THE BOOK OF HANDS

Being a Register of Who Actually Made the Things in This Realm, Compiled Because the Existing Records Note the Cost, the Date and the Material, and Leave a Narrow Column at the Right Which Is Usually a Mark.

Kept at the Office of Works, Castle Bastable, by Wend, who came into that office at nineteen asking why four bells work, and was sent to find out who hung them, and has been finding out who made things ever since.

WHY THERE IS A SECOND BOOK

The Office of Works already keeps a book. It is a good book of its kind. For every job it records the date, the job, the cost, the material — and, in a narrow column at the right, headed BY, it records who did it.

Most of that column is marks.

Not names: marks. A small careful stroke made by somebody who could not write and was asked to sign and signed anyway, as well as they could, in the box provided. Whole years of them.

I have spent nine years reading that column and I will set down here what nine years taught me, which is not a sentiment and can be checked: this realm's records are complete on the question of what a thing cost and silent on the question of who was good at it. We know to the copper what the north range mountings were paid for. We do not know, from any Office document, that they were hung by somebody who would not rush a job, and we would not know it now if the Woods had not kept a different book with names in it.

So this is the second book. It records hands. It notes cost only where cost explains something. It is not a memorial and I would be embarrassed if anybody called it one; it is a working register, and its use is practical, and the use is this: when a thing in this castle works, I want to know who to go and ask.

Each entry: The Work · The Hand · What It Cost Them · What It Is Worth Now. The last column is frequently the largest and is never money.

1 · THE FOUR BELLS OF THE NORTH RANGE

The Work. Four bells hung, Rainmelt, per Magister Fizzle's working. Twenty-nine years correct and counting, while twelve of their brothers invert.

The Hand. A Number, lent to this Office for a fortnight. Crossed out in the ordinary course some years after. In the Works book: a mark. In the other book, at the Woods: a name, which I have seen once, was not permitted to copy, and have not written anywhere.

What It Cost Them. A fortnight, and eleven opportunities to take the short way that nobody would ever have checked.

What It Is Worth Now. Two of the finest minds in the realm have spent twenty years unable to account for those four bells, and the only measurable difference anybody has found is the hanging. Four words are recorded of that person at the Woods: "Would not rush a job." I have had those four words above this desk for nine years and they are the whole of my profession.

2 · GCRC SHEET 2 OF 1 — THE SOUTH ELEVATION

The Work. The finest document ever made of Castle Bastable. Every stone, every chimney, the gargoyle at four-to-one, the cornerstone at eight-to-one.

The Hand. Not the man in the title block. He measured — for thirty years, honestly, and every figure on that sheet is his and I will not have one taken off him. She drew it. The title block calls her A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary): three words, two of them an insult and the third untrue for thirty-seven years.

What It Cost Them. Thirty-seven years, at the cold end of the long board, under the north light.

What It Is Worth Now. Every subsequent plate of this house is copied from it. And the man who measured it went back to that sheet in the last year of his life and entered, in the one column no committee could strike, "Turnip still better than committee" — which is the only correct entry in the Works tradition that anybody made before this book existed, and he never learned her name.

3 · THE PARISH BUCKET, MUCKLECOMBE

The Work. Mended. One split, base. Sixpence and an afternoon.

The Hand. N. Dellow, Bucket-Warden, elected as a joke.

What It Cost Them. Sixpence, his own, unclaimed.

What It Is Worth Now. The chapel floor by the north pew, which the churchwardens had budgeted four years to replace and did not have to. I include this entry because it is the plainest case in the book: a sixpenny repair by an unpaid man saved four years of parish income, and appears in no account anywhere, because there is no ledger in this realm in which money not spent is an entry.

4 · THE HANGING OF THE NINE LANTERNS, EASTERN EXPEDITION, 1893

The Work. Nine lanterns hung on staves in a line facing east, at the last camp, and kept burning two nights.

The Hand. Mr Marle and Mr Odgers, waggoners, who were not surveyors, whose names are on the roll only because a boy wrote everything down.

What It Cost Them. Two nights. Mr Odgers proposed going in on the rope three times and was refused three times.

What It Is Worth Now. Nothing. Nobody came back to them. I enter it because a register of hands that records only the work that succeeded is a register of luck, and I will not keep one of those.

5 · THE STAIRCASE AT THE CROOKED COMPASS

The Work. Eleven steps going up. Nine coming down.

The Hand. Unknown, and — I record this in fairness — possibly nobody's fault at all. I have had the treads measured twice by people better than me. It may be the house. It may be this realm.

What It Cost Them. —

What It Is Worth Now. One knighted surveyor's membership, he having stood on a table and proved it with a decanter and been asked to leave. I enter it because this book must be honest about its own limit: not every defect is a hand, and a register that blames a person for everything is as useless as one that credits nobody.

6 · THE COLUMN HEADED BY

The Work. Widening it.

The Hand. Mine. It is the only entry in this book about myself and I have put off writing it for four years.

What It Cost Them. Asking three times. Nothing else. It is a ruled line on a printed form and the change cost this Office the price of a new print run, which was less than the north range mountings.

What It Is Worth Now. Most of the entries in that column are still marks; that will not change in my lifetime and it would be a lie to suggest otherwise. But it is wide enough now, and when a person cannot write their own I ask them what they would like put, and I write it, and I read it back twice — which is not my idea. I learned it in a hut in the Woods from an old woman with a stub of pencil on a string, who read a name back to me twice before she would let me look at it, and who has been dead some years, and whose name I am not going to write here either, because she did not offer it and I did not ask, and I have thought about that particular failure of mine every working day since.

THE KEEPER'S NOTE, AND THE WHOLE OF WHAT THIS BOOK IS FOR

I am asked, chiefly by clerks who think they are being kind, why I bother — since a mark cannot be thanked, and most of these hands are crossed out in a book upstairs, and the work stands whether or not anybody knows who did it.

Two answers, and the second is the real one.

The first is practical. When a thing in this castle works, I want to know who to go and ask, and when a thing fails I want to know whether to mend the thing or the arrangement that made it. A realm that records only cost cannot tell those apart, and so it buys new bells for a hundred years and never once buys a fortnight.

The second. Every great mystery I have looked into in nine years has turned out to be a question about a hand that nobody asked. Why do the four bells ring. Why does the ninth column always balance. Why did that map hold when nine others did not. In each case there was a person, and in each case the record had their cost and their date and their material and, in the narrow column at the right, a mark — and two hundred years of clever men went straight past it, because who made this is not a question this realm knows how to ask.

I do not think we withhold the credit on purpose. I think we made a form, a long time ago, with a narrow column, and everything since has been shaped by the width of it.

So: widen the column. It costs a print run.

— Wend, Office of Works, at the desk under the four words.