The List at the Bakehouse

Pella took Ada to the river wards at dawn because the bread queue would be longest then and because the baker would be least willing to listen once his ovens were empty.

The streets narrowed as they descended. Upper floors leaned over washing lines. A woman lowered a basket from a window and called instructions to a boy who ignored the instructions but put potatoes into the basket. The ordinary ingenuity of the place made Ada feel she had arrived in a town the formal map had not quite admitted to knowing.

The queue outside the bakehouse turned the corner.

Pella joined it rather than going to the door.

“We need to speak to the baker,” Ada said.

“So does everyone here.”

A woman behind them laughed. She wore a man's coat with the sleeves folded back and held three copper coins so tightly that their edges marked her palm.

“You buying for yourself or a household?” she asked.

“Both of us,” Pella said.

“Then save the large loaves for the people with children.”

Pella nodded without promising something she had not yet seen.

They waited. Ada learned that the queue had been shorter the previous week, that the western miller's price had increased before his delivery cost did, and that a particular city councillor's carriage passed the bakehouse every morning without the councillor ever looking out. None of this came in the order she would have chosen for an official account. A conversation about grain could become a conversation about a neighbour's dog and then return to grain from a direction that revealed who had stopped being able to buy it.

When they reached the counter, the baker was taking a splinter from his thumb with his teeth.

“No large loaves left.”

“Two small,” Pella said. “And we're buying your time after the queue.”

“Can't afford it.”

“What does it cost?”

“Sleep.”

They helped carry cooled trays to the back room. Then Ada swept flour while Pella sorted the scorched loaves that could still be sold cheaply. The baker's name was Darro. His daughter, Leth, kept the accounts, moved sacks with a trolley and treated every interruption as a debt to be repaid in work.

Ada showed them the proposed receiving routes.

Darro looked at the grain spine. “You want this longer.”

“Some parts. We want to replace the fixed transfers with agreements that can be checked and ended.”

“Does the flour arrive?”

“It should, if the warehouse schedules change and the river crews—”

“Should doesn't turn in an oven.”

Ada put down her pen.

“What would you need to know?”

Leth came around the table. She pointed to the three previous deliveries in her account.

“Here. The cart arrived early and sat outside the upper warehouse for six hours waiting for the tally. Here, the mill had flour but no sacks. Here, we paid for speed because we'd been told the gate would close. It didn't close. We still paid.”

The fast road had not removed those delays. It had made them less visible to the people measuring only the journey between two official markers.

“May I copy this?” Ada asked.

“Not the customer debts.”

“I won't.”

“Show me before you take it.”

Ada copied the delivery entries on a separate sheet and held it where Leth could read every line.

By midmorning, they had six names of other businesses willing to show their records. A soup kitchen beside the river had space to cook more but not enough pots. A warehouse had a broken hoist. The owner of a small yard would allow overnight storage if someone else paid for a watchman. None of these discoveries made a road shorter. Together, they began making it possible for a road not to need shortening quite so much.

On their way out, they met the woman Ada had seen with the sleeping child at the bridge. This time the child was awake and furious about a mitten.

“Your necessary journey,” Ada said. “Could I write it down?”

The woman regarded the notebook.

“Will that open the gate?”

“Not by itself.”

“What do you want my name for?”

“So they can't treat the route as a convenience without being asked what they mean.”

The woman considered this while her child succeeded in removing the mitten.

“Dessa,” she said. “I wash sheets at the east infirmary. My mother keeps him in Coal Yard Lane. I cross before the fourth bell and after the evening wash.”

Ada wrote the actual places, the times, the work. Dessa corrected the spelling of her mother's lane and declined to give the child's name.

“That's not needed for a bridge.”

“No,” Ada agreed. “It isn't.”

They took their bread to a low wall by the water. Pella ate hers standing, watching a boatman attempt to land against a current that clearly had other plans.

“You're good at this,” Ada said.

“Eating?”

“Knowing who to ask.”

“I carried things here for years. People tell you a lot while explaining why the load is heavier than they said.”

“Will you come back to it?”

Pella broke a piece from the end of her loaf.

“I'd like to run a route of my own. Not just turn up when somebody else's boy is ill.”

“With your grandfather?”

“Near my grandfather. There's a difference he plans not to understand.”

Ada smiled.

Pella watched the boatman try again. “And I'd like to have a day when I'm not carrying evidence of what someone did to him.”

Ada closed the notebook.

For a few minutes they did not discuss the hearing. Pella told her which stalls sold fish worth buying and which sold an argument wrapped around a fish. Ada told her about Perrin's attempt to train a goose to follow him, which had succeeded only in teaching it to follow anyone carrying food.

When they returned to the customs house, they brought the copied accounts, a list of storage needs and one scorched loaf for Tomar, who preferred a hard crust and would have complained if they called it a favour.