Chapter 230: The Paid Rota [I]
The service paid its porters by the line, and Ren Lockwood had copied enough lines in two years to know that a line was a promise somebody had kept or had not.
The paid rota for the night of the fourteenth lay open on the long table in the service office’s back room at the sixth bell on the evening of the seventeenth, under the window that looked at the east stair’s wall, with Ren’s own purse on its edge as a weight against the draught from the door. It was the service’s book, board-bound, brown, with a page for every night and a line on every page for every task the service did at night on the island: the wing stairs’ lamps, the corridors’ lamps, the oil’s last carry, the linen to the Hall, the wardens’ lodge fires, the landing. Each line had a time and a porter’s initial and a column at the end for the pay, a farthing or a half or a penny, and when the porter did the task he initialed the line and wrote the time he did it, and on the last day of the month the clerk with the pen in her teeth added the column and the porter was paid what he had initialed.
It was not a record of what had happened. It was a record of what the service had paid for. Ren had learned the difference at the long table in the servant accounts room on the eleventh day of the first month, with two sheets side by side and a number on each, and one of them had been true.
The landing’s lines for the fourteenth were in Sallow’s hand, which was large and careful because Sallow had learned to write at thirty.
Landing: lamps trimmed, the eleventh, S., a half.
Landing: groove board laid, the eleventh.
And then not an initial. A short line in Sallow’s careful hand where the initial should have been: not laid, keeper at the gate, foreman said leave it. And nothing in the pay column.
Ren had read it three times. He read it a fourth, because the fourth was the one he would be asked about.
"You’ve the night of the fourteenth."
Master Grist stood in the back room’s doorway. He was the service’s supervisor, a thin man of fifty with very clean cuffs, who had run the service office for nine years and had never, so far as anyone in the kitchens knew, carried a tray. He did not come in. He did not need to; the back room was small and the table was the only thing in it.
"Yes, Master Grist."
"The inquiry wants the service’s night rota for the landing. A fair copy, by the noon, in the service’s hand, signed by the supervisor." Grist looked at the book on the table without coming nearer to it. "You copy well. You’ll copy it."
"Yes, Master Grist."
"The landing’s lines only. The lamps and the board." Grist folded his hands, which kept the cuffs straight. "The board was laid at the eleventh. Copy it so."
Ren did not look up from the book.
"The book says not laid, Master Grist."
"The book says what Sallow wrote at a quarter past the first bell in the morning with the bell just rung and a stone on the landing and wardens on every stair. Sallow writes slowly when he’s frightened. He wrote the wrong thing." Grist said it reasonably, the way he said everything, so that a person listening had to work to find the place where it stopped being reasonable. "The board was laid at the eleventh. The keeper was at the gate at the eleventh; Sallow says so himself. A keeper at a cradle’s gate lifts the groove board to look at the gate’s rail; it’s what keepers do. He lifted it. He didn’t put it back. He went down to the bay, and came up again against his orders, and fell on the island’s alarm." He unfolded his hands. "That’s the inquiry closed. One man, one night, too tired, too many hours. The works have already capped his hours. The captain’s already written the long version. The short version is the true one with less in it."
"It isn’t in the book, Master Grist."
"It will be in the copy."
Ren looked at Sallow’s line. Not laid, keeper at the gate, foreman said leave it.
He did the sum before he had decided to do it. He always did; it was the thing his mother said about him when she was well enough to say things, that he did the sum first and then found out what he thought.
If the copy said laid at the eleventh, the copy said the service had kept its promise and the keeper had broken it. The service would not pay for the night’s link. Sallow would be paid for a board he had not laid, a half, which Grist would put in the column himself, so that the line agreed. The keeper, who had stood on a sump stair with his wrist the wrong shape and a red line across his palm where the island’s alarm had run through it, and who had said at the debrief, aloud, when Captain Esk asked him, that he had been at the gate at the eleventh and had gone down at the twelfth less five and had not touched any board, would have a line in the inquiry’s file that said he had lifted it. His sheet would say one thing and the service’s copy another. The inquiry would choose the copy, because the copy was a book and his sheet was a tired man.
And the inquiry would close. That was what Grist wanted, and it was not a wicked thing to want. An inquiry that stayed open on the service’s night was an inquiry that read the service’s book, every night of it, and the service’s book had other lines in it like Sallow’s. Ren knew it did. He had copied them.
"Master Grist," Ren said. "The keeper’s sheet at the debrief says he didn’t lift any board."
"The keeper was on his feet since the third bell. He doesn’t know what he lifted."
"He says he was at the gate with the foreman. The foreman was there. The foreman’s book says the keeper checked the pins and went down at the twelfth less five." Ren had not been at the debrief. He had the kitchens, and the kitchens had Dunnet’s sister, who scrubbed the works’ office floor and heard everything Rudd said aloud, which was everything. "The foreman would say if he’d lifted the board."
"The foreman," Grist said, "is the works. The works will say what the works says. The service will say what the service says." He looked at Ren for the first time instead of at the book. "Are you telling me you won’t copy it."
Ren did not answer at once.
The back room was quiet. Through the door he could hear the front office: the clerk at the counter with her pen in her teeth, ruling something, and a porter asking for the linen sheet, and the clerk saying around the pen that it was on the board where it always was.
He thought about the long table in the servant accounts room. Two sheets, a hundred and eighty and a hundred and twenty, and a sealed form he had filled in with his own figures, and Lina’s letter, the last line of which had not been about the debt. He thought about a landing on the lower service stair in the second month, a girl with her leg bent where there was no bend, and a Valdrake’s instruction to be somewhere else at the half past, and his own coat folded under her head. He had not been somewhere else. He had taken the six for that day, because it was owed and the box would ask where it came from and he could say, and he had refused the hatch’s six on the stair, because he had not been at the hatch, and taken it a day later only when it was owed and not for anything, and he had refused the half for good, because the rooms had been his; wages were for what you had done, whoever paid them.
He did not have a Valdrake here. This was the service’s book and the service’s back room and the service’s supervisor, and the service paid him ten Crowns a month and board for the tray among the rest, and the Valdrake paid him four on the second, and none of those was this.
"I’ll copy the book, Master Grist," Ren said. "Every line as it stands. In the service’s hand, by the noon, for you to sign. The board line as Sallow wrote it, with the time he wrote and the words he wrote and nothing in the pay column." He kept his hands flat on the table on either side of the book. "I won’t write laid. It’s not what the book says. It’s not what the foreman says. It’s the opposite of what the keeper says, and he’s the one who’s hurt."
Grist did not move.
"You understand what the inquiry does with that line."
"It asks Sallow why he didn’t lay the board. Sallow says the keeper was at the gate and the foreman said leave it, and he went on to the corridor lamps, and forgot to come back. That’s true; he told me so in the linen room at the second bell yesterday and cried." Ren swallowed. "It asks the service why its porter forgot. The service says it put a man on the landing at the eleventh who was also on the corridor lamps and the oil’s last carry and the lodge’s fire, and he forgot one of four. That’s true too. The inquiry writes it down and tells the service to put a second man on the landing at night, or to have the works lay the plate. The captain already said the plate." He stopped. "It’s not a large thing, Master Grist. It’s a board."
"It’s the service’s book read aloud in the wardens’ long room."
"Yes."
"With other nights in it."
"Yes, Master Grist." Ren looked at the book. "It has other nights in it whether I copy one of them wrong or not."