Hesper’s face went the color of paper.
It did not happen as it had in the firelight, from the top down.
It left her all at once.
The brown stayed on the surface, weathered and creased, but under it she had gone white, the clean cold white of the Registry’s best stock, so that for a moment she looked like a map of herself, drawn in pencil on good paper and not yet inked.
The fennel stood in her mouth and did not move.
Her thumbs came out of her belt.
She did not seem to know that they had.
A faint green came up around her mouth and went down again.
Beside her Pask had gone white, though in Pask it was a short journey.
Wystan looked at the wax.
He had been taught to read a seal by Widow Marlow, in the dame school, on a stale bun, with a stamp cut from a turnip.
You pressed it, and then you ran it back.
The impression ran back to the ring, and the ring to the hand that wore it, and the hand to the name, and the name answered for what had been done.
A seal was a station for authority.
Like a station, it was a promise, and a promise wanted a name behind it.
He had copied stations under the cart’s tarpaulin all night, a hundred years ago, and every one of them had a name at its foot.
He ran this one back.
It ran to the rim, and from the rim to the smooth face, and there it closed.
It closed on nothing.
It was the control network again, a thousand spokes pointing at a hub that was not there, and he felt the old prickle gather at the edge of his sight, the high pale tremble he had met on the rise.
It was not a smudge this time.
It was a hole with neat edges, in the shape of a ring.
In his left pocket something went still.
It had been stirring since dawn, the small dry noises of a thing that dislikes lint.
He knew its stillnesses by now.
There was the held stillness it used when Hesper frowned, tense and listening.
This was not that.
This was an absence.
He laid two fingers on the cloth and felt nothing move, nothing warm, only the weight, like a coin in a snowdrift.
He wanted to open the button and look.
There were twelve Rubric soldiers on the road and he could not.
‘Obelus,’ he thought.
There was no answer.
The thing in the pocket had gone out like a lamp.
“Lieutenant,” said Hesper.
It was her ordinary voice, and it cost her something.
He could hear the cost in it, like the strain on a rope.
“The seal of the Registry is a wheel with a pen across its hub.
I have seen it on every sheet that has crossed my table for thirty years.” She did not point.
“That is not it.”
“No, Mistress, it is not.” Pike glanced down at the wax with the mild interest of a man asked the color of his front door.
“It is the seal of the Office.
I was issued it with the Order.
All Orders from the Office are sealed so.”
“All of them.”
“All that I have carried.
I have carried a good many.”
“What Office?”
“I am not at liberty.” He sniffed.
“I do not know, if you wish the truth.
It is not in my instructions to know.
The Order says what I am to do, and the seal says that it is the Order.
Does it trouble you?”
It was said with such plain courtesy that Wystan felt the hair move on his neck.
Pike did not know.
He had never wondered.
He had carried that blank thing in a leather case through a hundred camps, and in all that time it had not once occurred to him that a seal was a thing that had to be a seal of something.
“It is the hour,” said Hesper.
“I regret it.”
“I know you do.” She held out her hand.
“Open it.”
Pike broke the wax with his thumb.
It parted along the fold with a small dry click, a biscuit snapped, and the two halves lay in his palm, and both of them were blank.
He unfolded the sheet and offered it at the length of his arm.
She read it at the distance she read everything she did not trust, and Wystan read it over her shoulder.
It was a clerk’s hand, round and anxious and exact, the hand of the notice on the road.
By authority of the Cadaster, the bearer was empowered to conform such records as he found non-conforming to the Sixth Edition of the Provincial Sheets.
To enumerate by Registry number all persons attached to the party.
To take into custody any person who obstructed.
At the foot, S.
Fitch, for the Registrar.
The wax had been the only thing on the whole sheet that did not have a name.
“Fitch signs for the Registrar on all of them?” said Hesper.
“On all that I have carried.”
“And the wax?”
“The wax is the wax,” said Pike, apologetically, and sniffed.
She read it to the end.
She read the signature twice.
Then she lowered it, and for a time she stood looking at the broken halves in Pike’s hand with her small flat eyes, and Wystan saw her arrive at a decision, as he had seen her arrive at a bearing, by closing something.
She had asked for the warrant like a woman asking for the result of a test she is afraid of passing.
She had known what she would find on it.
She had needed to see it all the same.
There was a new entry for the column now, and it would go under none of the four refusals and under no fifth either.
It was larger than the fifth.
The fifth would have to stand behind it.
“Edwin,” she said.
“The field books.”
Pask started.
“Mistress Quarrel?”
“Give him the field books, Edwin.
All of them.”
“You said,” said Pask, and stopped.
His face had gone loose, as a face does when a rule it has lived by is put down in front of it.
“You said you would ask for the warrant.”
“I have asked.” She turned her head.
“I have seen it.”
She put her own book on the baize herself.
It had been in the breast of her coat, and it came out warm, a patched black oilcloth thing with a brass clasp, and she set it down in front of the lieutenant and kept her hand flat on the cover a moment.
Then she stepped back.
Wystan had never seen her do a thing that she did not mean to do.
This looked like one.
“Thank you, Chief of Party,” said Pike, and meant it.
“I regret it.”
He struck hers first.
He did it differently from the Redpens, with a flat deliberate hand, one page and then the next.
He did not read.
He opened at the front, and drew the pen down, and the red line stood and ran, and the page lay white.
Wystan watched the figures go.
He knew them.
He had held the rod for most of them.
The Hob loop, closed at two centimeters.
The north bank loop.
Thirty-one degrees, twelve minutes, eight seconds, from the willow to the chapel, taken by Hesper herself at the Alderman and written in her own fast forward-leaning hand with the Q running under everything.
It lifted off the paper and went into the red, and the red went out, and a clean leaf lay in its place.
It was Ashmere in small.
A page was a field, and the pen went over it with a gardener’s care, and left it smooth.
She watched every page.
She did not look away once.
She had never looked away from a bad figure in her life.
When it was finished Pike closed the book and held it out.
“It will be returned, as is usual.
The covers are not on the schedule.”
She took it.
It was the same book, with the same patched oilcloth and the same little dent at the corner where she had once sat on it.
She looked at it for a moment, and put it inside her coat, because there was nowhere else to put it.
Then Pike struck Pask’s six, and it was quicker, because he did not hold them.
“These are exceedingly well kept,” said Pike, turning the second.
“I have always thought so,” said Pask.
They were good books, as neat as a stack of ironed shirts, and as they went white Pask stood with the two hands that held his receipt joined at his waist and watched.
On the grass the pony Auditor looked on with his head up, and approved of nothing.
When the last had been closed Pike wrote Pask another receipt.
Received for conforming, six volumes, E.
Pask.
Provincial issue, Pike explained, travelled to the Registry and came back by the proper channel.
Pask took the receipt in both hands, and read it, and said, “Thank you,” with the careful courtesy of a man leaving a hospital, and put it in his breast pocket beside the first.
Two receipts for the same loss.
It seemed to Wystan that it might be the saddest thing he had seen all week, and he had had a good week for it.
“Wickes,” said Pike.
Tam came forward in his one boot.
He had put the lozenge away at some point.
He held out the book with both hands, and it shook, and he tried to make it stop, and it did not.
Wystan knew the book.
It had a green oilcloth cover, and a clasp with a broken tongue, and every page was in the round careful hand of a boy who was trying hard.
A hundred and four pages.
He knew which was the last.
Pike opened it at the front and drew the pen down the first page, and the next.
Tam stood and watched.
He did not look at anyone, and the wind off the river moved his red hair a little and let it go.
Wystan counted.
He could not stop.
Twenty.
Thirty.
Thin brown strips of numbers going white, chain tallies and pins and the day’s heat, a boy’s small honest arithmetic in a column.
Sixty.
Eighty.
Behind them Pugh had put down the ladle.
Ninety.
A hundred.
“Lieutenant,” said Tam.
It came out small.
Pike’s pen did not stop.
“There is a page at the back,” said Tam.
“That is mine.”
“I am sure it is,” said Pike.
“All pages.”
He turned to the last leaf, and Wystan saw it from the side.
It was round and careful, a row of beans.
FERRY, flat, on a rope.
ORLA, ferrywoman.
MAUDIE RUDD, baker, voice like a bread knife.
The two d’s, in a thick fresh stroke, where a pencil had gone over them twice.
For a half second Pike’s pen stood a hair above the page, with its brass tip trembling and the ink in the slit gathering to a drop, and Wystan could not have said whether the man had read a word, or whether it was only that a hand cannot always do a thing at once.
Then Pike drew it down.
The line stood.
It ran.
Ferry went in, and the rope, and the willow, and the girl with the gap in her teeth.
Maudie Rudd went in whole.
The page lay white and flat and a little warm, the whitest page in the book, and the book was shut.
Tam took it back.
He did it carefully, and held it against his ribs.
He did not look at Pike or at the sergeant or at Hesper.
He looked at Wystan, across the whole width of the road, with his mouth shut in a hard thin line, and Wystan looked back, and neither of them said anything.
After a moment Tam’s lips moved.
It was only two shapes.
They might have been a d and a d.
Wystan nodded.
It was all he had.
Sergeant Garrow, who had been standing by with his hands behind him, took a step toward the boy, and stopped.
He took from his coat the bulge that Wystan had marked from the road.
It was a pie in a cloth, a little squashed.
He held it out.
Tam looked at it, and at the sergeant’s cow-brown eyes, and shook his head.
“Thank you,” said Tam.
He said it with the pitiless courtesy of a boy of sixteen who has been taught manners and has no other use for them.
The sergeant put the pie away, and looked at the road.
The trestle was bare but for one squared stack, the sixteen books that were left on it, each in its cover, each with every page blank.
Wystan thought of the three notebooks against his ribs, field book on the left, reserve on the right, the fair copy between them.
They were the only books left in the camp.
Nobody had yet asked him for them.
Pike took a lozenge from the tin, and put it in his mouth, and the click of it was loud.
He looked down at the Muster, which Pask had handed over with the first volume and which had lain under the baize ever since, a single printed sheet, ruled in columns.
It had five lines on it.
He ran his finger down them.
“Quarrel, Hesper.
Chief of Party.
Pask, Edwin.
Instrument.” He did not look up.
“Wickes, Tam.
Chain.
Pugh.
Cook, hired.” The finger moved.
“Pell, W.
Chain.”
Wystan had been waiting for it, the way you wait for the bob to stop swinging on a plumb line, and it still arrived too soon.
He felt Hesper not look at him.
“Fenwick Weir,” said Pike, to the paper.
“The Sisters of Saint Aubrin.
That is a good house.” He lifted his eyes, and for the first time they settled on Wystan with entire attention, light brown and rather tired and not unkind, in a thin pink-nosed face that was only waiting to be told it was wrong.
“You are Pell.”
Wystan kept his mouth shut.
“You are the other chain.
How old are you?”
It was a question that could be answered.
“Seventeen,” said Wystan.
“Seventeen.
And the Registry number?”
He said nothing.
It was the one thing he knew how to do.
He stood with his boots in the cold and his hands at his sides, and his coat, with its eleven pockets and all they held, hung on him like a coat belonging to somebody else.
The sun lay on the road.
A fly walked along the baize.
In the left pocket nothing moved.
“It is a simple question,” said Pike.
“It is pending, Lieutenant.” Pask’s voice came from a long way off, high and careful, and he put out his hand and tapped the Muster with one finger, at the end of the line.
“The box is not filled.
I wrote pending.
It has stood so since Rimemonth, when I drew up the roll.
It is the Weir orphanage.
I believe the Sisters are slow with the paper.
I had meant to write to them.”
“Pending,” said Pike.
He tasted the word.
His lozenge clicked against his teeth, and he looked at the Muster as he had looked at the wax, with the fairness of a man trying to be fair to a figure that would not close.
“I do not care for pending,” said Pike.
“Pending is a number that has not made up its mind.” He sniffed, gently, and shook his head, with the faintest touch of regret.
“It is an error in the roll.
We conform errors.”
He drew the pen from its loop, and held it a moment, and looked at Wystan’s name.