Amice Thorold Pays in Plain Sight

For half an hour the bank at Fallowby Pier stared at a dark river, and Amice Thorold spent it practising what she would say to Master Gell’s widow: paid, every drop, and here is the mark to prove it.

When the Sun-House of Luxor’s boat finally slid in, its stitched sun gone brown with damp, a band of thirty in matching grey was already waiting at the plank. Their leader, a broad woman with a knitting bag, held a spare cloak out to Amice without being asked. “Ride with us. Price splits better, and nobody at the far gate knows whose purse went where.”

Amice looked at the board. Three drops a span and a tenth, near triple the morning’s. In grey she’d pay less and hide more. But a debt paid in grey was a debt nobody could swear to. The widow’s sons were the swearing kind.

“Keep it,” she said. “I want them to see my face on this one.”

She paid the full span, alone, and gave her name to Copthorne’s purser in a voice loud enough to carry. He wrote it plain on the line beneath thirty blank ones. The grey band filed past her without a word, a river of hoods, and Amice stood among them with her bare head and her receipt and felt, for once, poorer and quite certain.