第14章 The Price of a Stand

The instruction came on the Friday by the fast post, and it was four lines, and it removed him. *Nyle Threshwick, inspector of the rolls, is stood down from the Brackmoor reconciliation by the Inspector-General's order, the file to remain open in the district pending advice. Mr Threshwick will surrender his exhibit register and the city papers to the warden of Brackmoor within the day.* Nyle read it standing up. Then he sat down and read it again, because the second reading is where you find out whether the first reading was an insult or an execution, and this one was an execution with the courtesy of a good cloak. A stand-down of that kind is not a punishment that is entered on a file. It is entered on a sheet, kept in the district office, and the sheet is read by every inspector in the district for as long as the sheet exists, and what it says in the first line is the reason. The first line said: *stood down from the Brackmoor reconciliation, the file to remain open pending advice.* Nothing about a levy. Nothing about a coal price in December. Nothing that a junior could read and think well of him for. He handed the exhibit register to Halla Cray himself, in her room, in front of her clerk, and he counted the pages out loud as she signed for them, which is the procedure and which he had never once had to do before. "You could have filed," Cray said. "I did." "You filed a finding without a warden's assent, on a charge you had told me was outside your warrant." "Yes." "I countersigned nothing." "You countersigned the requisition for eleven years of press books at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning," Nyle said, "because you knew what was in them and you would rather they were removed from your building by me than kept in it by you. That was a decision. I have written it down as a decision." She wrote nothing. He left the register with her and went and found Ferrick on the Quay Ward hill. Ferrick had been stood down too. The Reckoner's office was held by a temporary from the district pool, a young man called something Nyle did not write down, and Ferrick was sitting on the wall outside his own door with his band uncovered. "Give me the notebook," he said. "It is not mine to give. It has your name in it." "It has my name in it because I said it out loud in your outer room to your junior's face, and I said it because you were going to find the plates in eleven days and I would rather be the man who handed them over." He put his hand out. "Please." Nyle took the notebook out of his coat and put it in his hand. "What happens to you?" he said. "Nothing happens to me. A Reckoner without an office is a citizen without a post, which is dull." Ferrick closed the notebook on his thumb. "What happens to me is that my band's cut for year thirty-two is the last one for a while, and a journeyman advance is twenty-four hours, and I have a house." "And if I had let the finding sit?" "Then somebody else would have opened it in four years and I would have still countersigned year thirty-six." Nyle went to the tally-clerk's house and sat on the end of his bed with his kit packed and unpacked on the floor, and did the arithmetic that he had been avoiding for six days, which was the arithmetic of a man with no post. An inspector draws his salary in hours, credited to his band quarterly by the district office, because the Office of the Rolls is an hourhouse like any other and pays its own staff out of its own account. An inspector on a stand-down draws nothing, because a stand-down is not a posting, and an inspector with no posting is a man with no credit. Forty-one years of service had left him with one hundred and eighty-one hours. A journeyman advance cost twenty-four. He could still take the advance. He went out and asked the tally-clerk, an old man with no interest in the business, and the old man cut him a band for the fee and told him the hourhouse at the district would forward the application, and it would sit in a box for four months, and it would be approved, because there was nothing in Nyle's file to prevent it. Nyle did not sign the application. He had been an inspector for sixteen years and had declined twice, on principle, and the principle had been comfortable both times. This was the third time and the principle was the same and it did not feel the same at all, because the third time the reason he declined was that a man who had put himself inside somebody else's winter by opening a file should not also put himself inside the next winter by taking an advance on the strength of it. He understood that this was vanity and that a warden with a daughter at the Grain Court would not care for it, and he wrote the feeling down in the notebook, because a man who cannot afford the vanity should at least be able to see it. Then he went and found Jory Ardlewood, who was in the outer room of the Hourhouse, alone, at seven in the evening, finishing the exhibit register he had been told was no longer his. "Go home," Nyle said. "I have forty entries left." "They are Cray's now. You are not on the district sheet for this city any more than I am." "I am not on it." Jory closed the register. "Inspector, I was stood down this afternoon. Nobody told me. I went to the district office to get a stamp and the man at the counter asked me whether I had been reassigned and I said no and he said then you have not been reassigned." He put the register under his arm. "That is all. I thought you should know that I know." Nyle looked at this young man of twenty-six, who had held a band register badly for two days and had got it right by Tuesday, and who was now standing in a building where he had no business, holding a book he had no claim to, because he had not been able to think of anything else to do with the information. "Take the exhibit register to the warden," Nyle said. "Not to the district. To Cray. Tell her it is complete, tell her the date, and tell her that if a single page is out of sequence she should write to me at my address and I will come and say so myself." "She'll say it is her book." "Then she will have said it. That is the useful part." Jory went. Nyle stood in the doorway and listened to the hourhouse settle for the night, which took about nine minutes, the clerks going out one by one, the shutters, the lamp being turned down at the end of the long table by the same old woman who had waved him through the door on his first morning. He was an inspector with no posting, a band of one hundred and eighty-one hours, a notebook with a Reckoner's confession in it, and an address in Averholt where a landlady had kept his letters for six weeks without sending them on. He sat down on the step of the tally-clerk's house and wrote four lines, and they were not a finding. *1. The file stands. I am not closing it.* *2. The levy book is the exhibit. It travels to Marnhull and nowhere else.* *3. If the South Ward guarantee is suspended before the finding is heard, that fact goes in the finding, in my hand, in my name.* *4. I will not sign anything I have not counted.* He read it over the lamp, and did not soften the fourth line, and put it in his coat, and went to find out whether a man with no post could still make a lawful requisition. ---