Tallow had never audited anything that breathed, and he found within the first hour that the Census was harder than wages. Wages were a matter of hands and days. A man worked, a man was paid, and the Ink wrote the sum in a column that added up or did not. The Quiet Census was a column of villages. Each village had a line of figures and a stroke at the end of it, and the figures had been put down by clerks who had never once been asked to explain them, and the strokes had been put down by clerks who did not wish to be asked anything at all.
He sat at the gatehouse table with the grey-boarded ledger open before him, a lamp at his left elbow and a pot of his good ink at his right, and he worked through it leaf by leaf. He did the sums for each line. He wrote each answer as a span, because the answer was never a single number. The Lessary clerks had rounded their hearths in a way he could reconstruct only to within a few, and the grain they had recorded was sometimes in sacks and sometimes in measures, and sometimes in a unit that had been crossed out and replaced with another, and then crossed out again, as if the clerk had changed his mind every time he dipped the pen.
On the first morning he wrote out the totals for the forty villages. The clerks had counted a little under six thousand souls. He reckoned the total from the grain ledgers, which was harder to fake, and he got between six thousand and six thousand four hundred. He wrote both figures in the margin and then, out of an honesty he could not explain, he wrote the difference too.
Mireille came down to the gatehouse at noon with a cup of Pell’s broth and sat across from him without speaking. She read the figures upside down, as she had read the warrant on the Hearing’s table, and when she saw the range she gave a small dry sound through her nose.
“Six thousand to six thousand four hundred,” she said. “Do you know that is the most honest thing anybody has said about the Census in two years?”
“It is the most accurate thing,” said Tallow. “It is not necessarily the most honest. The honest figure is the one the clerk wrote, and he wrote six thousand and sixteen, with a line through the sixteen, as though it might be wrong.”
“It was wrong,” said Mireille. “They were wrong on purpose. It’s the same thing, in the end, when you are the one who has to say it.”
He did not answer that. He turned the leaf.
By the second day he had found the marsh-towns. They were easy to find once he looked for them. Every struck village had a headman’s name at the head of its line and a grain figure beneath it, and the grain was entered twice, once as tithe owed and once, in the same clerk’s hand but in a different ink, as loss to the Crown’s store. He sat back and looked at that line for some time. He understood, at last, what the Crown had done. It had counted its own theft as a harvest. The grain had been taken from the marsh and recorded as spoiled, and the spoiling had been recorded as the Crown’s own loss, and in the end the books showed a store that had lost nothing and a village that had never been there.
He had to stop after that. He put his hand flat on the table, and his voice when he spoke was harder than he had intended, and the words came out in the clipped, unforgiving form of a clause he had learned by heart in the first winter, when the Chamber had asked him to minute the Charter of Shares and he had discovered that the law was the only honest mirror a clerk could hold up to a crown.
“Loss to the Crown’s store is not a loss of the Crown,” he said, to the empty room. “It is a loss of the people whose store it is. Any clerk who enters one as the other has falsified the book, and the book is the only witness the people have.” He stopped. He was angry, and he did not like the feeling, and he let himself have it for one breath because it was the only time in the three days that he had been permitted to be. “I should have quoted that to Halse’s clerks. I should have quoted it to the Chamber. I was not permitted.”
“You were permitted,” said Mireille, from the door. “You just did not have a Chamber in front of you. It is a different kind of permission.”
Tallow had not heard her come back. He nodded to her, and she came to the table and sat down, and this time she did not read upside down. She put her finger on the margin of the Sallowfen leaf and turned the ledger toward him.
Along the margin, beside the struck names, there was a row of small characters in the same ink as the clerks’ figures. They were not Lessaran letters. They were not numbers. They had the look of a cipher, with a regular rhythm to them, a group of five and a group of three and a single stroke at the end of each line.
“That is my own hand,” said Mireille. “It is keyed to the page numbers of the ledger. Each letter of the note is taken from the page, then from a line on the page, then from a letter in a struck name. You may try to break it, if you like. I should be glad of the company.”
Tallow tried. He tried three keys he could think of, and each one took him an hour. The first was the page number, read as a sum. The second was the line count from the head of the leaf. The third, which he was rather proud of, was the first letter of each struck village’s headman, taken in order from the top of the page. None of them opened the cipher. Each produced a string of letters that looked like a message and was not one.
He set the pen down and looked at her with something close to professional respect. “Three days,” he said. “Perhaps nine, with luck and a great deal of hot broth, which Pell would charge us for. I should give a range of three to nine days’ further work before I found the key, and I should not guarantee the answer at the end of it.”
“That is generous,” said Mireille.
“It is not generosity. It is a span.”
“Then it is a generous span.” She took the ledger back from him, gently, and closed it on her finger. “The key is not a key you will find in a book, Master Tallow. It is in a hand that you will recognise when you see it, and it is on a page that the clerks did not think worth copying. I shall tell you where when you have earned the right to be told.”
He nodded, and did not ask her what he would have to do to earn it. He had a feeling he already knew.
On the third morning he reached the last leaf.
It was the page on which Mireille had initialled the total, under the clerk’s final figure, in her small upright hand. Tallow had read it three times and had made his sums from it without once looking at its foot. He looked now. He turned the leaf toward the lamp and read the line beneath her initials, and then he turned the leaf over, because the margin on the reverse had been pasted down. Someone had glued a sheet of cheap paper to the back of the ledger’s final board, a loose page folded in four, with a plain edge and the Lessary mill-mark faint in one corner.
He unfolded it with great care.
It was not in the clerks’ hand. It was not in Mireille’s. It was written in a child’s careful letters, each one made with obvious effort, each one leaning slightly toward the next as though it had been held in a small fist for a long time. There was a list of names. There were no headings and no figures. There was only a column of names, one under another, and beside each name a single word in the same careful letters, which Tallow read twice before he understood it.
He looked at the first name on the list. It was a girl’s name, a plain one, and beside it the child had written, in a neat and deliberate hand, the name of the village the Crown had struck from its books in the autumn: Sallowfen. Beside every name after that the child had written the same word, the word a clerk writes when he calls a roll and somebody in the room answers to it.
Here.
Near the foot of the page, beside the last name, the child had written something else. It was a second word, and Tallow had seen it before, in the clerk’s hand, at the foot of the headman’s line on the Census leaf.
Loss.
He did not read the rest of the list. He folded the page back into its four, very carefully, as he would fold a document that had been signed by a witness who could not yet write, and set it down on the table in front of him, and waited for his hands to stop shaking enough for him to write the entry in the minutes.