Idris
Six days before the audit. Morning.
"Sixteen at the table," I said, "not counting the fish."
We were going down Chandler's Hill in a thin bright wind, and the whole street was heading the same way we were: carters, dyers' girls with baskets on their hips, a man with a live goose under each arm. Everyone was bound for the Exchange to pay what they owed or to be paid what they were owed, and either way to be looked at. She walked on my left, in her creased good dress and the blue ribbon, with her hand tucked in the crook of my elbow because a wife's hand belongs there. I had held out the arm at the front door, and Sergeant Gannet had been watching, and she had taken it. That was the arrangement.
"Seventeen," said Perpetua. "You've forgotten the chaplain."
"The chaplain went home at one o'clock, with a bottle of the Governor's wine and a chill." I had thought about this in the night, with my hands flat on a blanket. "The client congratulates you on the toast. It was said in Corvane's hand and by Corvane's boy, but Corvane was not at that table. She was across the lane, if she is anywhere. So the client has eyes. Someone who sat in the Long Hall, and watched you put your hand in your cuff, and left before the cake."
"Nobody left before the cake."
"Then someone wrote the note during it."
Her left hand had stayed in her sleeve since breakfast. There was a stiffness at the cuff, small and flat and round, the size of a florin, and anyone who carries a tin of soft beeswax in her sleeve on the morning the Governor invites her to a public stair is not carrying it for the look of it. She wanted the spoon. She had wanted it since the Bank's upper floors, where she had watched the guards change with her mouth a little open and her eyes taking a plan of the building. I had let her take the plan. A hunter who means to be led to his quarry does not lock his doors.
She considered the list, chewing the inside of her lip, which she has not lost. I had not expected that: that she would keep the small habits and lose the large ones, as a house keeps its cracks after the furniture goes. I told myself it was observation. It was observation.
"The Governor," I said. "He revived the clause. He told me to taste you before the vows. He is exactly the man to want a spoon at the bottom of my wife's mind."
"He didn't leave the table, though. And Corvane's boy doesn't run to the Governor."
"Gannet."
"Gannet couldn't sit still through a hymn. He'd have told someone by the fish course." She looked down the hill. "Merrow. She'd sooner poison me with butter."
"She would sooner poison me with butter," I said, "and I ate it for two years without complaint, and now again. It is a compliment." I did not say what I thought. I thought of the woman who had kept my house since the spring, and had once kept my secrets, and had walls you could read a newspaper through.
"The dyer," I said instead. "She sat with your brother and didn't drink."
"Neither did Merrow."
"Your brother, then."
"Don't be foul."
I had said it to hear how it landed, and it landed like a stone on a lid. There was no tin in her, only heat. There are things a man does not press even when he is paid to, and one of them is another person's brother on a Quarter-Day morning. I dropped it.
"We have a list of seventeen," she said, "and the only two we can rule out are a corpse and a fish."
"That is a fair summary."
"You're enjoying this."
"I have been an Assessor for six years, Mrs Carrow. I have never once been asked to solve a crime with a suspect I was married to." The corner of her elbow moved against mine, and it was a laugh, and it was gone. "I'm not enjoying it. But I am attending."
We turned into the Exchange square.
The Exchange is a hall the size of a cathedral, open on its long side to the harbour, and on Quarter-Day the doors are propped back and the hall runs out into the square like a spilled drawer. The Penny Cellar sells days by the mark; the Exchange sells them by the lot, with a Bank clerk at every stall to note the price. Sellers waited at the counters with their caps in their hands, and as I went along the front of them the caps came off a little higher, for the spoon, and the eyes went somewhere else. I am used to it. A woman with a baby on her hip turned her face into its hair as I passed, and I did not take it personally; she was carrying a note. Brokers cried from barrels: "A christening, a christening, warm as bread, one owner." "A sea-voyage, three months, the last of a sailor's, and he's not coming back for it." The green wax was everywhere, and down the long end where the money was, the gold, glinting in the glass cases like teeth.
All of it under the Bank's eye. There is a gallery across the head of the square, on iron pillars, from which the officers watch the trading; and that morning, at its rail, in a silver waistcoat, with a cup of something hot in his hand, stood the Governor.
"Assessor!" He didn't raise his voice. He never does. It carried anyway. "And Mrs Carrow. Come up a little, would you? I like to see my officers."
There was a flight of wide steps between us and the gallery, worn hollow in the middle, and at the foot of it stood a row of the Bank's constables in blue, arms folded, watching the crowd as they were paid to. We went up as far as the third step. Below us the square had noticed. Heads turned and stalls went quiet in rings, like a pond around a dropped stone, and the whole port looked up at the man in the grey coat with the spoon on his lapel and the small dark woman on his arm.
"Sergeant Gannet reports that the Assessor keeps to his own edge of the bed," said the Governor, pleasantly. "I am not complaining. It is a cold, orderly house. But I have not seen the Assessor kiss his wife."
Somebody laughed at the back. A constable's mouth twitched.
It was well done. He had picked a moment when there was no room to refuse, and he had put the question to me in front of four hundred people as a piece of harmless teasing. If I said no, I was a husband who would not; if I said yes, I was a husband who had been caught out. I have spent six years learning to hear the sums beneath what people say, and I could hear his: whichever it was, he would watch.
I opened my mouth to say something dry.
"Well, I am his wife," said Perpetua, quite loudly, "and I'd like to see it too."
Then she took her hand off my arm, and put both of hers on my lapels, and went up on her toes.
I did not move, and I did not lean.
Her mouth was cold from the wind. It was firm and rather clumsy, which was not what I had expected, and it tasted of salt and the last of the morning's bread. I stood there with my hands at my sides, as if sat down for a portrait and told to look natural.
It was the first in four years. I had prepared for it in the dark. I had prepared for every version of it except this one, in front of a market, with her small hands closed on my coat and her eyes shut and her whole weight on her toes. There was a September evening on the harbour wall, once, when she kissed me first, to stop me apologising for something very small. She was laughing while she did it.
I could have put my hand into her hair. I could have set the other at the small of her back and drawn her up against me, in front of the port and the Governor and God, and she would not have stopped me; she was on a public stair, playing a part, and she would have played it. I know how she likes to be held, at the base of the spine, with the palm flat, as if to steady a boat. It was all there, four years of it, sitting on the tip of my hands like a note that wants to be sung. And she would have thought: he's very good at this. She would have given the credit to nineteen candidates.
I would have been kissing her as the man she had lost. And she had made me swear on my own spoon that I never would.
So I kept my hands at my sides, and let her do it as she chose to. It was the hardest piece of work I have done for the Bank.
Then her fingers went to my lapel.
Her fingers came onto the cloth, light and no longer clumsy, and then onto the pin. There is a small clasp on the back of the spoon, hooked through a loop I sewed myself, and a good thief can free it in one breath. Something warm and quick brushed the underside of my collar, and the weight at my chest was gone, and I knew with perfect clarity what she was doing, and where it was, and how long she needed.
She wanted the shape of it.
A copy of the spoon would open nothing. The lock on the Reserve's shelf-cages tastes the silver, and it tastes the hand, and a cast in pewter or lead or gold would sit in the keyhole like a tongue in a shut mouth. She would find that out for herself. I should like to be in the room when she did.
So I let her have it.
The spoon went into her sleeve, and there was the small dry press of the bowl driven into something soft: wax, no doubt, out of a tin about the size of a florin. Two seconds. Perhaps three. She was quite calm about it, and she kissed me all the while as if it were the only thing she had come for. Then the weight came back to my lapel, and the clasp closed with its own small click, and it was pinned exactly straight.
I had waited four years to be kissed by her, and I had been kissed by the Linnet, and it was the best piece of work I have ever watched. I have never been so beautifully robbed.
She took her mouth away. She stood there flat-footed on the stair with both hands on my coat, looking at the front of it, and then at me, and her face had the flush of a kissed woman and the eyes of one doing sums.
"There," she said. "Was that what you wanted?"
She said it to the Governor. She did not look up.
The crowd let out a roar. It began at the front and rolled back across the square. Somebody threw a cap. A big red woman at a fish stall began to bang her scales with a ladle. The constables were grinning openly, and one of them clapped me hard on the shoulder as if I had done something clever.
Above us, at the rail, the Governor set down his cup. He clapped, three times, with the ends of his fingers, dry as a page turned.
"Admirable," he said. "I withdraw every remark. Assessor, you may take your wife home."
I said, "Thank you, Governor," or something of the kind. Behind us on the stair, Sergeant Gannet was writing in a small black book with the tip of his tongue between his teeth.
We went out of the square by the harbour side, where the stalls thin, and up the Steps road, and nobody troubled us. I walked as if I were carrying a tray. She walked beside me with her hand in my elbow again, looking straight ahead, and neither of us said one word until the noise of the Exchange had gone down to a hum behind us.
She was the first to break it. "What will the sergeant put in his little book?"
"That the Assessor stood like a gatepost and turned a remarkable colour."
"Did you?"
"I have no means of checking. I was looking at the sky." I had been looking at the inside of my own eyelids. "He will write that I was overcome. It is what the Governor wants written, and it is very nearly accurate."
"You didn't move," she said.
"No."
"You let me."
"You had the Governor to satisfy." I said it steadily. "I judged that you would rather do it your own way."
"I would." She was watching a gull on the wall. Her voice was a shade too even. "Your heart was going like a carter's drum."
"I am told it is what the Governor came to see."
"Is that a thing an Assessor can do to order?"
"No," I said.
She took that in, a step at a time, and I watched her set it somewhere and close the lid. "Well," she said. "The crowd liked it. Thank you."
I did not ask what for. I had a fair idea. I had been robbed of a pin's worth of my own silver in front of four hundred people, and she was thanking me for standing still.
The wind had dropped. The sun had come out onto the Steps road, bright on the wet, and everything was too clear, as after a fever. She had a smear of something on her cheek, from the market. Her ribbon had come half undone. I noticed, and I noticed that I noticed.
"You pick a pocket," I said, "the way you used to pick—"
I stopped.
It had been coming out of me quite naturally, like a stone rolling downhill, and then I heard the last two words in it, and shut my mouth over the rest like a hand. Used to. There is a whole dictionary of ways to be foolish in front of someone who has forgotten you, and I had just found a new one.
She had stopped, too.
We were on the steps below the Row, where the road climbs in flights from the harbour, and she had let go of my arm, and turned, and stood two steps below me so that our eyes were level. The wind moved the loose end of the ribbon. She was quite pale. She did not look angry. She looked like someone who has felt a tooth move.
"Used to what?" said Perpetua, very quietly.
The steps were empty. Somewhere below a bell was ringing the half hour, and neither of us counted it. I could hear the ribbon move. Below us the harbour lay open and bright, and along its edge, small at this distance, a row of lamps stood unlit in the day. I counted them from habit. The fourth, of course, was leaning.
I could taste the answer. I could feel every word of it in my mouth, in the right order, ready.
She waited. I could not say one syllable of it.