Perpetua
Three days before the audit. Noon.
Bastian Quennell arrived on the stroke of twelve, which I gathered was the only way he did anything.
He was old, and dry, and dressed from collar to shoes in the grey of the Governor's household, so that he looked like a moth someone had pressed in a book. He had a face ruled in fine lines as a ledger is, and a voice that got to the room a little after his mouth did. A silver spoon lay in the breast of his coat. He looked at the front parlour of Chalice Row, at the two hard chairs, the clock, the window on the harbour, and the Assessor standing in the window with his hands behind him.
"Assessor," he said. "I shall ask you to be furniture."
"I have been called worse."
"I daresay. Do not be worse."
Idris turned his back to the room and became a coat. I'd had two hours' sleep, and none of them had been restful, and I sat down on the hard chair with my hands in my lap and a stranger's boy against my ribs, under the stays, where a search would have to be indecent. He was warm. He'd been warm for six hours. I could feel him through the linen, and I could feel the second verse, sitting behind my teeth like a swallowed pin.
Quennell laid his spoon on the cloth between us, bowl up, as one sets out cutlery for a meal one expects to enjoy.
"The Governor has asked me to assess the Assessor's wife," he said. "I shall want an hour. I shall ask you things. You may answer or not, as you like, and I shall taste the difference." He touched the bowl to his lower lip, briefly, and put it down. "Your name."
"Mrs Carrow. I've been called it since Tuesday."
Pause. No tin. It was a true sentence, and a stupid one, and I was fairly proud of it.
"Have you stolen from this Bank?"
"I've never taken anything from this Bank that belonged to it."
He waited. His eyes were the pale grey of a river stone, and there was a good deal of patience in them, and none of it was kind. He waited the length of time it takes to count six marks slowly. I sat and was the plainest woman in Vessel, a thing I'm good at, and I thought about soup.
"That is a very careful sentence," said Quennell.
"I was brought up careful."
"By whom?"
"By a father who thought a lie was a poor tool," I said. "He said you can't oil a hinge with one."
There was a pause at the window, not much of one. It was a pause with a back attached.
"Are you the Linnet?"
"A linnet's a bird, sir. Do I look like I sing?"
He considered me as you consider a horse you have been told is sound. "That is a question."
"It's a good one. I've been wondering myself."
"No tin," said Quennell, mildly, to the air. He wrote nothing down. He seemed to be keeping it in the same place he kept everything else, which I suspected was an orderly drawer. "Were you on the fourth level last night?"
There it was. It came in on the end of a sentence, quite gently, as a clerk lays a paper on a table and then a second paper over it. I had the answer ready, because I'd built it in the night, in the yard, with the well-rope creaking. I'd laid it on the shelf and I gave it to him now.
"I was on my husband's night inspection. It's written in his book."
He turned the spoon a quarter turn on the cloth.
"So it is," he said. "In a fine hand."
"It's a fine book."
"I have seen the book. I have never seen a book look so pleased with itself." He tasted his lip again. "Did anything leave the Reserve with you?"
I'd been waiting for this one all morning, and it was worse than I'd thought, because it was simple. There wasn't a true no in the world I could reach. I could feel the boy's bottle, and the boy's mother, and the little house of true sentences I'd built round them going up on its stilts.
I went through the shelf in my head, one plank at a time, and I took the only plank that held.
"The Bank's book records no bottle leaving," I said. "It's a very thorough book."
"I did not ask what the book records."
"I know. I'm telling you what I've got." I opened my hands on my knees, palm up, and let him look at them. "I carried a great deal of worry for my brother down there, sir. I carried it up again. It's heavier on the stairs."
That was all true. I'd carried worry for Tobin down and up, and I'd carried a great deal else besides. But a taster can't taste what you leave out. It doesn't tell him a thing.
Quennell's eyes rested on my face for what was probably four seconds.
"A brother who owes the Bank," he said.
"Forty-one memories' worth."
"You are exact."
"I pay on it every quarter. Ask any clerk in the Collateral hall." I let a breath out, and it wasn't entirely acted. "It's the one thing I've ever been sure of."
I'd steered him, and so had he, and there wasn't a grain of tin in any of it. I saw his mouth move, minutely, at one corner. He was enjoying himself. I hadn't expected that. It made him more dangerous, not less.
The clock ticked. Somewhere in the kitchen a pan struck stone. The Assessor at the window stood like a monument to the failure of the Bank to hire better statues, and did not so much as breathe on my behalf. He had been told to stand beside me in the fire with his hands behind his back.
"Do you mean the Bank harm, Mrs Carrow?"
"I mean it none that it didn't mean me first."
Quennell's spoon stopped turning.
"That," he said, "is a sentence I shall be turning over on the stair."
"Turn it slowly. It's had a long week."
He nearly smiled. I'd swear to it.
"One more thing. It is not a question the Governor sent me with." He didn't look at the window. His voice had dropped a little, as an old man's does when he is about to ask what he would rather not know. "Do you love your husband?"
The room changed.
I don't know how else to say it. The clock ticked louder. There was no air in the parlour. I'd been ready for a good many things, and I'd been ready for none of that one, and I sat there with my hands open on my knees as if handed a bill in a language I couldn't read. I couldn't say yes. It would have been a lie, or it would have been the truth, and I didn't know which, and if I didn't know then Quennell wouldn't be able to taste it either, and I wasn't sure that was any better.
There was no plank on the shelf for it.
So I went and found one, in the only place left. It had been lying about since the chapel steps.
"I married him in front of a chaplain, a Governor and a loaf of bread," I said. "In five days he hasn't asked me for one thing I didn't want to give."
The window creaked, once, as a house does when the wind changes.
Quennell touched the spoon to his lip and stayed there a long moment, tasting. Then he lifted his head.
"That," he said, "is a remarkable thing to say about a husband."
"It's a remarkable husband."
"So I gather." He stood, in sections, like a folding rule. He took up the spoon and slid it into his coat, and looked round the parlour once with the expression of a man reviewing a bad batch of ink. "I have no more questions. The Governor asked me to tell you that the Reserve count was perfect." He paused at the door with his hat in his hand. "He finds that very strange."
He went out. The front door closed behind him like a full stop.
I put both hands flat on my knees, and I couldn't stop them shaking, so I let them. The bottle against my ribs was warm and quiet, like an animal that has been very good.
No tin. Not a grain, in an hour. I had sat in a chair and answered an Assessor's taster on every count he cared about, with nothing but the truth, and I had come out the far side of it with a child in my stays and a husband in the window.
The husband hadn't moved.
"That was," said Idris to the glass, in a voice I hadn't heard him use, "very well done."
"You didn't help."
"I was not permitted to."
"I noticed." My voice cracked in the middle of it and I drove straight on. "You'd have been good at it."
He turned then. I'd have liked to say he looked calm. He looked as if he had spent an hour with his teeth in a leather strap, and had done it on purpose, and was rather proud of the leather.
Before either of us could find a sentence, the kitchen door opened and Mrs Merrow came through with a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other, and knelt on the parlour boards where Quennell's chair had been, and began to scrub.
She did it in long, hard strokes, muttering. The smell reached me before she'd finished the first board: sharp, sour, clean, the smell of a pickle jar. Vinegar. I had the boy's bottle under my stays, and the smell went through me like a cold key.
"Mrs Merrow," said Idris, "there's no need."
"There's every need." She didn't look up. "Tasters. They leave a smell." She moved the bucket a yard along the boards. "I'll get him off it."
Her hands were red to the wrist with the lye and the vinegar, chapped raw, and the brush went round in them like a small animal. I looked at them. Stained. It could have been anybody's hands. It could have been these. She sat back on her heels to wring the cloth, and her pale eyes came up and went over me once, from my hair to my hem, with the look she'd given me on the first night.
"You've been down," she said. "The deep floors. It's in your cloak."
"We had a night inspection."
"So the porter's book says." She bent to the board again. "There's soup. Both of you. Sit. Eat."
I didn't sit. There was a sour taste in my mouth, and it wasn't the vinegar. I couldn't ask her what she'd sung to her boy, or how the fever had taken him. She wrote to the Bank every week at that kitchen table, in plain sight, in a firm round hand. Anything I asked her would go straight down the ink.
I let it lie there, and I went to find my hat.
Idris was in the hall, in his coat, with the spoon on his lapel. Gannet sat on his hard chair at the bottom of the stairs, a little pink from his night among the west racks, with a tally book open on his knee. It seemed there were two lots signed in twice.
"The Governor's office," said Idris, for the hall, "wishes to see me at two."
"Yes, sir," said Gannet.
He stood on the mat with his hat in his hand and gave me nothing. He wasn't going to reach.
So I did.
I went up to him, a wife with her husband going off to be reprimanded, and I straightened his collar, which didn't need it. My hand came down the front of his coat and stopped on the breast, flat, over the inside pocket where the letter lives. Under the cloth his heart was going as hard as it had in the dark between the shelves. I left my palm there a moment longer than a wife would.
"Go and be reprimanded," I said.
His hand came up over mine and held it against the coat. That was all. It was warm, and quite steady, and he said, in the dry, grave, ridiculous voice I was beginning, God help me, to look for, "I shall try to be reprimanded well."
Gannet coughed. It was a good cough, the cough of a sergeant who has decided to be extremely deaf.
The Blue Stair, in the afternoon, has the light of the inside of a cold bottle. The gutters run their bruise down both sides, and the steps are slick with woad, and the whole quarter smells of wet wool and a barrel that ought to have been buried. I climbed it in the borrowed cloak with my hand on the boy under my stays. Three days to the audit, and the first of them nearly gone.
I was going to hand him over. I'd known that since the dark of the yard. Forty-one pieces of my brother on one side of the scale; on the other, a fevered child already gone out of his mother's keeping, who would not be less lost for being kept by me. The sum came out as sums do when you're on the wrong end. But I wouldn't do it blind. Whoever took him from Corvane's hand would have to say that boy's name, and I'd stand there until they did. It was the only price I had left to set.
Tobin was in the yard, hauling a dripping length of cloth out of a rack by both ends. He saw me, and dropped it, and got the whole of it on his boots.
"You look terrible," he said, with joy.
"I've been married five days."
"Is he kind to you?" He came across the yard, wiping his hands on his apron. "You're not meant to answer that. You're going pink. Pet, you're going pink."
"I'm going home."
"You went home two minutes ago. This is where you're standing." He put his arms round me anyway, cloth and all, and I let him. He smelled of indigo and damp and burnt sugar. "Is it tonight?"
"It's tonight. Then it's done."
"Done." He said it into my hair. He held on, and I held on, and then he let go. "Come in. Hesper's got a stew on that could raise the dead. She'll make you eat all of it."
She had. Hesper put a bowl of eel stew in front of me and stood over the eating of it, and Tobin stole the crust off my plate. I ate all of it. I hadn't known how hungry a person can be after an hour of lying to an Assessor.
"You've gone quiet," said Tobin.
"I'm saving it for tonight."
He grinned and stole the last of my bread. It was the sort of quarter-hour Mrs Merrow would have called wasted, and had, at breakfast: she'd stood at the range that morning with her sleeves rolled on her raw red arms, scraping the pan for the last of the dripping, and put it on my plate without a word, so that I'd had the fat of it and not the meat.
The sun came slanting through the yard door and lay on the scrubbed boards, and the vats ticked as they cooled. Nobody in that shed was in any hurry, and for the length of a bowl of stew I let myself believe I wasn't either.
I was drying my hands on Hesper's cloth when the yard gate rattled. A lad stood outside it in a cap too big for him, one of Corvane's, with a folded paper in his fist. I knew him by the cap and the scowl. He'd stood on Chalice Row's back step two days running and never once taken his hands out of his pockets.
I went out to him alone. Behind me in the shed the pole knocked on the vat, and Tobin laughed at something, and a pot lid rang.
"For Mrs Carrow," said the lad. "There's no answer."
He went off down the Stair with his shoulders up. I unfolded the paper in the last of the light at the gate, and read it, and then read it again, as you do a bill.
The note said: Salt Steps. Eight bells. Bring what you lifted and nothing else.