Chapter 14: James's Day

The scribe was still in the study, and Max let him stay.

Let him copy and sniff and wait for Mary's orders, Max had told Rose; the letter box would keep, and so would the man with the gall ink.

What the box could not tell him was whether the foreman's thumb had ever agreed to anything.

So he went to find out.

The Greywater mill stood two miles down the Black River, a tall stone building with a wheel that still turned.

James rode beside Max the whole way, whistling.

"You're sure you want me along?" he said at the gate. "I'm very good at holding horses and very bad at reading ledgers."

"You're here to be seen," said Max. "A Helix prime at my elbow says I'm not alone."

"Wonderful. I'm a decoration."

"You're a decoration who knows how to talk to a miller."

James grinned.

"That I do," he said, and swung down.

The foreman came out to meet them, a stooped man with flour in his eyebrows and hands like old roots.

He bowed to James, then looked at Max for a long moment, then bowed to him as well, lower.

"Young master," he said. "It's been a year."

"I need to see the books, please. The fees paid to the house."

"Madam keeps the books."

"Then I'd like to see the copies you keep."

The foreman's face did something complicated.

He led them into a low back office that smelled of oats and lamp oil, and he took down a shabby box from a shelf.

"These are only the counts," he said. "Sacks in. Sacks out. Madam writes the sums, and I put my thumb to the page."

"Your thumb?"

"I can't write, young master." He said it without shame. "Never could. Your father knew."

James had gone still in the doorway.

Max opened the box.

Page after page of neat figures, and at the foot of each, a brown thumbprint in ink.

He ran his finger down a column and did the arithmetic in his head.

Mary had been drawing a fee from the mill every month for ten years, and she had been writing it down as though the foreman agreed.

"Thank you," he said.

"Is it wrong?"

"It's a very good thumb."

By the time they had copied what they needed, the sun was low and orange across the weir.

The foreman lit the lamps.

"I'm off to my daughter's," he said. "Lock the door when you go, and put the key under the wheel stone. You know the one."

"I do," said Max.

He did not, but the host's memory did, and he said so.

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