Chapter Four: Thursdays

On the third Thursday, the bell rang at ten in the morning, and the shop filled up with lavender.

I knew it before the door had shut. I had spent a week telling myself that I did not care whether Mrs Fennick came back, and I had believed it about half the time. Now I lay very still in my scuttle on the front shelf and kept my eyes closed. It is easy for me to pretend to be asleep. My eyes are no use open, and closing them costs me nothing.

"Good morning, Mrs Hobb," said Mrs Fennick, the widow who had pawned me.

"Mrs Fennick." Mrs Hobb's pencil did not stop. "Come to redeem?"

"Come to visit," said Mrs Fennick. "If that's allowed."

There was a pause in which I could hear Mrs Hobb deciding whether it was allowed. In a lifetime behind that counter, I suspect nobody had ever asked her.

"It's your pledge," she said at last. "You can look at it as much as you like. Tansy, give Mrs Fennick your crate."

Tansy brought the crate. She set it in front of my shelf, where she sat every evening. Mrs Fennick sat on it with a creak of good stays and thin gloves. For a while she said nothing. Then she began to talk, not to me exactly, but near me, the way people talk beside a grave.

She talked about her husband's pipe. It was a cherrywood pipe with a chip out of the bowl, and he had smoked it for forty years and never once cleaned it. She said the whole house on Ferrier Street still smelled of it. She said it was like living inside his coat. She talked about his jokes, which were bad, and which he told twice, in case you had missed them the first time. She talked about the way he hummed when he was working, always the same three bars of a song he never finished, so that she had spent forty years waiting for the fourth.

I lay with my eyes shut and listened to every word. I knew that song. I had heard him hum it under his breath on a thousand winter evenings, with his feet up on my back to warm them. He never did finish it. I had never asked him what came next. I had thought there would be time.

"He used to talk to you," said Mrs Fennick. Her voice had come closer. "In the evenings. I'd hear him through the study door, going on and on. I used to think he was talking to himself. And then one night I heard you answer him."

I kept my eyes shut.

"I suppose you miss him too," she said, very quietly. "I suppose you must."

Above us on his shelf, Quill shifted. I could feel him looking at me. I did not open my eyes. If I had opened them I would have had to answer, and if I had answered I would have had to say something true, and I had no idea what that would be.

After a while, Mrs Fennick stood up. The crate creaked as she rose. She did not touch the scuttle. I heard her gloves rustle as she put them back on, finger by finger, and I heard her cross to the door.

Tansy was there before her. I heard the girl's quick light steps on the boards, and then her voice, low and level, the voice she used for prices.

"Mrs Fennick," she said. "Will you redeem him?"

She said him. I noticed that, too. Mrs Hobb called me it. Mrs Fennick called me he. Until that morning, Tansy had been careful to call me nothing at all.

The lavender went sharp. Mrs Fennick did not answer straight away.

"Not yet," she said.

"There are twenty-eight days left," said Tansy. "After that, it's the Reckoning. Anyone can buy him at the Reckoning."

"I know how a pledge works, child."

"Everybody says that," said Tansy. It was exactly what Mrs Hobb had said on the first morning, in exactly her voice, and I heard Mrs Hobb's pencil stop.

Mrs Fennick opened the door. The bell rang. The cold came in.

I could have called her back. You must understand that. I want to be fair to myself in this story, but I want to be fair to her more. I have a voice, when I want one, like a cathedral organ. I used it once to stop a battle on the river, and once to tell a king precisely what I thought of him. If I had lifted my head out of that scuttle and said her name, she would have stopped on the step. She would have turned round. And I think, though I can never know, that she would have counted out eleven crowns and the interest on the glass, there and then, and carried me home.

I did not call her. I lay with my eyes shut and my teeth together. I told myself it was because I was sulking. It was because I was proud. It was because, if she had taken me home to Ferrier Street, I would have had to lie every night in a house that smelled of his pipe, beside a chair with nobody in it.

The door shut. The lavender thinned and went. And from that moment, though I did not let myself know it yet, I was going to the Reckoning.

The bell rang once more that day, at noon. It was a boy in a Guild cap, with a letter. He did not wait for an answer. Mrs Hobb read the letter standing up at the counter, and then she read it again sitting down. I heard the paper shake very slightly, the way paper does when the hands holding it are cold, or are not quite steady.

"What does it say?" said Tansy.

"That the Lamplighters' Guild understands this shop holds a dragon," said Mrs Hobb, "and that, should the dragon go unredeemed, the Guild intends to bid for it at the Midwinter Reckoning. And that they will send an agent to inspect the pledge, at my convenience." She folded the letter. "At my convenience. I like that."

"Will you burn it?" said Tansy.

There was nothing to burn it in. The stove in the back room had been dead for years, and the Guild lamp on the counter would not have scorched a moth. Tansy knew that. I think she asked so that Mrs Hobb would have to say no out loud.

Mrs Hobb said nothing at all. She opened the drawer under the counter, the one with the strongbox in it, and she put the letter inside, and she shut the drawer. Then she said that it was past noon and the shop would not run itself, and Tansy went to see to the coal merchant.

That night, after the shop was shut, I did not hear Tansy counting. I heard Mrs Hobb instead. She sat alone at the counter with the big ledger open in front of her, under the cold light of the Guild lamp. She turned the pages back a long way, so far back that the paper sounded different, softer and more brittle.

Then I heard her pencil, writing something short.

And then, after a long while, I heard the small dry scrape of a rubber, rubbing it out.