Idris
Two days before the audit. Night.
The Governor came back at the hour the tellers go home, and brought his own chair.
A clerk carried it, and set it down outside the bars at the correct distance, and was dismissed. Harrowgate sat, and arranged the skirts of his tea-coloured coat, and regarded me through the iron as he has looked at me across his desk for six years: with interest, and without heat, and with a very slight fondness, as one looks at a good instrument that has gone out of tune.
"I don't enjoy this, Carrow," he said.
"That is the first thing you have told me today I could not taste, Governor. I regret that I cannot check it."
"Your wife is at large, I should say, and will not be for long. The Blue Stair, the Row, Tallow Lane. My constables are patient men, and the port is a small town with a great many mouths." He let that lie between us a moment, gently, like a napkin. "Sit, if you like. It's a long speech." I remained standing, and he inclined his head to allow it. "The Auditor lands tomorrow at nine. On the ninth, there's an audit. Between the two I have an Assessor who was in my Reserve on the night of the fifth, on his own signature, with the Linnet. I have two false seals. I have a broker who cannot speak, and a thief who can. I have the Bank's name to think of, and it is a good deal older than yours or mine." He touched his waistcoat pocket, very lightly, where the small silver weight sat. "What I would like is a much simpler story."
"I expect you have one."
"You were deceived. A cunning seller, a woman of the cellars, made herself your wife by a forged licence and used your household to walk into the Reserve. You are the Bank's injured officer, not its accomplice." He said it kindly. "All I need from you is the name. Say she is the Linnet; say she lied to you at every turn. You keep the spoon. You keep every day you have. The Auditor writes deceived in a box on a form, and by the ninth we are all embarrassed and none of us is drawn."
It was a well-made offer, and I turned it over as I would turn any lot: for the grain, and the flaw, and the price. The price was one sentence. The sentence was not even a lie. She was the Linnet. She had deceived me, in the sense that a woman deceives who stands in a kitchen door and says I've never taken anything from this Bank that belonged to it. It would have tasted of nothing, and it would have been the worst thing I had ever said.
"No," I said.
"You haven't considered," he said.
"I considered it while you were sitting down."
He sighed, and it was a real sigh. "Do you know what I admire in you, Carrow? You are the only honest man I employ, and the only one I cannot use." He leaned back. "I would ask you to consider the rest of it, then. Reserve theft carries a drawing. It has since the founding, and it makes no exception for an Assessor; it makes, if anything, a point of it. The needles are for the ninth. I shall not enjoy that either."
"You'll enjoy the Guild's face at it, I think."
"Memory is the only honest currency," said Governor Harrowgate gently. "Everyone has some. Everyone spends it. The Bank merely keeps the books, and I have kept them for thirty years so that the poor could eat. You have seen the Collateral hall, Assessor. You know the queue. You know what the queue would be without us."
"I know what it is with you."
"Yes." He smiled. "That was almost witty."
I stood at the bars, and it occurred to me that I had one question I had not asked in six years, and that I would probably not be asked to a cell again.
"The Reserve," I said. "You told her, on the tour, that after the audit it goes to the Proprietor's vault. Who is the Proprietor?"
For a moment the pleasant face did not move at all. It was like watching a lamp behind a blind: I saw the thing, and I saw that the thing knew I saw it.
"The Reserve is not mine, Assessor," he said. "It is owed."
"Owed to whom?"
"To the one everyone owes." He stood, and the clerk came from the shadows to take the chair. "You have never tasted him. You won't."
He went up the passage with his hands behind him. I listened until the last of the boots had gone, and then I sat down on the bench and put my hands between my knees, because they had begun to do something I did not wish to look at.
I have spent a good deal of my life in the company of small facts, and there is comfort in them. A cell has a great many. It is, I suppose, why cells suit men who are paid to grade things. One can spend a whole night on the whitewash, which was three coats, the bottom one lime. The window at the height of the passage floor showed boots and the hems of coats. The bench was oak, older than the Bank's current charter, and someone before me had scratched a tally in the grain that stopped at nineteen.
I did not think about her. That is a lie, but only in the sense that a man is lying who says he is not thinking about his hand while he holds it in the fire. I thought about the spoon, which I would not see again. I thought about a bottle in a bodice, and the exact angle of her head as she took it. I thought about a grey room at dawn, and which of the sentences in it had been mine, and how the worst of them had been.
A drawing on the ninth would be done at the Governor's pleasure, and a drawing is not chosen. If they took the summer from me as it had been taken from her, I should be standing in the same country she stood in: knowing it had happened from the record and not from the picture. I found that this did not frighten me as it ought. I found that I was curious about the country.
The night linen came down at midnight.
I heard it before I saw it, as I hear everything now, a cart with one wheel in need of oil, drawn by a girl; and a bucket; and the turnkey's chair scraping as he rose for his supper, and his boots going away with an ease that did credit to whoever had paid him. At the head of the stair a cough. It was Gannet, unmistakable, the cough of a man clearing his throat to say nothing. He stood with his back to the cells and studied the wall as if he had been asked to value it. He would lose his post for this, and I suspected he had done the sum and gone ahead.
Someone came down the passage, at a laundress's tired pace, with a folded stack of grey sheets in her arms, and a cap over her hair, and her head down.
She stopped at the bars. She set the linen down on the flags. She straightened.
I had thought, once, that I knew all the ways she could look at me. I had four years of them in a box in my head. This was a new one. It had no anger in it and no warmth; it was the look she gives a lock she means to open, all attention, with nothing to spare for the person holding the door.
"Don't stand up," said Perpetua. "You'll only knock the bench over."
I was already on my feet. I sat down again. I have never been so obedient in my life.
"I've five minutes," she said, and glanced once over her shoulder at the stair head. "Gannet's bought them with his post, and I don't like the price. I'm not here to forgive you." She looked me up and down, like a buyer at a sale. "You look dreadful."
"They took my razor."
"It suits you." A breath. "I've something to tell you and I want to tell it once. You're not to say a word till I've done."
I said nothing. It was, on this occasion, a great relief.
"The client," said Perpetua, "is Hesper Lune, the dyer, who keeps my brother. She's a sealer in the Reserve, Ring number seven, and the boy in the bottle was her son."
She stopped. She was pale under the lamp in the passage, and her hands, which were hanging at her sides, were quite still. I saw what that cost. I saw it as you see a man's grip on a rail.
Three sentences. She had cut it like a hem, so it should not fray.
Somebody's son. I thought, unwillingly, of a bench outside a draw-room four years ago, and of three hours on it, and of the other doors along that passage that autumn and who had sat outside them.
I placed her at once. Broad, blunt, blue to the knuckle; the wedding guest at the foot of the table who had put her hand over her cup, and said borrowed days gave her a head. Tobin's employer. I had bowed to her over two loaves in my own kitchen. I had stood beside her, in a hall of tellers, and had not once looked at her face.
"She said to ask the woman who kept my notes in a tea caddy," said Perpetua. "That's all. She'd not say who gave her our words. She said the man in the good coat was a man she paid. She offered me a berth on the morning tide of the ninth, and I left."
The rest arranged itself in my head as a shelf arranges when a bottle is lifted out of it, so that the space is the shape of what was there.
Hesper Lune had been a sealer for two years, with her hands on every lot in the Reserve's wax-room. She had had eleven forty-seven under them, and its grafts, and the words I had spoken at the harbour wall had been in the grafts; I had tasted them myself, from a spoon, by a candle, on the first night of my marriage. Or Merrow had given them to her: Merrow, who reports to the house office, who kept a caddy, whom the Bank had sent to me in the spring. I weighed Merrow as I would weigh anyone. I did it honestly, and hated the scale, and put her back on the shelf unresolved. As for the man in the good coat, Tobin had written what a man made him write, and I had settled that on the day of the chit.
"The dyer," I said.
"You may speak now."
"I don't have a great deal." I found I was holding the edge of the bench. "I'm sorry, Perpetua. I didn't taste her. I was in a room with her for an hour."
"Nobody tasted her. That was the point of her."
"I'm at Merrow's sister's, on Cordwain Street," said Perpetua. "She took me in at the back door and fed me and put me in a bed. I don't know what she is."
"Neither do I," I said. "That is the honest answer, and I dislike it as much as you do."
"Did the Governor say anything?"
"He said the Reserve is not his. It is owed, to the one everyone owes." I heard how it sounded, and did not improve it. "That is not a name, I know. It is a debt."
She bent, then, and drew from the fold of the sheets a small roll of soft leather, tied with a cord, which I had last seen sewn into a hem. She unrolled it on the flags in the light from the passage. Steel tongues lay in it, thin as the bones of a fish.
"Nine minutes on that lock," she said, "and a pin I'm ashamed of. Gannet's on the stair, the turnkey's at supper, and the drop-cage isn't guarded till the shift. I'll have you out and up the officers' stair by the half hour and on a lighter by the tide."
"No," I said.
She did not move.
"If I go," I said, "the Bank draws your brother on the ninth. The Governor holds his note; I've seen it. And you are hunted, from now, for the rest of your life, by a Bank that has a great deal of life to spare. The Auditor lands in the morning. I wrote to the Guild on the fourth day. The Governor dropped the letter through these bars this morning, unopened. I'd rather be found in this cell by the Guild than on a lighter by the Governor." I made myself say the rest, and I said it slowly, so it should not sound like the opposite. "That is what I think it costs. It is not for me to spend it for you. If you'd rather I came, ask. I'll come."
I had not known I would say that. It sat in the passage between us, and I looked at it, and it did not look at all like tin.
For a long time she looked at the picks.
"That's a very clean speech," she said.
"I've had a cell to write it in."
"You've decided again."
"I have decided for myself. It's my neck." I could not entirely keep my voice level. "And it's your choice what you do about it. It always was."
She rolled the picks up, slowly, one turn at a time, and tied the cord. She put them away in her sleeve. She did not say whether she had forgiven the answer.
Her hand came out of the sleeve again to push a strand of hair back under the cap, and the ring caught the light on her thumb. I looked at it. She saw me look.
"Don't," said Perpetua. "It doesn't fit anywhere else. That's all it is."
"I said nothing."
"You said it very loudly."
"There's a thing I want to say," I said, "while I have you."
"Five minutes."
"The box." I kept my hands on my knees. "The bottle in it was yours. The box is yours, and it always was. Whatever you choose to do with what's in it, drink it or pour it into the harbour or sell it to a stranger for a Tuesday's rent, I'll sign it." The words came in the order they had once come at a lamp on a harbour wall, and I let them. "You needn't tell me. You needn't ask. I have signed it already."
She stood very still. There was a smear of lye on her forearm. It had been put there, I saw, to make her hands look right.
"On the roof," she said, at last. Her voice had gone quiet. It had been a roof at one in the morning, with the whole harbour lit below her feet, and a slate loose under my heel. "The night you followed me up. You told me you'd been in love with one person in your life and weren't permitted to say who."
"Yes."
"Did you mean it?"
It is a very strange thing to be asked a question you can answer with nothing but the truth. I have made a trade of it, and I have never once found it easy. I looked at her through the bars, in a laundress's cap, with soap on her sleeve and four years of oath between us, and my mouth did not want to be careful.
"Every word," I said. "And I would mean it if I had met you on Tuesday."
She put her hand through the bars.
She did it slowly. It was the left one, with my too-big ring still on the thumb, and she laid it along the side of my face and left it there. Her palm was cool. The lye smell came off it. It did not tremble, and it did not ask.
I did not move. I have had a good deal of practice at that, and I have never been so grateful for it. I sat on the bench with a woman's hand on my face and my own hands on my knees, and let her decide, and she regarded me a long moment, and I thought I saw her decide.
She moved her hand down. She took mine, the one nearest the bars, and lifted it, and held it against her face, and only then did I close my fingers.
She kept them there one breath. Then she let go, and picked up her sheets, and went back up the passage with the tired walk of a girl who has done the night linen. At the stair head Gannet coughed. She did not look back.
I sat with my hand in my lap, the one she had held, and the lye smelled on it. I would have liked to say something to the empty passage. I found I had a great deal to say and no one in the port to say it to, and that the bench had room for it all.
The clerk came a quarter hour later with a lantern and a folded cloth.
He was a young man, damp with nerves, and he did not look at me. He set the lantern on the table outside the bars, a plain deal table that I had not noticed before, and unrolled the cloth on it, and it was green baize. He took from his pocket a case of soft leather.
"For the ninth, sir," he said. "The Governor prefers them laid out where the prisoner can see. He says it's kinder."
He set them down one at a time, in a row, on the baize, with a small click of silver on cloth. Each was about as long as my hand, with a fine hooked tip. I know the sound. I have heard it ten thousand times, in a cellar on Tallow Lane, behind a curtain, as someone else was made lighter.
I counted them, aloud, in a low voice, the way she counts marks. One. Two. The lantern moved with the clerk's breathing. I got to twenty, and thirty, and did not hurry, and they went on being the same needle.
At forty-one I stopped.