Chapter Seven: Lot Nineteen

On the fourth Thursday, the bell did not ring at all until past nine, because nobody had opened the shop.

I had been awake all night. I had heard the ledger close at about two in the morning, and then nothing. Tansy did not go up the stairs. She did not come into the back room. She sat at the counter in the dark, in the cold, and I lay in my scuttle by the dead stove and listened to her not moving.

Here is what the line said. She read it to me later, so I can give it to you exactly. It was written in an old, thick hand, in ink gone brown. It was Mrs Hobb's father's hand. He had still kept the shop in the year of the flood, and she had kept it since he died, the winter after.

One girl, aged five. Pledged against four crowns, by her mother, who made her mark. Redeemable at any time. Interest waived.

That was all. No name for the mother, only an X. No name for the girl. Just a line in a column, between a pair of silver sugar tongs and a mantel clock.

At about six, when it was still dark, I heard Tansy get up. I heard her cross to the drawer under the counter, the one with the strongbox in it, the one where Mrs Hobb had put the Guild's letter and the Guild's envelope. Tansy had a key to that drawer. She had always had one. She kept the accounts. I heard her open it, and I heard paper.

She did not read this one aloud. She did not need to. I heard her breath stop, the way it had stopped over the ledger, and then go on again, very carefully, as if it were something that might break.

Mrs Hobb came down at a quarter past nine. I heard her stop on the bottom stair.

"Why isn't the shop open?" she said.

Tansy did not answer the question. "You've done the Reckoning list," she said.

There was a pause.

"It's due on the first," said Mrs Hobb. "The magistrates want it early this year."

"Lot nineteen," said Tansy. Her voice was quite steady. "One girl, aged sixteen, pledged eleven years ago against four crowns, unredeemed."

Mrs Hobb came down the last stair. I heard her boots on the boards. She did not come close to the counter. She stopped some way off, as if there was something on it that might bite.

"It's the law at sixteen," she said. "An unredeemed pledge of a person must be listed when the person comes of age. I've no say in it."

I waited for her to say something else. I think Tansy waited too. Mrs Hobb said nothing else at all. And I thought of my first night in the shop, when Tansy had counted the days to Midwinter, and then counted them again, more slowly, as if the number had come out wrong. She had turned sixteen that autumn. I think some part of her had known.

"Of course," said Tansy.

And then she put the list back in the drawer, and locked it, and turned the sign on the door, and the bell rang for the first customer of the day. She did the accounts. She wrote up a pledge for a pair of boots and a pledge for a wedding ring. She told a man his silver was plate and not to argue, and he didn't. If you had come into the shop that morning, you would have thought nothing at all had happened.

I had been in that shop for three weeks. I knew better.

Mrs Fennick came at eleven. The lavender came in with the cold, and under the lavender, very faintly, there was salt. She had been crying, not long before, on the way. She sat on the crate in front of my shelf for only a few minutes. She did not talk about her husband. She said she could not stay, and then she stayed a little longer, and then she went. Tansy did not ask her about redeeming me. Tansy did not ask anybody anything all day.

That night, after the shop was shut, she carried me through to the back room. She did not ask first. It was the first time.

She set me down by the stove, and she sat on the crate, and for a long time she said nothing. Quill, on his shelf, said nothing either, which was twice in one month. Then Tansy spoke, not loudly.

"What am I, then?" she said. "Stock."

I want to tell you that I said something wise. I had been alive for more than nine hundred years. I had lit the first fire in the city. I had advised kings and argued with wizards and once, for a fortnight, been worshipped by a village, which I did not encourage. I had a great deal of experience of what to say to people at the worst moments of their lives.

I had no idea what to say to her.

I lay there with my fire ticking low in my chest and thought about it. I thought about Mrs Fennick on the crate, and Quill on the shelf, and a stage magician who did not specify which Tuesday. I thought about my own ticket, with my own teeth marks in it, in a widow's purse on Ferrier Street. I was a pledge. I had been rude about pledges for three weeks, and I was one, and so was she.

"If it is any comfort," I said at last, "you were very badly priced."

There was a pause.

"Four crowns," I said. "For a girl who can tell plate from silver by the sound, and keeps a ledger better than any clerk in the Corn Exchange, and asks before she picks a person up. I should have asked for nine at the very least. Mrs Hobb's father was a fool."

Quill made a small strangled noise on his shelf.

And Tansy laughed. It was not much of a laugh. It came out wet, and it broke in the middle, and it turned into something else halfway through, and she put her face in her hands. But it was a laugh, at the start. Let the record show that it started as one.

I did not say anything else. I had used up all my kindness in one go, and it had come out wrong, and I was afraid that if I tried again it would come out worse. So I lay there by the dead stove while she cried, and I listened, and I did not shut my eyes.

After a while, she stopped. She wiped her face on the sleeve of the second cardigan. And then she said something that made Quill sit up so fast he lost a feather.

"Right," she said. "If I'm going to be sold at Midwinter, then I'm not going to spend the next three weeks waiting for it. The street's going to be warm first. Somehow."

"How?" said Quill.

"I don't know yet." She had her pencil out. I heard it scratch. "I'll make a list. Every house on Tallow Lane. Which ones still have a given hearth and which ones have gone cold. Who might spare a light, and who needs one." The pencil moved quickly. "The cobbler's still lit. Mr Abel's not. The woman with the tin, not. If one warm hearth can light two more, and those two can light four..."

She was talking to herself now, the way she did over the accounts. She was not talking to me. She did not ask me anything. She had stopped asking me.

She worked on the list until late. Then she stood up and went to her candle on the floor. She had been keeping it lit every night from the cobbler's hearth, going next door with it each evening and asking for a light, the way she had on the second Thursday. It had burned very low. She picked it up to take it next door.

The bell rang as she went out. I heard her knock on the cobbler's door. I heard it open, and I heard the old man's voice, and then I heard what he said, and I heard her say nothing at all.

She came back in. The bell rang. The cold came in with her, and nothing came in after it.

"His fire's gone out," she said. "He ran out of coal on Tuesday. He's been sitting in the dark."

She sat down on the crate with the dead candle in her hands. I could not see her hands. I did not need to. I could hear them, shaking with the cold, and I knew they had gone blue.