Chapter 8 A Receipt Is a Promise

The south desk, second gallery, at the first bell. There were eight of them that week, and it was not a public thing. Prentices stood in a line at a table that had been sanded until it was the colour of weak tea and gave their chits to a clerk who wrote on them and pushed them back. It took about a minute each. Ryam gave his chit over. The clerk wrote, and pushed it back, and he read it in the queue behind Coll's back. One thousand four hundred and twenty hours, against the standing of three thousand nine hundred. The card said one third. He had done the division in his life twice. One third of three thousand nine hundred was one thousand three hundred, and he had held one thousand five hundred and sixty after the cut, and he had checked his own band with his own eyes on the steps that morning. "Coll," he said. "What's yours?" "Two hundred and eighty," Coll said, and then looked at it properly, and then at Ryam's face, and then back at his own chit. "Why?" "Mine's says one thousand four hundred and twenty. It should say one thousand three hundred." That is not a lot to say in a gallery with a clerk eleven feet away. Coll folded his chit into his shirt. His mouth worked. "They always take a bit extra," he said. "That's not extra. That's one hundred and twenty hours. That's eleven weeks of coal for my mother. That's the whole difference between her physician coming and her physician not coming." "They'll say I said wrong." "They'll say what they say." "The one on the wall says one third," Coll said. "My mother looked at it before she sent me. She can't read all that well but she knows a three." "Your mother's right." The clerk at the table called the next name. Merek Coldspur was not in the gallery; he was across the hall with a senior man in a good coat, and both of them were looking at a book, and neither of them was looking at the line. Ryam did not take it to anyone. He put the chit in his shirt, next to his ribs, and he went out to the third landing and sat on the stone with his back against the cold and read it a fourth time. At the fourth reading he began to get angry, which took a while, because the anger had to get past twenty years of being the cheapest thing in the yard. One hundred and twenty hours. He had felt it go. He had known on the steps that the cut had taken more than one third, and he had decided the extra was the price of the knife, or of the block, or of being a south-ward boy on a Thursday afternoon, and he had decided it in about nine seconds so that he could carry the parcel home to his mother without having to look inside it. Nobody in Halbeck had ever told him that a receipt was a promise. They had told him it was a document. The first prentice had been born in the north and held eight thousand hours, and his tariff had been two thousand six hundred and forty, and his chit said two thousand six hundred and forty. The fourth one along was a girl of seventeen out of Ropewalk, born at three thousand two hundred, tariff one thousand and sixty, chit one thousand and sixty. The seventh was Coll. The gap moved. That was the thing he could not get past on that stair. If it were a fixed surcharge every south-ward body would carry the same one hundred and twenty, and then it would be a tariff, and tariffs are printed. But the north-ward boy at one thousand two hundred over a band of eight thousand was carrying a fifteenth, and Coll was carrying a fifth, and Ryam was carrying a thirty-first, and a man on the ninth chair had a band of two thousand one hundred and was carrying nine per cent of it. A percentage. Not a fee. A rate. He went back and stood in the queue behind a man twice his age, and when his turn came he said, "Excuse me. Does one thousand four hundred and twenty include anything besides the third?" The clerk looked up. He was about thirty and he had the cuff of an ordinary clerk and the eyes of a man who had learned to make people sorry. "That's the charge," he said. "Right. I only wondered if it included something." "It includes the advance on the tariff and the standing fee." "What standing fee?" "The standing fee," the clerk said. It was, Ryam understood, a door closing politely, and it closed so gently that he would have been a fool to put his shoulder against it. He took his chit back and thanked him and went out into the rain, and on the bottom step of the north stair he looked back up at the second gallery and saw the clerk write one thousand four hundred and twenty on the top of a page of nine, and then reach for the tenth of ten. Ten chits. Ten south-ward prentices. Twelve hundred hours, unrecorded, in one morning. *Twelve hundred hours.* He wrote the number out on his own fingers on the wet rail and then he did not know what to do with it, so he put his hand in his pocket and walked home the long way, past the Foldmarket, with the river on his left and the water running brown under the bridges. It had gone on a long time, if it went on at all. If it was a standing fee it was standing every quarter, and it was standing for every south-ward prentice the House ever cut, and the number of south-ward prentices the House cut every year was a number he did not know and could not find, because the sort of number you cannot find is usually the one with the most money behind it. He got home at four and his mother was in the room with the door shut and he could hear the pot on the small stove and he stood in the front room with his coat on and his hand in his shirt and felt the chit against his ribs. Wenna opened the door before he knocked. "You have gone thin," she said. "I have not gone thin." "You went out with one and you came back with four hundred." She held her hand out and he put the chit in it and she read it standing up, which was the only thing she could still do for long, and her finger went down the number in green-black ink and stopped at the bottom and stopped again at the top. "That is not one third," she said. "It is not one third." "The knife takes a bit." "The knife takes four." "The rest is the office." "The rest is the office." She put the chit on the table and stood with her hands flat on it and did not say anything for a while, and he stood in the door with his band under his sleeve and watched her hands on the wood, and he thought, and this is the only thought that has ever frightened him, that she understood it the same way a man understands a wound when it is fresh and still wet, without the benefit of the twenty years it takes a wound to be a fact. "One hundred and twenty," she said. "Yes." "One hundred and twenty an advance." "Every advance." "Then you will not advance again." "I know." "You will not advance again, and you will be a journeyman with one thousand five hundred and sixty hours and a rate of pay and eleven a day and a cough in your chest and a mother in a room, and you will die at fifty-three with two hundred and nine hours on your arm and no office in the world that will give them back to you, and I will be in the room with the cough that has been in the room for six years and nobody will have said anything about it because nobody said anything about it." She turned and put the chit in the back of a drawer. "There," she said. "Now it is a receipt." ---