Chapter 14 · Chapter 14

The knock came in the hour when the street belongs to the water carriers — three flat blows of the iron ring, unhurried, and then a fourth sound that was not a knock at all but the butt of something set down against the door.

I was above, at the lattice, with a bundle of dried rue in my hands and the stems still green at the join. I did not go to the stair. A house is judged by how many people answer a door at once, and I have learned to make it one.

Hasan had gone down to the Alcaicería at first light with the silk and with our account of what we owed. So it was Saad who came out of the workshop with ink on the side of his hand, wiping it on the cloth at his belt before he touched the latch — the small hatch, not the door, the hatch at the height of a man's face.

The officer stood in the street with his hat under his arm and the Holy Office's small cross worked at his sleeve. Behind him a boy held a bay horse sweating at the flank, and two more men waited at the corner, standing the way men stand when they have been told to be seen standing.

"Salazar," he said. "An errand of inspection. Open."

"Of what is the inspection?" Saad said.

"Of the house."

"The house is a workshop. Registered. The cofradía of scribes of this city, since Abu Jaafar's time. It is written in their book, and their book is at the gate by the silk exchange."

"Then you will not mind a look."

"I would mind it very much," Saad said, "and so would the guild, and so would the corregidor, who has the ordering of these streets and does not care to have his ordering done for him by men on horses."

He put his hand inside his coat, unhurried, and brought out a folded parchment, and opened it once, and held it against the hatch bars so the seal hung outward where the light could take it.

"A registered workshop is searched on a written mandate. Sealed. Naming the room. Not on an errand."

The officer read it. From above I could see how he read it — the way a man reads a thing he has been assured does not exist.

Then he put two fingers on the corner of it, as if to turn it toward himself, and Saad's thumb came down on that corner and did not move, and the two of them stood so, the parchment held between them, for as long as it takes to say a short sentence slowly.

"Five souls in this house," the officer said at last.

"Five."

"Name them."

"Abu Jaafar is dead these years, and his name is still standing on your paper, and the house is Hasan's now. Hasan, his son. Maryama, his daughter. Aisha. Ali. Saleema, his granddaughter."

He said it in one breath, in the order it stands in the parish list, and did not slow on my name, and I heard my own name go out into the street and be taken up into a stranger's mouth.

"And myself, entered under lodger. Saad, of Málaga, twenty-eight years, scribe."

"A lodger does not speak for a house of women."

"The guild's register says the workshop is mine," Saad said. "The parish list is a paper about souls. The guild's is a paper about doors."

A shutter went across the street — small, quick, the sound of a neighbour deciding to be able to swear afterwards that she had heard nothing, because she had closed her window.

Salazar put his hat on. It was the putting on of a hat that means a man has not been refused, only delayed, and means to say so to someone above him before the day is out.

"Thirty days," he said, "is what they tell me the paper gives."

"Then come on the thirty-first," Saad said, "and bring the mandate folded, and I will open the door to it myself."

He shut the hatch. Not hard. He shut it the way a man closes a book he intends to open again.

The horse went first, because the boy turned it too sharply. The two at the corner came off the wall and went after. The street was as it had been, with a wet line down the middle of it from the water carriers, and the smell coming up off the stones, and the whole street having heard everything.

I came down when the sound of the horse was gone from the lane.

The water jar stands in the passage where the wall keeps it cold. I filled the cup and carried it out and put it into his hand, and he took it, and did not drink.

His hand was steady. Then it was not, and he set his other hand under it, and still he did not drink, and I stood in the passage and did not touch him, because the door was not locked and the street was ten feet away and a woman's hands on a man's coat are a thing a neighbour can be made to remember wrong.

"You gave him my name," I said.

"He came holding it. I only told him where it stands in the house."

"You did not raise your voice once."

"There was nothing in the street worth raising it for." He looked at the cup then, as if he had been told it had something in it. "He will have the mandate in a week. The corregidor will sign it, because it is cheaper to sign a paper than to argue with an officer's master."

"Then we have a week."

"We have a week of him writing the word room in a place I cannot see."

He drank then. He rinsed the cup at the jar himself, which is a thing he does, and set it back upside down on the shelf, and went into the workshop, and I heard him lift the lid of the inkhorn and set it down again, and after that the small dry sound of him sharpening nothing at all.

I went to the table where I had left the ledger open, and read the fifth column in my own hand. Lodger. Málaga. Twenty-eight. Scribe. The letters were small and level and I had made them in the morning, in a house where the whole of it could see them, and they were still the truest thing on the page.

I did not write anything more. A column cannot be improved by being added to the day after a man has read it aloud at your own door.

Then I counted. Not the days — the days were counted for us, and counted out in an officer's mouth. The names. Five, the way a woman counts coin on the step before a market, to be certain of what she is carrying in, and to be certain that none of it can be taken out of her hand by a man with a paste pot and a hammer he has no need of.

Five. And then, because a woman who has heard her own name read out in her own street learns to be careful, I counted them again.