85 - Assigned Creditor

The docket under the tab was an assignment, and he had the whole of it in about four seconds and then stood in the yard for a minute and a half reading it again, because reading a thing quickly is not the same as being willing to have read it.

Assignment of pre-registration. Ward Nine. Subject a minor, sitting entered for the spring. Paper-holder of the ward, the Sedge Counting House. Instalment schedule to open on the day of Assessment and not before. Factor appointed, Ferring, Coll.

He read it from four feet off with a lamp in one hand and did not put the other anywhere near it.

You do not touch a Rendered. You stand off it and you read it and you let it finish.

The crate was strapped across the back on cord worn into its old groove in the green wool, and the dock stamp on the side of it was six years old and is going to be six years old for ever, and the man under all of it was about fifty with grey in his beard. Hesper had gone across the yard an hour before with her file shut. There was nobody out there to see any of it.

He counted the turns of cord across the shoulder while he stood there. Nineteen. He did not notice he was doing it until he was back at the bench.

He had spent the best part of a year assuming that the brass at that collar was kept up by a widow or a daughter, and had been told in the autumn, by a collector on a folding stool, that it was kept up by a department.

Nothing on the docket was wrong.

That was the first thing he checked, going down the lines twice with his thumbnail under them, the way you check a docket you would like very much to be able to argue with. The dates were right. The ward was right. They had spelled his sister's name the way she spells it, with the two esses, which nobody in an office had managed in his hearing in nineteen years.

Then the porter turned and walked the length of the shed and out through the far door, still delivering.

Kalen sat down on the strip bench and copied the whole docket out from memory, twice, and checked the second copy against the first.

He put both copies in his coat. There was a brass tag in there already, and a rate sheet ruled with the edge of a knife, and a Sedge dock receipt for four bales of cord that had come out of a dead lining in the spring.

* * *

The ward filing office shuts at the eighth bell and he got there at the seventh, which cost him the light and the whole of the walk home.

The book is chained to the counter and it is free to anybody who can stand up in front of it, and he had been doing that on and off for a year, so he knew where the schedules sat and did not have to ask a clerk for anything.

It took him eleven minutes.

He read the clause three times and then read the clause above it, which is where they always put the thing that matters.

An assignment is not a bargain and does not want anybody's agreement. It is a note of where a ward's paper sits. A ward's paper sits with the ward's paper-holder, and every file opened in that ward opens underneath it, and there is nothing in the schedule about consent, because consent has never been one of the ingredients.

Objection to an assignment may be entered by the paper-holder, by the Assessor, or by a Warranted of the ward.

He read that line four times. Then he put his hand flat on the page for a moment and took it off again before anybody came round the end of the counter.

Ward Nine holds nine thousand and some on the roll. It holds three Warranted.

He walked back down through the ward in the dark and went at the thing the way he goes at everything, and there were no figures in it anywhere. That was the whole difficulty. A docket with no amount on it cannot be argued down.

Marra Sull's boy came up in the spring at a Line of eighty-one and ninety-four the wrong way before he had done a day's work in his life. Kalen had read the slip out to her in the strip shed at her own asking, and it had taken an hour, and he had told her in advance that she would not enjoy it.

There has been a card on her mantelpiece since the summer.

He had seen it in June, standing in her kitchen with a bolt-set in his hand, and had taken it for a rent card and had not looked at it, because it was on somebody else's shelf and a man does not read another family's mantelpiece. He had noticed the paper. He had thought nothing whatever about the paper.

Four years counting what that ward paid, in tenths, per head, per quarter, back two hundred and seventeen years.

He had never once counted who was holding the other end of it.

* * *

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Nessa had the table cleared and the crew book open at the current quarter, which is how that room looks most evenings now. She did not put the pencil down when he came in.

He put the copy on the bread board and turned it round for her before he took his coat off.

She read it the way she reads everything. Once, fast, from the bottom upward. He watched her hand stop halfway and start again.

"They are not going to collect it," she said. "They are going to own it."

"Yes."

"No figure anywhere on it." She put the pencil across the page to hold her place. "Not a bill. A note saying whose desk the figure lands on when there is one, and the desk is chosen now and the figure is in the spring."

"That is the whole of it."

Nessa read it through a second time.

The rope-walk stove would go until the ninth and neither of them had lit the lamp, and there was enough off the street to read by if you happened to be the two people in Ashfall who could read in that light.

"Say the part you went and looked up," she said.

"Objection may be entered by the paper-holder, by the Assessor, or by a Warranted of the ward."

"And you are a Freehand."

"And I am a Freehand. I may be told." He sat down. "That is the whole of what a Freehand may do about it. I may be handed a copy in good time in a fair hand and I may read it and I may keep it. There is no counter in Kentra where a man of my grade may say the words this one is mine and have a clerk write them down."

Nessa folded her arms, which she got from their mother.

"You have been going at this the wrong way round for a year," she said.

"Go on."

"You keep getting better. Line, Craft, the crew, the guild book, the grade Sabra put you at last week. All of that is you being better at the work." She tapped the docket twice with two fingers. "And every single time you have actually got anything, somebody let you through a door. Karrow. Hesper. Sabra. Belk, once, and he did not have to."

"That is fair."

"This is a door as well and there is nobody standing at it, because a Freehand does not come to that door at all." She sat back. "It is not what you can do. It never was. It is whose objection they are obliged to read."

He did not answer for a moment, because she had not finished and because she was right.

He got the ham off the shelf and cut it in half without looking at it, and she let that one go, which she does about one time in four.

"A name at the bottom," Nessa said.

"Ferring, Coll. Factor."

She got there before the end of the sentence.

"What is a factor?"

"A man sent out to a ward to assist a family with its file," said Kalen. "I have not got the faintest idea what that means, and I would like to know before he does it to us."

* * *

They found out at about the eighth bell, when somebody knocked on the door of a room on the second floor of a rope-walk on Tallow Street.

That does not happen. Everybody with business up those stairs shouts from the bottom of them.

He was perhaps thirty. He had a good coat and a soft hat, and he had taken the hat off out on the landing rather than at the door, which is a small thing and is done on purpose or not at all.

"Mr Ashgrove. Coll Ferring. I am sorry about the hour."

"It is the eighth bell."

"It is, and I have been told twice today that the eighth is a civil hour in Ashfall, and I did not believe either of them." He had a card out already. "May I stand here and say four things? I am not going to ask to come in."

Kalen took the card. Good paper. The House at the top, and under the House the words assigned creditor department in a smaller face, and under that a name and a street in this ward.

Ferring said the four things standing on the landing with his hat in his hand.

Nothing is owed and nothing is due, and if anybody tells them otherwise this week that person is wrong and he will put it in writing. He is factor for eleven files in Ward Nine and they will have a copy of everything he does on the day he does it, because that is the standing instruction and he would do it anyway. He sits down with a family beforehand and goes through the schedule, which takes an hour and costs nothing, and he would rather do it in the autumn than in a hall in the spring with forty people waiting behind them.

The fourth thing was the address on the card.

"I have taken rooms at number eleven," Ferring said. "Down by the tallow works. So I am not a man who comes out from town on a Tuesday. I am at the end of the road."

Nessa had come to stand at Kalen's shoulder with the pencil still in her hand.

"You are Nessa," Ferring said.

"I am."

"You keep the books for the crew. Four of you and one on the bench."

He said it and then put his hat on and stood there with it on, and explained, without being asked, that he was not being clever and that the whole of it was on the file, because everything is on the file, and that he would rather say it out loud on a landing than have them find it later and spend a week wondering what else was on there.

"What else is on there," Kalen said.

"About nine pages. You may read all of it whenever you like and I will bring it up myself."

Then he went down the stairs, and stopped halfway, and came back two of them.

"I grew up over a works in Ward Six," he said. "I do know what this looks like from your side of a door. I am not going to pretend otherwise."

He went. They stood in the doorway and listened to the whole of it, which took a while, because he went down slowly and did not slam anything at the bottom.

* * *

A factor is a man who sits at a family's table with the schedule in front of him, and reads it out in a kind voice, and answers every question honestly, and puts the instalment where the family can reach it, and does that at eleven addresses in one ward until the ward has stopped thinking of the House as a building in town and started thinking of it as Coll Ferring, who is at the end of the road and who was very good about the winter.

Kalen had the whole of that standing in his own doorway with a card in his hand, and there was not one thing in it he could have put in front of a clerk.

He shut the door and put his back against it.

"He did not do one thing wrong," he said.

"He did not do one thing wrong, and he was here at the eighth bell on the day the docket went out, and he knows my name and the size of your crew." Nessa sat back down in front of the book without opening it. "Say the true sentence."

"There is nothing to complain about, and if there were I could not complain."

"The true sentence. Write it in the book."

He wrote it in the book.

Then he stood at the window for a while. Down at the end of the road, past the rope-walk yard where the drying stove was going out, there was a lamp in a first floor room at number eleven that had been dark every night of his life.

"I want the grade where they have to read it," he said.

"Say the grade."

"Warranted."

"Then: the whole of the winter," Nessa said.

He did not count the panes in the window. He noticed that he was not counting, and stood there a while longer, and that was worse.

Ferring's card said he would call again on Sunday.