Where the client is a continuation, identity shall be established by the book of questions and not by the hand, the hand being subject to change. Ostrand and Sons, standing office practice
“How much.”
“Half a day. Possibly less, if they are quick, and they will not be quick.”
Take it.
“Say it properly.”
Azaelis, take the wheel. And do not do anything in there that you would not do in front of me, because you will be in front of me.
“That is not the reassurance you think it is,” he said, and had her.
Ostrand and Sons kept a room over a saddler’s on the square at Halverside and had done since before he was a client, and the stairs smelled of leather and wet wool and had a bend in them that a man could not take with an armful of anything.
He went up.
The clerk at the top was about forty and had the sleeves and the ink and the entirely closed face of a man whose whole professional value was that he did not react to people coming up those stairs.
“Madam.”
“I am here on the Brannt continuation,” said Azaelis. “I will need the book of questions and I will need whoever holds it, and I would like to save us both twenty minutes by telling you now that I am aware how this looks, and that I know what the third question is, and that the third question has been the same since eighty-nine and somebody should have changed it.”
The clerk looked at her for a moment.
Then he got up and went through the inner door and shut it, and Azaelis stood in a small room over a saddler’s with a woman’s hands folded in front of him and waited to find out whether eleven years of business was worth anything at all.
What is the third question.
“You will hear it.”
You are enjoying this.
“I have not been able to do anything of my own since April,” said Azaelis, “and I am about to have a conversation about instruments with a professional. Yes. I am enjoying it. I would ask you to be generous.”
The man who came out was sixty and was called Ferris and had done his continuation work for nine years, and he stood in the doorway and looked at a tall woman in a bad dress and did not move.
“Question one,” said Ferris.
“The Brannt instrument was drawn in the spring and the second schedule was amended twice, and the second amendment was made because your Mr Dellow found a defect in the description of the eastern parcel, and I said at the time that Dellow was the only man in your firm who reads the descriptions.”
“Question two.”
“Your father held this book before you and he took snuff and he had a habit of tapping the box twice on the desk before he opened it, and it drove me to distraction for six years and I never once said so.”
Ferris’s face did something very small.
“Question three.”
“Question three is what did the client say when the fee was raised in eighty-nine,” said Azaelis, “and the answer is that I said it was about time and that you had been undercharging me for a decade, and I want to say again, as I have said at every one of these for thirty-seven years, that a question with a flattering answer is a bad question, because a man who wanted to be me would guess it.”
There was a silence.
“Sir,” said Ferris.
“Yes.”
“Would you come through.”
The room through the inner door had two chairs and a window and a great deal of tin, and Ferris sat down opposite him and poured two glasses of something out of an office bottle and did not touch his.
“You will forgive me. This is the fourth time in nine years and it does not get easier.”
“It should not. If it got easier I would find another firm.”
“Yes.” Ferris looked at the glass. “May I say that this is not the body on the notice.”
“It is precisely the body on the notice.”
“It is the body on the notice,” Ferris agreed, “and it is also alive, and I have been sitting through that door for four minutes doing arithmetic that I do not care for at all.” He set his hands on his knees. “The province has not written to us. The eastern house has not written to us. If a continuation of ours is in a difficulty of this size and nobody has written to us, then somebody is holding something, and my firm does not like being the last to know.”
He is honest, said Su’inn.
“He is a professional,” said Azaelis. “It is a very good imitation and it is often the same thing.”
Ferris’s eyes came up.
“Sir?”
“I was talking to somebody else.”
Ferris put his glass down.
He got the money in about forty minutes, which was fast, and he got it because eleven years of not being difficult is worth more in a room like that than any argument available.
Sixty pounds against the Brannt income, on the firm’s own paper, with a note that it was advanced at the client’s instruction and against the client’s own funds and was not a loan, because Azaelis had spent four hundred years learning that the word loan does things to a file.
Ferris counted it out and wrote it up and turned the book round for the hand, and stopped.
“The hand will be wrong.”
“The hand will be wrong every time,” said Azaelis, “and there is a practice for it, and the practice is that you enter it as signed by the continuation in the vessel current at the date, and you write the vessel’s description in the margin, and I have signed in eleven hands and no clerk in this province has ever blinked at it.” He took the pen in the right hand. “I would ask you to look away, in point of fact. The handwriting is hers and it is going to come out of my fingers looking like a forgery of a woman who is dead, and neither of us needs the afternoon.”
Ferris looked away.
The signature came out looking nothing like anything. He examined it with some interest.
Then he did the other thing.
Give it back, said Su’inn. You have the money.
“One moment.”
Azaelis.
“One moment. There is a filing I want done while I am in a room with the man who does the filing, and it will take four minutes and it is dull, and if I come back for it I will have to climb those stairs again in a body that has one hand.”
He turned back to Ferris.
“There is a second matter and it is administrative.”
“Sir.”
“I want a notice of need opened.”
Ferris’s pen stopped.
“Sir, there is a notice in force. It was answered in the spring.”
“That notice was answered by the vessel I am sitting in,” said Azaelis, “and it is answered and closed and I am not asking you to reopen it. I am asking you to open a new one, forward dated, unpriced, and lodged dormant with the provincial office, on the standing instruction that it activates on notification of the current vessel’s demise and not before.”
“That is unusual.”
“It is not unusual, it is unfashionable. It was standard for about sixty years and it went out because it made people uncomfortable, and a dormant notice sitting in a drawer at the seat is the difference between a transfer in nine days and a transfer in thirteen months.” He kept his voice exactly where it had been for the last forty minutes, which was the flat pleasant register of a man discussing a parcel description. “I have watched a colleague go into a girl with a bad heart because there was nothing certified in the province and he had two weeks. I do not intend to do that.”
Ferris wrote it down.
“On notification of the current vessel’s demise,” he repeated.
“Yes.”
“And the current vessel is.”
“Female, forty-three, certified out of the eastern seat in the spring,” said Azaelis. “You have the description in the margin of the page in front of you.”
Ferris wrote that down too, and blotted it, and did not look up, and did not ask the question, because he was a professional and because there was nothing in the world to be gained from asking it.
“It will be at the seat by Monday,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Sir.” Ferris capped the ink. “Is there anything you would like me to be doing about the other matter. The one nobody has written to us about.”
Azaelis stood up.
“Find out who has been renewing a standing inquiry on the Kell estate for twenty-one years,” he said, “and who instructed the third renewal, and do not write to me about it, and do not tell your Mr Dellow you are doing it.”
“That is an inquiry against a client of this firm.”
“Yes,” said Azaelis. “I know exactly what it is. I have been your client for eleven years and I am asking you to find out whether that has been worth anything, and if the answer is that it has not, then I would rather know it from you than from somebody else.”
Ferris sat with that for a while.
“Monday,” he said.
He came down the stairs into the square with sixty pounds in a woman’s pocket and the taste of coins in a mouth that had not stopped tasting of them in five weeks.
Give it back.
“Yes.”
He stopped by the cross and put the right hand flat on the stone, which was a thing he did.
Azaelis.
“Yes.”
The notice of need. The dormant one.
He stood very still in the square with his hand on the cross.
“Yes.”
You did not ask me.
“No,” said Azaelis. “I did not.”
You did it in front of me.
“I did it in front of you,” he said, “because I told you at the fork that I would not be tactful and look away, and it turns out that runs in both directions, and I find I dislike it a great deal more from this end.”
There was a silence.
It is a piece of paper in a drawer, said Su’inn. That is all it is. It does nothing until I am dead, and I am going to be dead, and it does not make it sooner.
“That is correct.”
Then why do I want to be sick.
“Because I did the arithmetic,” said Azaelis, “and told you afterward. Again.”
He took his hand off the cross.
“Take it.”