with my fist in his lapel; and then it wasn't clumsy at all. His hand at my waist stayed exactly where I had put it for the length of a heartbeat, flat and careful, as if it were a document he'd been asked to witness. Then it spread. His mouth was warm, and tasted of the cold and of ink and of something like clove, and he made a small sound against mine, low in the throat, that a man makes when he has been told for a long time that he mustn't. His other hand let go of the brake wheel. The cage, unbraked, began to climb faster, and neither of us took any notice.
I have kissed people for money, and for spoons, and once for a landlord's silence. I had never kissed anyone because I couldn't think what else to do with my mouth and I had decided.
The cage struck the stop at the top of its shaft with a jar. We came apart the width of a breath and stood there with our foreheads together, in the dark, listening to the chain settle.
"The brake," I said.
"I know."
"You let go of it. You've got both hands on me."
"I am aware."
He found the wheel. The gate rang open on the officers' hall, and the porter was still asleep upright, and the book lay open on his desk with our night's entry in it, black and legal. Somewhere below us a young man was counting bottles by the light of a lantern, and I hoped they were interesting.
We went out by the yard door. Idris signed us out in the same hand, without a tremor, and I watched him do it.
The Bank's yard, before dawn, is the loneliest place in Vessel. There's a well, and a mounting block, and a wall with the harbour behind it, and the whole sky is one pearl-grey sheet with a smear of pink in the east that hasn't decided to be anything. Gulls stood about on the cobbles like clerks. It had rained. The stones were black and shining, and the well-rope creaked in the wind.
Three days to the audit, and an Assessor at my side, and a boy's bottle against my ribs with his mother's voice going round and round in me like a splinter. I could hear the verse. I couldn't have got rid of it with a bucket.
"Whose little boy is he?" I said.
I was looking at the well. I didn't look at him. I wanted to hear it without the face.
"I don't know," said Idris.
It was as clean as a pin. I listened for tin in it, for the grain that isn't there, and I thought of an Assessor's face, and of how many faces I'd seen him lie with, and of how he'd said No about the child and gone white about something else. There wasn't a flaw in it anywhere.
I believed him. That was worse.