Perpetua
One day before the audit. Night.
The servants' stair began behind a green baize door in the wall of the great hall, and the first thing on it was a guard eating a cake.
I stopped on the landing above him with my back to the whitewash and my heart going like a dropped tray. The song was still coming through the wall, three hundred voices, huge and flat and lovely, loud enough that no one would have heard me fall down the stairs. Below me were two of the captain's men in Bank blue, side by side on a step, each with a hand full of almond cake, and between them and me, planted on the treads with a covered tray on her hip and her sleeves pushed up, stood Mrs Merrow.
She didn't look round. That was how I knew she'd seen me.
"I'll tell you what I saw," she was saying, "and then you can decide whether you want to be the man who didn't listen. A young woman in a white dress, going by me at a run not two minutes since, up the east stair to the long gallery. Dark hair. She had a blue ribbon in her hand, and a look on her like she owed somebody money. I asked her civil what she was about, and she said, Tell the Governor I've gone to see the Auditor's rooms, which any person of sense knows is where they keep the Guild's silver."
"The east stair?" said the first guard, through almond.
"East. And I'd say quick, because she had a knife in her garter and a man's watch in each hand." Mrs Merrow lifted the cloth from the tray and held it out. "Now take these. Twelve dozen, the Governor's own favourites, and if a man of yours goes up a stair on an empty stomach in my hearing, I'll tell Cook."
They took the tray, one hand each. They went up past me at a trot with their mouths full, and the man behind stared straight into the whitewash as he passed, and I stayed a plaster saint until the boots had gone.
"A watch in each hand," I said, when the stair was quiet.
"They like detail." Mrs Merrow shook out her apron. "Go on. He's at the bottom, with the sergeant. I'll not come further."
"Merrow—"
"I'll be in the kitchen." She went up after the guards, and at the turn she stopped. "That dress," she said, "was a good piece of work. Mind the hem."
I went down.
The Bank's third level is kitchens and stores and, behind them, a long cold passage where the cage comes up. It smells of tallow and old bread and iron. The lamps were low. At the end of the passage stood the Bank's own draw-room, its door shut, and beside the cage, in the good blue coat of a sworn watcher, with his badge back on his chest and his freckled face the colour of dripping, stood Sergeant Gannet with one hand on the lever. Next to him, in an apron a size too small, was Tobin.
"Ma'am," said Gannet.
"Sergeant."
"It's the Governor's cage. A household watcher may work it for the household." His hand was steady. "I've never lied to it before. It seems to be taking it well." He glanced at the draw-room door. "The cage-master's at his supper till the quarter to. At the quarter they ring for the sealing, and he'll want his cage, and I've no more lies to give him. Down and back by the quarter to twelve, ma'am. Not a minute past."
Tobin looked at me. He hadn't slept, and he'd washed his face, and the blue was gone from it, though not from his neck. He said, "You look like the front of a ship."
"Thank you."
"I mean it as a compliment. It's got a lot of people looking at it."
Gannet saw Hesper before I did. I watched it happen in his face: the sergeant went out of it and a boy came in, one who's been caught in the pantry. He said "Ma'am" again, in a different voice, and not to me.
She had come down the officers' stair at the other end of the passage with a wax-tray in her hands, a sealer's errand that no guard on any stair would question. She'd slipped away in the singing, I supposed, by the stair she'd gone up and down for two years. She wore a sealer's grey, with the number stitched at the shoulder, and the hood pushed back, and without it her face was older than I'd seen it. She set the tray down on a flour bin. She held her right hand out in front of her, palm up, with the middle finger bare.
"Give it back to me, girl," said Hesper.
My hand had gone to my pocket for the pick on its own. I took it out empty.
"I can't seal without it," she said. "I've looked for it since six. I went through the vats. I went through the loft. Then I thought of you holding me." She almost laughed. "It's what I'd have done. And I thought, she'll want his book, and she'll have to come by the cage for it, because nobody walks on four but the household. I've never set foot on it in my life."
"Hesper."
"Give it to me. I'm not asking you not to take the ledger. I can't stop you, and I'm not sure I would. Only give me the ring. If I go up to that hall at midnight and there's no seal on my finger, they'll turn my sleeve out and my head after it."
"They'll turn it out anyway," I said.
"Perhaps." She wasn't looking at me now; she was looking at the shaft, at the dark going down. "It names me, that book. Number Seven. The wax I did for them, the marks they paid. And Wat." Her voice went ragged on it. "They'll say he was got by fraud, and they'll draw him out of me again. He's been mine for two days, girl. Two days in four years. I can sing him to sleep in my own head. If they take that out of me, there's nothing left to do it with."
I'd been ready for anger, or a knife. I wasn't ready for her hands. She'd let them fall open at her sides, blue to the knuckle, and she stood in the lamplight like someone who's lost her way in a strange house and can't think how to ask.
I know a hole in a person when I see one. I've got one myself. Mine is the size of one summer, and I can't tell you what was in it. Hers was the size of a boy, and she'd filled it, for two days, and I had come to take the roof off.
"I can't give it back," I said. "I'd like to. I can't."
"No."
"But I'll tell you what I can do. When they put that ledger in front of the Auditor, I'll stand up and say the boy's yours. I'll say it to Lorn's face. I'll say it to the Governor's, and to anyone who can't hear it, till they've heard. I don't know how I'll make them. But I'll fight for him to stay in you, Hesper, and I'll do it whether you like it or not."
She stood there.
"That's the only thing I've got," I said. "It's not much. I'm not selling it."
Tobin came forward. He walked between us, slowly, and stopped with his back to me, so that she saw him and not me. His hands were empty. I saw his shoulders go up, and come down.
"Hesper," he said. "Don't."
She looked at him a long moment.
"I know, love," said Hesper. And she picked up her tray, and pulled up her hood, and went back up the officers' stair with her hands under the wax, until the dark took the grey and then the shape and then the sound of her feet.
"She'll be in the hall," Tobin said, to the floor. "At midnight. In the hood."
"Yes."
"She'll try something."
"Yes," I said. "Get in."
I got into the cage between them. Gannet swung the gate shut and threw the lever, and the floor dropped away, and the wall of the shaft began to go up past us in rough wet rock. I'd been in this cage before, and each time I'd had a hand to hold. Now I put mine in my pocket and took out the violet bottle.
I hadn't looked at it in days. It lay in my palm, thumb-long, a piece of my own heart with a stranger's face to be put on. Tobin looked at it and I saw him remember what it was.
"Hold this," I said.
"Pet, that's—"
"I know what it is. Take it." He took it, in both hands, like an egg. "The lock we're going to weighs what you carry. I want nothing on me tonight but what I've chosen to put there." I closed his fingers over it. "Nobody drinks this."
"Nobody," said Tobin. He put it inside his shirt, against his skin. Then, carefully, not looking at me, he said, "I'd give a lot to be the one going through the door."
"You would. That's the whole trouble with you."
The cage stopped. Gannet opened the gate on a landing of wet black stone, and there was the old service gate at the end of it, low and rusted and closed, with a palm-plate in its door worn silver by hands. My father's work. He'd built it when the Reserve was young, and forgotten, being my father, to tell the Bank that it didn't need the Governor's key. I laid my palm on the plate.
It took what it took. A smaller thing than last time. A morning in the workshop, brass hot from the file, and a stool too high for my feet. It went like a coin through a hole in a pocket. Then the gate swung in on the dark, and I went through it a little poorer and no slower, with my brother at my back.
Gannet stayed with the cage. "I'll hold it," he said. "Till the quarter. I'll hold it if the Bank itself comes down the shaft." And then: "Ma'am. Quick."
The Sealed Reserve in the dark is a very large room full of people who are not there. The black glass gave back the lantern in a thousand small drowned suns. I walked down the long aisle between the shelves without looking left or right, because a thief's rule is that you don't touch what you're not lifting, and because on the eleventh shelf, somewhere on my left, were forgeries I'd made in a dye-works with my brother, and I didn't want to see how well they'd taken.
At the far end there was a wall of black iron with no handle on it.
I had it before the lantern reached it. It was my father's, the deepest one he ever built, and the maker's mark was struck low on the door where a man would put his hand to steady himself: an H and a V, back to back, and between them the little open palm he used to sign his work. In the middle of the door was a plate of black glass, warm as a hand.
The Proprietor's door. The Governor called it that in the wax-room, boasting, and it had come to me secondhand, from my brother on the floor of our rooms on Tallow Lane.
"Well," Tobin whispered behind me, as if it might hear. "That's it. That's what you meant."
"That's it."
"It's very ugly," said Tobin.
"He wasn't a sentimental man," I said.
Down the shaft behind us, far up, a bell struck the half hour, small, like a spoon on a cup. A man's voice called something after it, and another answered, and the rock carried both down to us as a mutter, like men arguing in the next house.
I stood in front of the door and did the sum.
I did it twice. It doesn't get shorter.
There were two things on me worth weighing. One was the nine days. I don't mean I could hold them in a bottle; I mean they were in my head where I'd put them, one on top of another. A hand closing my fist over a ring too big for me. A laugh smothered against a man's shoulder in a narrow bed, with a sergeant listening. My fingers in his in the dark of a cage. A man on a roof saying he'd been in love with exactly one person and wasn't permitted to say whom. My hand through iron bars, on his cheek. A voice saying ask me, and waiting, and letting me be the one to answer.
They came to nine days. On the Bank's scale, they'd fetch a good deal less than a house.
The other was under my ribs. It had a black-glass neck and a paper card at its throat that said nothing, because it had never had a tally to say. It was the last third of a summer I'd sold to keep my brother alive, still worth a house. I had it because a man had hidden it in my own box and had not been able to say why. I hadn't drunk it. I could have. I could have tipped it into my mouth in a stolen corridor, and known in an instant why I'd loved him, and what the something was that had moved in me when I signed my name in Corvane's carriage.
It takes the dearest. It doesn't love. It weighs.
I could hand it to my brother. He was standing right there with his hands open, and I saw him see me look.
"Give it to me, Pet," said Tobin.
"Tobin."
"I'll hold it. I'll keep it for you. The lock takes the nine days off you and you drink the rest at the top of the stair. It's yours, isn't it? The good one. It's what all of it was for." His voice was shaking. "It's what I was buying back."
There was a silence in which I could hear the Reserve breathing.
"I know what you were buying," I said. "That's why it's not yours."
"Pet—"
"You sold me, and I'm going to forgive you; I'm not there yet. But you don't get to pick which of the two I keep. Not you, and not the man who hid it in my box, and not me at twenty-two. Me. Now." I found I was smiling, which was horrible. "Now stop arguing. It's a family failing."
He shut his mouth.
I put my palm on the black glass, and I said it out loud, so that there'd be a witness, even if it was only my brother and a door.
"I'm keeping the nine days."
It was warm. That was the first thing: a palm-shaped warmth, like a chair where someone has just been sitting. Then the cold came, and I was being read. I can put it no other way. A clerk with a cold finger, going down my ledger line by line: a line for the pancakes, and for the rain on the window; a line for the ring; a line for a laugh in the dark. He passed over each. He took his time. He stopped under my ribs.
It went out of me through my hand, the way a draw goes out through the needle. And going, it passed me.
A face. One flash of it, no longer than a door opening on a lit room and shutting again. Seen from below, by someone who had to tip her head back: a man with the wind in his hair and his hat gone off over the water, younger than any face of his I knew, unshaven, laughing. Laughing with his whole face, as if nobody in his life had ever once refused him anything. Idris. I'd never seen him laugh. I'd never seen anyone look at me like that, as if I were the good news.
Then it was through my palm and into the iron, and gone.
I didn't make a sound. I heard my brother make one, and I put my free hand out sideways, without looking, and found his sleeve.
Under my stays, against my skin, the bottle went cold.
It wasn't dramatic. It didn't burn or hum or shine. It went light. A stone that's been in your pocket all day, and you didn't notice its weight until it was gone. I waited for the hollow to grow. It didn't. It was the size it had always been, because there had never been a picture in it. I'd had the picture for one breath, and I'd paid it over.
The door swung inward on a dark room.
I took my hand off the glass. The plate was cold now. I stood there and went through the nine days, as you count your fingers after a door's been slammed, once, and then again.
"They're all there," I said.
"What?" said Tobin. His face was wet.
"The nine days. They're all there."
He took a long time to answer, and when he did it was only my name.
Inside the door was a room about the size of Merrow's pantry, and it held one shelf, and on the shelf, on a dish of black velvet, was a single bottle. It had no lot number. It had black wax, stamped at the neck with a ring pressed so deep that the seven at its centre could have been read by a blind man. Hesper's mark, on the Governor's book.
I held it to the lantern. It was heavy. I wanted one drop so badly my tongue hurt, because a thief's rule is that you know what you carry. I didn't take it. A drop of a stranger's day stays; I'd learned that from a wedding breakfast and a child's fever. I didn't want the Governor in me for good.
From my sleeve I took the iron ring, still faintly warm from my skin. I pressed it into the stamp and gave it the quarter-turn Tobin had told me of in our rooms on Tallow Lane, and the wax gave with a small dry click and came off the neck in one round piece, like a lid from a tin. I put the wax disc in my pocket, and the ring after it, and the bottle inside my dress, in the pocket Merrow had sewn me against my hip.
Down the shaft, clear this time, a bell began: the quarter to midnight. And riding on it, shouted from level to level and down the rock to us, one word I'd have known in any voice.
Needles.
"They're sending for them," said Tobin. "The draw-room. Pet, that's the passage—"
We ran.
The service gate took its small fee on the way out as well. I never felt which day it was.
Gannet had the gate open and the lever thrown before we were through it, and the cage went up so fast my stomach stayed on four. Nobody said a word. The rock went by. Above us, getting louder, came the sound of a passage with somebody in it.
The cage stopped at three, and there was a man at the gate.
He was one of the captain's, in Bank blue, with a long leather case under one arm that he'd fetched from the draw-room; and he'd been standing there shouting for the cage-master, and turned at the noise of it arriving, and found a sergeant, a kitchen boy, and a woman in a white dress.
He knew me. I saw it in the way his free hand came up.
"The Assessor's wife," he said. "The captain's looking for you."
"Then he'll be glad of you," I said.
"Out." He got the gate open and his hand round my wrist in one movement, and he was strong, and not stupid, and his eyes went down my dress to my hip, where the pocket was. "What's that? What's in the skirt?"
"Corporal," said Gannet.
"Stand off, Sergeant. You were taken off that house days since—"
"I'm sworn to the Assessor's household," said Gannet, "and so's she, and I'm the Bank's ear on it, and you'll put your hand in her skirt in front of me, Barty, and I'll report it to the Auditor by your name and your mother's." He had gone white to the ears. He didn't move. "She's got the Auditor's token on that wrist you're holding. Look at it."
The corporal looked. Lorn's bone disc lay against my skin under his fingers, with its little spoon cut in it. His hand didn't open. It didn't go to my pocket either. It stayed exactly where it was, an inch off the Governor's book, while he worked out which of his masters he was more afraid of.
Up the passage, from the foot of the servants' stair, someone roared Needles! as if it were the second time, and the third.
"He's waiting," Tobin said, helpfully, from behind my shoulder. "The Governor. I'd not keep him, myself."
"Take me up, then," I said. "I'm going to the hall. Walk behind me and tell him you found me."
Every word of it was true. The corporal heard it as surrender, which is the trouble with true sentences: people hear the one they want. He swore, and shifted the needle-case, and let go of my wrist to take hold of my elbow instead, and marched me up the passage to the stair with his fingers dug into my arm and my hip, with the ledger on it, swinging a hand's breadth from his coat.
We took the stair at his pace, which was fast. I have run up more stairs in the last nine days than I did in the last nine years. Behind me I could hear Tobin and Gannet, and above me the hall, coming down the stair like water: a great roar, three hundred voices, and over it a man's cold silver voice I'd have known in a coal-hole.
At the baize door the corporal let go of me to put his shoulder to it. I stepped round him. I got my dress straight, and put my chin up, and walked out onto the floor of the great hall ahead of him, with a stolen ledger in my skirt.
The Governor stood on the dais with his hand raised and his back to the Auditor. The whole Bank was on its feet. The gallery was on its feet. And in the middle of the boards in his irons, with the pewter spoon crooked on his lapel, stood Idris, looking at me across the floor with a face I'd have crossed a sea for. It wasn't laughing. I'd have known it anywhere.
"Before the Auditor," the Governor was saying, in his voice like a good glove. "As an example. Here, and now, in front of the whole of the Bank." The corporal went past me at a trot with the leather case, and the Governor nodded to a clerk in green. "Lay them out."
The clerk knelt, and unrolled a cloth of needles at Idris's feet.