Idris
One day before the audit. Midnight.
She crossed the boards of the great hall with her chin up and one hand pressed to her hip, and the captain of the guard took a step towards her, and Lorn said, without raising her voice, "The Auditor's guest, Captain," and he took it back.
I had never before watched a room of four hundred people decide, all together, that it would like to see what happened next.
The cloth of needles lay at my feet, forty-one of them in a row at the same angle, bright as fishbones. The clerk who had unrolled it knelt beside them with his hands on his knees, and did not seem to know what to do with his face.
She came up the three steps to the Auditor's chair and put her hand into her skirt.
The bottle was black glass, thumb-long, corked, with its wax off. She held it out on her open palm as though it were nothing, a thing she had found in the street. "You said bring you something you can taste."
Lorn took it. She held it up to the lamps, where the black glass gave back nothing, and turned it, and looked into the neck at the cork. Perpetua laid a small round disc of wax on the arm of her chair, the stamp in it deep and plain, and Lorn read the number aloud in a flat clerk's voice for the whole of the hall.
"Ring Number Seven. A sealer's seal, opened by a sealer's ring." She set the disc down. "Governor, the bottle is yours?"
"It is a theft." The Governor had come down off the dais, and stood with his hands in front of him as at a graveside. "A bottle taken by a thief from a private shelf, and dressed up by her to say whatever she likes. I do not see what such a thing could prove."
"Then it will taste of that," said Lorn. "Which will be a proof of its own."
"Auditor, I protest—"
"It is noted. It will be the first line of the record." She looked down at me. "The Guild's rule is two tongues, and one of them without interest. Mine has none. The other has read the Governor's hand on every order for six years, and is in irons for it." She held the bottle a little away from her body. "Captain. The key."
The captain of the guard looked at the Governor.
The Governor looked at the ceiling.
A warden in undyed wool put out his hand, palm up, and after a considerable moment the captain gave him the key. The warden knelt at my wrists. A key turns, the bracelet opens, and the weight simply isn't there; it is only afterwards that you find the skin is raw. The chain went down on the boards in a long slither and I stepped out of it.
Lorn's clerk opened a velvet case, and Lorn took out a Guild spoon and put it in my palm. It was heavier than mine, silver-gilt, the bowl a little deeper, and warm from the case. She took a second from the velvet for herself.
"A taste, not a swallow," said Lorn. "Before witnesses. You will speak it as you taste it, Mr Carrow, and I will taste beside you, and say to the hall whether you lie. I do not let an accused man taste the evidence alone."
An Assessor may not taste a lot in which he has a declared interest. I searched myself for one. I had none, in this bottle. It was the only lot in the port I could say that of.
She tipped one drop on my bowl and one on her own. Mine was black in the lamplight and it shook.
We put them on our tongues together.
It came as I have known ten thousand come: first as a room. A small room with no windows. A table, a lamp turned low, and in front of me a page in a firm, upright hand that was not mine and that I recognised at once, because I had read that hand on every Bank order for six years. The Governor's. A memory of the Governor writing his own books.
"It's a ledger," I said. My voice sounded odd in the great hall; it always does, when one speaks a tasting aloud. "The Governor's own account of the Reserve, drawn out of his own head and sealed, so that no taster could find it by finding him. There's no tin in it. Not in a single line."
"The first pages are sales." I went slowly. "Love, cut from the Reserve's own stock. A great love, whole, sold to a merchant's wife for eleven hundred marks. A faceless love, sold in violet wax for four hundred, to any buyer who could pay. The Governor lists them by the week. Fifty-three, in the last year. He calls them disbursements."
"Lies," said the Governor, softly.
"Grief," I said. "That's the second column. Grief lots, taken from people who could not pay the infirmary and pledged what they had. He has sold them, to collectors who enjoy a grief. A mother's drowned daughter, at forty marks. A widow's husband. A child's." I stopped. The Guild spoon was cold on my tongue, and there was dust in the taste, the dust of a velvet chair. "With the buyers' names."
The hall had stopped making the sounds a hall makes.
"Two men," I said. "A magistrate and the harbourmaster, Egan Pardoe. Ruined, this spring, by women who had been sold violet. The Governor sold the violet. The women paid in gold. He wrote the two men down as losses of the ordinary kind." I could feel my voice thinning. I made it steady. "Under the sales, a payment. Thirty marks a quarter to a sealer, Ring Number Seven, for waxing and for keeping quiet. And two days ago, a further sum. One hundred and forty marks to Ring Number Seven, for a collateral note. T. Vane."
Somewhere behind me a cry, hardly a sound, and the scrape of a boot.
I did not turn round. I was in the memory now, and it had one thing left for me to see.
There is a second room at the back of any well-kept ledger, the room in which it was made. In this one the lamp had been turned down still further, and across the table from the Governor, in a high-backed chair, sat a man. I could taste his coat: velvet, with dust in the pile. I could taste his voice, which was low and dry, and unhurried, and said, Keep the account, Lucan. The account is all. I could taste the exact weight of the Governor's fear, which is a very particular flavour and one I had never once, in six years, had from him.
But there was no face.
"There's a man in this memory," I said. "He sits across from the Governor, in a chair with a high back. He gives orders. And the Governor has cut him out."
"Cut him—"
"Trimmed him, as the Bank trims a person from a summer. A torn edge from the hairline to the collar, clean, at the man's own instruction, I believe, so that there is nothing in the Governor's head for any taster to find. I can taste where it was. I can't taste who." I took the spoon from my mouth. "The Governor calls him the Proprietor. He is the person the Reserve is owed to."
Nobody in the hall said anything. The lamps went on burning, as they had for two hundred years.
Lorn took her own spoon from her mouth and laid it on the arm of her chair. She turned, not to me, but to the gallery.
"None," said Cassia Lorn. "I taste no tin in the ledger, and none in the Assessor."
"Governor," said Cassia Lorn, "you will surrender your keys."
He raised his hand instead.
"Captain."
He had never in his life shouted at a Bank officer. He gave the order in the voice with which he had asked me, nine days ago, to sit down; and the captain of the guard, who had been the Governor's man for eleven years, put his hand on his sword and took one pace forward.
Sergeant Gannet came out through the servants' door in his blue coat, with his badge on his chest and a face like a boiled sheet.
"Captain," he said. He walked to the middle of the dais and planted himself between the guard and the Auditor's chair, all six feet three of him, quite white. "Sir. I'm the Assessor's household watcher, sworn. I'm to hear everything that's said in his house and report it to the Bank." He swallowed. "I've heard it, sir. Every word. I'm reporting it to the Auditor."
"Sergeant—"
"I'd be obliged if you'd stand down, sir."
Above us, along the west wall, three hundred people in their funeral coats stood up at the rail as one man.
It was the noise of people who have sold pieces of themselves for fourteen marks getting to their feet, and it went round the hall like the beginning of weather. A thin man at the rail said, quite clearly, "Ask him about the widows." A woman with a tin whistle put it in her mouth and did not blow.
The captain stopped. His hand had gone off his sword. It is a hard thing for a man to fight a crowd that is only standing.
It was then, in the quiet that follows a hall making up its mind, that the sealer by the bronze door began to run.
I had forgotten her. She came across the boards in six strides with the sleeves of her gown flying, straight at the Auditor's chair and the black bottle on its arm, her hand outstretched for it and the other lifted as though to strike it off the wood. I saw the blue of her knuckles under the grey. I saw Perpetua take one step to put herself in the way and know she would not be quick enough.
Tobin was quicker.
He must have been standing at his sister's shoulder all this while, in a kitchen apron a size too small, without anyone in the Bank so much as looking at him. He came off the mark like a boy in a race. His long arm went out and his fist closed round the grey wrist a foot from the bottle, and the two of them stopped, hard, in the middle of the boards, with the hood falling back off Hesper Lune's face.
"Let go," she said. "Let go, love. It's for the boy."
"I know it is."
"They'll draw him out again."
"I know," said Tobin. "Hesper. I know." He held on. He did not hurt her; I have seen a man hold a bird like that. And then he turned his head, and spoke to the hall.
"It was me," Tobin said.
His voice cracked on it, and he cleared it, and said it again, so that the gallery could hear. "There was no man in a good coat. I told my sister there was, because she'd forgive me a threat. I went to the go-between myself, and I sold him the Linnet, and her hand, and the words off the harbour wall, and me for bait, to buy back the summer she sold to save my life." He was crying now; he didn't stop. "It's on your ledger, if you like. It's the day I sold her."
There was no tin in it. Not a grain.
For three days I had said one thing about that boy, flatly, and never turned it over: a man in a good coat had put a pen in Tobin Vane's hand. I had kept my mouth shut for it, in a carriage and a study and a cell. Now a column of figures I had added a dozen times came out wrong from the first line down.
It did not make me angry. It made me think of a boy who had signed a delivery chit in front of me in his sister's hand, and looked up as he did it.
Perpetua had not moved. She was looking at her brother across ten feet of oak. Her face was the face of a person doing a sum for the second time and finding it comes out the same.
Hesper Lune sat down on the top step of the dais, slowly, like a much older woman. Tobin let go of her wrist, and she did not lift it. Nobody touched her. After a moment Perpetua crossed the boards and sat down beside her on the step, not close, and looked at the hall.
"Give him the violet!" It was Gannet, hoarse, pointing across the dais at the Governor. "Sir, ma'am, make him say it himself, make him say it with his own mouth—"
Tobin had the bottle in his other hand. I had not seen him take it out. The violet caught the lamps: a woman's love for the man she had sold, that would take on anyone in front of it.
"Nobody drinks what they didn't choose," said Perpetua.
She did not raise her voice. She said it to the step, and then she looked up, and said it to Gannet, and then to the Auditor, and last of all to the Governor, who had turned very white.
"Not him. Not me. Not a boy. Not a Governor." She held out her hand, and Tobin put the bottle into it, and she closed her fist.
Lorn had the Governor's pockets turned out.
She did it courteously, by two of the wardens, in the sight of four hundred people. A pocket watch. A key on a chain. A folded letter, unopened, which she took out of a warden's hands and put into her own sleeve without looking at it. And, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, a small silver spoon with a worn bowl, which she laid on the table beside the black bottle.
"Mr Carrow. This is yours, I believe."
"It is."
"I cannot overturn a Bank's drawing. I can record what the Guild believes." She nodded to her clerk, who stood with a pen and a single sheet. "It is my belief that the Assessor Carrow, in the matter of the Reserve, acted under the coercion of the Governor of the Reliquary, who was at that time engaged in fraud. I am prepared to write it. Then the spoon is yours, and the drawing lapses, and you go home."
"Auditor," I said. "I wasn't coerced."
Lorn waited.
"On the night of the fifth, I took a lot from the Sealed Reserve. I did it of my own will, and no man made me. It had a false label. Under the label was a lot that belonged to someone else, and I put a forgery in the gap so that the count would hold, and I carried the thing out in my coat past the Bank's night guard." I did not say whose. The oath was in my mouth like a bit, and I kept my teeth on it. "I hid it from the Bank, and from the Auditor, and from the person it belonged to, for reasons I thought were kind. They were not. I took it because it was hers. Before I hid it, I drew one minute of it off with a needle into a glass of my own, in case the rest had to go back on the shelf. It is in my coat now, against a letter. That is hers as well, and I have not told her."
The hall was quiet. On the step, Perpetua had turned her head to me. Beside her, a woman with one bare finger sat perfectly still.
"Reserve theft carries the needle," said Lorn, "whoever commits it. Assessors included. You know that."
"I have sworn to it since I was twenty-four."
"It would be tomorrow."
"Yes."
"I could write the other sentence, Mr Carrow. It would cost you nothing but a lie. It is not even a large one."
"It would taste of tin," I said. "In my own mouth. That's rather the point of the Bank's having given me a spoon."
She considered me for the length of time it takes to read a long name. Then she laid down her pen.
I picked up the little silver spoon and turned it once in my fingers. It was warm from a Governor's pocket, and it weighed exactly what it had always weighed. I set it down again on the table beside the Guild's, bowl up.
"That's the whole of it," I said. "I'll stand where the Guild can see me."
Nobody applauded. A woman in the gallery wept aloud, without embarrassment, and the man next to her put his arm round her.
The pewter spoon sat crooked on my lapel where she had pinned it. I did not touch it. It was all I had left.
"Governor Harrowgate," said Lorn, and stood. "You are held by the Guild's wardens, on the Guild's authority, until the Guild's court sits at dawn. Captain, you will oblige me by sitting down."
The Governor turned his silver head. He looked at the black bottle, and at me, and at the woman on the step; and last, with the courteous, glacial calm that had been his one gift, at the Auditor. "You will never taste him," said Lucan Harrowgate. "No one ever has."
"Then he must be introduced," said Cassia Lorn.
They took him out by the officers' door, with a warden at each elbow and no irons. The bronze door stood open in its baize, empty, its ribbon still across it. Someone in the gallery began, uncertainly, to laugh.
The hall emptied slowly, in quiet knots. The gallery came down the stair in its Sunday coats, and no one stopped it. Merrow appeared from the servants' door with an empty tray, and stood looking at the floor as if she were counting the boards. Tobin sat on the dais steps with his head in his hands, and Gannet, hovering, put a large freckled hand on his back and left it there.
And across the emptying floor, for the first time in two days, Perpetua looked at me.
Neither of us moved. There were twenty feet of green baize between us, and a chain, and a cloth of needles that nobody had yet thought to roll up. She had her fist closed around the violet bottle and her dress was torn at the hem where Merrow had told her to mind it.
Lorn, at my shoulder, said drily, without turning her head:
"The Guild will sentence you in the morning, Mr Carrow. Tonight you are not an Assessor. You're allowed."