Perpetua
Seven days before the audit. Morning.
I woke with my hand shut on a bottle and my cheek on the wall, and for about a second I was nobody's wife and it was a perfectly good morning.
The other half of the bed was empty. The blanket lay over it flat and square, tucked at the corners, as though the man who'd been in it had been folded up and put away. Down on the window chair sat the good coat with its little silver spoon, and beside the coat, his boots. I looked at the boots until I'd worked out that he was downstairs in his stockinged feet, being quiet, for the sergeant's sake. Or mine.
Seven days. I said it once, to the ceiling, and the ceiling took it without comment.
Good evening, Linnet. He'd said it like a card he'd been holding for two years. I'd lain awake half the night with the lockpick under my pillow and the violet bottle in my fist, working out how he'd got from a cellar bench to my name, and every road came out at the same place: he was clever, he'd been patient, and he had not arrested me. That last part wouldn't add up. Someone who lets you keep the knife wants something. I'd worked out a dozen things he might want, and I could have handled every one.
I put the bottle back in my stocking. The door creaked when I opened it. Gannet, on his chair at the stairfoot, jumped up and stood to attention as if I were a general.
The kitchen was at the back, down four steps, and it smelled of vinegar.
Mrs Merrow was scrubbing the table. She had a bucket at her feet and a brush in her fist and a bottle of the sharp brown stuff at her elbow, and her sleeves were rolled to the shoulder, showing arms as red as boiled ham. The whole board was wet, and the grain stood up in it like a plough-field. She didn't stop when I came in. She did, however, point the brush at a chair.
"Sit."
I sat. On the other side of the table, at the far end, the Assessor was reading a ledger with his elbow in a puddle. He looked up when I came in. His face did something small and civilised, a man greeting his wife, and his eyes went to my hair, the ribbon still tied in it, and away.
"Good morning, my dear," he said.
He said it beautifully. I've heard men say my dear to their wives across a hundred kitchens and it's never once sounded like anything but a receipt.
"Husband," I said.
A plate arrived in front of me. It had two eggs on it, and a heel of bread, and a rasher, and a yellow slab on the side that could only be one thing, and Mrs Merrow put a knife by it as if she were laying down a sentence.
"Eat. Butter's not a sin."
"I'm not—"
"You're thin." She'd turned round to say it, and now she looked at me. Not the quick sweep a housekeeper gives a new mistress. She studied me hard, with those pale sharp eyes, and her red hands went still on the brush. It was the look you'd give a headstone in a strange churchyard, if the name on it were wrong and you couldn't say how you knew. Then she blinked, and turned back to the bucket. "That's all. You're thin."
Gannet had come in behind me and sat himself at the corner, and a bowl had already appeared in front of him, as bowls do around anyone who is always about to be hungry. Mrs Merrow was ladling porridge into it without looking.
I ate an egg. It was the best egg I'd had in a year.
Merrow finished the table, and wrung her brush, and began to sing.
I don't think she knew she was doing it. She had her back to us, the brush going in circles on the last damp corner, and the tune came out low and a bit flat, worn in like a step. Everybody in Vessel knows it. It's what the lighters sing coming in on the tide, what nursemaids hum to fretful children. She sang it through once, all four lines, and the sound of it was so plain and so tired that the sergeant put his spoon down.
Lamplighter, lamplighter, up the long stair, Light me a candle for those who aren't there. Light one for the sailor and one for the sea, And one for the dark, that it won't frighten me.
She stopped, with the brush in the air.
"Everybody knows the first verse," she said, to the wall. "Nobody knows the second any more."
Nobody answered her. She dipped the brush and went back to the corner, and I found the Assessor watching her over the top of his ledger, careful and rather tender. She'd sung that to him before. She'd sung it to somebody.
Then she rinsed her hands, dried them on her apron, and sat down at the other end of the board with a sheet of paper and a pen. She squared the sheet, wet the nib, and wrote, in a good round schoolroom hand, a heading I could read upside down: To the Bank's House Office. Weekly.
She saw me reading, and didn't cover it.
"It's what I'm paid for," said Mrs Merrow. "The Bank likes to know its houses are kept. What's eaten. What wants mending. They send a boy on Saturdays." She dipped. "There's no harm in it. I write it where the master can see."
"How long have you kept his house?" I said.
"The Bank sent me to him in the spring."
That was all. She bent to her paper, and her pen scratched, and I ate my bread with the ordinary feeling of having been told a fact and not the whole of it. The house had a Bank sergeant in the hall and a Bank pen at the table. I'd married into a place where the walls filed reports.
"Mrs Carrow takes it to the crust," said the Assessor.
I looked up. He'd put down the ledger and taken the loaf, and he had a knife, and he was buttering me another slice: slowly, with his head bent, spreading right to the edges, not leaving a corner bare. He wasn't looking at me. He was doing it for the sergeant. It was very well done. I watched his hands.
They were long, and ink-stained at the second knuckle, and there was a little white scar at the root of the left thumb like a stitch. They were steady. They'd been on my neck two days ago, reading the price of me off a row of scars, and last night they'd lain on a blanket for a quarter of an hour, an inch from my hair, as if somebody had tied them there. I had lain in the dark and noticed every second of it.
He put the bread on my plate and slid the plate an inch nearer.
"Thank you," I said.
"Not at all."
I bit into it, furious. The bread was warm and the butter was salt, and I was angry that I'd been watching, and angrier that I'd noticed the scar, and angriest of all with whoever had put a man in front of me whose hands did that. There wasn't a violet bottle in the house that could be blamed for it. It was just my own eyes, working for nobody.
I finished the slice.
The Bank in daylight is all brass and echo, and a lot of it is for show. The Assessor walked me through it at ten o'clock as if walking his wife through a garden.
"That's the tellers' gallery," he said, at the top of the great stair, with his mouth near my ear and his arm held out for me to take. I took it. It was what a wife would do. "I'm told it smells of ink. You needn't go in."
It did smell of ink. I'd never told him I minded. He'd said it for the two clerks who were watching, and their faces softened, and one of them dropped his eyes to the ledger, flushed, as if he'd seen something private. I was privately impressed. The man could lie so as to make a room feel sorry for him. I'd been doing this for years, and he made me look like an amateur at a fair.
"You needn't have," I said.
"On the contrary." He inclined his head to a passing teller, who touched his forehead to the spoon. "You have been wanting to see it since yesterday, and you were too proud to ask. Mind the step."
There was no step. Every teller in the gallery smiled.
We went along the upper floors. I'd been in the Bank's public hall a hundred times and in the rest of it not once, and I went through it on the Assessor's arm with my eyes wide, gaping like a wife, and taking everything. Second floor: a corridor of officers' doors with brass numbers. Third floor, back of the house: a landing with an iron gate across it, twelve feet high, and behind the gate a shaft with a chain in it as thick as my arm.
"The drop-cage," said the Assessor, in the tone of someone showing off a wine cellar. "The Bank's own. A rope and a counterweight, from the tellers' floor down to the vaults. It goes to level four in a minute and forty seconds, and I regret to say I've timed it."
"Why would you time it?"
"Because I'm fond of it." He held my eye. "It's the only fast thing in the building."
It was a good line. He said it for a guard who'd stopped chatting to listen. I looked into the shaft and counted: a lock on the gate, plain and a bad make; a bolt on the cage door; a bell-pull at the side, for the lift-man below. I counted the guards, four in all, and where they stood. When the bells went, at the quarter, the two at the landing swapped places and looked at their watches, and I marked how long it took them, which was long enough for someone who'd never been taught to hurry.
He walked me back to the great stair and we were halfway down it when the Governor came up it. Silver head, silver waistcoat, hands folded behind him as if he were inspecting a regiment.
"Assessor. Mrs Carrow." He smiled, and I could feel it not going up past his cheekbones. "You are showing your wife the house."
"She wanted to see it, Governor."
"I am delighted to see you so attentive." His eyes went to the Assessor's arm, where my hand was, and to his other hand, which had come across, not touching, to shield mine from a swinging door. "Nineteen women of family, and it took a seller to teach you manners. You'll come to the Exchange tomorrow, both of you. It's Quarter-Day. The port likes to see its Assessor with something he wants to protect."
"We shall be there."
"Do bring your wife," said the Governor, "to the steps."
He passed us, and went on up, and the smile went with him. I breathed out through my nose, like a kettle going off the boil.
"He's noted it," said the Assessor, too quietly for the guard. "And he's testing it. The Exchange is where the whole port comes on Quarter-Day, and where he can see us. Whatever he wants to see, he will not be satisfied by tea."
"What does he want to see?"
"A husband," said Idris Carrow, "who cannot keep his hands off you."
I stared. He didn't smile, and his ears had gone red to the rims.
"I said cannot," he added. "I'm not offering."
"You've such a way with words."
"I'm told it's my only charm."
He took me down the rest of the stair and out through the great doors into a day like a wet plate, and left me on the step with the excuse that the Governor's clerk had an inventory that wanted his eye. "Go home," he said. "Gannet will find you. Don't get lost." And to the doorman, for the doorman's benefit: "Mrs Carrow is my wife. If she wants anything, she's to have it." He held my eye a moment too long. Then he went back in.
I walked home. It was only down the hill.
The black carriage was at the corner of Chalice Row, where it turns into Hook Street, standing across the road with its door open and its step let down. I'd been half expecting it since breakfast. I looked both ways, and there was nobody, only a milk-girl at the far end with a yoke, and a gull on a gatepost, and I got in.
"You look well," said Madam Corvane.
"I've been fed."
"So I see." She had the rug over her knees again and her gloved hands folded on it. "You were seen yesterday at your own wedding breakfast, and I'm told it went off very prettily. I'm told you were charming." She let the word sit. "Is he dosed?"
"Yes."
I said it at once, plain, with no true thing standing behind it. It was the first outright lie I'd told Corvane, and it went out of me as easy as breathing. I didn't even turn my head. Corvane isn't a taster. She can't hear tin. All she has is her eye, and I kept my own on her face and kept my mouth soft, and thought about soup.
"Say it again."
"He's dosed. He was mine before the cake was cut."
She looked at me for the length of a breath. "My client will know if you lie."
"Then you'll tell your client I said yes."
"I shall." She rapped the roof, and the driver began to pick up the reins. "The audit is in seven days, Perpetua. I'd advise you to have a road down by then."
"I've a plan," I said.
"I'm sure you have," said Madam Corvane. "That's why we hired you."
I got out at the corner. The carriage went down the hill without another word. I stood there with my heart going, and rubbed my palms on my skirt, and tried to look like someone who'd been to the bakery.
I had a plan. I'd begun to lay it while I stood on the stair with my hand in his elbow, watching the guards trade places, and it had gone on laying itself down the whole walk home.
The spoon was the key. There was no other way to say it. A thing that opens the lock of level four is a thing you can't lift and can't copy, unless you have its shape. Wax would do that. I always keep a tin in my sleeve, a flat tin the size of a florin, of soft beeswax gone tacky from carrying, made for taking a pin's shape through a keyhole. A spoon is not a pin. But a lapel is not a keyhole either. All I'd need was his lapel in my fingers and the wax under my palm for a count of three.
And the Governor had just handed me the way to do it. The port likes to see a husband who cannot keep his hands off you. A husband who can't keep his hands off his wife doesn't look at where hers are.
I'd have to kiss him.
I said it once, in my head, in the street, quite calmly, as I'd have said I'll have to pick the lock on the coal-hole. It was a job. It had a price, and I'd know afterwards what it had been like. I went on up the Row.
Night, and the lamp low. Merrow had cleared the plates; Gannet had gone off to his chair in the hall with a heel of the cake; the Assessor sat at the end of the table with a candle and a page of figures he wasn't reading. I sat across from him with my chin in my hand.
Neither of us said anything. It was a comfortable silence, and I distrusted it.
There was a knock on the back door. Not loud. Two knocks, and then a third, and Merrow was there before any of us, drying her hands, opening it with the chain still on. A boy stood in the light of the step. He was a small boy in a black jacket, with a runny nose and a folded paper, and I knew him by sight. I'd seen him trot behind Corvane's carriage for three years. He held the paper out through the gap to the housekeeper, and said "For the bride," and was gone before she could tip him.
Merrow held it out to me between two red fingers, as if it might be damp.
I opened it. There were only two lines, in Corvane's small square hand, and I read them out under my breath so that the man across the table could hear.
The note said: The client congratulates you on the toast. Next time, pour.