第7章 The Plate Behind the Cut

Enid Scarfe kept an hour-marked tally stick by her door, a thing she had inherited and had never had cut, and she used it to measure how much fuel she had left, which was a use the Hourhouse did not recognise and would not have permitted. She was fifty-one, a carter in the South Ward, and she had brought Nyle a chair without being asked because he was standing in her doorway holding a plate of brass in a folded handkerchief as though it were something that might bite. "You're the one at the mill," she said. "I have been at the mill." "My man said a man from the Office asked Teasdale about the weather line." She sat down. "Teasdale talks. He is not a bad man, he is just a miller with nothing to do." "He told me about a clerk six years back." "Then he told you more in one morning than the Hourhouse has told me in nineteen years." She held out her hand. "Give it here. My eyes are not what they were." The plate was small, two inches of soft brass, slightly bent at one end where it had been levered out of the press. Stamped along one edge: YEAR THIRTY-ONE. Stamped in the middle: SCARFE, ENID. QUAY WARD, RESIDENT. And struck into it in the flat numerals a cut plate carries, the figure the band had held on the day of the cut, together with a rank mark. Nyle looked at it for a moment before he said anything, which was a thing he did when he wanted the first thing he said to be the last thing he needed to say. "You paid twenty-four hours for a journeyman advance," he said. "Nine years ago. In the spring." "I did not." "Your band carries it." "Then my band is wrong." She took the plate and held it at the distance of the arm that had been given it. "I have never had a journeyman advance. I can lift nine times what I could lift at twenty-one, which is what everyone says they can do at twenty-one, and my hands are the hands of a woman who loads a coal cart." Nyle set the notebook on the table. He told her what the plate was, which was that when a band was cut, the press struck a plate, and the plate went into the Band Register in the cellar under the Hourhouse, and the plate could be read by anyone who brought it back. "It is a copy," he said. "It does not give a rank. It gives what the band said at the moment of the cut. The rank itself is entered in the Register of Attainment, and that register is kept at the Ministry, in Marnhull, and comes here once a year in a sealed box." "And the box says I am a journeyman?" "The box will say what the city sent the Ministry nine years ago." Enid Scarfe put the plate down on the table with two fingers, as though it had changed temperature. "So they have taken twenty-four hours out of my band for something the Ministry knows nothing about." "Yes." "And nobody at the Hourhouse told me." "No. Because at the Hourhouse the cut is the record. If the plate says it, it happened." She was quiet for a while. Outside, a cart went past on the Bank Ward road and the sound came up flat and then went away. "I paid it," she said. "I felt it go. There is no other way to say it and you can write it down. My band was at one hundred and six and it came back at eighty-two and I went home and I did the sums I have done every week since I was fifteen, and the sums said I had paid for something, and I did not care what. I thought I had paid for a licence for the cart, or the winter allotment, or something. I have been poorer for nine years on the strength of an hour and a half a day." Nyle wrote nothing. He wrote nothing because the sentence she had just said was better evidence than anything he could have taken from her, and because an inspector who writes while a woman is telling him the worst day of her life has made the woman a clerk. "Who cut it?" she asked. "That I do not have yet. A press cut is a press cut. The cutter's mark is on the plate, if the cutter used one, and the plate has no cutter's mark, which tells me the band was cut in the Hourhouse's own press rather than at a ward desk." "So somebody with the key." "Somebody with the key." Enid picked the plate up and looked at the underside, which was blank, as undersides were. "Will they take it back?" "No." "Why not?" "Because the plate is my copy. The rule is the citizen's copy." Nyle took the plate again and put it inside his coat, against the lining, where it sat flat and hard. "And because I am going to go to Marnhull and stand in front of the Register of Attainment with your name on it, and they are going to have to tell me a person, and a person is a different thing entirely from a schedule." "You will lose your post," she said. "How do you know about posts?" "I have a cousin at the Hourhouse. He says the inspectors who come down from Averholt with a schedule get one year, and the ones who come down with a plate get nothing." She straightened the chair she had brought him out from the wall. "I have a daughter who wants a licence for the cart and I am not going to be the reason an inspector loses a wage." Nyle did not answer that, because there was no answer to it that did not involve asking her to be brave, and he had spent his working life refusing to ask people to be brave. Instead he wrote her plate number, the cut date, and the twenty-four hours in the schedule headed *charges to bands without corresponding advancement*, and then he made a second entry, in a different ink, which was her name and the number one hundred and six. It was the first time in sixteen years that he had written a citizen's figure beside his own. He did not look at it again for the rest of the day, and he did not sleep well, and he understood that this was simply what the work cost when you let it cost the right thing. ---