In the morning Ossane went to the Chancery in her best grey, and she asked the porter at the side door for the Chancellor’s clerk, not for the Chancellor.
It was a small distinction, and the porter, who was an old man with a bad hip and an excellent memory for the advocates who had been struck off the commission’s list, noticed it at once. He looked at her over the top of his spectacles for a while. Then he went away up the back stair without a word, and came down again with a young clerk in a black coat and a face of exquisite neutrality, who bowed to her as though she had been expected for a month.
“The Chancellor is at his luncheon,” the clerk said. “He has asked me to attend you, Advocate, and to see what it is you wish to say.”
“Then I shall say it to you,” said Ossane. “You will be able to repeat it accurately to him, I trust. It is the one thing the Chancery has never taught its clerks to do well.”
The clerk’s mouth twitched. He did not answer. He took her into the side room off the Chancellor’s corridor, where the windows looked onto the Chancery’s own garden and the fountain that had been built to show the Assembly that Lessary could afford water in a dry summer. The room was small and warm and smelled of ink and beeswax. There was a long table, and a…
