Idris
Five days before the audit. Dawn.
There is a way to taste ink, and it is not the way to taste a day.
I did it at the kitchen table before the house woke, with the range still cold and the sergeant asleep in his chair in the hall, snoring like a saw in green wood. I had not been to bed. I had lain on top of the blanket on the door edge and listened to a woman a hand's breadth away not sleeping, and in the small hours I had understood that if I lay there any longer I would say something. So I had come down.
The letter lay in front of me, unfolded. I had read it perhaps three hundred times. I had never tasted it.
But last night she had stood in my study with two slips of paper in her fists and said, in a voice like a thread, that she had never written me a letter. There had been no tin in it. I had the sole means in the world of knowing whether she was wrong, and I had been keeping it in a pocket out of delicacy.
I was not being delicate now. I touched the tip of my tongue to the last stroke of the last line, where the ink pooled as the pen was lifted.
Iron gall has a year, as a wine does. It is made of oak apples, and they carry the season's rain. Ink written a year ago has begun to brown at the edges, like a bruise, and tastes of it. Ink written four years ago is a red rust that flakes when the paper is folded, and tastes of blood on a spoon.
What lay on my tongue was black and green and hard, with the bitter, sappy edge of gall gathered in a wet spring. There was no rust in it at all.
It was this year's.
She had not written it in the week before the needle. She had not written it at all. Somebody had sat at a table this spring with a pot of new ink and copied her hand (the lean, the long tails, the crossbars that cancel what they cross) well enough that I, who had watched it fill three hundred pages, had not doubted it for eleven weeks. And that person had known what to say. You told me once what you would do with anything I put in front of you. Whoever it was had not merely her hand but the sentence, whole.
There were not many people who could have had it. I took a pen to write them down, and put it down again.
The stair creaked.
She was on the fourth step from the bottom in her stockinged feet, with her hair down and her creased dress on, and the ribbon in her fist. She had not slept either. She had the look of someone who has washed her face in a basin of cold water and then been unfair to it. She stood on the stair, with one hand on the wall, and did not come into the kitchen.
"You've been at it all night," she said. Very low. Her eyes went to the sheet. "Is that it?"
"It is."
"You said I couldn't see it."
"You may not read it." I pushed it an inch across the board, face down. "I would give a great deal to say otherwise. But there is something I can tell you about it, and it is not the summer, and I would like you to have it before Mrs Merrow comes down."
She came the rest of the way. She sat on the far bench, across the table, with her knees together and the ribbon wound round her knuckles.
"I tasted the ink," I said. "It is this year's. It was written since the spring."
She sat quite still. "I told you I didn't write it."
"You did. It is a comfort, of a kind, to have it proved." I heard my own voice; it was very level. "It was forged. Someone has your writing, and knows enough of what to say to me to be believed. It is a recent hand, and a skilled one."
"Who has my hand?"
"I don't know."
"You must have a list."
"I have three names, and I dislike them all." I would not say the one I disliked most. I said the sensible thing instead. "You are the one to ask. Who has seen your hand a great deal?"
"Tobin." She said it at once, almost lightly, and I noticed that she was not looking at me. "He's forged my name on everything since he was nine. School slates. The rent book. A note to the parish once, from the chaplain." A dry breath that was nearly a laugh. "He's still proud of that one."
"Then—"
"Don't," said Perpetua. "I mean it as a joke, Assessor. He does a very bad Governor and a very good me. He was fifteen the year I—" She stopped, and put it away. "And Corvane's got forgers. Every broker's got forgers. It could be a dozen people, and I'd want the dozen before I want my brother."
"I have said nothing about your brother."
"Good."
I said nothing, and I was aware that I said it well. A woman had made a joke in a bad hour about a boy, and I did her the kindness of taking it as a joke.
She turned the ribbon over. "What are you going to do?"
"Find out who has been at your hand. Find out who has been cutting your—" The word was on my tongue. I bit it off, and tasted the blood of it, and began again. "Find out who has been cutting into the Reserve's stock. By the front door, if I can. It is the lawful way, and I am an officer of the law."
"And when the lawful way goes into the Governor's office and doesn't come out?"
"Then I shall have tried it."
She looked at the table. "Idris."
It was the second time she had said my name, and the first time she had meant to. I sat rather carefully.
"Whatever you find. Whoever you find it in." Her hand came across the board and closed on my wrist, over the cuff, cold and hard, with all her fingers. "Nobody calls Tobin's note. Not by accident. Not to make a point. Not because a clerk at the Collateral Office asks a question with your name on it. You give me your word. It's the only price I've got, and I'll pay a lot for it."
"You have it. I gave it last night." I looked at her hand on my sleeve. "You may have it again."
She did not take her hand away, and I did not move my arm. The range ticked. Out in the hall the sergeant snored on, and I sat as still as if a bird had landed on my wrist, and looked at the top of her head and thought of nothing whatever except a woman in a kitchen on Cordwain Street, four years and a lifetime ago, who had heard every word of the summer through her wall and kept the notes. I thought of the Bank house office, which had sent that woman to me in the spring, unasked. I thought of who has the run of a man's coat.
I hated myself. Promptly, and thoroughly. Mrs Merrow had fed me when I was twenty-four and had nowhere else to eat. It was a foul thing to think. It was also, I noted, a thing I had thought.
"Thank you," said Perpetua, and took her hand away.
The Governor received me at nine. He was alone.
He rose, as he does for everyone.
"Assessor. You look tired. Married life." He gestured to the chair. "Sit."
I sat. I had prepared it as I prepare a tasting: what to say, in what order, and what to leave at the bottom of the glass. I did not say a word about a bottle in a woman's stocking. I laid my old notes on the harbourmaster's cup on his blotter and said what any officer of the Bank would have said.
"The violet wax in the Pardoe matter is Reserve stock. It's the Reserve's own colour and the Reserve's own cut. I would say, as I would say of any wine, that it did not come from a private hand. A love-graft is being made from the Reserve's real lots and sold on. Two men are ruined. I believe there will be a third." I paused. "I should like the graft drawer inspected before the audit. Quietly. By me."
The Governor listened, with his head slightly on one side, like a coin being weighed.
"You smell it on the wax."
"Yes."
"And you believe it is my Reserve."
"I believe it is someone in the Reserve, Governor."
He sat back, and took his time, and laid out a smooth reply as one lays a cloth. "I am obliged to you, Carrow. I mean that. You bring me an ugly thing early, and I would rather have it early than from the Guild. The Reserve's books are sealed by charter, as you know, and even I may not open them without the Auditor present. But I shall look to it. Quietly, as you say."
"Thank you."
"And I have been thinking," said the Governor, "about the whole matter of theft."
I waited.
"It is a wretched thing, that the Bank's own Assessor comes to me the week of an audit afraid that someone is stealing from the Reserve." He smiled. "You will forgive me if I take you at your word. I shall have the pre-count brought forward: the seals burned, the lots numbered off the shelves. It has always been held at dawn on the day of the audit, with the Guild in the room. I shall hold it two days before. If your thief has been in my stock, he will not have been able to hide it."
The pre-count is the audit's first count: a chip off every Reserve seal held to a flame, because the Bank's black wax burns green and nothing else does.
I said, "That is very thorough."
"And I think your house wants a stronger hand. I am moving Sergeant Gannet inside. He can sleep in your hall as well as at the foot of it, and hear what he likes. It will comfort me. It will also comfort your wife, I am sure, to have a sergeant so near." A pause, exactly measured. "And tonight, Carrow, you will bring her to the Reserve."
I had been holding my face, as I do. I held it.
"It is a tradition. Every officer who marries takes his wife down to see what he guards. She should see her house, and know what it is that her husband is sworn to." He stood; the interview was over. "Eight tonight. I shall send the carriage. Dress her warm; the Reserve is cold."
I thanked him. I said something about honour. I went out, and down the great stair, and at the foot of it I stopped, and the doorman looked at me and looked away.
He had not asked me which lot.
A man is told that his vault leaks, that the leak is in the graft drawer, and that there is a third dose in the port. He has the Reserve's inventory in his head as I have the price of ink. And he asks how I smell it, and what I believe, and who else knows. He does not say: from which shelf? which lot? whose? He does not say the one word any man says who has lost something and is afraid for it.
Then I went out of the Bank into the morning.
I wrote to the Guild before I lost my nerve.
The Guild of Tasters has no seat in Vessel, which is the reason it exists. It sends an Auditor who sails in once a quarter to count what the Bank says it owns, and it is the one authority the Governor answers to. If I could not go to the Governor, I could go over him.
I did it at a stationer's in Hook Street, on a borrowed desk: a plain report, in numbered paragraphs. That the harbourmaster and the magistrate had been dosed with love-grafts, and that the wax was Reserve wax. That a further graft was in circulation, drawn from a living seller's memory, without her knowledge. That I had applied to the Governor, and been thanked. I left out her name and I left out mine. I sealed it and addressed it to the Chief Auditor.
The harbour packet meets the Auditor's ship three days out, where by long custom the two hand across their post. A sealed letter to the Guild is a privileged paper, and no clerk in Vessel would dare break an officer's seal. I gave it over the counter and watched it go into the grey pouch with the others.
I told myself that it was done. It is a great comfort, in this life, to have posted a letter.
There remained the archive, because anyone who has been thanked by a Governor ought to know what he has been thanked for. I found the autumn four years ago in the clerk's round hand, and the lot I wanted, eleven forty-seven, her summer, and against the buyer's name the word Reserve. That was all. In the register of the Reserve's own sales, where a graft would appear if a graft were ever sold, the entries ran down the column in a single word: Disbursements.
I put the books back in their places and went home.
Chalice Row was quiet in the noon light. I let myself in and stopped in the hall.
On the landing above me, outside our bedroom door, there was a cot.
It was a Bank cot, canvas on a folding frame, made up tight with a green blanket, and set so that no one could go in or out of the room without stepping over it. Sergeant Gannet stood at the head of it in his freckles, with his boots together and his notebook in his hand, and he was smiling like a boy who has been given a puppy.
"Orders, sir," he said. "I'm to hear everything."