Idris
Nine days before the audit. Dusk.
I knew her from the foot of the Cellar steps. I would like to say it took longer, that an Assessor's training got in the way of a man's eyes, but it did not. She was sitting on the sellers' bench with her shoulders rounded and her mouth a little open, dull as a shut shop, which was the thing she used to do when the vault clerks came round to check her work. I had to put my hand flat on the stair rail to keep from saying her name.
Perpetua. Perpetua Vane. It tasted of nothing, because it was true.
Everything I said to her afterwards was true as well, which is the only reason I got out of that cellar standing up.
I sent the constables back to the watch-house by the harbour road and took the hill alone. It was the long way to the Reliquary, and I wanted the length of it. The lamplighters coming down Tallow Lane with their poles touched their caps to the spoon on my lapel and not to me. That is the usual arrangement. Tonight I minded my right hand, which had been behind her ear an hour before and did not seem to have come back from there.
Twenty-two needle scars, I had told her, and that was true. I had not mentioned the other. Below the row, where the hair grows soft at the nape, there is a longer mark, raised and pale, that no cellar needle makes. The Bank infirmary's draw-room makes it, when it trims a whole person out of a stretch of someone's days and sells the stretch as one lot, one number on the Bank's books. I had sat on a bench outside that room for three hours, four years ago. This afternoon my fingers had found the mark before my head gave them leave, and stayed on it, and she had noticed. She never in her life let a pin sit wrong in a lock.
She had not bitten her thumb. That was the only thing about her that was new. That summer she had bitten the side of it whenever a tumbler stuck. Today she had sat with both hands open on her knees while I read the price of her like a shelf label, and I had thought, of all the things a man might think with a warrant in his pocket: she has stopped biting her thumb. Who stopped her?
I did not turn round at the corner of Hook Street. I will set that down to my credit, since there was not much else to set there by the end of the night.
She serviced her father's old locks on the Bank's fourth level that summer, the doors of the Sealed Reserve, where the Bank keeps the shelves it leaves off its own books. The Bank sent a junior Assessor to sit on a crate and watch her hands in case they took anything. I was the junior Assessor. Her hands took nothing. They took three weeks to make the great door run sweet, and she swore at a loose pin in a whisper and talked to a stiff one as if it were a horse. Halfway through she left a list on my crate, headed Things the Assessor Pretends Not to Watch.
Two pictures are all I let myself keep out.
The first is the harbour wall at the end of August, with wind off the water hard enough to take a hat. The fourth lamp was out, as it usually was, and therefore ours. Her brother Tobin, fifteen, fished off the stones below with a line he never baited. She had a lease for two rooms over a chandler's, and she flattened it against the lamp's iron foot with both hands and asked me to read it first. I said, "I'll sign anything you put in front of me." It was the most foolish thing I have ever said aloud, and the truest, and she laughed until she had to hold on to the post. In September, at the same lamp, I asked her the other question, and she said yes before I had finished. To save time, she said.
The second is Mrs Merrow's back room on Cordwain Street, the night before the trimming. The boy had taken the grey fever in October. The Bank's cure cost nine hundred marks. I had six hundred, every mark I had put by since I climbed out of the Cellars, and she would not take them; nor would she let me pledge my own days against the rest, which an Assessor may not do and keep his spoon. So she sold the one thing she owned that would fetch nine hundred. She sold the summer. She sold me.
She held my spoon herself, bowl up, as if it might spill, and made me swear on it. That I would never tell her what she had sold. That I would never court her as the man she had lost. If she knew, she said, she would spend her life and the boy's money trying to buy it back, and she would not have me loving a stranger out of duty. I swore both. An oath on the spoon binds by charter: break it, and the spoon goes. Through the wall, Mrs Merrow banged her pans at eleven, as a kindness.
The boy lived. At the Bank's sealed auction the next month I bid my six hundred for her summer and lost it to a Reserve account. I went home. I have not bid on anything since.
There was a great deal more of that summer, and none of it was mine to tell her, and not only because of the oath. If I told her what she had sold, the sale would be void. The nine hundred would fall due at once, and the Bank collects its large debts with the needle, from her or from the boy.
The letter came eleven weeks ago.
It came by a courier who would not step inside and would not give a name. It was in her hand: the forward lean, the long tails, the crossbars struck hard enough to cancel what they crossed. The letter said: You told me once what you would do with anything I put in front of you. I'm putting this in front of you now. Sign it and send it back with the one who brought it. Don't come looking for me. I'll be in front of you soon enough. A blank marriage licence was folded inside.
I have tasted ten thousand inks. I did not taste hers. It would have been tasting her, and she had not offered. I believed (I believed it still, going up that hill) that she had written it before the needle and left it with someone to send if she ever came to need me. I signed the licence and gave it to the courier. The letter went into the inside pocket of my coat, where it has been ever since, against my ribs, like a wage I had not earned.
The Governor had been counting my refusals aloud since the spring: nineteen women of good family in a year, each sent away with the same courteous sentence. After the letter I sent them away with a lighter heart, because I was waiting.
So in the Cellar I had asked her, "Have we met?" I asked it to learn whether the letter was hers: whether she knew me and was playing a part for reasons of her own. She said, "I'd remember," and I waited for the tin. A lie spoken near an Assessor tastes of tin; it is most of what the Bank pays us for. There was none. She did not know me from the next man with a warrant. It followed that whoever had kept her letter four years had sent it without her knowledge; and I could not think who, or why now.
And the Linnet. I had hunted the Linnet for two years across every shelf the Bank owns: a thief who took only the bottles somebody had loved. I had told her to her face that I was looking for a woman with a list. She gave me back a sentence as clean as a key cut for one lock, and it tasted true, and I stood there with the Bank's warrant in one pocket and her letter in the other.
The Bank draws its thieves blank: every day they have, and they are left breathing in the quiet ward, on the Assessor's oath. I had let her walk out of a raided cellar. That is the second-worst thing an Assessor can do. The worst would have been to take her.
At the top of the hill the Governor's runner found me, out of breath and apologetic, and I went in by the officers' door. The Reliquary at night is cold enough to keep meat and quiet enough to hear the lamps drink their oil. The Governor's clerk was waiting at the top of the long stair with the face of a man whose master has been kept waiting.
Governor Harrowgate stood when I came in, which he does for everyone, and which means nothing. He is sixty and silver and entirely courteous, and his office smells of beeswax and money. On his desk, squared to the edge, lay a marriage licence on Bank vellum.
"Assessor. Sit. You'll want to." He turned the licence round with one finger so that it faced me. "The banns went up on the chapel door at six. You're married at noon tomorrow."
I did not sit. I looked at the licence. My own name, in my own hand, dated eleven weeks back. On the line beside it, where for eleven weeks there had been nothing, was a name I had never seen written: Bess Tolley.
The hand was hers, fast and forward, the hand she kept her lists in. She had pressed so hard that the nib had gone through the vellum, and I could have put a fingertip in the hole. She used to do that when she was angry and had decided to do the thing anyway.
"A Miss Bess Tolley, of Tallow Lane," the Governor said. "The broker Corvane brought it to the chapel registry an hour ago, signed and witnessed. I don't ask how brokers come by their paper, Carrow. I'm merely relieved." He smiled a little. "You were down in the Penny Cellar today, I think."
"I was."
"And found nothing for the Bank."
"Nothing I could bring you, Governor."
He let that go by. He is not a taster. He has other ways of weighing a man, and he weighed me and put me back on the shelf. "Do you know her?"
"I met her this afternoon," I said, "in the Penny Cellar."
"Then you've a whole night to become acquainted, which is more than my father was given." He passed the licence to his clerk to be copied. "The clause is satisfied. The Assessor's household is whole by the audit, and the Guild's Auditor will find nothing to write down about us. I confess I'd begun to think you would rather lose the spoon."
"I had not thought the clause was written with me in mind."
"The charter is not a suggestion, Assessor." He said it kindly. He says everything kindly.
So the licence I had given to a nameless courier had come home by way of Madam Corvane, who brokers what cannot go through the Bank, with Perpetua's own hand on it under the name she sells by. Corvane had a client, then, and the client had hired a thief to marry the one man in the port whose household may go down to the fourth level.
The clerk brought the copy back, sanded, and the Governor handed it to me as if it were a present. I took it. It would have been a lie to refuse.
Chalice Row is a street of narrow houses built for clerks who were expected to stay thin. Mrs Merrow had left the kitchen lamp in the window. When I let myself in she was at the stove with her sleeves pushed up and her hands red from the lye. On the airing rail by the fire, beside my shirts, hung a second pillow in a fresh case.
"The banns bell," she said, without turning round. "The whole Row heard it at six. I've done the bed."
I put the copy of the licence on the kitchen table, because I did not know what else to do with it. She came over wiping her hands and looked down at the bride's line.
She went still. The wooden spoon in her hand dripped on the boards. She let it. She had seen that hand on enough notes left on her kitchen table. She read two words three times, and then she folded the copy in half, writing inward, set it on the dresser behind the salt box, and went back to the stove.
The Bank's house office had sent Mrs Merrow to keep my house this spring, unasked. I was too glad to see her to ask why. I had lodged with her on Cordwain Street from the winter her son Kit died in the town fever house until the autumn Perpetua sold, and I had not expected to eat her cooking again.
"Eat," she said, and put a bowl in front of me: mutton, barley, and a crust with the butter already on it, because she has never trusted me to butter my own.
I picked up my spoon. I could not do it. I put it down, and she took the bowl away without a word, and that was the kindest thing anyone did for me all day.
I did not go up. I stood at the parlour window with the lamp out and looked over the roofs to the harbour wall and its row of lamps. I counted along them, as I have every night for four years. The fourth was out. It usually is.
Four years I had kept both halves of that oath. I had not gone looking, not once. And tomorrow at noon the Bank would stand me up in its own chapel and give her to me as a stranger. I would be allowed near her at last on condition that I never let her see why I wanted to be.
I could still feel the scar under my two fingers. It was as if my hand had decided to stay behind in the Cellar and let the rest of me walk up the hill without it.
The Governor had said one more thing as I reached his door, with his eyes already on the next paper. I had carried it home in the same coat as her letter.
"And, Carrow. The Bank will want the Assessor's wife assessed. Taste her before the vows."