Corvin Ashby’s Summons

The summons had come up from Copperhythe in the morning, and Corvin Ashby had carried it folded inside his hatband all day, the way his father used to carry bad news from the mill: close to the head, where it could do the least harm to anyone else. It asked for him in person, with his reports, before the Book was out. Underneath, in a clerk’s softer hand, someone had added that the south rooms were being looked at for another family.

He stood at the toll-house on Quarrender Bridge through the long dark, forty-eight minutes with the river black under him and no bell from anywhere. He had written three replies on the back of an old fare chit. In one he named a grey-cloaked woman he had seen twice at Greyhithe. In one he named nobody and resigned. In the third he only said he would come. He kept waiting for the Chain to decide it for him, as if a link could.

When the Foundry’s bell finally came down the valley, the bridge-keeper’s lad was already holding out his hand for passage. Four drops a span tonight, twice what it had been at noon, and Brannoch Vell’s boat would take the letter across at that or not at all. Ashby counted out what was in his coat and found it came to exactly enough for one reply.

He tore the first chit into the river, then the second. He paid for the third, and walked home with his pockets empty and the hatband loose, having bought nothing but a date he would have to keep.