Chapter 8 The Woman Who Paid Twice

Tirsa Ordry was a journeyman, which meant she had a cut plate of her own and a band with two rows of digits and the right to take work at a rate the ward tally-clerks could not refuse. She took the audit in her kitchen with the plate on the table between them, and she took it the way a person takes a piece of news they have already had. "Year thirty-one," she said. "I took my advance in the spring of year thirty-one. I have the certificate. It is in the plate-box and the plate-box is my mother's, and my mother's house went to my brother, and my brother keeps things." Nyle put his own plate beside it. Two brass strips. Same year stamp. Same figure of hours taken. Same price. "You were charged forty-eight hours," he said. "I was charged twenty-four and I had eighty-six and I have thirty-eight." She did not say it bitterly. She said it the way a person reads out a fact they have had to make fit a smaller house. "And I do have the certificate, Inspector, so you can stop looking for the thing where somebody got me twice for one thing, because you will not find it. If I had not passed, I would have been charged for nothing and I would know it now instead of then." Nyle picked up his own plate and looked at it, and then at hers, and the thing he had been carrying since the cellar under the Hourhouse arrived in his head with a small cold click. The Register of Attainment is not kept in Brackmoor. Tirsa had passed. Her advance was real, lodged, confirmed, and entered in Marnhull in a sealed box once a year. Her plate showed twenty-four hours and the box had twenty-four hours in it and the two agreed. Enid Scarfe had not passed. There was no advance, no application, no box entry, no certificate, nothing anywhere in the city or the capital that said the twenty-four hours had bought anything. The only record in the world that she had ever paid for a journeyman advance was the plate, which sat in a case in a cellar, which recorded only that hours had left a band. The citizens could not be cheated and helped at the same time. Every phantom advance was a citizen who had paid and not passed. Every real advance was a citizen who had passed and been paid once. There was no third kind, and the difference between the two appeared in a register that was four hundred miles away. "That is a good piece of arithmetic," Nyle said, "and it has put my schedule in the wrong order." She pushed the plate across. "Which schedule?" "I had one finding and I was going to put your double charge in it beside Enid Scarfe's, because they look identical on the page and a reader loves two identical things. They are not identical. Yours is a citizen who got what she paid for and was overcharged at the counter. Hers is a citizen who paid a counter and received nothing and had no way to know." He turned his pencil round in his fingers. "They go in separate schedules or they go in the wrong one, and the wrong one is a schedule that gets thrown out and takes the right one with it." "You are going to make my case smaller so that hers stands up." "I am going to make yours true so that hers is believed." He put the plate back in front of her. "I have eight hundred and forty people in the South Ward whose bands carry a cut they cannot account for, and you are one of them, and you are the only one of the eight hundred and forty I have found who can stand up and be asked a question and answer it correctly. That is worth more to me at this moment than being angry on your behalf." Tirsa Ordry looked at him for a while with the expression of a woman revising an estimate. "You have no manners," she said. "I have a schedule." "You have a schedule and no manners, and I am going to help you anyway, because I would like to see the man at the Hourhouse asked about the weather line by somebody with a docket." She stood, went to a drawer, and came back with a folded sheet. "This is my certificate. Look at the date at the bottom. That is the day my advancement was lodged, not the day my band was cut. Six weeks apart. Why do you suppose the Hourhouse cut my band in March and lodged me in May?" Nyle read the date. "Because the band is cut at the start of the year in which the charge falls," he said, "and the return goes to the Ministry after the close. But a cut in March of year thirty-one would not reach the Return for year thirty-one. It would reach the Return for year thirty-two." "Unless somebody held it back." Tirsa sat down again. "If you were an Hourhouse and you had a cut to make that the Ministry must not see in the current year, where would you book it?" "In the following year's schedule," Nyle said. "Which means the phantom cuts are not in the year the citizens paid. They are one year later." He wrote that down, and it was the first time in nine days that a number had made the schedule worse. If every phantom cut was booked a year late, then the deduction and the phantom cuts and the unspent ceiling were not one mechanism. They were three, staggered by twelve months, each one covering for the others in rotation, and a reader of any single Return would see a city that was short nine hours in one small, permitted, itemised way. Only somebody who went back forty years, and read all of it at once, and put the years side by side, would ever see that the short nine hours were being carried, like a splash of water, from one column to the next. "You have gone a colour," Tirsa said. "I am all right." "You have gone the colour of a man who has just found that the thing he was going to write is smaller than the thing he has to write." She pushed the certificate back across the table. "Take it. I have other paper." Nyle took it, and thanked her, and meant it, and asked her one last question that had nothing to do with arithmetic. "Does anybody at the Hourhouse know you kept the date on this?" "You are the first person who has asked me for it," she said, "and you are not at the Hourhouse." ---