Idris
Three days before the audit. Afternoon.
There were two things in my coat that afternoon which did not belong to me. One was her letter. I will come to the other.
The Governor did not ask me to sit, and that was how I judged his temper. Lucan Harrowgate offers a chair to men he intends to dismiss, to men he intends to flatter and to widows; the ones he means to hurt he leaves standing, in courteous silence, as a clerk keeps a picture straight on a wall. His office smelled of beeswax and money. On his desk lay the porter's book, open at last night's page, and beside it a paper of the Reserve clerks' count, squared to the edge.
"Your hand is beautiful, Assessor," he said. "I have always thought so. Assessor Carrow and household, night inspection. It might be engraved."
"An Assessor may inspect at any hour, Governor. The charter allows it."
"The charter allows a great deal. I wrote most of the parts that do." He laid one finger on the clerks' paper. "The Reserve was counted at six this morning. Every lot, every seal, every tally card. Eleven hundred and some bottles, and not one out of its place by the width of a hair." He looked up. "I have governed this house for eleven years, and no count of mine has ever been perfect. There is always a lot misfiled, a card gone brown, a clerk with a cold. A perfect count is a count that somebody has taken trouble over."
"Or a Reserve kept by careful men."
"You are kind." He came round the desk, unhurried. He is not a large man, and he has never needed to be. "I do not say the Reserve was entered. I say it was visited last night by an Assessor who writes so beautifully, and that this morning it is flawless, and that I cannot tell what has been taken from it. I find that extremely disagreeable."
I said, because it was true, "The book records an inspection, Governor. It was one."
"So it does." He is not a taster, but he has heard men decline to say things for forty years. "Therefore. At tomorrow's pre-count every lot in the Reserve will be re-tasted, and every seal flame-tested for its green, and you will stand at my elbow through the whole of it and taste what I tell you to. I do not accuse. I count."
"Yes, Governor."
"And the broker." He went to the window. Beyond it the harbour lay the colour of pewter. "Corvane brought me a bride on Bank vellum in a broker's hand, and I asked no question, because I was pleased. It occurs to me that a pleased man ought to ask more. I have been wondering, Carrow, whose marriage I have been sold." He said it very gently. "I have men at her house and at her stable. She is in neither. She will come home. Everything does."
"Yes."
"I am wasting Sergeant Gannet on your hall. I need every man who can read a street. He leaves you at four." He turned. "I hope that will not distress the household."
"It will distress Mrs Merrow's larder."
He laughed then, briefly, and it did not reach his eyes. Something settled in me as I stood there, and I set it down because I have promised myself to put down what I learn. He had not commissioned the theft of his own Reserve. He had been robbed, and did not know of what, and would hunt whoever had done it through every street in Vessel with perfect politeness. Whatever else he was, he was not the client. I had suspected he might be, for four days. I let the thought go like a coat that has stopped fitting, and I was sorry, because it had been a comfortable coat.
I bowed and left, with the other thing pressed against my ribs, four feet from his hand.
The infirmary stands behind the Bank on the harbour side, and it keeps, along with its beds, the Reserve's grief accounts, because griefs come out of its wards, and the Assessors' counting rolls, because nobody else would have them. The records room is on the ground floor behind the dispensary: a long white room, a stove, a clerk with ink to the wrist. He gave me the register for the fever autumn without being asked twice, and retired to his stool.
I found the gap in less than a minute. The Bank does not hide, in my experience. It removes, and it stamps the removal.
The register was a fat ledger in green cloth, and eleven leaves had been cut from the middle of it with a very good knife, leaving stubs as clean as a barber's work. A slip was pasted in the gutter. Removed for audit. By order of the Governor's office. There was a date, a month old. I looked at it for some time. Then I found, on the second leaf after the gap, in a clerk's small hand at the head of a summary sheet, the figure the knife had left behind: Grief pledges, the fever autumn: 23. Of which defaulted to drawing: 23.
Twenty-three families had lost a child in one autumn and could not pay for the ward. Twenty-three had pledged their memories of the child, and the Bank had drawn every one. Their names were on the eleven missing leaves.
The re-sealing roll from three months ago was where the clerk said, in a drawer of the counting rolls, and it was in my own hand. Counting Assessor, I. Carrow. Lots tasted, one in twenty. Recused: eleven forty-seven. Under it ran the sealers, which is to say their numbers. The east wall had been done by three rings: Four, Seven and Eleven. Six clerks had carried trays, and one runner the wax. I had stood at the foot of the wax-room stair with a slate on my knee and counted every bottle back down, and not one had been out.
Ring No. 7 had shelves ten through fourteen, and shelf eleven, where the bottle labelled eleven forty-seven stood, lay in the middle of the run. But Four had done the next run, and any sealer, clerk or runner might have been let near any lot for a breath by a friend who was not looking. I could not narrow it. The ring register, which would have said whose hand lay behind each iron number, had gone in the same removal.
I asked the clerk for the audit sale list for the ninth.
He gave me a printed sheet, nine pages of small type: the stale lots the Bank clears before the Guild's Auditor comes, each with its reserve price in the last column. I ran a finger down it.
0212. Grief. Reserve price, four marks.
It had been entered a month back, in a clerk's initials I did not recognise. Anyone in Vessel with four marks could buy that lot on the ninth without a question.
I folded the sheet very small and put it into my coat.
I had thought to go straight home. I went the other way.
The quiet ward lies behind the infirmary, along a passage of whitewash with a strip of coconut matting down the middle. I had not been in it for sixteen years. The sister at the desk looked up, saw the spoon and stood; and beyond her lay the long room, and I stood in the door and could not go any further in.
It is a clean room. There are a hundred and forty beds in two rows under high windows, made up square, and the light comes down on the coverlets like milk. The air is boiled linen and beef tea. A girl in a green apron goes down the aisle with a tray and puts a spoon to each mouth in turn, and the mouths open and shut as mouths do in a dream. The eyes are open. No one in that room is asleep. They have been drawn blank, every day taken out, everything but the habit of breathing, and the Bank feeds what is left because the law says a man may not be starved even after he has been emptied.
My mother died in a ward like this one. I was fourteen. I came on Sundays with the bread I had saved and sat by the bed and told her what I had learned that week, and she looked at the window, and the sister said she could hear me, and the sister was kind, and the sister was wrong.
I told myself I was looking for a mother, and I asked the sister for any women of the east row who had come in the winter after the fever. She said six. I walked the row with my hands behind me and looked at six faces, and none of them could have sung a note. I had known that before I began. I had not known what else to do with the afternoon.
At the sixth bed from the window a man sat on a stool with a bowl on his knee, in a coat of the Bank's blue with the buttons undone. He had a spoon in his hand and a napkin tucked in a woman's collar, and he was feeding her broth as one feeds a bird, a thimble at a time, and murmuring to her the whole while.
It was Gannet.
He saw me at the same moment. He went the pink of a boiled ham to the roots of his ginger hair, and stood, and knocked the stool over, and caught the bowl, and did not spill a drop.
"Sir. Assessor. Sir, I was — it's my hour off, sir, before I go to the search, I —"
"Sit down, Sergeant."
He sat, slowly. The woman in the bed had his freckles, and his wide mouth, and nothing behind either. She looked at the ceiling with great courtesy, as though she had been asked to wait.
"My mother," said Gannet. He had gone very quiet. "Six years. Da died, and there was the rent and the burial and a bill the Bank would not put off, and she pledged what she had, and it went. They took all of it, in the end." He wiped her chin. "I come in my hour off. I know she can't tell. It's only that if I didn't, there'd be no one." He looked up at me, and I saw the boy in the man, the boy who had been very proud of a tally book that morning. "Don't tell the office, sir. They'd think I'd a soft spot. They'd move me off your house."
"The office will not hear it from me."
"I'm to hear everything, sir," said Gannet. "I've never said what I hear in your house that would do you a hurt." He swallowed. "I'd not."
I told him I was aware of it, which was true. I stood by the bed a minute longer in the milky light and put my hand on the iron rail at its foot. Then I went out as I had come, past the sister, who gave me a look that asked nothing.
Now I will say what the other thing in my coat was.
It was a bottle of black glass, thumb-long, under black wax. It had the number painted on its shoulder in white, in a clerk's round hand: oh-two-twelve, the stale grief on the audit sale list, four marks to anyone.
Last night I had gone along the grief lots opposite shelf eleven with the spoon, tasting a drop from each like a man walking through rooms. Grief lots are not cut. No one carves a grief into graft; there is nothing in it to sell. This one had been scored across its shoulder with a dozen fine strokes, and the strokes were real.
I put a drop on the spoon and touched it to my tongue.
Wind. That came first, the wind off the water hard enough to take a hat. Stone under a hand, cold, with the iron foot of a lamp at the end of it. A voice close by her ear, and it was mine, saying something foolish about signing. Then a face, seen from below and a little to one side by someone who had to look up to see it. It was twenty-six years old and unshaven and laughing, with the wind in its hair. I had never before seen my own face laugh. It looked like a stranger's, someone who had never once been refused anything. And under the seeing, from where she stood, a lightness the exact size of my ribs, so wide and so unguarded that I put the spoon down on the shelf and held on to the lattice with both hands, and for one slow breath I could not have told you which of us I was.
It was hers. The last third of her summer, the remnant, the piece the Bank had not yet cut, lying on the grief shelf under a stale number with graft scars on its wax. Someone had swapped two labels: her summer under a grief nobody would miss, and something else under the number that bore her name. They had wanted her summer to sit unwatched until the ninth, and they had wanted a thief to carry a bottle out of the vault believing it was her own heart. I could not have said why. I could say that in three days it would be sold to the first person with four marks in his hand.
She was ten yards behind me, with her eyes shut and a stranger's child on her tongue.
I went back down the aisle. Her satchel stood open at her boots. It took under a minute. I took the spare forgery from it, which the boy had blown for her hands' sake, and with my thumbnail I scraped the numeral from its shoulder and wrote oh-two-twelve in its place with the white marking-pencil every Assessor carries for tally cards, in a clerk's hand and not my own. Its neck was sealed already in her black, smooth as a pond. I laid the edge of the spoon's bowl to it a dozen times, short and shallow, copying the cuts on the real one, and wrote the real one's tally out on a blank card from my case and tied it at the neck. I set it in the gap on the grief shelf. Her summer went into my coat. My bid on eleven forty-seven is on the Bank's books and forbids me to touch that lot; it says nothing about oh-two-twelve.
I took nothing from the graft drawer. I had found a better use for the night.
Thirty years an honest man, and it took under a minute.
When I came up the aisle with the colour gone out of my face and said it isn't yours, I was telling her the truth, and only the smaller half of it.
I walked home. It took me longer than it should.
The house was quiet. Gannet had gone at four to look for Corvane, and Mrs Merrow was in her kitchen with the door shut, and Perpetua's cloak was gone from its peg, so I could tell where she was. I went up to the study and shut the door and stood before the desk.
The box sat where she had left it on the third day, the plain case her father made, with her own lock inside. I turned the wheels. I have known the combination for four years, and I have never once used it. It ran sweet, and the lid came up on a hairpin and a dried sea-pink, and a stub of chalk and a slip of Bank paper marked outbid.
I took the bottle from my coat and stood it on the pressed flower and looked at it.
There were reasons, and they were good. I am a sworn officer of the Bank. If I put that bottle in her hand and said this is what you sold, the Bank would have told her, and the sale would void, and nine hundred marks would fall due at once, to be collected by the needle, from her or from the boy. It would break the oath I made on the spoon in a back room on Cordwain Street, in her own voice, at her own asking. And it was a stolen Reserve lot: a woman found holding it would be drawn blank by noon. I had all three at hand, and I set them out for myself, one by one, like tools on a cloth.
There was a fourth. I put it down last, since it was the one I would have preferred to keep to myself.
I wanted her to choose me without it.
I wanted her to look at me across a table and not know what she had loved, and reach anyway. I wanted the woman who had taken my hand in the cage without knowing why to be the one who stayed. I was in no doubt what that made me. It made me a husband who had taken a thing from her hands and put it in a box for her own good and his own comfort, and could not have said which was the more true.
Before I closed it I did one thing more, and I set it down here because I would rather it were set down than found. I put the fine needle from my case through the wax and drew off a minute of it, no more, into an empty tally-glass: in case the rest had to go back on the shelf; in case I lost her twice. The glass went into my coat, against her letter. It was hers. I kept it anyway.
I closed the lid. The wheels ran round and locked. It was the only place in the house I could put it and not feel I had stolen it a second time.
I was standing with my hand flat on the case when she came to the study door.
She had dressed for the Steps: the dark plain dress, the boots laced, her hair pinned hard under the knitted cap. Her left cuff hung heavy. She had sewn something into it, a small hard shape the length of a thumb, and she held that arm a little away from her side.
"You're home early," said Perpetua.
"The Governor has ordered Corvane taken," I said. "He has men at her house and her stable. Sergeant Gannet left at four to help look. If she goes anywhere tonight, she will be followed."
Her face changed. It did not change much. "Then I'll be quick."
"Perpetua."
"You promised not to follow me."
"I did."
"Then don't." She waited. I could see her not wanting the next thing to be said, and I could see her wanting to leave before it could be. "I'll be back before the ten o'clock bell. I'll bring Tobin's note."
She went. I heard her on the stair, and the hall, and the front door closing exactly as a door closes that has been shut by someone who does not wish to tell the house.
I kept my hand on the box until the sound of it had gone.