Chapter Eleven: The Reckoning

The last week went by in the cold, and I slept through most of it. On Midwinter morning the bell over the door of Hobb's Pledges and Loans rang once, as Mrs Hobb locked the shop behind us, and then it was quiet.

There were three of us, and a handcart. Mrs Hobb pushed the cart. On it were all the pledges that had not been redeemed that year. There were the boots, and a wedding ring in a twist of paper, and the carriage clock from beside my shelf. And there was me, in my scuttle, under the third cardigan. Tansy walked beside the cart with her bag over her shoulder. It was not a heavy bag. I had heard her pack it.

Quill stayed behind. He was not due at any Reckoning. Nobody had come for him in eleven years, and nobody had listed him either. The Great Ambrose had paid for his keep three years in advance and then vanished, and the law did not know what to do about that. Quill had said goodbye to me from his shelf with great formality. He had also said, when he thought I couldn't hear, "Bring her back." I don't think he was talking to Mrs Hobb.

The auction hall was on the far side of the Corn Bridge. It was a long high room that smelled of wet coats and candle wax and too many people. The candles were Guild candles. Hundreds of them, in iron rings hanging from the ceiling, all giving light and no heat. The benches were hard. I could hear the whole of Greyhithe sitting on them and shifting about, trying to get comfortable, and failing.

They had come to buy back their own things. That is what a Reckoning is, mostly. It is a hall full of people who could not pay in time, hoping that nobody else will want their mother's ring.

"Lot one," said the auctioneer. He had a voice like a cart going over cobbles, fast and loud and never stopping. "A pair of boots, good leather, hardly worn, who'll start me at a shilling."

I lay on the lots table in my scuttle and listened to Greyhithe buy itself back, one shilling at a time.

The Guild had a bench to themselves near the front. I could smell it from the table. Lamp oil and starch. A row of lamplighters, eight or nine of them, big men in heavy coats, with their poles stacked under the bench. And in the middle of them, Mr Strand, with a purse on his knee that clinked when he moved. The purse was very full.

Mrs Hobb sat on the sellers' bench, at the side, with her hands folded. Tansy sat next to her. Neither of them said anything. Lot nineteen was on the list, on the board by the door, in chalk. Everybody who came in could read it.

I counted the lots. I couldn't help it. Tansy had taught me. Lot six was the wedding ring, and a young man bought it back for nine shillings, and his mother cried. Lot ten was the carriage clock, and nobody wanted it. And then the auctioneer cleared his throat, which he had not done for any of the others.

"Lot twelve," he said. "Now here's something. One dragon. Elderly. Small. Bites." There was a laugh from the benches. "Pledged against eleven crowns. I have a reserve on this lot of two hundred crowns."

The laugh stopped.

"Two hundred crowns," said the auctioneer. "Do I have two hundred?"

"Two hundred," said Mr Strand. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to.

"Two hundred from the Guild. Do I have two hundred and five?"

The hall was silent. I could hear the Guild candles burning in their rings above us, and a child somewhere at the back with a cold, and somebody's coat dripping on the floor.

"Two hundred and five," said a voice from the back of the hall.

It smelled of lavender. I had not smelled her come in.

Mrs Fennick stood up at the end of a bench near the door. I heard the people around her turn to look. I heard her gloves, and the stays of her good coat, and the paper of a purse much thinner than Mr Strand's.

"I sold the books," she said, to nobody in particular, as if she needed to explain. "His library. All of it. Yesterday."

"Two hundred and five from the lady," said the auctioneer. "Do I have two hundred and ten?"

"Two hundred and ten," said Mr Strand, without any change in his voice at all.

I lay in my scuttle and listened to Mrs Fennick count her purse. I could hear the coins. I knew how many there were, roughly, the way Tansy knew what things weighed. There were enough. Not many more than enough, but enough for one more bid, perhaps two.

"Two hundred and ten from the Guild," said the auctioneer. "Madam? Two hundred and fifteen?"

She did not answer straight away. Instead she came down the aisle, between the benches, all the way to the front of the hall, until she was standing beside the lots table. Beside me. The lavender came with her. So did the pipe.

"Madam," said the auctioneer. "I need a bid or a no."

"In a moment," said Mrs Fennick. She bent down to the scuttle, quite close, the way she had on the third Thursday. She spoke very quietly, so that only I could hear, and Tansy, who had come to the end of the sellers' bench, and nobody else.

"If I buy you," she said, "you're bought. Aren't you? And your fire's bought with you. That's what the grandmothers say. I'd take you home to Ferrier Street and you'd lie by that grate, and you'd breathe on it, and it would be cold. Every night, for as long as you lasted. I'd have you back, and I'd have paid for you, and I'd never be warm again."

I said nothing. She was right. I think she had known it on the bench by the door, before she ever stood up.

"I don't want you bought," said Mrs Fennick. "I'd rather you were given. To someone. It doesn't have to be me."

She straightened up. She turned to the auctioneer.

"No," she said. "No more."

And she went and sat down, in the front row, with her hands folded over a purse she had emptied a library to fill, and she did not look at me again.

"Two hundred and ten crowns," said the auctioneer. "Going once. Going twice."

Here is what I want you to understand. I had made up my mind on the coldest night of the winter, and I had not changed it. But I had also, in nine hundred years, never been sold. I had been given and lent and borrowed, and once stolen, briefly, by a baron. I had never been sold, and I found that I minded it a great deal.

"Sold," said the auctioneer, "to the Lamplighters' Guild." And the gavel came down.

It was a small sound. Wood on wood. I felt it through the table.

"The Guild will take possession at noon," said Mr Strand, standing. "As agreed." I heard him take out his watch. "In nine minutes."

Nine minutes. Until noon I was still Mrs Hobb's pledge, and my fire was still my own. At noon, all of it that was left would be the Guild's, and cold, for good. I lay in the scuttle and listened to Mr Strand's watch. Then I turned my head, as far as I could, towards the end of the sellers' bench.

"Tansy," I said.

She was there at once. She knelt by the table, by the scuttle, so that her face was level with mine. I could feel her breath. I could smell the ink and the soap and the cold.

"I should like to ask you something," I said. "It's a thing I've only heard asked. I've never once asked it myself. I'm not sure I'll get the shape of it right."

"Al," she said. "Don't."

I asked it anyway.

"Can you spare a light?" My voice came out no louder than the candles.

She did not understand. I felt her not understand. I had heard those words through the wall every evening that winter. But they had only ever meant three different things, and this time they meant the opposite of what they said. They meant: will you take mine.

"You've got a candle in that bag," I said. "The one from the back room. I heard you pack it. Hold it out."

Her hands were shaking. I heard the bag open. I heard the candle come out, the dead candle with its black wick, the one that had been lit and relit all winter. I heard her hold it out, over the scuttle.

"You haven't paid for this," I said. "Not a penny. Nobody has. It isn't the Guild's. It's not even mine, after this. It's yours. Do you understand? It's given."

And I lifted my head out of the scuttle, the whole way, for the last time that winter, and I breathed.

I gave her everything I could spare. And then I gave her a little more than that, because whatever I kept back would be the Guild's in nine minutes.

The wick took it. It did not make the small sound a wick makes. It made a sound like a door opening. And the warmth came off it, not a candle's warmth, not even a hearth's, but something older and wider than either. It spread out over the lots table and the sellers' bench and the front row of the hall.

Mrs Fennick caught her breath. Mr Strand's watch snapped shut in his hand as he turned round.

And all over the hall, one after another, I heard people lift their heads. Because for the first time in forty years, the auction hall on the far side of the Corn Bridge smelled of warm candle wax.