The Auction of Lost Things

POV: Dex

By law, nobody could be arrested in the Customs House that night, and Dex had been counting on that for nine days.

The law was called the Auction Act of 1710. It was older than the Charter, older than the Council, and so dull that no one had thought to repeal it. It had been passed by a cabal of Merrick Bay merchants who wanted to sell their smuggled goods without being hanged for it, and it said, in three crabbed paragraphs, that for the duration of any lawfully declared public sale, the hall in which it was held should be a place of peace. No writ might be served within its walls. No weapon might be drawn. No man could be seized, detained, or molested, upon pain of forfeiting his office. Each bidding House might bring five attendants and no more.

It had not been invoked in forty years. But Penny Penhallow had found it in a sea-chest in the cellar of a printing house, and Isidore Greeley had had it read to the Council's clerk by a Pullman porter who happened to be his cousin. And at eight o'clock on the evening of the twenty-seventh, the great bronze doors of the Customs House on Ash Docks stood open, lit with a hundred lanterns, and the Chartered Houses of Merrick Bay came down off their hill in masks.

…

It was the oddest crowd Dex had ever seen.

They came in carriages, in sedan chairs, on foot, in the tight, nervous knots of people who had never visited the Docks in their lives and were privately certain of being robbed. The ladies wore velvet and diamonds and half-masks of white lace. The gentlemen wore black domino cloaks. Each House bore its color: the scarlet of Prescott, the green of Aldous, the black of Rennick, the silver of Vane, the saffron of Lyle. Behind each stood its five attendants, big silent men in livery with their hands clasped behind their backs.

Dex stood at the top of the hall, on the auctioneer's dais, and watched them come in.

It was a vast, echoing space, the old bonded warehouse of the port, a hundred and twenty feet long, with a floor of black and white marble and a ceiling of iron girders strung with chandeliers. Rows of gilt chairs filled the nave. A rope of crimson velvet ran down the aisle. And on every side, in the shadows between the pillars, in the gray-and-white livery of the Customs House staff, stood waiters, footmen, maids, and cloakroom boys who moved among the guests with trays of champagne.

They were all his.

He could not tell them apart from the genuine article. That was the beauty of it. A gray-haired butler near the door was Sister Perpetua's cousin. A girl with a tray of canapés was a Soot Saint who had once lifted the Mayor's watch. The cloakroom boy was Big Ned's nephew. The tall footman at the south door, with the careful blank face and the military carriage, was Dray's sergeant, who had been told to see nothing. And at the foot of the dais, with a long wooden clipboard and an expression of bored authority, stood Ma Tilly, in a black bombazine dress and a lace cap. Nobody had looked at her twice.

Everyone, thought Dex.

He turned to face the hall.

He wore a coat of dark plum velvet, borrowed from a theatrical costumier on Fell Street, and a plain black half-mask that left his mouth bare. His hair was slicked back. He had his cane. In the right pocket of his waistcoat lay a black ledger, and in his left a folded handkerchief, and in his chest a heart that was going like a trip-hammer. He lifted a small silver gavel. He tapped it three times on the lectern.

The hall hushed.

"My lords, my ladies," said Dex. "Good evening. I am the Auctioneer of Lost Things."

…

He gave them a speech.

He had written it himself, on the back of a coal-merchant's invoice. It was an old-fashioned, plummy, extravagant thing, half carnival barker and half undertaker, and he delivered it as he'd once delivered a thousand false stories to a thousand marks. He thanked them for coming. He reminded them, with a smile, of the Act. He named the rules of the sale. A vial would be shown. Its contents would be named. Bidding would begin at ten dollars in gold.

"And what, you will ask, are we selling?" He spread his hands. "Why, memory, ladies and gentlemen. The lost kind. Things that have been taken, or thrown out, or mislaid, or simply set aside. Things that some of you have forgotten. And things that others of you would very much prefer to have forgotten, and would pay a great deal to see stay so."

A ripple of laughter, nervous, thin.

He nodded to the boy at the side.

The first lot came out on a silver tray. A glass vial, no bigger than a thumb, with a thread of faintly rose-colored light curling inside. Dex held it to the chandeliers.

"Lot one. The afternoon of the fourteenth of June, eighteen eighty-seven, in a summerhouse at the foot of Aldous Park. A lady in a green silk dress. A gentleman of a rather different house, whose name I shall not give." He tilted the vial. The light inside danced. "Opening bid, ten dollars."

Nobody moved.

On the front row, behind a mask of emerald silk, a woman in a green gown had gone entirely still. Her fan had stopped in the air. Beside her, a heavy man in a black domino turned his head slowly toward her, and then away, with a very particular look.

"Ten dollars," said a voice.

It was the woman in green.

"Ten, from the lady. Do I hear fifteen?" Dex smiled. "Twenty, from the gentleman in black? Thank you, sir. Twenty-five, from the lady. Dear me. It does seem to be a popular afternoon."

The woman in green bought it for three hundred dollars. She paid in notes, with shaking hands. She carried the vial away in her fist as if it burned.

None of it was real.

Felix had brewed the thread in the vial from rosewater and a drop of phosphorus. Penny Penhallow's girls had spent a week collecting rumors from every kitchen on the Terrace. It was a small thing, a petty thing: a rumor, a hint, a lie nobody could prove. But it had worked exactly as Dex had known it would. All through the hall the masks were turning. People were looking at one another. A silence had settled, thin and brittle, like ice over a pond.

They're afraid, thought Dex. They're all afraid. Good.

He let it sit. Then he nodded to the boy again.

"And now," he said gently, "something rather more valuable."

…

They carried it in on a cushion of black velvet.

Two Saints bore it between them, in white gloves. They walked slowly, with the grave, small steps of acolytes, down the long aisle between the gilt chairs. The sphere was the size of a grapefruit. It was clear as spring water, so clear it seemed barely to exist. A faint pink glow turned in its heart. And running down the whole of its curve, from top to bottom, so fine you had to know it was there, a long thin seam of darkness ran like a hair.

The hall made a sound.

It was not a gasp. It was something lower, more bodily, like a great beast turning in its sleep. Every head in the nave turned. Every mask. Every pair of eyes behind every mask. A hundred and forty of the richest people in Merrick Bay sat forward, and the chandeliers shivered, and in the front row Dex saw a woman's hand go to her throat.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said softly. "The Merrick Heart."

They laid it on the lectern.

It sat there in the lamplight, beating. Once. The pink glow brightened, held, and faded. In the stillness, a hundred hearts beat with it.

"Taken," said Dex, "from the vault of the Meridian Trust, nine days ago, by persons unknown. The Trust, I understand, has not yet noticed." A thin ripple of laughter. "It is the last memory of Hannah Merrick. Or so it is said. It answers to a voice. It holds the secrets of the Founders and the grief of the Docks, and, if one believes the old tales, it can write a man's past upon the air. I offer it, tonight, to the highest bidder."

"Not so fast," said a voice.

It was a dry, courteous, silvery voice, and it came from the left of the hall. A man was rising from his chair. He was thin and gray, with a long sallow face and a mouth like a purse. He wore the plain black of a journeyman, and carried in the crook of his arm a brass-and-glass instrument the size of a hatbox.

"I am Master Trent," he said. "Assayer to the Meridian Trust. I will test the article."

…

It was the longest minute of Dex's life.

He did not move. He stood behind the lectern with the gavel in his hand and watched the Assayer come up the aisle. The man walked slowly. He set the brass box on the marble, a foot from the sphere. He unrolled a coil of wire. He took, from a velvet case, a long glass probe with a bulb at the end.

Felix made it, thought Dex. Felix made it, and Felix gave it a scar, and it's a hundred on Dray's gauge. He told himself that. He told himself, once again, that it was true.

But his hands were cold, and he could feel his pulse in his teeth.

Master Trent touched the probe to the glass.

Ting.

It was a small clear sound. It rang out, high and bright, over the silent hall. The needle on the dial shivered and began to climb. Trent bent over it. His face was gray in the lamplight, and unreadable.

Dex counted. One. The needle crossed seventy. Two. Eighty. Three. It hung at ninety-eight.

It went on.

A hundred.

The Assayer straightened.

For a long moment he looked at the sphere. Then he looked at the instrument. Then he took the probe again and touched it, very gently, to the black seam that ran along the curve. The note that came was lower, and softer, and strange. It was like the sound a bell makes when it is struck in a dream.

Trent let out a breath.

"It is true," he said. His voice shook. "I have heard its note in the Trust vaults, and I have heard it ring in the Founders' Hall. It is the Heart." He looked up, and for the first time his dry eyes were wide. "It is, God help me, the same."

A murmur ran down the hall, rising to a roar.

Dex lowered his eyes. He hid, for a second, behind the plain black mask, and he did not know whether what he felt was triumph or nausea. It was a very close thing.

He raised the gavel.

"Then we shall begin."

…

It went the way a great auction goes, which is to say it was a performance.

House Prescott opened at ten thousand. House Aldous met it with twenty. A thin, bird-like man in the black of House Rennick raised to fifty thousand, in a dry whisper, and a lady in saffron screamed, actually screamed, and was led away. The numbers climbed. They went to eighty. A hundred. A hundred and fifty. Dex called them in his clear dry voice, rolling the gavel in his fingers, and with each one he felt the hall contract round him like a closing fist.

He was not watching the bidders. He was watching the door.

There was a figure at the back of the hall, standing apart, in a charcoal coat and a plain gray domino, with a gloved hand resting on the head of a silver-topped cane. He did not sit. He had come in late, at the end of the Prescott bid, and had stood at the rear wall with his arms folded, quite still, quite calm. His face was half hidden by the mask. But Dex had known the set of those shoulders from across a pier.

Whitcomb.

At two hundred thousand, House Rennick dropped out. At three hundred, House Aldous. Prescott went to four, and then to five, and then, with a visible struggle, to six hundred thousand dollars in gold. Sweat ran down the Prescott patriarch's temple. The hall had stopped breathing.

"Six hundred thousand," said Dex. "Six hundred thousand, from House Prescott. Do I hear—"

"One million dollars."

The voice was quiet. It carried like a bell.

Every head turned.

Augustus Whitcomb stood at the back of the hall, with his hand on his cane. He had not raised it. He had not moved. He stood with his gray silk domino and his silver hair and his faint pleasant smile, like a man at a church bazaar who has decided, on a whim, to buy the whole stall.

"One million," he repeated, gently. "In gold. Payable at the door."

The silence was absolute.

Dex heard his own pulse. He heard, from somewhere very far away, the rattle of a cart on the cobbles. He heard a woman's fan fall to the marble floor. Nobody moved to pick it up.

"One million dollars," said Dex. His voice came out steady. He didn't know how. "From the gentleman at the back. Do I hear more?" He turned his head, slowly, left, right. "Going once."

Prescott's patriarch put his face in his hands.

"Going twice."

Nothing.

He lifted the gavel. He let it hang for a moment in the lamplight, silver, small, a little absurd. Then he brought it down on the lectern with a crack like a pistol shot.

"Sold," said Dex. "To the Chairman of the Meridian Trust."

…

The hall erupted.

It was a noise like a wave breaking. Men were on their feet, shouting. Women were weeping. The Prescott patriarch was held up by two attendants, gray as paper. In the middle of it all Whitcomb walked unhurriedly down the aisle, hat in hand, nodding to left and right with grave courtesy, as a statesman accepts applause.

He mounted the dais. He stood beside the lectern. And he raised a hand, and the hall fell quiet.

"My lords. My ladies." His voice was warm and level. "I thank you. I need hardly say that it grieves me to see a treasure of this city, a relic of the Founders, hawked in the open market like a fish." A small, sad smile. "But since it has come to this, I will pay the price. I will not see it lost. Tomorrow, at noon, beneath the Dome, I shall return the Heart to the Council, where it belongs. I ask only that you attend, and bear witness."

Applause. A scattering, and then a storm.

Hero, thought Dex. He's made himself a hero.

It was clever. It was perfect. He felt a flash of pure, cold, professional admiration.

"And the payment, sir?" he said, in his best Auctioneer's voice.

"At the door," said Whitcomb.

"In gold, as stated."

"In gold."

They came in through the bronze doors, a line of them. Six carts, each drawn by a pair of dray-horses, with an armed guard on every seat. They rolled down the long marble nave between the gilt chairs, with the horses' hooves ringing, and the iron-bound strongboxes piled high in their beds. A porter dropped one off the tailboard. It burst on the floor. A stream of yellow coins ran out over the marble and spun away in the lamplight in a hundred glittering arcs.

The sound was extraordinary. A long bright jingling roar, like a river of bells.

…

He had a moment, at the end, when the hall was busy.

He bent over the lectern, with his back to the crowd. The black ledger lay open under his hand. His fingers were steady. He took the pencil from the spine, and he wrote.

Received: $1,000,000.

He looked at it. It was the largest figure he had ever written. It looked, on the page, quite small.

In the next column he wrote: Owed: everything.

"A fine night's work, Mr. Aldridge," said a voice at his ear.

He did not turn.

Whitcomb stood a pace behind him, so near that Dex could smell the starch in his collar and the faint cold lavender of his hair. His hand lay on Dex's shoulder, light, affectionate, like a grandfather's. The watch in his waistcoat ticked its half-beat late.

"I wish you to know," he said softly, "that I have never heard your mother's voice so well imitated. It was most skilful. It makes me look forward to tomorrow." The hand pressed. "She sang beautifully, you know. She had a gift. I will hear her again at noon."

Dex's hand didn't tremble. His face did not change. He had learned to do that at nine years old, in the dark of Number Nine, with a mouth full of dust.

"I'll sing it for you, sir," he said, "just as she did."

"I know you will."

The hand lifted. Whitcomb moved off, down the steps, into the crowd. His silver head went, bowing, among the black dominoes.

Dex closed the ledger.

He stood a moment with both hands flat on the cover, and breathed. The roar of the hall washed round him. The chandeliers swung. The last of the gold was still rolling over the marble, ringing like a thousand small bells.

And from the harbor, a mile off, over the roofs and the masts and the dark lines of the cranes, came a sound.

It was a train whistle. A long low sustained note, from the Rail Porters' yard at the foot of Tallow Street. It sounded once. Then twice, shorter. Then a third time, long and sweet and rising, trailing off into the night.

Three blasts.

Long, short, long.

It was the signal. The one he'd agreed with Greeley, over bad tea, in the Cooperage nine days ago. The one that meant she's out.

Dex lifted his head. Behind his plain black mask, for the first time that night, he smiled.

Across the hall the Chairman of the Meridian Trust, who had not missed a heartbeat in fifty years, turned his silver head toward the sound.

He had, for a single moment, missed one.