‘Tomorrow,’ Gorgas repeated, sliding into the chair beside her and peering over her shoulder at the mortgage deed she was copying. ‘That’s a nuisance. I was going to spend tomorrow evening catching up on the work that’ll have piled up while I was away. You know, I wish she’d think about things like that sometimes.’
Heris kept her eyes on the page and didn’t answer. Years ago she’d worked out that while Gorgas frequently said all sorts of unpleasant things about his sister, that prerogative was reserved for him alone. For what it was worth, she got the impression that Niessa liked her, or at least approved of her, in the same way a chess-player approves of one of his pieces when it stays where it’s been put and doesn’t go wandering off all over the board.
‘Have you got much more of that to do?’ Gorgas said. ‘I’d like to take a walk around the Square before dinner.’
Heris shook her head. ‘At least,’ she added, ‘I wasn’t planning on finishing it today. There’s miles of it. The parcels clause alone is two sides.’ She hesitated and wrinkled her nose. ‘This is a big place,’ she said. ‘Since when did we have clients among the landed gentry?’
Gorgas laughed. ‘You should see it,’ he said. ‘Three square miles of rock and scrub, no useful timber and about the only thing you’d ever grow there is old before your time. The two brothers – they’re both in their late sixties – gave up trying to make a living farming it years ago; they just net the weirs for salmon and pootle about in that little toy quarry they’ve got on the western edge. We’ll be lucky if we see a bent quarter out of that one while they’re still alive. But two old boys living on their own – call it a long-term investment.’
‘I see,’ Heris replied. ‘I expect you know what you’re doing. There,’ she added, drawing a line under a finished clause with her ebony ruler and putting the stopper back in the ink bottle. ‘That’s enough of that for one day. I’ll get Luha and Niessa ready while you put the desk away for me.’
It was almost dark by the time they arrived in the Square, and the evening promenade was nearly over. Around the steps of the fountain the stallholders were gradually packing up for the night; fortunately, they all knew Gorgas Loredan by sight and quickly unfolded their trestles, spread their cloths and started laying out their goods again. Heris bought a honey-cake each for Niessa and Luha, cheese and sausages for the evening meal and a quarter of cinnamon to flavour the wine, while Gorgas amused himself by haggling with an old friend and sparring partner for a new penknife and set of writing tablets he didn’t really want, and ended up striking such a good bargain that he was obliged to buy them.
‘Heris,’ he called out across the Square, ‘I’ve come out without any money. Have you got seven quarters?’
The stallholder grinned and assured him that his credit was good, but Gorgas looked suitably shamefaced and promised faithfully to send his boy out first thing in the morning with the money. The stallholder insisted on making a show of wrapping the things carefully in a square of waxed silk tied up with red cord, packed up his stall with a flourish and departed with his trestle and pack over his shoulder, whistling cheerfully.
‘Not another penknife,’ Heris sighed. ‘You’ve got a whole box of them you never even look at, and you insist on using that old thing you made out of a pan handle that you’ve had ever since I’ve known you.’
Gorgas shrugged. ‘I’m afraid that if I take the good ones out of the house I’ll lose them somewhere. You know what I’m like. But if I leave the old home-made one somewhere or it falls out of my pocket, then it’s no great loss. Besides,’ he added, ‘it gets the job done. You can sharpen pens with it. What more do you want from a penknife?’
‘Rubbish,’ his wife replied. ‘You just prefer using things that are old and tatty.’
‘Old, tatty and functional,’ Gorgas said gravely. Heris laughed, but with just the trace of an edge; and that’s why you’re still with me, and not one of those girls you pick up when you’re away… She called to the children. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Time we were getting back.’
Niessa protested, needless to say, and made a specious but basically ill-founded case for being allowed to go paddling in the fountain, which her parents wisely ignored. Luha swallowed the last of his honey-cake and licked honey and the last flake of almond off his thumb. They were just about to go back when Gorgas stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Just a moment,’ he said. ‘You go on, I’ll catch you up. There’s someone I haven’t seen in a long while.
Heris nodded and led the children away. Gorgas stood motionless for a while under the shadow of the fountain, hard to see in the dim light, studying an old man who was buying the last loaf of bread from the last remaining stall. It was two years since Gorgas had seen him last, in the city of Perimadeia, on the night before it was stormed by the plainsmen. He’d heard since that the old man had escaped and was still alive, but the rumours had placed him on the Island, where he was said to be living off the thinly disguised charity of a young merchant and his sister. Gorgas frowned. He knew without understanding why that the former Patriarch Alexius was a very important man, important enough to have come to the attention of his sister. If he was here in Scona, it followed that she had had him brought here; and if that was the case, what was he doing pottering about in the Square buying stale bread at a discount?
He crossed the Square quickly and quietly, keeping in the shadows more from force of habit than for any conscious reason; but the old man saw him and recognised him before he spoke.
‘Gorgas Loredan,’ he said.
‘Patriarch,’ Gorgas replied, with a polite nod. ‘You’re looking well.’
Alexius smiled. ‘I can say the same of you,’ he said, ‘and with the added advantage of telling the truth.’ He hesitated, having nothing else to say; he remembered their last conversation, in his lodgings at the Academy.
‘Would you like to join us for dinner?’ Gorgas said. ‘We’re having lentil soup and a leg of lamb, and my wife’s just bought some rather fine-looking sausages. It’s not far, just around the corner.’
Alexius looked at him, and Gorgas was reminded of the expression in the stationer’s eyes as they argued over the price of the penknife. A bargain was being struck here, compromise traded for compromise. ‘That’s very kind of you,’ Alexius said, and he glanced down at the lump of hard barley bread he was holding in his hands. ‘But your wife won’t thank me for rolling up for dinner at a moment’s notice, I’m sure.’
‘Not at all,’ Gorgas replied. ‘We enjoy having people for dinner, and there’s plenty to go round. Our cook always makes at least one helping more than we need, and then eats it himself. He could do with losing weight, before he ends up getting hopelessly wedged in the scullery doorway.’
‘In that case,’ Alexius replied, ‘I’d be delighted.’
In the short time he’d been on Scona, Alexius had seen rather more than he’d wanted to of a couple of large, apparently official buildings and slightly less of the very cheap inn where he’d deposited his second-best coat and shoes. So far, he hadn’t seen inside a real house, and he had to admit to himself that he was curious. Why this should be, he didn’t know. Since he left home and joined the Foundation, he’d spent most of his life in dormitories, cells and lodgings, and the only ordinary dwellings he’d ever got to know properly were his family home and the house of Venart and his sister Vetriz, the merchants from the Island who’d rescued him from the sack of Perimadeia. The two establishments had been so unlike each other that any scientific attempt to extrapolate a model of an Ordinary House was clearly futile. Nevertheless, he wanted to see inside Gorgas Loredan’s house, and that was all there was to it.