Perpetua
Six days before the audit. Afternoon.
I stood two steps below him on the Steps road with my ribbon coming down in the wind and waited for him to say it was nothing.
A figure of speech. A slip. The way you used to pick— what? He could have put any noun in the world on the end of it, and I'd have let him, and been grateful. I'd have priced it at a fair lie and gone home.
He didn't say a word. He stood there, the tallest man on the hill, with his mouth shut on whatever it was, and I could see him holding it. His hands were at his sides. There was nothing in his face at all, and that was what told me, because I have seen that face before, on myself, in the glass over Esk's ledge on the days I sold something I minded.
"Can't or won't?" I said.
"Can't." It was quiet, and it was steady, and it had a crack in the middle. "Not in the street. I am sorry."
"Sorry's a poor price for a sentence."
"I know," said Idris Carrow. "I have never in my life owed anyone so much."
That's all he said. He took me the rest of the walk up the Row as if walking a witness, and at the door he stopped and said the Governor's clerk was waiting on the Exchange returns and he'd be gone until the evening. Gannet stood up from his chair. The Assessor bowed, as one bows to someone one doesn't know how to leave, and went back down the hill.
I gave him ten minutes. Then I told the sergeant I was bored.
"Ma'am?" He'd got out his notebook again, and he put it away.
"I've been married for two days, Sergeant. I'd like a book. Your master has a study, hasn't he? I'll be no trouble. I'll sit."
He looked worried for a moment, and then his face cleared. "The Assessor said you might have the run of the house, ma'am." A pause. "He did say."
"Then I shall run," I said, and went up the stairs at a walk.
I've searched forty-three rooms in my life, not counting the Bank's, and the trick with all of them is the same. You don't look for what you want. You look for what's out of place, and then you look at what's put away too well.
His study was on the first landing, at the front, a long room with a slope to the floor and a window on the Row. Book-shelves on three walls, and a desk with a leather blotter and a rack of pens, each one sharpened to the same length. A cold hearth, and nothing on the walls but a plain framed chart of the harbour. It was so neat it looked as if someone had rehearsed being tidy.
Under the floor Merrow was at the bread-board, thump and turn, and above that, faintly, the scrape of the sergeant's chair. I crossed the room on the outsides of my feet and shut the door.
The desk first, because a man keeps his working lies in the desk. No letter. He'd told me there was one, and it wasn't in the blotter, or the pen rack, or the false floor of the top drawer that took me four seconds. Ledgers, all in order. A stack on the left with a strip of red ribbon round it. I slipped the ribbon and turned the top one over.
Pardoe, E., Harbourmaster. A tidy hand, all the clauses in their boxes. Statement of the accused. Statement of the wife. A list of what he'd signed away in a week, in a column: the Ropewalk berths, the timber wharf, the whole of the eel-fishery. Dosed, by all accounts, from Reserve stock. And beneath it, in the margin, in the same neat hand, a line I read three times: She was never found.
That was the harbourmaster. There was a magistrate under him, and a second column. I put them back with the ribbon in the same place, tied the same way.
Then the bottom drawer, which was locked, and which took me eleven seconds.
It was full of me.
Not me, exactly. Warning notices. The Bank posts them on the doors of every cellar in Vessel, on pale blue paper, when a thief has been at its shelves: Information wanted regarding the person known as the Linnet. I'd been looking at them for three years, in passing, as a woman looks at her own name in the newspaper. He'd kept every one, ticked and dated in the corner, and on the newest, in pencil, at the bottom, a line of his own handwriting: Small. Quick. Works alone. Does not steal what sells.
I shut the drawer and turned the key back the exact quarter it had been, and I went along the shelves as I'd been trained to, with my eyes half shut, until they snagged on the one thing in the room that was put away too well.
It sat on the third shelf up, between a Bank almanac and a jar of dried lavender, where nobody's eye would stop. A box the size of a loaf. Dark wood, close-grained, with brass corners, and a little brass plate on the lid no bigger than a stamp.
I took it down.
I turned it over in my hands and my stomach did something that had nothing to do with lunch. There was a mark on the plate, two letters cut side by side with a hammer's tap between them. H.V.
My father's mark. He put it on every case he ever built, the size of a grain of rice, under the lid. It's on the lock-cases in the Reliquary. It's on the door of a house in Tallow Lane that isn't mine now. It was on the underside of a box in the Assessor's study, between lavender and a calendar.
And there was a lock in the lid. It wasn't Hollin Vane's lock. I know his locks. This one was cleverer than his, and more finicky, with a wheel where a wheel had no reason to be, and a double pin behind the wheel that my father would have called an affectation. I knew it as you know your own handwriting on an envelope. It was mine. I'd made it.
I sat down on the floor between the desk and the window with the box in my lap.
There's a moment in my trade when a lock stops being a problem and turns into a memory. Your hands do it. They've done it before. I ran my thumb along the wheel and knew, all through my forearm, that I'd sat once on a stool in my father's shop with the good lamp pulled close and the vice screwed tight and my tongue between my teeth, making this. I remembered the oil and the shavings and the small brass file. I remembered that I'd been happy, in the stupid unexamined way you are when a job's going right. I remembered that I was making it for someone.
I couldn't see who.
That's all I can say about it. It was daylight, and I was in it, and the person I was making it for was a hole in the daylight, shaped like a person, with the edges sheared clean. I'd been told about torn edges by a dyer with a wet face. I hadn't known that in the right light you could put your hand into one.
I tried the combination I'd have used at twenty-two: the day and month of my father's birthday, back to front, so nobody but the family could ever guess it.
It gave under my fingers without a sound. Good oil; somebody had kept it oiled.
There were four things in it.
A hairpin. Bent, cheap, the kind sold four for a penny at any chandler's. I'd have sworn it was mine, and I'd have sworn it of any hairpin.
A sea-pink, flat and dry as paper, pressed between two squares of blotting-cloth. It had been a bright pink once. The sea-pinks grow in the cracks of the harbour wall in July, out where only fishermen and lovers go.
A stub of chalk, half a finger long, gone grey. Harbour-wall chalk. The kind lightermen use to mark barrels, and children use to draw hopscotch on flagstones, and, if they are in a particular frame of mind, initials.
And a slip of Bank paper, folded in four.
I unfolded it. It was printed in the Bank's tidy type, with the blanks filled by a clerk's dry pen.
Sealed auction, Autumn Quarter. Lot 1147. Bidder: I. Carrow. Bid: six hundred marks. Outbid.
The ground shifted under the house. A lot is what the Bank calls one bottled day, or a run of them. Every bottle has a number, and the number goes in the books, and it's the number that gets sold. I had a lot number of my own. I had had it for four years, folded small in my stays where the boning is, on a slip of paper soft with wear that I'd never unfolded because reading it had never put anything back.
I undid the second button of my dress with fingers that didn't seem to be mine, found the fold, and drew it out.
I didn't read it at once. I stood a moment with my thumb on the crease, thinking that I could put it back, that there was nothing on it I didn't already know, that I'd been in the habit of not looking for four years and habit is a decent roof. Then I unfolded it on my knee, next to the other one.
The Bank's stamp in green, the Infirmary's seal, my own name, Perpetua Vane, in a clerk's round hand, and the amount, nine hundred marks. And a line of print, low down on the right, where the receipts of every seller are numbered so that the Bank can find them again:
Lot 1147.
I laid them side by side on the floor. They were the same number. It was the only number in the world.
Then the room went white at the edges, and I was inside it with my knees drawn up, and my body knew before my mind was allowed to. It knew it low, under the ribs, where the hollow lives. I'd always thought it was the size of a summer.
Someone had bid six hundred marks for it.
He had stood in the Cellar with the spoon on his lapel, bruised under the eyes as if he hadn't slept since the last audit, and looked at my face like a label he half remembered. He had asked whether we had met, and I had told him I would remember, and something had gone over his face and been put away.
I sold him. I sold the whole of him, as you sell a house to pay for a funeral. I had sold my summer and the man in it, and he had bid six hundred marks to get us back, and lost, and kept the chalk.
I put my hand over my mouth. I did not scream. It wanted a room with the door shut, and a person to say it to, and he was at the Bank.
He came in at six. I heard the front door and the boots, and Gannet's chair, and the Assessor's voice, quiet, asking whether Mrs Carrow had been comfortable. The sergeant said she's in your study, sir, she's had a whole afternoon of reading. I sat where I was, in the last of the light, on the floor with the box open in front of me and my receipt on top of the slip.
The door opened. He stopped in it.
He saw me first, and the box second, and the paper last. I watched him take the three in order, as he'd taken the row behind my ear: one scar at a time. Then he shut the door behind him without a sound and stood with his back against it.
"Whisper," he said. It came out of him hoarse. "Please. Gannet is at the foot of the stairs, and Mrs Merrow has the house-office pen in her hand and the kitchen ceiling is thin."
"I know what a ceiling is."
"Yes." A breath. "You would."
I held up the two papers, one in each hand, like a clerk holding up two halves of a bill. "Eleven forty-seven."
He didn't say a word.
"That's my receipt," I said, low. "That's yours. It's the same lot. You bid on it. You bid on me. Six hundred marks, and you lost, and you kept the slip in a box that I made." My voice was a thread. "Were we—"
I stopped, because I couldn't say it. It was the hardest sentence I'd ever had to get through and I got as far as the middle.
He crossed the room. Not to me. He went to the far corner, to the bookcase, and put his hand flat on the shelf as though he needed it to hold him up, and turned his back.
"There is a thing in the law of this port," said the Assessor, "that everyone knows and nobody thinks about. It is public. You could look it up in a book."
I waited.
"A seller has no claim on what she sold. It belongs to the buyer. If anyone tells her what was in it, and the telling reaches the ear of the Bank, then the sale is void. She has broken the contract by hearing it. The money falls due, the whole price, at once." He said it like a sentence read off a wall. "The Bank collects its large debts with the needle. From the seller, or from any pledge she has made. From someone she loves."
"Nine hundred marks," I said.
"I do not know what sum you have in mind."
"You do."
He said nothing. In that room, with the light going, the silence had a weight.
"Nine hundred," I said. "It's what the cure cost. I know that number as I know my own teeth. If I got told what I sold, and it got to the Bank, I'd owe them nine hundred marks by nightfall, or they'd take it out of Tobin. Out of forty-one—" My voice failed, and I got it back. "And you're the Bank."
"I am a sworn officer of the Bank." His back was still to me. "If I tell you, the Bank has told you. Sergeant Gannet, who is ten feet from that door, is another. Mrs Merrow writes to the house office every Saturday, and I have never asked what she puts in it. The law does not care what I would like."
"And that's why—"
"That is why I could not answer you on the road."
"Because a lie would be tin in your own mouth."
He turned round then. I hadn't known what his face would do, and it did nothing, which was worse.
"I have also sworn an oath," said Idris Carrow, "on this." He touched the little silver spoon on his lapel, once, with the ends of two fingers. "And I will keep it."
"To me."
Nothing.
He stood there while I got to my knees, with the papers in my fists, and then to my feet.
"Did I love you?"
I asked it very low. I asked it the way you'd ask a stranger the hour, because if I asked it any other way I'd have broken.
He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. His eyes were wet.
That was my answer.
"All right," I said, and heard how it sounded, and laughed, once, with no breath in it. "All right."
Then the rest of it came, and my knees nearly went. I had been thinking about the summer as a thing lying still in a vault. But the bottle in my stocking was violet, and the wax was a graft, and a graft is a love with the face taken out. And he had taken a drop of it on his spoon on our wedding night, in the candle-light, with his back to me, and he'd said a seller's. He'd said meant for me. He had tasted it and held his face together for a quarter of an hour.
"The bottle," I said. "The one I was to pour. What you tasted."
He looked at me.
"It was mine."
He didn't say it. I saw it go over his face like a light over a wall when a door opens on another room.
"I am not permitted," said Idris, in a voice I hadn't heard before, "to say anything about any bottle."
"No."
"I am sorry," he said, and shut his eyes.
Somewhere below, a chair scraped. The bread had stopped.
"Dinner," said Mrs Merrow's voice, through the floor, without any particular tone at all.
I didn't come down. I said I had a head. He told the kitchen, in a voice so ordinary I could have hit him, and Merrow said she's not eaten, and him say leave a tray outside, and the floorboards say goodnight.
There was a tray on the landing at eight. I didn't touch it.
I lay on the narrow bed, on the wall side, in my creased dress, in the dark. I didn't cry. I'd gone past it and out the other side, to the flat cold place where I do my sums. I had a great many sums to do.
He wouldn't lie to me and he couldn't tell me. Everything between those two walls was mine to ask, and everything I'd get back would be true and shaved. That is a very narrow country to live in, but I'm a locksmith's daughter. I've worked in less.
The bottle was in my stocking. I took it out and held it up against the window, where the last of the harbour lamps came through the glass. The wax was violet. The glass was the length of my thumb. Inside, where the light stopped, there was a small dark drop that had been my heart once, before someone took a knife to it and sold it by the piece.
I closed my hand on it, and the wax was warm from my leg, and I couldn't tell which of us was holding the other.