Perpetua
One day before the audit. Morning.
The Guild's ship came alongside the Bank quay with her canvas still half furled, and every porter in Vessel went for a trunk. It is the one work in the port that doesn't ask what you've sold.
I went for one with them, in a porter's shawl that is grey and thick as a horse blanket and comes down over the brow, because a woman under it with a rope across her shoulder is furniture. Beside me, in a smock two sizes too small for his shoulders, Sergeant Gannet carried a hatbox as if it might go off.
"Ma'am," he said out of the side of his mouth, "they're all looking at me."
"They're looking at the hatbox, so carry it as if you're paid by the piece."
The Bank had turned out for the occasion. Tellers in green stood along the quay in order of height. In front of them all, silver-headed and smiling, Governor Harrowgate stood at the foot of the gangway with his hand out to a woman coming down it.
She was tall, fifty-odd, in a black gown as plain as a lawyer's, with a white band at the throat and grey hair cut short as a boy's. She took the hand as though it were a receipt.
"Auditor," said the Governor. "The Bank is honoured."
"The Bank is expensive," said Cassia Lorn. "I've read the harbour dues." She looked past him, along the quay, at the carriage with the Bank's arms on the door. "I'll walk. The Guild keeps a house at the end of the quay, and the Guild's trunks will be carried by people the Guild has hired, so that the Guild knows where they are."
I had a trunk on my shoulder by then. I hadn't been hired. Nobody counted.
The Governor bowed, and said that tonight's gala would be a small welcome, and Lorn said she was sure it would be very large. He went off to his carriage without a glance at the porters. That's what a porter's shawl is for.
The procession went the length of the quay, the wardens in front in their undyed wool, the porters behind. I fell in a pace behind her shoulder. She didn't turn her head.
"You are carrying that on the wrong side," Lorn said. "A porter takes the load on the side he doesn't write with. You write with your left."
I moved the trunk to my right shoulder, and she went on as though nothing had happened.
"They read me a warrant on the gangway," she said, still to the road ahead. "A Bank courtesy. A Perpetua Vane, calling herself Bess Tolley, the wife of the Assessor, and the Linnet. I'm told she is small, quick, and dark, and wears something blue about her." A pause. "I would put that ribbon out of sight."
I unwound it from my wrist and pushed it up my sleeve and kept my hand over the place where it lay, which is not what a porter does with her hands either.
"Speak as you walk," Lorn said. "Say only what's true. I would hate to waste the breath."
So I did what I'm good at, which is choosing, and I chose everything, because there was nothing left to hide behind. I told her the Governor sold love cut out of the Bank's Reserve, sealed in violet, poured into two men's wine until they were ruined, and one of them was the last harbourmaster. I told her the Reserve had cut my summer up that way. I told her the Assessor had written to her four days ago. I told her he was in a cell under the Reliquary with a drawing fixed for the morning, and that the Governor kept his true books not on paper but as a memory, drawn out of his own head, in a bottle behind a door my father built. Tobin had it from Hesper's own boasting, and he'd handed it over at dawn with the rest of his confession. And I told her the boy I'd carried out of the Reserve was a dyer's son, drunk by his mother in her own yard, and that whatever else she'd done, the boy was hers. I said that last part twice, and I don't know who I was saying it for.
It took the length of the quay, and she said nothing the whole way, and I could feel her tasting it as you feel a draught from a door somebody has left open behind you.
"I have had no letter from Vessel in three weeks," Lorn said at last. "I put it down to weather."
"The packet office is a Bank office."
"So I am learning." She stopped at the steps of a plain grey house with a Guild spoon over the door, and I set the trunk down, and she turned to me for the first time. She had eyes like the underside of a slate. "Everything you have said tastes true. Either you believe it entirely, or you are better than any liar I have met, and I have met a Governor."
"Then—"
"Then I have a thief's account, honestly given, of a Governor's private shelf." She let that sit. "The Guild audits what the Bank lays before it. It may open what the Bank keeps back only on the Bank's leave or on proof tasted in the open. My proof is a woman with a warrant on her, and if I open a Governor's shelf on her word, I lose this port for a generation. My tasters are aboard, by the way. The harbourmaster has found that their papers need reading. I am told it will take him until tomorrow's tide."
"So you won't."
I took the violet bottle out from under my shawl and held it on my palm, and said that it was Reserve graft, cut from my own summer, and she didn't touch it. "A graft proves someone cut a love. It doesn't say who." She closed my fingers over it with her own. "I will do exactly one thing, and it is what the Guild was made to do." She took my other hand and turned it palm up, and put something in it. "Bring me something I can taste."
A disc of white bone, the size of a wedding ring, with a spoon cut into it. It was warm from her pocket.
"The Bank gives its gala tonight. The Auditor may bring guests to the great doors, and the Bank may not turn them out in my sight. Inside that door you are my guest, not the Bank's." She went up her own steps. "Outside it you are whatever the warrant says. I would not be outside it."
The door shut behind her, and Gannet arrived a moment later with his hatbox, sweating through the smock.
"What's that in your hand?"
"Getting through the door," I said. "That's all it is. The rest is mine."
Mrs Merrow's sister lived in a house so like Merrow's that I kept looking for the vinegar. By eleven o'clock it had five people at the kitchen table and one loaf, and none of us had eaten.
Tobin wanted to go in alone. "Give me to the Governor. Walk me in the front and say here's the boy, and while every eye in that hall is on me, you go down the back way."
"You'd be forty-one memories lighter by dawn and call it a bargain."
"I'd call it the first sensible thing I've done since March." He looked at his blue hands. "I've not got anything else to give."
"You've got a pair of arms and the ability to stand where I put you." It came out harder than I'd meant, and I put my hand over his. "I'll tell you where."
Sergeant Gannet sat in his shirt, enormous and freckled and wretched, turning his mug round on the table. "The ward's paid out of the Reserve, ma'am. If it all comes down, who feeds my mother? She eats if you put the spoon in her hand, and not otherwise. I'll run the cage. I'd only like somebody to tell me it'll be all right, and I know nobody can."
I don't make promises I can't pay. "There's a woman on the quay with a Guild band round her neck who's been sent to look at exactly what feeds your mother. If she looks, there's a chance. And I'll be standing next to her when she does."
"That's not a promise."
"No. It's the odds."
"I've had worse odds from the Bank," said Gannet, and drank his tea.
Mrs Merrow wanted nothing for herself, and said so, stirring with her back to us. "I'll carry what you like up what stair you like, and tell the Governor's steward any lie you want. But if the choice is between your plan and that man in his cell, I choose him. I want that understood at this table."
"It's understood."
"Good. Now eat."
I gave them the plan in three sentences, which was all it had: a front door for me, a back stair for the woman with the cakes, a lift for the sergeant and a boy to stand where I told him. Nobody asked how I'd get from the top of it to the bottom.
Master Esk was standing on a chair in the Penny Cellar with a hammer, hanging his licence on its nail, when I came in. He got down the way a man gets off a horse he doesn't trust.
The Cellar was shut. It was the slack of the afternoon, and the benches were full of people who hadn't come to sell. There were about forty of them, a cooper, a widow who'd sold her wedding, a girl of sixteen with a baby in her lap and her hair scraped back so I could see her scars. They gave me the flat, patient look of people who've been told to wait so often that waiting has got a shape.
"They don't know who you are," said Esk. "I told them you were a friend of the Cellar."
"I am."
"You're the Linnet." He said it under his breath, and nobody flinched. "I've known since the Widow Carrick came in crying, the day after her boy's birthday turned up in her head again. I'm not asking. That's all." He rubbed his hands on his apron. "Gallery tonight, is it? Open to depositors on Audit Eve, by charter, and there's not a soul on Tallow Lane owns a good enough coat."
"Sunday coats," I said. "Everyone who has one."
"They'll want to know what for."
I stood on his bench and told them. Not the plan. Only that tonight the Auditor would be at the Bank, and the Governor had been selling their days for years, and that when a woman crossed the floor of the great hall, they were to be the loudest thing in it.
The cooper put his hand up like a boy at school. "And after?"
"After, I'll give you the Linnet's list."
That got a murmur. They all knew there was one.
"Everyone who sold a day because they had no choice," I said, "and who's got a bottle on a shelf that ought to be in their own head. If the Bank falls tomorrow, I'll not stop at the names I've got, and I'll do it by the law, with a Guild seal on it, till you've all got your days back. I can't promise the day. I can promise the trying, and my own name on it." I stopped. "My real name. It's Perpetua Vane."
Nobody said anything, and the girl with the baby stared at me as though I'd offered her a fortune and she was wondering about the interest.
"We'll be there," Esk said. "In our coats. We'll be very loud." His voice cracked. "I've paid fourteen marks to a great many people for their good days, and I never once was asked for mine. I'd like to be asked."
"I'm asking."
"Somebody had better tell the widow to bring the baby's whistle."
I went to the Blue Stair alone, in the last of the afternoon, because there was one more thing I needed to know about the Proprietor's door.
Tobin hadn't wanted me to. I'd put a hand on his chest and said, "You stay," and he'd stayed, looking exactly as he had at nine, when I'd told him he couldn't come fishing with the big boys. It ought to have felt like winning.
Hesper's yard gate was open and the vats were going, and she was at the big one with the pole, working the cloth under and humming the tune, only the tune, until I stood in the doorway and she broke off and put the pole against the rim.
"You've come about the tide," she said, not turning round. "There's room on it for two."
"I've come to say I'm not taking it."
"No. I didn't think you would." She wiped her hands down her apron, one and then the other, and looked at me. She had thinned in two days, and it showed in her hands, where the iron ring on her middle finger, a plain worn band I'd taken for a widow's, had slid down to the knuckle and turned there.
"Hesper. The Proprietor's door. Does it take what my father said it takes?"
She didn't answer at once. "Tobin told you."
"Tobin told me a great deal."
"I expect he did." She went to the table, the one under the window, and sat on the bench and folded her blue hands. "I'll not stop you, girl. I've stopped nothing yet. I've only made things happen and watched them go." She looked at the table. "But I'll not have you walk up to that door blind. It's the last thing I've got that doesn't cost him."
I sat down opposite her.
"It takes the dearest thing you carry," Hesper said. "Not a little bit. The dearest. And it weighs, girl. It doesn't love. It doesn't care which memory's the one you'd die for. It reads the price, like the Bank, and takes whichever one is worth the most." Her eyes went to my ribs, where the bottle lay under my stays, where it had lain since the loft, and stayed there. "The Governor told me so himself, the night he was proudest of it. He goes through with his pockets empty, mostly, and a crumb of a day comes out of him each time, and he never notices. The once a year he carries his book, it goes through untouched: a night of a man writing figures fetches nothing on any market, and the door takes the dearest, not the nearest. You can't go through it empty. You've something on you now that weighs a house."
I put my hand flat on the bottle.
"That's all I'm giving you." She almost smiled. "It's more than I gave your brother."
I stood up. I'd come for a rule and a ring, and I had the rule.
"Come here," said Hesper.
She got up too, and put her arms round me, all of her, broad as a wardrobe and smelling of indigo and wet wool, and held on. I'd been held by her twice. She didn't say anything, with her chin on the top of my head, and she rocked me a little, so exactly as a mother does that I had to shut my eyes.
I took the ring off her finger while she held me.
It wasn't hard, because it had come loose already: one hand round her back, and a thumb and finger closing over the iron as I let her go, so lightly that the band came off in my palm and went up my sleeve. That was the second half of what Tobin had given me at dawn, the other thing Hesper had boasted of: her own ring lifts her wax clean, and no other hand does. A thief's trick, and a poor one, because it works on anyone who's grieving. I had never used it on someone I loved.
"Go on," Hesper said, and let go. "Go and rob my Governor."
"You'll be in the hall at midnight."
"I'm paid to be." She took up the pole again. "I'll be in my hood. Nobody sees a sealer's face. Go on, girl."
I went down the Stair. At the bottom I turned, and she was in the doorway of the shed with her sleeves pushed up, looking after me, and one hand was closing and opening on the place where the ring should have been.
Merrow re-cut the wedding dress at her sister's table, with pins in her mouth and the good scissors, while I stood on a stool in my shift in the last of the daylight and let her, and she didn't ask why. She took in the waist, because I'd got thinner, and let out the sleeves for the room a thief needs in her shoulders, and stitched a deep pocket into the seam of the skirt, big enough for a pewter spoon and a Guild token and, if it came to it, a stolen ledger.
The spoon lay on the table by her elbow, made from my father's tools and my wax impression and four hours' filing, and it couldn't turn a lock but it could go on a lapel.
"He'll hate it," I said. "It's a fraud."
"It's a spoon." Merrow spat out two pins. "He'll wear it if you pin it."
"He may say no."
"He may."
I looked down at the top of her grey head, and my mouth said the thing before I'd decided to. "I don't know what he was to me. I mean I know the shape. I can't tell you what he was."
She sewed one seam without a word. Then she took the pins out of her mouth, one at a time, and set them in a row on the table, and looked up at me. She had pale eyes, very sharp.
"He waited," said Mrs Merrow. "Four years, he waited, and he never once said your name in my kitchen. That's what he was." She picked up the pins again. "Now hold your arm out."
I held it out.
At six she took her shawl off the hook, because the Bank's kitchens had sent for her to see about the almond cakes, twelve dozen of the Governor's favourite, and she meant to be seen fussing over them. "I'll be an hour," she said, and took a basket.
She was fifty minutes. I was in the dress, with my hair up, and Tobin and Gannet were pretending not to look at me, when the back door banged and she came in with the basket empty and her face the colour of her apron.
"They've put a new line on the evening's order," she said. She put the basket down. Her red hands were shaking. "I read it over the steward's shoulder. 'The Assessor Carrow is to be presented to the Auditor. In irons.'"