Marcel Said He Could Sell a Day

Marcel said he could sell a day.

"Trial preparations can be extended by eighteen days." He set a schedule on the reception room's record desk, not a coin. "Port rations will hold for six days. Five hundred sacks of inland relief grain will go out within three. What the duke's daughter needs to buy right now isn't grain. It's time."

Lydia hoped he was wrong. Elias checked the figures immediately and found nothing off. Marcel's trading house held the warehouses, the carts, and the insurers, all of it. If he pulled out, Lydia's interim seat would wobble on its grain conditions, and Gerard's public hearing preparations would stall before they could even afford paper.

"That's why it's expensive," Lydia said.

"Calling an expensive thing cheap is a lie."

Marcel didn't hide his greed. Not hiding it made him look, strangely, clean. Lydia knew that cleanliness was the dangerous part.

"We're not granting warehouse priority or an insurance monopoly."

"Then my house has no reason to take on the risk. If the crown seizes it, your signature gets tied up along with it."

"A thirty day short term loan, public interest rate, collateral limited to a portion of unfrozen port revenue. That's as far as this goes."

Marcel tapped the table with a finger. "The duke used to leave the door open a bit wider when he negotiated."

"I don't like hands reaching in through a door left ajar."

Elias swallowed a cough. Lydia didn't check whether he was holding back a laugh or a warning.

"I'm attaching conditions." Lydia said. "No wage arrears for workers. No grain hoarding. Open ledgers. A co-signature from the port workers' representative."

Marcel didn't laugh this time. "You want me to accept those terms without an insurance monopoly?"

"I'm not asking you to accept all of it. I'm proposing a partial deal."

"If you only buy part of it, you only buy part of a day."

That was true too. Every time a true statement made her uncomfortable, Lydia pushed down the urge to cast the other person as a villain. Marcel had the cash that could save the port. At the same time, he demanded the right to hold his hand at its throat the moment it tried to breathe.

"Then here's the middle ground." Lydia said. "We accept the thirty day loan. No insurance monopoly. But this shipment of relief grain will be insured through Orte's house alone. Interest rate and fees disclosed. Co-signature from the workers' representative."

Marcel studied her for a while, then tilted his head. "And if the representative doesn't sign?"

"Then there's no deal."

"What does a representative know about assessing insurance risk?"

"He knows where his own wages go missing."

Marcel didn't lean back in his chair. "My lady, if you give a workers' representative signing authority, next he'll want to sign off on loading order too."

"He might."

"Then the house will lose the tide every time it has to renegotiate."

"Right now the house lost people's names because it never negotiated at all."

Elias inserted a new line into the loan agreement. The representative's signing authority is limited to the insurance rate on shipping and the payment schedule for wage arrears. Lydia knew the sentence wasn't broad enough. But moving every authority today would break the deal. A broken deal might look clean, but the grain wouldn't move.

"That's the limit of the signing authority." Lydia said. "The next scope gets handled at the hearing."

"You always leave the next document behind, don't you."

"And you always leave the next fee behind."

Marcel laughed for real this time. "That's what makes it a deal."

The unloading warehouse at the grand duke's residence had been converted into a temporary distribution point. The smell of grain mixed with wet rope. When the two workers' representatives came in, blue thread was tied around their wrists. The thread was too worn to be decoration, and the knots sat in different positions to be a uniform mark.

Lydia didn't ask what it meant. It wasn't time yet to demand an explanation. The list came first.

The younger representative touched the blue thread on his wrist. The knot was loose but tied in a way that didn't come apart easily.

"What is that thread?" Elias asked.

The representative didn't answer right away. Lydia didn't push either.

"It's a mark so we don't lose track of the list." he said after a while. "Please write down only that much."

Marcel shrugged. "There are a lot of marks around the port these days. A lot of factions too."

The older representative looked at him. "There are marks in the trading house's warehouses too. Red string for sacks that get paid, black string for sacks that get paid late."

Lydia didn't ask further about the blue thread's meaning. She couldn't tell yet whether it was rebellion, mourning, or a simple roster mark. She only noted that the thread tied around a wrist occupied the same place as a blank in a ledger.

"This is the wage arrears list." The older representative held out the paper. "The people listed by ship number are marked separately."

Marcel spoke from the side. "Ship numbers are just practice. There's a lot of shift labor during voyages."

The younger representative answered immediately. "If it's practice, does the wage go missing as a matter of practice too?"

Lydia turned the pages of the list. The same ship number disappeared once every three months. Beside each vanished line was a short phrase: insurance claim processed. No name. The payout was lower than a dockworker's daily wage.

"Is this a death list?" Lydia asked.

Marcel spread his hands. "It's an accident processing list. Deaths, disappearances, and contract terminations are mixed together."

"If you mix them, no one knows who died."

"The trading house insures by ship."

The end of the older representative's blue thread struck the back of his hand. "A person isn't a ship."

The statement was so simple that it held its ground on the record desk for a long time. Lydia pulled three sheets of the list aside. Same number, different month, similar omission. She couldn't yet call it a crime. But the lines were too neatly arranged to dismiss as coincidence.

"Did my father see this ledger?"

The representative didn't look at Lydia directly. "It carries the duke's seal."

Marcel found his smile again. "When the port was busy, the duke looked first at whether the ships were moving. He trusted the people on the ground to look after the names."

"And who profited from that trust?" Lydia asked.

Marcel didn't dodge the question. "The trading houses. Myself included. But the ships moved."

"Do you think it's enough that the ships moved?"

"On starving days, yes. On funeral days, no. The problem is that the port is always one or the other."

The workers' representatives didn't argue with that. Not because they couldn't. It was the silence of people who had lived through both the starving days and the funeral days at the port. Lydia knew that reducing Marcel to a single word, greed, would erase that silence too.

Lydia searched for a sentence that would defend her father. Warehouses had been short before the war, the crown's pressure had been severe, and Gerard had to make hard calls. Several sentences came to mind. None of them filled the blanks in the list.

In the late night accounting room, Elias laid the official ledger side by side with the wage arrears list. Lydia marked small dots on the blanks that repeated every three months. The dots weren't many, but they were regular.

"This isn't conclusive evidence." Elias said.

"I know."

"The duke may have known and looked the other way."

"I know that too."

"And you're still marking it?"

Lydia didn't put down her pen. "If you don't mark what you don't know as unknown, the person who pretends to know wins."

Marcel signed the revised contract. The insurance monopoly was gone, leaving only this one shipment's insurance. The co-signature line for the workers' representative was still blank. He looked at that blank and smiled.

"The duke used to say it was enough that the ships moved."

"It isn't enough for me."

"Then things will go slower."

"Then they'll be recorded."

Marcel pushed the signed contract toward Lydia without folding it. "A record is slow money. I'll see whether you can carry that money all the way to the end."

"You carry your public interest rate all the way to the end too."

"Making it public raises the price."

"Hiding it costs more later."

At that, Elias pressed a finger against one of the blanks in the ledger. Lydia looked at the blank and checked once more the line stamped with her father's seal. She still couldn't tell what Gerard had known. Not knowing didn't make it clean.

The workers' representative didn't sign right away. He read the public interest rate clause in the contract twice and set his finger beside the wage arrears payment date.

"What happens if this date passes?"

Marcel started to answer, but Lydia spoke first. "It gets deducted automatically from the shipping insurance fee. I'll add that clause."

"And if the trading house objects?"

"Then the representative won't sign."

Marcel didn't hide his displeasure. "I bear the risk, and the representative holds the right to the penalty."

"I just saw a ledger showing that the workers were bearing the risk first."

Only then did the older representative pick up the pen. The blue thread came down over the contract. He wrote his name clearly and added his own crew's name beside the ship number. Watching the addition, Elias murmured that they'd need a new form.

"I'll have the new form ready by tomorrow." Lydia said.

"By tomorrow?" Elias asked.

"If we make it today, it'll be wrong. A wrong form lasts a long time."

For the first time, the younger representative looked straight at Lydia. "If you're wrong, can it be fixed?"

Lydia looked at the line bearing her father's seal. "I'll leave the signature line blank so it can be fixed."

Marcel looked at the empty signature line for a long time. "A blank calls people in. Not only good people come."

"Bad people got in even through closed boxes."

"Hard to argue with that."

He pulled one copy of the contract toward himself. "Thirty days. After thirty days, I'll be demanding new terms."

"After thirty days there will also be a joint hearing record."

"Do you believe that record will be on your side?"

"No. That's exactly why it's needed."

The workers' representative pulled the blue thread and tied it once more. "We won't be cheering. Not until the arrears actually come in."

"I'm not asking for cheers." Lydia answered. "Ask for the date."

Elias wrote the penalty clause beside the wage arrears payment date. Marcel disliked the sentence but didn't strike it out. If everyone disliked the contract a little, at least no one side alone had been deceived.

The door opened and Sabine came in. She carried a welcoming banquet invitation along with a short report. The invitation, in the queen dowager's gentle handwriting, carried an added line: for the kingdom's stability, the couple's harmony is to be shown in public.

The report was shorter. The access log for the grand duke's residence's separate bedchambers had been pulled up at an outside viewing desk.

Marcel looked back and forth between the invitation and the report. "The crown demands the couple's harmony, and someone else is hunting for proof there isn't any. It's just like a market. Easy to follow."

"What's different from a market?" Lydia asked.

"In a market, everyone believes they know the price. At court, they call the price etiquette."

Sabine pointed to the bottom of the report. "The viewer is listed under the royal chief of security's name. We don't know yet whether he looked at it himself or lent his name to someone else."

"Why would someone need the separate bedchamber information right now?" Elias asked.

Lydia looked at the word harmony in the invitation. "They're going to demand proof at tomorrow's banquet. The moment you prove something, the other side gets to decide how it's proven."

Marcel gathered up the contract. "Then my deal today just got more urgent. Protecting a reputation takes money too."

"I won't lower my terms for a reputation."

"I thought as much." Marcel said, smiling as he stepped back toward the door. "I'm not withdrawing what I said, that the duke never asked the same question. I still want to see how far his daughter will ask."

Even after Marcel left, the representatives wearing the blue thread didn't leave right away. The older representative folded a copy of the contract and tucked it inside his coat.

"I don't believe anything just because it's signed today."

"I never asked you to believe it."

"Then what am I supposed to do?"

"Count the days. If it's late, file a complaint under my name."

Only then did the representative nod. What Lydia had gained wasn't support. It was surveillance.

That surveillance might last longer than cheers ever would. Lydia decided to let it stand.

Lydia set the invitation on top of the roster. Beneath the line demanding that harmony be shown in public, the fact that there were two doors was already in someone else's hands.