Perpetua
The day of the audit. Dawn.
The Guild took Idris Carrow's silver spoon at a quarter past six in the morning, and the only thing I wanted to know was whether he'd let them have the other one too.
The other one was pewter, filed out of a tavern tankard. He'd worn it through the tasting and the night, and now he stood at the foot of the Guild's table in the Long Hall, under the dead governors, in yesterday's coat, with that bent grey thing still crooked on his chest. It was the only thing I'd ever given him that he knew I'd given.
Lorn sat at the head of the table and read off a single sheet, and didn't waste a word on any of us.
"The Governor goes to the Guild's island, to be tried by people who can't be bought," she said. "The Reserve is shut under Guild wax, and every sale it touched is frozen, down to the last note."
"Hesper Lune," said Lorn. "Exile from Vessel, for life. As to the child's memory—"
I stood up. Nobody had asked me to. Hesper sat at the far end in a brown shawl with a warden behind her chair, and she didn't turn round.
"The boy's hers," I said. "I carried him. Write it."
Lorn looked down the table at me with her taster's face. Then she tipped her head at the clerk, and he wrote it. At the foot of the table two blue hands came open on the wood and lay there, flat.
"Mr Carrow," said Lorn. "The Bank's spoon."
It lay on the table in front of her where he'd set it down at midnight, bowl up. She gave it to the clerk, and Idris didn't watch it go. The clerk's eyes went to the pewter on his lapel, and stayed there, hopefully.
"Tin," said Lorn, "is not the Guild's concern." She turned her sheet. "Lot eleven forty-seven was bought into the Reserve four years ago on an account the Governor's own ledger shows was kept for fraud. This court voids the purchase. A sale voided for the buyer's fraud goes back to the seller, and the seller keeps the price. Reserve theft is theft of what the Reserve owns, and the Bank's drawing was for that. What Mr Carrow carried out of the Reserve was never the Bank's, and the drawing has nothing left to stand on. It lapses on the Bank's own terms, which is the only way the Guild may end one." She did not look up. "He did lift a sealed lot from a sealed shelf, falsify the count with a forgery, and hide the thing from this audit. For that, the court's sentence: his spoon and his office forfeit, with his pension, and a bar for life from any post in any port that carries a spoon."
When she said forfeit he didn't move. He bowed to her. He looked down the hall at me once, the length of a held breath, and then a warden touched his elbow and he went out by the officers' door with the pewter still on him.
I hadn't spoken to him. That was the fact under all the others.
Lorn came down the hall with a paper in her fingers. I stopped her before she could give it me.
"The man in the chair," I said. "The one with no face."
"The Guild has a writ for a man with no face," said Cassia Lorn. "It will take a year." She put the paper in my hand. "This is yours to dispose of."
She went to breakfast.
It was a Collateral Office note, green, in a clerk's round hand, out of the Governor's effects. Across it, in the Guild's black, somebody had stamped void.
Tobin was waiting on the Bank steps with his apron off. He'd been sick behind a pillar at some point in the night. In the grey light he looked like something a dyer had rinsed too hard.
"Come on," I said.
We went down Hook Street, where the queue for the Collateral Office had stood nine days before. It was empty now, and wet. At the corner I unfolded the note and held it out.
"Read it," I said.
He took it, and read it with his lips moving, as he's read since he was six, and got to the figure, and stopped.
"Three hundred and forty," he said.
"Yes."
"It was always three-forty."
"Since the fever. I've paid the interest on it for three years."
"You never said."
"No."
"I'd have—" He stared at the number like a knife somebody had finally let him hold. "I'd have got a second job. I'd have known what I was—" He couldn't finish it.
"You'd have sold something sooner," I said. "That's why." It came out like a sum read aloud, neither kind nor cruel. "It was my mistake, and it was the same one as yours. I carried it for you and never asked if you wanted it carried. I'm sorry, Tobin. I should have told you."
"I should've asked," he said.
"You should."
"I'm not saying it's the same."
"It's not the same," I said. "It's close."
He had a tinderbox in his pocket. He always does, from the bottle-works; his hands know it as mine know a pick. He struck it on the third go and held the spark to the corner. The green went brown, and the brown went black, and the flame walked up the note, past the figure, past the forty-one, past the Bank's seal, and reached his fingers before either of us thought to let go.
He shook it off. The ash went down Hook Street on the wet, in a long soft curl.
"I'm not there yet," I said. "I'm going to be furious with you at odd hours. Over breakfast. When you're being funny."
"That seems fair."
"But I'm holding your hand while I'm not." I took it. It was hot and sticky, with a fresh burn across the fingertips. "You don't get to go off and pay for it. You get to stay, and be bad at it in front of me."
Tobin shut his eyes. When he opened them he was looking down the hill, at the masts.
"Can I go and see her off?" he said. "The ship. I don't know why."
"You don't need to ask me."
"I want to."
"Then go," I said, and let go of his hand one finger at a time. "It's your tide."
The harbour wall runs out from the fish market for a quarter of a mile, a grey arm of stone with a lamp on an iron post every forty paces. I walked out along it in a dress Merrow had cut and I had ruined, with my hair coming down, and at the second lamp I stopped, because it was the first with a view of the whole harbour.
A coasting brig lay off the end of the wall with her canvas loosed, riding low on the ebb. A boat was pulling out to her from the water stairs, and on the thwart, in a brown shawl with a bundle on her knee, sat a broad woman with her hands folded. She didn't look back at the town.
I put my hand on the nearest post. The iron was wet and cold. And a voice behind me said, quietly, "Not that one."
He was ten paces off on the stones, hands empty, the pewter crooked on his coat. He'd been standing there some time, I thought, deciding not to come nearer.
"Which?" I said.
"The fourth."
He walked me to it, a pace to my left, not offering his arm, past the third lamp, and stopped. The fourth was out. It usually is, he said, as if it were a private joke that had cost him a good deal to keep.
"That's a poor way to pick a lamp."
"It was never picked for its light."
Iron post, glass box, a scrap of dead wick. Round the foot the stone was worn hollow, as if people had stood there. I laid my hand flat on the cold iron and waited to feel anything at all.
Cold, and wet, and the wind coming up the harbour. I had spent it.
"I paid the lock with it," I said. "The summer. The bottle you put in my box. The door weighed it against the nine days, and I wanted the nine days. I could have handed it to Tobin and drunk it at the top of the stair and known why I loved you. I didn't." I kept my hand on the iron. "I wanted you to have it from me and not from a clerk. I chose it. Nobody chose it for me."
A small muscle moved beside his eye and was stilled.
"Then it's gone," he said.
"I'd do it again tomorrow, with the same hand. I haven't lost you. I've got every day of you but the first ones."
"I'd have given every mark I own to keep it whole for you." A pause. "Which is the thing I have to say, so I'll say it plainly. I found what had been taken out of you, and I hid it. I told myself it was the law and the oath and the needle, and all of that was true. The reason under the rest was that I wanted you to choose me without it. I let you walk to the Salt Steps and come home to me, and I had a whole day to tell you." He met my eyes. "I decided for you. I won't again." His hand went to his coat, and came away empty. "The minute is still here. The court gave the whole lot back to you, so it's yours by law as well as every other way. Say where it goes."
A finger of my own summer, in a man's coat, against a letter I never wrote.
"Keep it," I said. "Not for me. For me to ask for. That's different, and you'll know the difference."
"I will."
Out in the harbour a bell rang eight, thin and clear.
"I've been angry about that for two days," I said. I found my hand at my mouth and took it away. "But you've said it to my face. Not through a wall, not through bars. I don't need it twice."
"I'll say it as often as you like."
"Don't. It'd get boring. Besides, it's my turn." I looked at him. "You swore an oath on your spoon. I worked that out in a study a week ago and never got the terms."
"There were two halves," said Idris. "Never to tell you what you sold. And never to court you as the man you lost. You asked it of me the night before. You said you'd spend your life and your brother's money trying to buy it back, and you'd not have me loving a stranger out of duty."
I'd have known her, that girl. She'd have said exactly that, with her chin up, to a man she was about to lose.
"I release you," I said. "Both halves. I'm the one who asked, so I can unask it. You're not the Bank's any more, the sales are frozen, and what you'd tell me about is inside my father's iron. There's nothing left to void." I put my other hand on the post. "So you can court me. Not as who I was. As whoever this is. Tell me one thing. Not the summer. One thing that's only ever been yours."
It took him a while. He looked at the lamp, and at the worn stone, and at the harbour, where the brig had her boat alongside and her sails were filling, slow and white. He came to me last.
"When you were deciding whether to kiss me," said Idris, "you bit the side of your thumb."
I stood there.
"Here. At this lamp. I was reading the lease, and you had it flat on the iron, holding it down with both hands against the wind, and you stopped waiting for me to finish. You said, oh, bother it, and you put it between your teeth, and you stared at me for a good ten seconds as if I were a lock that had stuck. Then you let go of the lease, and it went off across the harbour, and you kissed me anyway."
"The lease blew away."
"It was a very good lease. Two rooms over a chandler's."
I laughed. It came out of me in a great foolish rush, and I put my hand up to my mouth and found my thumb there, between my teeth, exactly where he'd said. I'd been doing it for five minutes. I took it out. It had the mark of my teeth on it.
"You'd stopped," Idris said, very quietly. "I noticed in the Cellar. You've started again."
"Since the Salt Steps."
"I know. I've been counting."
The brig had gone out past the end of the wall and was beginning to lean. I looked for Hesper at the rail and couldn't tell her from the rest. I raised my hand a little way and didn't wave. There are people you can't hate however honestly you try; you get no purchase. At the water stairs Tobin stood with his hands in his pockets, and one came out and went up, high, and stayed there.
I turned back. He was near now; I hadn't seen him move. There was a pace between us, and then not.
"I said it once at this lamp," said Idris Carrow, "and I'd say it again. I'll sign anything you put in front of me."
He said it plainly, like the time of day. I'd had those words for a week, in a forged letter and a housekeeper's handwriting and a boy's memory of a wall, and it was the first time I'd had them from the mouth they belonged to.
He took a folded paper from inside his coat, soft at the creases from three months against his ribs, and gave it to me. My hand. I'd never written a word of it. I held it out over the edge of the wall and opened my fingers, and the wind took it off across the harbour after a lease.
"I love you," he said. "Present tense. I've been careful about the tense."
"I love you," I said. "I haven't got the reasons. I've got nine days and the last five minutes, and I'm told that's how most people start."
I kissed him then. Somebody had to; he'd have stood there till the tide came in. His hand came up and stopped an inch from my face, and waited, and I turned my cheek into it. It smelled of cloves and ink and salt wind, and it shook.
When he drew back he had the terrible seriousness on him again. "Lorn's clerk points out that Bess Tolley doesn't exist. Which leaves me with no spoon, no post, and no wife."
"Are you asking?"
"I've a rule these days about deciding for you."
I looked at him, at the ridiculous pewter on his lapel and the white line on his wrists where the irons had been, and I put my hand in my pocket, where it couldn't give me away.
"Then ask me properly," I said.
Five weeks after the audit. Evening.
He asked me properly on a Tuesday in the Penny Cellar, from a sheet of paper he'd plainly rewritten four times, in front of Master Esk and eleven sellers who'd come in for nothing of the kind. I said "Terms" before he'd reached the verb. We wrote them on the back of a sellers' receipt: we ask; nobody buys my days, him included; butter. He read them through before he signed, which was the fourth term, and Esk wept into the Cellar's licence.
We gave back forty bottles that month, lawfully, under Guild stamps. Corvane drank the first of hers sitting up in a bed in the quiet ward, and her eyes came back into her face like a tenant into a house, and the first thing she did with them was price me.
Gannet's mother was three beds down. Lorn's clerks had found one lot of hers, a single day the Bank had kept and never sold: a Sunday, the sea, a boy of six on her knee with his hat gone. Gannet held the cup. She drank, and looked up at the enormous freckled young man by her bed, with his badge off and his ears scarlet, and put out one hand to him as though he were a very long way off.
"Colm," she said. "You've got so tall."
Gannet made a sound like a door coming off its hinge, and knelt down in the aisle of the quiet ward in front of forty beds, and put his face in her rug. I went out and looked at a wall.
We were married on the harbour wall in the last week of the summer, at six in the evening, with the wind coming off the water hard enough to take a hat.
Tallow Lane came in its Sunday coats. Esk had a new licence pinned over his heart. Merrow stood at the front with her red hands on a prayer book, looking proved right about the weather. My brother gave me away in a borrowed coat with the sleeves too short, and told me out of the side of his mouth that he was sober and that his speech had a cat in it.
Idris was waiting at the fourth lamp. He'd had it mended. The glass was clean and the iron scraped, and the foot, where the stone was worn hollow, stood dry and swept. He wore a grey coat that fitted, and on the lapel, crooked, a pewter spoon.
I don't remember what the chaplain said. I remember Idris's hand, warm and dry and not quite steady, and a new ring, small and silver, that went over my knuckle and stopped exactly where it should.
Then the register, on the lamp's iron foot for a desk, with Idris holding one corner against the wind and Tobin the other. The chaplain gave me the pen. I'd signed a false name in a carriage with a violet bottle at my feet, so hard the nib went through the vellum.
I wrote Perpetua Vane.
The nib didn't go through. It ran across the paper like a boat across still water, and the line came out long and forward-leaning, and when I lifted the pen there wasn't so much as a scratch.
"Well," said Merrow, loudly, to nobody. "That's a proper name."
Then Tobin unfolded his speech. "My sister," he said. "She's short."
"Sit down," said Merrow.
"She's short, and she's quick, and she doesn't eat. When I was fourteen there was a Tuesday in March, and our father set a pan on fire, and I floured the cat." He found me in the crowd and didn't hurry it. "I've got the whole of that day. I'm keeping it for her. Any time she wants it, she's only to ask, and I'll tell it from the start. The pan. The rain. The cat—" His voice went. He got it back. "I swore the cat wanted to help. I still say so."
I didn't get the day back. I got my brother's telling of it, and it wasn't warm the way the drinking would have been. It was warm in the hands.
Afterwards I took him down to the end of the wall while the others stayed at the cake.
The light had gone long and yellow across the water. I took the violet bottle out of my pocket. I'd carried it five weeks, because I hadn't wanted anyone else to. The wax was the colour of a vein at the wrist.
"I'm going to pour it out," I said. "You don't have to say anything."
"I wasn't going to say a word."
"Liar."
"I was going to say one." He was smiling, a little. "I'll stand here."
I broke the wax with a fingernail. It came away in a single piece, and the smell came up out of the neck, cold and faint and sweet. A love with the face cut out, cut from my own summer. I tilted the glass, and it went out in a slow thin thread that the sea took at once and made nothing of.
I turned to his face.
He'd put one drop of it on a spoon, on the first night of our marriage, the false one, and I saw that drop go over him now, all of it, like weather over a field. I'd seen a dyer's face do that in a booth on Tallow Lane and hadn't known what I was looking at.
"It was so warm," I said.
He shut his eyes. "Yes."
I dropped the empty glass in after it. We stood looking at the place where it had gone in, and down the wall the sellers were singing something with a chorus, out of tune, and Merrow's voice said, "Sit down, boy."
"I've a wedding present for you," said Idris. "I'd rather you had it here."
He took it out of his inner pocket as carefully as a man lifting a sleeping cat. A bottle, thumb-long, of glass clear as a window, so that I could see straight through it to the level: a finger's depth of something so faintly gold it might have been the light. The wax on it had no colour at all.
"That isn't Bank glass," I said.
"No. I bought the glass on Chandler's Hill and sealed it myself. I wanted you to be able to see through it." He held it out on his palm and didn't close his fingers. "The minute you gave me to keep, at this lamp. It's been in a tally-glass in my coat for five weeks, and you haven't asked, and I find I'd rather you carried it than I did, if you'll have it. You needn't open it. A lot is a lot, whatever size you bottle it in."
"One minute of what?"
"You, at this lamp, in August. The wind. The lease flat on the iron under both your hands." He stopped. "And me. I didn't cut anything out. My face is in it."
I knew the face. I'd had it for one breath at my father's door, a man with the wind in his hair and his hat gone over the water, laughing as if I were the good news, and then it went out through my palm into the iron. It was sitting in his hand now, in a finger of gold, where I could see it.
I took the bottle. It was heavier than it looked. I closed my fingers round it until the glass was warm, and I didn't break the wax.
"What's it worth?" I said.
He considered it, as he would any lot, because I'd asked him to. "On the Bank's scale, a minute of a great love, whole, with the face in? Eleven marks. Twelve, to the right buyer."
"And to you?"
"I'm not permitted to say. I've no spoon."
I put it in the pocket Merrow had sewn me, and put my hand over the pocket.
"Not now," I said. "Maybe not ever. When I want it, I'll ask you for the story first, and then I'll decide." I lifted my head. Out past the end of the wall the harbour was going gold to the edge of the world, wide and full of ships, and somewhere out there a Guild writ was going door to door with a year to run. "It's not for sale."
"No," said Idris. "It never was."
He put out his hand. I took it. The new ring turned once against the bone, and stayed.
We walked back along the stones. Ahead of us, at the mouth of the wall, a lamplighter came out with his pole and his little flame and began to work his way along, one post at a time. He lit the first, and the second, and the third. At the fourth he stopped, and looked at the mended glass, and looked at us, and reached up; and it caught, first time, and threw two shadows down the gold stones, joined at the hands.