Hesta Vale disliked people who said the sky was free. They were usually the first to complain about it.
At nine each morning she stood beneath the brass awning of the Weather Exchange and sold what the town had caught overnight: rain in stoppered jars, wind rolled around wooden spindles, sunlight folded into packets that smelled of hot linen. Outside the town's catchment, the world took whatever weather came. In Bellwether, roofs carried nets, and the nets carried their catch to the Exchange. Here a washing day could be arranged.
A rain hour meant the quantity that had fallen in that hour. Pour it quickly and you had a shower; pour it slowly and you had an afternoon. Time itself wasn't for sale, though Hesta had been accused of selling it.
Hesta could tell a bidder's limit by the way he buttoned his coat. She called strangers my fortunate friend and customers who owed her money by their full names. When a sale went badly, she polished her spectacles. When it went well, she polished them longer.
This morning she was offering forty minutes of southwest wind.
“Enough to dry six streets of laundry. Insufficient to remove a properly fitted hat. Twelve silver, I have twelve, fourteen at the back—”
The man at the back held up three fingers.
“Sixteen, then.”
He shook his head.
Neri, her assistant, stepped close. “He said thirteen.”
“I heard him.”
She had not. She had heard a scrape, a hum, and the clear, inconvenient clink of a bottle against Neri's belt. For some months the words of other people had been arriving with pieces missing. Hesta's own voice remained excellent. It crossed the room, struck the far wall, and returned exactly as she remembered it.
“Thirteen is an untidy bid, my fortunate friend. Shall we make it fourteen?”
The man laughed and raised a fourth finger. The wind went to him. Hesta wrote the amount so firmly that the nib pierced the paper.
Neri was twenty-six, wore her black hair in two thick plaits, and had the deplorable habit of waiting for an answer. Hesta had hired her because she could lift a rain jar without sloshing it. Lately she had started saying things like We could put the bids on a board.
A board. As though Hesta sold potatoes.
After the last ordinary lot, a porter brought out a glass vessel the size of a baby, seated in a copper cradle. Its glass was green with age. On the side someone had painted a crooked word:
THURSDAY.
Underneath, in smaller letters: WHOLE. UNSORTED.
The town had found it while clearing the oldest loft of the Exchange. A date on the cradle placed it eighty-three years earlier, before weather was routinely separated into saleable kinds. Someone had caught a complete day's weather and bottled it together.
The council wanted it sold. Mr. Rusk, the council's receiver, had already brought a ledger and taken the best chair. The reserve was eighty silver. Hesta's commission was one tenth of the sale.
She imagined a price in four figures. Collectors paid extravagantly for weather with a date attached. One merchant owned the fog from his wedding morning and let it out every anniversary, to the increasing irritation of his wife.
At noon, Hesta would sell Thursday.
Mr. Pell had come to buy it. He was opening a hotel on the western hill, and a genuine antique day would look excellent in his advertisement. He had asked whether it included sunshine.
“It includes a Thursday,” Hesta had told him. “Which is considerably rarer.”
Now she bent over the cradle. Beneath the painted word lay a strip of paper, held by a copper clip. The lettering had faded into the colour of old tea.
“Shall I read that?” Neri asked.
“Fetch the lot cards.”
“I can do both.”
“Then you will find yourself doing neither properly.”
Neri went. Hesta rubbed the strip with her thumb. She could make out Catchment and a number. Delivery instructions, almost certainly. The Exchange had changed its pipework three times in eighty-three years.
The vessel gave a small shiver against the cradle.
Hesta rested two fingers on its neck. Warm. A little warmth was normal. Stored weather resented glass.
Behind her, Mr. Rusk said something.
She turned with a smile. “A splendid piece, yes.”
“I asked whether the cradle was included.”
“Of course.”
He looked satisfied. She could hear satisfaction perfectly well when it said nothing.