Perpetua
Five days before the audit. Afternoon.
Sergeant Gannet's cot took up the whole of the landing outside our bedroom, so the trunk went over it.
"Mind the sergeant," said Hesper, from the bottom end.
"Mind the trunk," said Tobin, from the top, backing up the last stair with his knees bent and the carrying strap across his chest, towing the trunk up the stairs like a canal boat. "The sergeant's Bank. He'll mend."
"I'm right here," said Gannet mildly. He was lying on the cot with his boots off and a ledger open on his stomach, and he lifted both stockinged feet into the air with the patience of someone who has been asked to make himself small before. The trunk went under them with an inch to spare.
It held everything I owned that wasn't sewn into a hem: two dresses, a tin of buttons, one good boot and one that meant to be, and my father's tools rolled in oilcloth. Fetching it had been Idris's idea. A wife keeps her things under her husband's roof, he'd said at breakfast, in the flat voice he uses for decisions that are for the Bank's benefit, and it had the merit, which he hadn't mentioned, of putting a lockwright's tools in the same house as the spoon. Hesper had shut the vats for the afternoon and brought her handcart, since nobody she'd fed was going to be moved in by a Bank porter.
The study door opened. Idris stood in it with a pen in one hand and ink on his cuff, and he said, in the voice he'd have used to read out the banns, "The Governor's carriage comes at eight for the Reserve. A wife should see what her husband guards. It's tradition."
It went down the stairwell like a stone down a well. Mrs Merrow was at the bottom with an armful of towels. Gannet was on his cot. Tobin and Hesper were on the stairs with my trunk between them. Every one of them heard it, since it had been said for that purpose, and every one of them went on with what they were doing. Tobin said, "Left a bit." Hesper said, "Your left." Merrow carried her towels off to the press. Gannet turned a page.
"Tonight," I said.
"Tonight. I told the Governor you'd be delighted."
"I've wanted to see your vault since the day we met."
That was true, and only he and I on that landing could have told you how true. He went back into the study and shut the door on something that on any other man I'd have called a grin.
The trunk went into the bedroom with a bang that made the ceiling drop plaster. Tobin dusted himself and asked whether the Bank fed its watchers, and Hesper said the Bank could feed him after he'd washed, and they went down to the kitchen in a knot of elbows, and I followed, with five days on my back and a whole evening to get through.
Mrs Merrow had put the kettle on for the carriers, which in her is a declaration of terms.
She and Hesper met over the teapot like two ships passing in a narrow channel. Hesper had brought a loaf, of course; Hesper always brings a loaf. It sat on the table beside the one Merrow had baked that morning, and both women looked at both loaves, and neither said a word until the kettle made up its mind.
"Rye," said Mrs Merrow, as another woman might have said Whig.
"Wheat," said Hesper. "Yours has been a day in the crock."
"It's meant to be."
"Then it's meant to be a doorstop."
Tobin, who has no sense of danger, cut himself a slice from each and ate them side by side to be fair. Mrs Merrow poured, and Hesper accepted the cup as if it were a treaty, and I sat down on the bench between them with my hands round my own.
Then Mrs Merrow said, "There's the sheets still to air," and left, taking her disapproval with her like a tray. Tobin went out to the yard pump to wash the blue off his wrists before somebody told him to.
That left Hesper and me and two loaves.
I hadn't slept. I'd lain on my back the night before and gone through what I knew as you go through your pockets after a fire: a man's name, a box, a number, the fact of a summer. It was all there, tidy as a ledger, and none of it would come up out of the page and be a picture. I'd been too proud to ask anybody. Hesper was cutting bread with her back half turned, and she'd tasted the edge of it herself across a booth curtain.
"Can I ask you something daft?" I said.
"It'd be a change."
"How do you miss someone you can't remember?"
She cut the slice. She laid it on the board.
"You don't need to remember a person to grieve them," said Hesper.
Then she pushed the butter across the table and asked whether I wanted the heel.
I took the heel. The pump in the yard shrieked, and Tobin swore at the cold, and somewhere over our heads the trunk lid banged where Gannet had sat down on it to read.
Idris came down to the kitchen when the noise of the pump had stopped, which I put down to the smell of the bread.
He stood in the doorway with his cuff still inked and his spoon on his lapel, tall enough that the lintel had an opinion about it, and Tobin came in from the yard with his sleeves rolled, dripping, and the two of them looked at each other across the kitchen.
I'd been ready for Tobin to make a joke about the Assessor's ears. What I hadn't thought of was that they'd met before.
"You've grown," said Idris.
"You haven't changed," said Tobin.
It was pleasant enough, said in a pleasant enough tone, and it dropped into the room like a plate. Neither of them moved. Tobin picked up a towel and dried his arms with more attention than arms need, and Idris straightened a cuff that didn't need it, and I sat there with the heel of the loaf in my hand while it came to me that my brother had known this man. Of course he had. He'd been fifteen that summer, and no fool. He knew what I'd sold, to the last stitch. He'd known it for four years, and he'd straightened my collar at the foot of a chapel and let me marry a man I'd supposedly met on a Tuesday.
I could have asked him. It was in my mouth. But there is a rule in this port about what a seller may be told, and it has a Bank ear at the other end, and in that kitchen the ears were a sergeant on a landing and a housekeeper with a pen. Whatever Tobin told me, somebody would carry to the Governor's office by Saturday, and the Bank would send me the bill in the shape of his forty-one. I ate the heel.
"Mistress Lune," said Idris, with a small bow that included the loaves.
"Assessor," said Hesper. "You've got ink on you."
"I've always got ink on me."
"Then there's a lot of it about."
He nearly smiled at that. Then there were boots on the back step and a knock that made the door shake, and two Bank porters in green came in with a crate between them the size of a coffin.
"Household of Assessor Carrow?" said the front one. "Sergeant Gannet's effects. Bedding, mess-tin, rations, one box of ledgers. Mistress of the house to sign."
He put a printed chit on the table, and a pencil beside it. Gannet had heard the word effects and come thundering down the stairs in his stockings, and Mrs Merrow had come back for the noise, and there were eight people in a kitchen built for two. I reached for the pencil.
Tobin got there first.
"Allow me, madam," he said, and swept a bow that put the towel over his shoulder like a waiter's. "I've done my sister's hand since I was nine. Who d'you think signed my school slates?" He bent over the chit with his tongue between his teeth. "Received in good order," he said aloud as he wrote, "with thanks, better than it looks. Mistress P. Carrow. Loop on the P, because a lady should have a flourish."
He turned it round for us to admire.
I'll say this for my brother: it was perfect. It was my hand, the forward lean, the long tails, the crossbars struck across the t's as if they'd offended him, and he'd given the P a loop I've never made in my life because I think loops are vain. He'd got the vanity out of me and put it on a delivery slip. The porters laughed. Gannet laughed with his mouth open. Hesper said, "Tobin, for shame," in the voice of someone who wanted to see it twice. Even Mrs Merrow looked at the chit, over Idris's arm, and then at me, and then went back to her pot, and I laughed hardest of all, because at dawn I'd named my brother as a suspect for the joke of it, and here was the joke at my own table, doing tricks for its supper.
Idris did not laugh.
He took the chit out from under the porter's fingers and read it. It took him a good deal longer than the words needed. Then he folded it in three, and put it inside his coat, and buttoned the coat over it.
"That's Bank paper," he said. "It will want signing again, in the name they have. The office will ask who Mistress P. Carrow is."
"Nobody," said Tobin. "A joke."
"Then the office will have to be told it's a joke." He said it lightly, to the room, and turned to the porters. "Thank you. That will do."
They went. The crate stayed. Gannet fell on it. I sat watching Idris's back go up the kitchen steps, and I saw his face just before the door took it, and it was the face a clerk pulls when a column won't add. A Bank man who doesn't care for jokes on Bank paper: there are worse things to be married to.
Tobin and Hesper were gone within the quarter hour, out by the yard gate with the handcart, Hesper telling him to keep to the inside of the pavement and Tobin telling her he wasn't nine. He kissed me on the cheek at the gate and told me to write. Hesper said, "Eat," and gripped my arm above the elbow for a second, and went off up the hill with the cart-handles in her fists.
"Whoever collects the bottle," said Idris, "I follow."
It was ten past four by the bedroom clock, and we were speaking in the voice of two people saying their prayers. On the far side of the door, three feet from the panel, a sergeant of the Bank was lying on a cot with his eyes on the ceiling and every one of his ears turned our way.
"No," I said.
"You said a road to them," said Idris.
"I said a road. I didn't say a door with you standing behind it in a coat." I had my back to the wardrobe and my arms folded, and he stood at the window with his hands behind him as though the sill had a warrant out. "They've bought Tobin's note. Forty-one of his days. If the Assessor is seen dogging their collector, they call the note. That's one afternoon and a needle."
"I'm not asking you to give me the client."
"You're asking to be there," I said.
"Yes," said Idris.
"That's asking."
"It is a request," he said, "made in the plainest terms I have."
"Are you angry?" I said.
"Yes."
"At me?"
"At the arithmetic," said Idris, and I nearly laughed, and that made me angrier. The trouble with the game of true sentences is that it's a bad way to have a quarrel: there is nowhere to hide and nothing to throw. "You are proposing to walk into the Reserve tonight, on the Bank's arm, with a stranger's order in your stocking, and lift a thing that someone hired you for. And when it is done, you will hand it to a person you have never seen, and I am to stand in Chalice Row and wave."
"Yes."
"I would like to know," he said, rather louder, "why I am the only one in this house who is expected to—"
"You are being a fool," I said, louder. "You are being an Assessor at me."
"I am being a husband, Mrs Carrow, which is a good deal worse."
Through the door a bedstead creaked, and Gannet's voice came, pitched to the ceiling, reciting scripture.
"I didn't hear that, sir. I'm very deaf, suddenly."
There was a silence. It's hard to go on quarrelling with someone who has tactfully gone deaf.
Then a knock, and a different set of boots, lighter, and Mrs Merrow opened the door without waiting. She had a parcel in her red hands, brown paper tied with string, and she held it out to me at arm's length.
"The boy from the black carriage," she said. "At the kitchen door. He wouldn't come in and he wouldn't wait." Her eyes went from me to Idris and to the bed, and rested on the bed a moment longer than the bed deserved. She didn't ask what was in it. That, in someone who asks what's in the salt box, was worth a note in the margin. "Supper's at seven," she said, and shut the door on us with the flat of her hand.
I cut the string with a pick. Inside the paper was a stoppered vial with something grey in it, thick as milk that has been told bad news. Grey drop. It's what the apothecaries sell to sellers who can't sleep after a heavy draw: six drops in a cup and a carthorse would nap. Under it lay one folded sheet, in the small square hand I'd seen on Corvane's notes for three years.
I read it to him in a whisper.
"The note said: You didn't pour. Take the spoon tonight while he sleeps. The Reserve tour will show you the shelf."
He didn't move. He looked at the vial, and I watched the sum go through him: what it was, and whose it was, and what it was for. Tonight. Tour. An order given that morning by the Governor, spoken aloud on a landing a little after two.
"They know about the tour," I said.
"Yes."
"You said it in the hall. There was—" I counted them, since it was easier than not. Gannet on his cot, and Mrs Merrow with her towels, and my brother and Hesper on the stairs with a trunk. Four people who weren't us. Then, because the Governor's office had ordered the thing in the first place: "Or anybody. Anybody at the Bank could have—"
"Six drops," said Idris. "In my cup. So that I sleep through my own spoon being lifted off my coat, by my own—" and his voice went up into the clear cold register of someone who has decided to be heard. "I will not be drugged in my own house by a broker's—"
Out on the landing, the cot creaked, and a pair of stockinged feet came down on the boards and stopped at the door.
I don't remember deciding. My hand went across his mouth.
It was flat and hard, and he was taller than I'd allowed for, so I had to come up on my toes with the other hand against his chest to keep my balance. The word he'd been going to say died on my palm: the warm, quick breath, the shape of his lip, and the beginning of some other word, which he did not finish. His eyes were above mine, wide and without a joke in them, and there were stockinged feet on the far side of an inch of pine.
Somebody's shoulders started to shake. I think it was mine. It came up my ribs as it does in chapel, when the chaplain says a word that sounds like another word, and I bit the inside of my cheek and shook, and under my hand Idris was shaking too, silently, all six feet of him, with his eyes screwed shut, in a very quiet fit. We stood there vibrating in the corner by the wardrobe, two grown people with a Bank sergeant on the landing and a sleeping draught on the bed, dying with our mouths shut.
The feet went away. The cot took the sergeant's weight, and creaked, and was still.
The laughter went out of us all at once. It left the way water goes out of a basin, with a small sound, and then nothing. I was still standing on my toes. My hand was still on his mouth, and his breath was still on it, and neither of us was laughing now, and I took my hand away and looked at it as if it were a glove I'd found on the street.
The window had gone the colour of a dyer's gutter, that last thin blue before the lamps. He'd turned his head to it. I turned mine.
"Well," I said, very low. "That's the most intimate thing I've done in a Bank house."
"It is the most intimate thing I've had done to me in one," said Idris, and I could hear that his voice didn't quite hold.
At a quarter to eight he was at the bedroom door in his good coat, brushed, with the spoon pinned bright to the lapel and something in his coat pocket that crackled when he moved.
"The Governor's carriage," he said.
I had changed into the grey silk, which has a hem I can climb in. I stood at the washstand with my back to him and my skirt turned up, and slid the sleeping draught into my left stocking beside the violet bottle, the dose I hadn't poured: two little cold necks against my thigh, and neither of them for drinking.