61 - Charter Work

The clerk at the Charter counter read the bid twice and then asked for a number that had nothing to do with the work.

"Line."

"One thousand five hundred and seventy."

"Again."

"One thousand five hundred and seventy," Kalen said.

The clerk wrote it into the box at the left of the sheet and ruled under it.

There was a printed schedule on the back of the form. Four grades of Charter, and a floor figure against each, and the floor against this one was fifteen hundred. Kalen had stood at this counter nine days ago with one thousand four hundred and twenty on his sheet. He had read that schedule twice and gone away and said nothing to anybody.

Nine days. Three men on wages, a load-frame on Cinder Row that held, and eleven days of ward work entered in his own hand.

A hundred and fifty of Line. It was the difference between a clerk writing a number in a box and a clerk telling him the counter was shut.

"You are admissible," the clerk said.

"Thank you."

"It is not a compliment. It is a box." He turned the sheet over. "Three bids. You want them read or you want to sign first."

"Read them."

Cinder Row runs eleven hundred feet from the tally shop to the ward gate. There is a gantry line the whole way: forty iron masts in stone footings, thirty-one rungs each, and a head at the top of every one carrying a sheave and a pawl and a swivel. In the spring a length of the running chain let go on the loading dock and put a Sedge clerk face down on the boards.

The ward posted its own figure after that: three hundred and forty marks, and six months of not spending it.

The house out of Ward Eleven had come in at three hundred and twenty-eight. The Sedge yard's own hands had come in at three hundred and ninety, which is over a posted figure, and which a Chartered house may do and nobody may query.

Kalen had bid two hundred and forty, and he had not bid it to be cheap. He had bid it because the other two had priced forty new castings and forty Binds, and he was not buying a casting.

"You are not replacing the heads," the clerk said.

"No."

"The notice says a working gantry line."

"It says a working line. It does not say a bound one."

Kalen put two fingers on the paper and turned it round so the man could follow.

"There is a Pattern in about a quarter of those heads and the live ones are the reason a chain let go on that dock. A bound head runs on somebody's Balance and nobody has topped one of them up since the works shut." He moved his finger down the clause. "Take the Pattern out and a head is a sheave and a pawl and a pin. It turns because it is round and it holds because there is a tooth in it."

"Then it wants greasing."

"Then it wants greasing. Once a month, forever, by a man with a can and a ladder."

The clerk looked up.

"Somebody has to stand at this counter and say that out loud before the ward signs," Kalen said. "So I am saying it."

The clerk wrote something in the margin, which Kalen could read upside down and did not enjoy reading.

The terms printed while the pen was still moving.

CHARTER OFFERED

Reclamation of forty gantry heads, Cinder Row,

Ward Nine. Term: three weeks from signature.

Materials at cost. Recoveries at schedule.

On overrun the Charter is discharged unfilled

and the ward's figure is assessed on the holder.

The ward's figure. Not his bid.

Three hundred and forty, because the ward would have to buy the work again at what the work costs the ward. The Accord had no opinion at all about the hundred marks of difference.

* * *

The crew registration had come back on the Tuesday morning, sealed.

It had gone in twelve days before and had sat in a box behind a counter. Now it was on the strip bench with the ward seal in the wax and Wick's name entered under Kalen's own, and so was the materials countersign, and so was the ostler's certificate of title off Fetter Street.

Nobody had brought them. Nobody had said anything about them.

Ilve Karrow had stood in the yard doorway on the Monday night for some part of an hour and had not spoken one word. Then he had gone away and sealed every piece of paper Kalen had waiting in that building.

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Kalen put it on the list of things he did not understand.

* * *

He told the crew in the yard at the sixth bell, standing at the pan post, because a thing said at a table sounds like an offer.

"Two hundred and forty on delivery. Twenty-two days from tomorrow." He had the sheet against his knee. "The twenty-second and not the twenty-first. The counting starts the day after signature."

"Materials?" Ferrin said.

"At cost. Winch and rope is thirty-three, the smith is forty-four for forty pins, and oil and grease is about twenty-two, and that comes back."

Ferrin had the pencil out and was already down the column. He had done that on his first day, on a barrow he was not being paid to count.

"Wages are wages," Kalen said. "Doss six, Ferrin five, Wick three."

"Three."

"Three."

"Brem gets four," Wick said, "and Brem has never got a Pattern out of anything in his life."

"Brem is nineteen days into the trade in a house with a roof on it, and you have been on wages twelve." Kalen folded the sheet. "Ask me again in the spring."

Doss went on rolling a length of chain onto his forearm.

"What are you taking?" Ferrin said.

"Four a week."

"Doss is on six."

"Doss is worth six."

Nobody said anything to that, which was the correct answer, and Ferrin wrote the figure down without any expression at all and underlined it twice, which was not.

"The part that matters is the last line."

Kalen said it to all three of them and did not soften any part of it.

"If it runs past the twenty-second day the Charter is discharged. The ward puts its own figure on me. Three hundred and forty. Not on you. On me."

"And the wages?" Ferrin said.

"Wages are not a share. You are paid to the day the work stops, whether it stops right or it stops wrong."

"And if you cannot pay us."

He asked it flat, looking at his column and not at Kalen, and it was the best question anybody had put to him in a month.

"Then Sabra pays you out of the house and takes it off me. I asked her on Sunday and she put a fee on it inside four seconds." Kalen put the sheet in his coat. "Two a month. I would not take the word of a man who told you there was no fee."

Wick looked from one of them to the other.

"So the worst of it is a Third," he said.

"The worst of it is a Third."

"That is the worst?"

"That is the worst," Kalen said.

He left it there. A boy of fifteen asking whether a thing goes worse than a Third has not yet met anybody it went worse for, and there was no version of that sentence he was going to say in a yard at dusk.

Doss finished the chain and hung it on the wall and spoke for the first time.

"Which ones are live."

"Four, nine, eleven, fourteen, seventeen, twenty-two, twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-one, thirty-six, thirty-eight." Kalen said it the way you say a thing you have said to yourself on a walk eleven times. "Eleven live, twenty-nine dead."

"You have had one down."

"I have not had one down. I have read the whole line twice from the ground, in the evening, from the far pavement, and once at night with a lamp."

"From the ground," Doss said.

"From the ground."

Doss took a ladder off the wall and went out of the yard with it, and came back forty minutes later in the rain, and put the ladder where the ladder goes.

"Seventeen is live," he said.

* * *

The old man from the cooperage was standing at the yard gate when Kalen crossed to the office, holding a paper against his chest with both hands, the way you hold a paper in a wind.

Kalen knew him the way you know furniture. He came to the board on the first of every month and stood in front of it with the other three. He could not read one word of it and he stood there anyway, for as long as the rest of them stood there.

Kalen had never learned his name. He had never once asked it.

"You are the one that reads," the old man said.

"I am. I have got a Charter counter shutting at the eighth bell and a collector waiting on me."

"It is one page."

"It is always one page."

Kalen put his hand out and took it, because he took everything, and had a coat that showed it.

"Thursday," he said. "Come to the strip shed at the eighth bell and I will read it out twice, and write what it says on the back in a hand you can carry to somebody."

"Thursday," the old man said.

"Thursday."

He put it in his coat with the ward-tag and his sister's rate sheet, and went in to Hesper Vane.

* * *

She was on the folding stool with her own lamp lit and the file already open at the page, and she had the week's instalment written out before he sat down.

"Eleven marks," Hesper said.

"I have got eleven marks."

"You have got eleven marks this week."

She took it, wrote the receipt, gave him the receipt, and put the coin away without counting it, which she had done in front of him every week for seventeen weeks. He did not remark on it.

"Now show me the Charter."

He put it on the desk. She read it twice at the pace of a woman reading a form she has read four hundred times, and then took a pencil out and did the arithmetic on the back of her own docket, upside down to him, in a small even hand.

"Forty heads. Twenty-two days. Four hands, one of whom is fifteen." She did not look up. "You entered a rate on the tenement, one load-frame in three weeks. You entered a rate on the foundry, sixteen Patterns in six weeks, working alone."

"Those are not the same job."

"No. They are the only two jobs you have ever entered at ward scale."

She turned the docket round.

"Off your own paper you are one Pattern every two and a half days. Forty at two and a half is a hundred days. You have got twenty-two."

"Twenty-nine of them are dead, and a dead head is two hours and a pin."

"You have counted eleven live from the ground."

"Yes."

"What is it if it is fourteen?"

"Then it is twenty-two days and no margin," Kalen said.

"So that nothing is missed, and if it is sixteen."

"Then I do not deliver."

Hesper put the pencil down. Out in the yard the sixth bell had gone an hour ago, so the gate would be shut, and forty of them would be standing at it in the cold, going nowhere at all, in good coats.

"For the record, three hundred and forty, assessed on a Balance at minus five hundred and sixty," she said. "Say the band."

"Third."

"Say it in full."

"Third grade. Two hundred to four hundred and ninety-nine."

"You have had one."

"You know I have had one."

"I want it said at this table before you sign."

She was not unkind about it, and she had not been unkind about anything in fifty weeks, which was the whole difficulty with her.

"What did it take?"

He put his left hand flat on the desk, which was the shortest way to answer it, and they both looked at it. The two smallest fingers, still on the hand, still the right colour, doing nothing whatever.

"What does it take the second time," he said.

"Something else," Hesper said.

He sat with that for about as long as it deserved.

"You are telling me not to take it."

"I am telling you what the arithmetic says, and the arithmetic says do not take it." She closed the file. "I have not been wrong about a figure at this desk in seven years."

"But."

"I have been wrong about which figure mattered. That is a different trade and I am not qualified in it."

He walked up Tallow Street with the counter still open and told his sister the whole of it at the table, in order, including the three hundred and forty and including the word Third.

She had asked him months ago to stop deciding a thing and then reporting it, and he had been late with that four times since, and this was not going to be the fifth.

She did not tell him what to do. She wrote two figures down, turned the paper round, and let him look at them.

Then he went back and signed it at the eighth bell.