The Blue Door
There was a procedure for a settlement notice and Rook had followed it four hundred times.
Fourteen days before the due date, the collector attended the address, confirmed the debtor was living and resident, read the count aloud, served the notice, and answered questions. He did not bring the rod. He did not stay longer than the questions required. The purpose was to remove surprise from the transaction, and the House believed in it sincerely, because a surprised debtor was a debtor who ran, and a debtor who ran cost eleven marks in wardens' time.
Rook believed in it for a different reason, which he had never said out loud to anybody in the House: a person should be allowed to know. Whatever else the arrangement took from them, it should not take the fourteen days.
He went up Cutler's Stair on the sixteenth of Rime with the notice in his inside pocket and no rod in his coat.
The stair was so narrow that two men could not pass. Eleven doors on it, all of them grey, except the fourth from the top, which had been painted — badly, and recently — a blue that did not belong anywhere in Corvane.
It was the blue of a summer that did not happen here. Somebody had got a pot of it from somewhere and had done the door without taking it off its hinges, so there were runs down the panels and a thumbprint at the edge of the frame where a hand had steadied it.
Rook stood in front of it for a moment longer than the procedure required.
Then he knocked twice and waited.
The girl opened it.
She was thirteen or so, in a dress cut down from something larger, and she had a kitchen knife held flat along her forearm with the blade back against her elbow, where she thought he could not see it.
She had understood in half a second exactly what he was. They always did, the children — faster than the adults, faster than the bound themselves. And she had not stepped back.
"She's working," the girl said.
"Then I'll wait."
That was not the answer she had prepared for. He watched her have to find another one.
"She's not here."
"She is on the other side of that wall," Rook said, "and she has stopped moving, which is what people do when they are listening. I am not going to argue with you about it on a stair, because the neighbours are listening too and you have to live here afterwards." He took the notice out and held it where she could see it, folded, the House seal uppermost. "This is a fourteen-day notice. It is not a collection. I have no rod with me — you may look at my coat if you want, and I would rather you did, because otherwise you will spend fourteen days wondering."
The girl looked at his coat. Then, deliberately, at both his hands.
"Why haven't you got it?"
"Because today is not the day, and bringing it would be a threat, and a threat is not part of the procedure."
Something in the flatness of that seemed to reach her where kindness would not have. She stood back from the door, not far, and Rook stepped past her into the room and took his hat off because the ceiling was low.
Two rooms, a stove, a line of washing strung under the beam.
On the table, a school slate with sums chalked on it. Long division, six problems, done carefully and then done again underneath in a second column — the same six, worked through twice, the second set of figures sitting under the first like a reflection.
Rook looked at the slate for rather longer than he meant to.
"I check them," the girl said, behind him, defensively. "You're supposed to check them."
"Most people don't."
"Then most people get them wrong."
Maren Coyle came out of the back room holding the wall.
She was thirty-six and she looked sixty. The verdigris had gone up past her elbow and there was a green thread of it climbing the side of her neck, and when she crossed the room it was in stages, and when she sat down at the table it was in stages too.
"Mr. Rook," she said.
He had not given his name.
"You know me?"
"Everyone on this stair knows every collector in the Ninth by name and by coat," said Maren Coyle. "It's the only subject we've got." She folded her hands on the table. "Read it, then. Nessa, sit down. You will not stand behind him with that thing in your sleeve for a quarter of an hour, you'll drop it and take your own foot off."
Nessa sat down, furious, and put the knife on the table with a bang.
Rook opened the notice.
"Coyle, Maren. Bound to House Ferrow the fourth of Ash, year thirty-four. Principal: eleven years. Rate: four hours the day." He read it at the speed of a real number, the way he always did, one figure at a time, giving each one its own air. "Paid to date: ten years, two months, twenty-four days. Outstanding: nine months, six days. Settlement falls due on the thirtieth of Rime."
Nobody said anything.
"Do you contest the count?"
"No."
"Do you understand that you may contest it? There is a process. It costs nothing and it takes eleven days, and I will write out the address for you if you want it." He looked up. "I am obliged to ask that. I am also telling you honestly that in nineteen years I have seen the process reverse a count twice, and both times it was an arithmetical error of a fortnight."
"No," said Maren. "The count's right. I've kept my own."
She reached across the table and turned over a small paper book, the kind that costs a penny, and Rook saw that it was full — page after page in a cramped upright hand, four hours a day, ruled off by week.
Ten years of it.
"You've counted," he said.
"Every day since the fourth of Ash, year thirty-four." She did not say it proudly. She said it the way you report a household chore. "I thought at the start that if I wrote it down it'd be mine. Then I thought it was a stupid thing to do and I kept doing it." Her mouth moved. "I've got four days more in my book than you've got in yours. I was going to say. Then I thought — four days, and they'll send someone else about it, and it'll take eleven days to prove and they'll be right anyway because their book is the book."
Rook held out his hand.
She looked at it. Then she gave him the penny book.
He went through it. It took four minutes. Nobody spoke. He found it in the third year: a week in Thaw with eight entries instead of seven, a line written twice on a turned page.
"Here," he said, and turned it round and put his finger on it. "You've double-entered the fourth week of Thaw, year thirty-seven. It runs four days out from there to the end."
Maren Coyle looked at the page for a long moment.
"Ten years," she said, "and I got it wrong in the third one."
"You got it wrong by four days in ten years," said Rook, "in a book you kept by hand while working, and the House has a room of eighty men with nothing else to do. You did it better than they did. That is what the page says."
She laughed — once, a real one, surprised out of her — and then put her hand over her face and kept it there.
Nessa was staring at him.
At the door he stopped and put his hat on.
"Fourteen days," Maren said, from the table. "It's a Tuesday."
"The thirtieth of Rime, in the morning. I will come myself." He turned. "I will knock twice, and I will wait, and if you want your daughter out of the house I will wait for that too, and if you want her in the room then she stays in the room and nobody will move her."
"You'd allow that?"
"It is not mine to allow. It is your kitchen." He put his hand on the latch. "Last words are permitted and not required. There is a column for them and I have never left it blank. If there is something you want said, think about it in the fourteen days, because people who have not thought about it say the first thing that comes and it is usually not the thing."
Maren Coyle looked at him with an expression he could not read at all.
"What do most of them say?"
"That it was fair," said Rook. "It's nearly always that it was fair. I have four hundred of them and I would say a third of them are those exact words."
"Is it?"
He stood in the doorway with his hand on the latch and the fog coming up the stair behind him, and gave her the true answer, which surprised him more than it surprised her.
"It's accurate," he said. "I have spent nineteen years satisfying myself that those are the same thing."
He went out and pulled the blue door shut behind him, and stood a moment on the narrow stair, and did not look back at it.
Fourteen days.
He got as far as the bottom of the steps before he took out the ledger and wrote, on the private page, under Coyle, M. Outstanding: 276, in a hand that was not quite as tidy as usual:
Keeps her own book. Four days out in ten years. Sums done twice.
He looked at what he had written.
He had no idea at all why he had written it, and he did not want to find out, and he closed the ledger and went to work.