For three weeks, I read the rows the way Corvin would.
It did not come naturally. It came the way a second language comes, one painful word at a time, and every evening I caught myself slipping back into my own. A deposit would appear in Lotte's round hand, and before I could stop it, my mind had put a face on it: a farmer's wife in a clean shawl, a little frightened of the capital, holding her cloth of harvest coin against her chest as if someone might take it. And every evening I had to take the face off again, and look at only what was there. A name. A sum. A date. A thumbprint. A little brass house and key.
During the day, Corrinford went on as if nothing could ever go wrong in it.
Fenn had cut the two hundred and first line into the Trust House doorframe with a nail, a little longer than the others, and brought half of Bakers' Lane to admire it, including several people who had already admired it twice. Borrik told a carter that he was Head of Security at a house of two hundred and one depositors, and the carter asked him what a depositor was, and Borrik explained, at length, with gestures, until the carter opened an account to make him stop. A tinker's boy called the bank the Sekka to my face four times in one afternoon.
Correction number two hundred and four, I thought, and let it pass. I was not giving up. I was conserving my strength.
At night, I read.
By the end of the first week, I had found something. It wasn't in any one row. It was in the shape of them, the way Corvin had always said, the way I had never quite understood until I made myself look.
When Brenna put a crown into her account, the crown stayed. It sat there for weeks. Sometimes she took a few marks out for flour, and the rest stayed, and grew a little, and stayed. When Hettie saved, it stayed. When Fenn saved his three bits from an errand, they stayed so long that he forgot they were there, and then remembered, and was delighted. That is what savings do. They stay.
The coin from down the road never stayed. It came in, four crowns, three crowns, four and a half. And three days later, sometimes four, it went out again, almost to the bit. Every account. Every time. Like water through a sieve.
Savings don't move like that, I thought, with my finger on Meg Holloway's page. Wages move like that. Dues move like that.
The training module at home had a line about this, near the end, the part everyone skipped because they thought they had already passed the test. Know your customer does not only mean knowing who they are. It means knowing why the account exists. What it is for.
I had asked Lotte who. I had never asked her why.
So, on the evening of Day 208, I wrote a second question in the description column, with no money in the row.
To L.W. The accounts from down the road: the coin goes in and out again within days. What is it for? S.H.
The answer came late that night, long after the eighth bell, when I had almost given up and gone home.
Their dues to the estate, Sekka. Rent and the mill fee. They bring it up with the produce, and it's paid out of their accounts to the estate's men here, so nobody has to carry coin home past the ford. L.W.
I read it three times.
It made sense. It made perfect sense. Every merchant on that road had carried his money in his boots. Hob had stood at my counter and told me so. Here were a dozen poor families from Crane's land, using the bank to pay their landlord without being robbed on the way. It was exactly what I had built the Aubrelle door for.
The estate's men, said the small tired voice at the back of my mind. Whose men?
The baron's, I told it. Obviously the baron's. It's his estate.
The baron who never pays anyone. Whose steward pays his creditors on time.
I shut the book on it. It was very late. I had a pile of PENDING passbooks waiting for me in the morning, and a queue, and a tinker's boy who would call me the Sekka.
Only once in those three weeks did anything in Lotte's hand look different. On Day 213, in the middle of a row from down the road, there was a blot: a small, round splash of ink beside a sum, as though the pen had been held still over the page for a long moment before it wrote.
I looked at it for a long time. Then I turned the page.
Corvin was due on Day 223. I had counted it on my fingers, the way Fenn counts, the morning he left.
So on the morning of Day 221 I wasn't expecting anything. I went to the Trust House before dawn only because I had gone before dawn every day since he left. I let myself in, and lit the lamp, and sat down on my stool in my coat with the hall still dark and cold around me, and opened the book to the back pages, the way other people open a window to see what the weather is doing.
There was a new row at the bottom of the Aubrelle page.
It was not in Lotte's hand. It was cramped and dense and ink-stained, and it was still being written. The letters were appearing one at a time, a little faster than Lotte's ever did, the way Corvin writes when he is counting and doesn't want to lose his place.
Day 221. Arrived last night, early. Hedda pushed. Vault counted before opening, by C. Dalle, with L. Wren and Wat. Both keys turned. Every shelf. Twice.
I put my hand flat on the counter.
Cash opname, I thought.
At home, internal audit could walk into any branch on any morning without a word of warning, before the doors opened, and count every rupiah in the khasanah while the branch manager stood beside them and sweated. We all hated it. Everyone in every branch I had ever worked in hated it. The tellers used to whisper that audit only came on the mornings you'd overslept. I had never once, in four years, understood what it was actually for.
The pen three weeks away moved on. A new line.
Coin on the shelves: 62 crowns, 12 marks.
Then a gap, as though the hand had stopped and gone back to check something. Then the next line.
The ledger says: 117 crowns, 4 marks.
I looked at the two numbers. I did the subtraction before I could stop myself. Four years of balancing a drawer at the end of every day will do that to you. My mind simply did it, coldly, perfectly, the way it had done a thousand times at home, and handed me the answer.
Corvin wrote it anyway. Of course he did. He would never leave a sum for the reader to do.
Short: 54 crowns, 12 marks.
The lamp hissed. Outside, the first bell rang over the river, the dawn bell, very faint and very far away. In Aubrelle, I thought, it would be ringing too.
Fifty-four crowns and twelve marks.
It was nearly four times Brenna's life savings. It was nearly three years of a laborer's wages. It was the price of Brenna's whole building, nearly three times over. It was a little more than one-sixth of everything Aldous Penhallow had ever put into this house.
And it wasn't on the shelves. Somewhere between the book and the vault, fifty-four crowns and twelve marks had simply walked away, and every row they had walked away through had been written in a round, steady hand, and sealed in gold, and checked by me, every night, with my chin on my hand, looking for the good.
My face, I am sure, did nothing at all. There was nobody there to see it. But I have learned since then that it doesn't matter whether anyone is watching. My face does nothing regardless. That is what four years of Counter 3 did to it. It had locked itself, the way a validated page locks, so that nothing written on the inside could ever show through.
Inside, something was screaming. It wasn't saying words. It was just screaming, very steadily, the way a kettle does.
At home, when my drawer was short, the coin was always in my shoe.
I took off my shoe. I am not proud of it.
Fifty-four crowns do not fit in a shoe.
At the second bell, I opened the door.
I didn't decide to. I simply found that I had stood up, and tied my hair at the nape, and walked to the door and drawn the bar, the way I had every working morning since Day 1. There were four people on the step. Widow Marsh, bent like a question mark, with eleven bits in a twist of cloth. A carter. Two of Hettie's girls.
Never make a frightened customer wait at a locked door, I had said once, on the morning of the run.
I had never thought about what you do when the frightened one is behind the counter.
"Good morning," I said. "Welcome to the Corrinford Trust House."
"Morning, Sekka," said Widow Marsh.
I wrote her row. I took her eleven bits. I validated it, and the gold ran along the edge, and she watched it go with the same small, toothless satisfaction she always did. It was the most ordinary thing in the world. My hand didn't shake. I checked.
Tamsin came in at the third bell, as she always did, and sat down on the customers' bench with her crossbow across her knees. She looked at me once. Her scar did not go white, but something in her face went very still.
"Bad?" she said.
"Yes."
"Aubrelle?"
"Yes."
She looked at me a moment longer.
"Going?"
"Yes," I said, and realized as I said it that I had known since dawn.
Tamsin got up and walked out of the door without another word. I learned later that she went straight to the Guild Hall, past Liesl's counter and up two flights of dark timber stairs, and stood in Rook Varga's doorway until he looked up, and said, "Two blades. Tomorrow. Aubrelle." And Rook Varga looked at her face, and took his liquorice root out of his mouth, and said only, "Hm." The short one.
All morning I worked. All morning, in the moments between customers, I turned the book round and looked at the back pages. The pen three weeks away came back to them three times.
At the fourth bell:
Wat says: he turned his key every time Miss Wren turned hers. The slips were always gold. When the steward came for withdrawals, coin went down. Wat cannot remember coin ever coming up from the counter for the deposits from down the road. He did not think to remember. It was not his key's business.
At the sixth:
Deposits from down the road since Day 190: 54 crowns, 12 marks. Coin that came up for them: none that Wat or I can find. Withdrawals from the same accounts: 50 crowns, 7 marks, every one through the hands of G. Pask, on the holders' leave. Every row under five crowns. Every row sealed. The brass stamp is in my satchel. Aubrelle stays shut until you come.
And just before closing, after a long gap, one more line, smaller than the rest:
Miss Wren has said nothing. She has not cried. She sits in the room above the vault with her hands folded in her lap.
I read that line for a very long time.
With her hands folded, I thought. The way I fold mine. The way she folded hers by Rook's door, on the first day I ever really looked at her.
I wondered then whether she knew she was doing it.
The last line came when the hall was empty and Tamsin had come back and barred the door. It was two words long.
Come. C.D.
I climbed the hill to Penhallow House that evening, alone, with the book under my arm.
Mistress Hale opened the iron gate before I reached it. She looked at my face, which had not moved, and at the book, which I was holding against my chest with both arms, and she said nothing at all. She simply walked ahead of me through the honey-colored house to the study, very straight, like a general leading a very small army to a battle it was going to lose.
Aldous was in his chair with his bandaged foot on its stool. He took off his reading spectacles when I came in.
I told it the way I tell everything that matters. Plainly. In order. Without adjectives. The thumbprint accounts from down the road. The coin that came in and went out within days. My first question to Lotte, and my second, and her answers, and that I had accepted both. Corvin's count. The numbers, to the bit. Fifty-four crowns and twelve marks. I laid the book open on his desk at Corvin's lines, and turned it round so that he could read them himself, and stood with my hands folded in front of me and waited.
Aldous read them. He read them twice, which is how I know he had heard every word.
Then he sat for a long time without saying anything. The fire ticked. Somewhere in the house, a clock I had never noticed was counting.
"You warned me," he said at last, in his thin, dry voice. "The day we signed. If this house loses money, it's my capital that pays." He turned one of his heavy gold rings on his finger, slowly, all the way round. "I told you I'd risked more on worse."
"Yes, Master Penhallow."
"I meant it." He looked up at me, and his sharp, pale eyes were very tired. "I am finding tonight that I meant it less than I thought."
I had no answer to that. There isn't one in any manual.
"Go," said Aldous. "Go to Aubrelle. Count it yourself. Find out where my fifty-four crowns walked to, and on whose legs." He put his spectacles back on, which I understood meant the interview was over. "Then come back up this hill and tell me how much of it was my money, and whose fault."
"Mine," I said.
"I'll decide that," said Aldous Penhallow. "Hale will keep your counter."
Mistress Hale, by the door, inclined her head one exact inch.
Brenna was waiting up for me by the oven when I came down the hill. She didn't ask. She had seen Tamsin go to the Guild Hall, and Fenn had seen Tamsin come back, and by now half of Bakers' Lane knew that something had happened in Aubrelle, though nobody yet knew what. She put a bowl of something hot in front of me and sat down across the kneading table and watched me not eat it. After a while she took the bowl back and ate it herself, because waste is a sin in a bakery, and then put a second bowl in front of me, in case the first one had been the problem.
After a while, I took the appointment letter out of my notebook.
My copy. The bank's copy. The one I had laid over Lotte's and stamped across the seam on Day 96, while she stood on the customers' side in her blue kerchief and her best brown shawl, and read every line twice, because somebody in the room has to read. Her specimen signature, round and steady. Authority: up to five crowns a row. My signature as keeper. The gold along the seam.
And at the very bottom, well below the rest, the box Corvin had ruled and left empty, with one word at its head.
REVOKED.
My signature and my stamp in that box, he had said, and her stamp is plain brass again.
I took my pen out of my breast pocket. I held it over the box for a long time. Brenna watched me, and said nothing, the way she says nothing when she is waiting to see whether the bread will rise.
Then I put the pen back.
Not yet, I thought. Not from three weeks away. Not by candlelight in a bakery, with my face doing nothing. Not until I've seen hers.
I wrote my closing instead.
Day 221. Depositors: 210. Short at Aubrelle: 54 crowns, 12 marks.
I looked at the first number for a long time. Three weeks ago I had written Achievement: 100.5% underneath it, and underlined it, and eaten cake.
I went down the names again, the way I had on the night Corvin left. Every one I had seen. Every one I hadn't. Then I took away the thirteen from down the road whose faces I had never seen, and whose coin had come in and gone out like water through a sieve, and whose names had been written in a round, steady hand by a woman who was sitting, tonight, three weeks away, with her hands folded in her lap.
One hundred and ninety-seven.
We never reached it, I thought. We never reached it at all. I counted names, and I called them people, and I ate the cake.
I wrote it down underneath, in ink, where I would have to look at it.
Real: 197.
We left for Aubrelle at dawn.