The receiving-hall was cold, and Velvet had decided, before the first petitioner came through the door, that the cold would not be mentioned. A Chamberlain who complains of the weather has conceded that the weather is in charge. She stood at the head of the hall with the Record on its brass stand at her elbow, her hands folded above the ledger’s green cover, and she looked down the length of the room with the expression she had worn for three hundred years of trade, which was the expression of a woman receiving guests she had been waiting all her life to receive.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” she said, to the empty stair, because the prince had not yet come down it, and because the sentence would be needed later and she preferred to have it ready. “What a privilege it is to have the Hold’s patience in the building.”
The petitioners stood along the wall with their coal-chits in their fists. There were fourteen of them this morning, Lowgate families for the most part, two of the Thornwick carters who had driven their empty wagons up the Lessary Road for the coal and had not yet been paid for the last load, a widow from the goat-lane with a basket of eggs she had been told she could not bring in, and a boy of perhaps twelve who had come with his mother’s chit and no idea what it was for. Velvet knew them all by their faces. She…
