The counter reset at the same moment the settlement landed, and for a second there were two sets of letters in the corner of his vision, and then there was one.
[Daily Objective]
Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement.
$10,000 remaining · 23h 59m
He waited for a third. Nothing came. The last time the balance had moved this far, a diner on Renny Street had turned into a quest, and the absence of anything was its own kind of information. Ten thousand a day was the job now. There would not be a notification every time he did it.
He closed the binder on the word SUNDAY and left it on the hall table. There was a note in the margin of the page behind it, small, in her hand: bus 9.40. The first one east.
The house at midnight was the house at any other time with the people taken out of it. The cleaners had done the flags in the passage and the flags looked wrong clean. Somebody had put a bulb in one of the two hall lamps. He had not authorised it and did not mind.
The pantry was at the end of the kitchen passage, past the kitchen itself, where Tess had left the range clean and a single plate turned upside down on the rack. The light was on under the pantry door. It had been on when he'd come through at eleven, and at half past, and he had walked past it both times.
Aldric was sitting at the pantry table with his jacket on and a cup of something in front of him that had stopped steaming some time ago. There was a ledger on the table, a proper one, cloth-bound, and beside it a document wallet with a solicitor's name printed on the flap. Both had been placed so that they faced the empty chair. Behind him the pantry shelves ran the length of the wall, and the top two were full and the bottom three were not, and the tins on the full ones had been brought forward to the edge so the gaps behind them did not show from the door. He stood when Sebastian came in.
"Sir."
"The ledger."
"Yes, sir." He pulled out the second chair and did not sit again until Sebastian had.
The jacket cuff nearest Sebastian had been turned. You could see the line where the original edge had been and the slightly darker cloth that had been the inside, now the outside. It had been done well, by somebody with the right thread. It had been done a while ago, and the other cuff had been done more recently, by the same somebody, and did not yet match.
Sebastian looked at that for about as long as it takes to notice a thing, and then looked at the ledger, and did not open it.
"The fourth line yesterday," he said. "In the shoebox. Whose was it?"
Aldric folded his hands on the table.
"Mine, sir."
"Since when?"
"The figure runs from May."
"That's five months."
"Five and some days, sir. I've not been counting the days."
"Miss Nakamura read three names off that page and you gave her three account numbers and never said a word."
"She read three names because there were three names."
"Why isn't yours on it?"
"Because I keep the book," Aldric said. "If I put myself on the page, I am the person deciding whether I get paid before Tess does, and I would rather not be that person. The figure is there. It has simply seemed better that it not have a name against it while there was less money than names."
"It's a wage."
"It is."
"A wage is owed whether or not the man who's owed it is holding the pen."
"That's true, sir."
"Put your name on it."
Aldric looked at him for a second. Then he took a pen out of his inside pocket, opened the household book to the page, and wrote A. Aldric against the fourth line, in the same hand as everything else on it. He blotted it with the side of his hand and closed the book.
"Thank you, sir."
"Don't. I haven't paid it."
"No," Aldric said. "But it has a name now."
He opened the wallet, not the ledger.
"The ledger is the house. Wages, suppliers, the roof. Mr Pell has been kind enough to reconcile it, which is why it was with him. It will not tell you what you asked me a week ago." He set it aside. "This will."
The wallet had perhaps forty pages in it, in three bundles held with treasury tags, and it had been opened often enough that the flap had gone soft along the fold. Somebody had written JULES — M. on the outside in pencil and then rubbed most of it out again. The top bundle was a schedule of some kind, typed, with a column of dates down the left and figures down the right, and the figures did not get smaller.
"I'm going to want the short version," Sebastian said. "How much. To whom. When."
"Nine hundred and forty thousand dollars," Aldric said. "To the Marchetti family, through their company. On the thirtieth."
Sebastian took the bundle out of his hands. Aldric let it go without checking first what would be done with it, as he had with the household book on Saturday, and put his hands back on the table.
It was there, at the foot of the schedule, in a box, with a line above it that said balance outstanding including accrued interest to the maturity date. He ran his eye up the column to see where it had started and it had started at eight hundred, in a year that was four years ago now. Every line between the two figures was larger than the one above it. There was a column headed received down the right. It had entries in it for the first three years and then it did not.
"The last payment was in March."
"February, sir. March was the meeting about it."
"And nothing since."
"There has been nothing to send since. Miss Lucia has written to them twice. Mr Pell has written to them four times. The replies are in the third bundle, and you'll find they are very short."
"And they've not sent anyone."
"They have sent a photographer," Aldric said. "Twice. Mr Marcus mentioned it at breakfast, I believe, on your first morning down."
Sebastian turned to the second bundle. That was the note itself. He found the same number on the last page. Under it, the maturity date, and the names of the borrowers. Two of them.
The third bundle was correspondence. He did not read it. The top letter was on Marchetti paper, one paragraph, and the paragraph was two lines long.
He put the pages down on the table in the order he'd read them.
"What's the security?"
"The house. The yard. The Chandler Street property." Aldric did not need to look. "The three things you were told about at breakfast on your first morning down. Mr Pell has the schedule for vacating, if it comes to that. Twenty-one days."
"Marcus said they'd photographed the cranes."
"They are entitled to."
"The thirtieth is a Monday."
"It is. Mr Pell has asked whether funds clearing on the Tuesday would be accepted, as a courtesy. They have not replied." Aldric moved his cup an inch. "I would not plan around the Tuesday, sir."
Sebastian looked at the letters in the corner of his vision. 22d 23h. He'd stopped reading that line days ago because it only ever went one way. It went one way to that Monday.
Sebastian looked at the figure again, not because it might have changed.
A hundred and seventeen thousand dollars. He'd walked down the passage ten minutes ago feeling that number in his pocket. It had been a great deal of money at eleven fifty-nine. Now it was a bit over an eighth of something, and the something had a date.
Ten thousand a day brought a hundred back, ninety of it new. He did not do the rest of the arithmetic, at one in the morning, with the paper still in his hand. There was a line of small clean letters at the edge of his vision that said net worth of $1,000,000, as it had said every morning for a week, and it sat there next to a piece of paper that said nine hundred and forty thousand, and he looked at both and thought: I need more money than I thought, faster than I thought. That was the whole of the thought. It was nearly one in the morning.
"Whose signature is that."
He'd found it on the last page of the second bundle, beneath his father's — a second line, a second name, in a hand that was larger and rounder than the one above it.
Julien Ambrose Jules.
Aldric looked at it without leaning forward.
"Yours, sir."
"Not my father's."
"Your father's is above it. That one is yours." He turned the page back an inch so the line was flat. "The note required a second member of the family. I understood at the time that it was a formality, and I understood later that it was not. Mr Pell can explain the difference better than I can."
"Try."
"There are two borrowers on that paper, sir. Not a borrower and someone standing behind him. Your father, and you. Each of you owes the whole of it, and they may ask whichever of you they like, and they need not go to the house first." He said it the way he'd said eleven months about the gutter. "That is what the second name is for. It's why they wanted one."
"When?"
"The date's on the page."
Sebastian read the date. Then he read the passport in his head, the birth month he would not have guessed, and counted back.
"He was nineteen."
"Yes, sir."
"Nineteen, and he signed for nine hundred and forty thousand dollars."
"Eight hundred," Aldric said. "At the time. The rest is the four years since."
"Why?"
"I don't know, sir. I wasn't asked." He said it plainly, as a fact about the house. "It was a bad year. I can tell you what was signed and when. I can't tell you why a boy of nineteen put his name on it, because I wasn't in the room, and the only two people who were have not discussed it in my hearing since."
Sebastian turned the wallet round so it faced him properly and sat looking at the signature, and Aldric let him.
Julien had known about this. He'd sat in the room in March and asked Pell about the interest calculation and been insufferable about it, Lucia said. He had known the number, and the date, and whose name was on the paper. Then he'd been ill for eleven days and woken up as a man who had to be told all three at one in the morning by the butler.
"Aldric," Sebastian said. "If I told you —"
He stopped.
The boiler was on somewhere below them, making the sound it had been making since Saturday afternoon.
Aldric waited. He did not look away and he did not lean in. He sat with his hands on the table and his cold cup beside them and gave every impression of having nowhere to be until morning.
Sebastian put the pages back in the wallet in the order he'd found them.
"You don't have anything you want to ask me."
It came out flat, not quite a question.
Aldric looked at him.
"No, sir."
He stood and picked up the cup. He looked at it, then put it down on the draining board behind him, where it would be found in the morning by somebody who was not him. He put the household ledger under his arm.
"Mr Pell's papers stay in the house. He'd prefer they weren't taken out of the wallet, but he'd prefer a great many things. I'll leave them with you." He paused at the door with his hand on the frame. "The boiler man said the flue wants looking at again in the spring. I've put it in the book."
"Aldric."
"Sir."
"Your wages. Put them in the book properly. Amount, date, the lot."
"They're in the book, sir."
"Then leave them there until they're paid."
"Yes, sir," Aldric said, and went, and the door shut behind him with the click it always made.
Sebastian sat in the pantry with the wallet and the light and the sound of the boiler.
After a while he got the green notebook out of his pocket, and turned past Other people's debt counts and 150 credits — for what? and the page headed THINGS THAT COST TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS with a horse on it, to the first clean sheet.
He wrote the three things he knew, one under the other, in the order Aldric had given them to him.
MARCHETTI — $940,000
DUE — DAY 30
JULIEN SIGNED