Chapter Six: Eleven Years

The bell rang on Wednesday morning for the coal merchant, who had come to be paid, and Mrs Hobb paid him in pledges.

I listened from my shelf as she did it. A pair of brass candlesticks, unredeemed since the summer. A clock that did not go. A fur tippet that had been a fox, and before that, I suspect, another tippet. The coal merchant grumbled and took them all, and gave her two sacks of coal she had nothing warm to light with. That is how a pawnshop runs in winter. Things go round and round, and nobody is ever quite paid, and the coal sits in the cellar waiting for a fire.

"It's tonight, isn't it?" said Tansy, when he had gone.

"What on earth is tonight?" said Mrs Hobb.

"Quill's anniversary," said Tansy. "Eleven years."

Mrs Hobb said that she had not forgotten, in the voice of someone who had. And I, lying in my scuttle between the carriage clock and the spoons, felt a stirring of something I had not felt in weeks. It was not hope. I am not sure dragons go in for hope. It was the old, low pleasure of knowing that before the day was out, somebody was going to make a fool of himself, and that I would be there to hear it.

The owl had been preparing all week. I had heard him at night, muttering on his shelf, trying out phrases and discarding them. Once, at about three in the morning, he had said "Friends, pledges, fellow stock." After a long pause he had said "No."

At closing time, Tansy carried me through to the back room. She set my scuttle by the cold stove, as she always did, and then she sat on her crate and folded her hands. Mrs Hobb came and stood in the curtain with her arms crossed, which for Mrs Hobb was a great concession.

Quill cleared his throat. It took some time. Owls do not have much throat to clear.

"Eleven years ago tonight," he began, "in the year of the great flood, I was placed upon this shelf by a stage magician of the name of the Great Ambrose. He paid for my keep three years in advance. No pledge in the history of this shop has ever had that done for it, and the law has never known what to do with me since. He informed Mrs Hobb that he would return for me on Tuesday."

"He didn't say which Tuesday," said Tansy, who had clearly heard the speech before.

"He did not specify which Tuesday," said Quill, with great dignity. "And so I waited. I have waited through eleven winters and eleven summers. I have waited through three moults, two leaks in the roof, and the incident with the ferret. I have seen pledges come and pledges go. Watches. Wedding rings. A complete suit of armour, which was redeemed by a very small man who I am fairly sure was not its owner."

"He was its owner's nephew," said Mrs Hobb from the curtain. "I checked."

"And through it all," said Quill, raising his voice slightly, "I have kept my place. I have kept count. I have never once fallen off. Some might call that a long time to wait for a stage magician. I call it a career."

"Hear, hear," I said.

Quill turned his whole face towards me, slowly, the way owls do. I could feel the full weight of his disapproval, even with my eyes.

"Some of us," he said, "have been on this shelf for eleven years, and some of us have been in that scuttle for three weeks. I would ask the newer pledges to hold their remarks until the end."

"I was pledged before your Great Ambrose was born," I said. "I was pledged before his grandmother was born. I have been carried in more scuttles than you have had moults."

"And yet," said Quill, "you were not invited to speak."

Tansy laughed. It was the first time I had heard her laugh, and it came out of her all at once, as if she had not known it was there. Even Mrs Hobb made a sound in the curtain that might have been a cough.

Quill went on. He spoke about dignity. He spoke about endurance. He spoke at some length about the moult, which he felt was not properly understood by the general public. And then, near the end, he said something I did not expect.

"I was not the only pledge to come to this shop in the year of the flood," he said. "The girl and I are of the same year. She was smaller then. She was so small she could not reach the counter. I used to watch her sitting under it, with a pencil, writing her letters on the back of old tickets." He paused. "I have watched her grow up from this shelf. I would like that noted. That is all."

There was a silence in the back room. Tansy did not say anything. I heard her hands tighten in her lap.

"Well," said Mrs Hobb at last, quite gruffly. "Very nice, Quill. Bed, all of you. It's freezing." And she went.

It was freezing. It was the coldest night yet. Tansy had a brick for her bed. She carried it next door every evening, and the cobbler let her warm it at his hearth, for nothing, because she asked. She had brought it back an hour ago, wrapped in a flannel, and set it by the curtain.

Now she got up and picked up the brick and put it on Quill's shelf. She tucked the flannel round it and nudged it up against his feathers.

"Happy anniversary," she said.

"You'll freeze, you ridiculous girl," said Quill.

"I've got three cardigans," said Tansy. "You've only got the one owl."

Then she went up the stairs, the fourth step and the ninth, to a bed with no brick in it.

I did not sleep that night. I lay in my scuttle with my fire ticking in my chest, low and slow. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to breathe on that brick and warm it all night, or to warm her blankets through the ceiling. I had done far harder things for kings. I did not do it. A flame given is a flame gone, and I had very few left, and they were mine. I lay awake and told myself that, over and over, the way Quill practised his speech.

Some time after midnight, I heard her come down again.

She did not come into the back room. She went to the shelves at the far end of the shop, where the old ledgers were kept, the ones from years ago. I heard her lift one down, and blow the dust off it, and lay it on the counter. I knew what she was doing. Quill had said the year of the flood, and she wanted to check the date. She checked everything.

I heard the old pages turning. They were soft and brittle, the way the pages had sounded when Mrs Hobb turned them back that night with her pencil. I heard Tansy's finger moving down a column. I heard her find Quill. She said "There you are" under her breath, the way you'd greet a friend.

Then the pages went on turning, and then they stopped.

There was a long silence. It went on so long that the cold crept into it. Then, very quietly, as if she was reading it to make sure it really said what it said, Tansy read one line aloud.

"One girl," she read. "Aged five."