THE NIL RETURN OF THE DRUDGEFORD ROUND

Being a Royal Exchequer Collector's Return, One Leaf, Correctly Completed, and of No Legal Effect Whatever.

A found paper. Recovered not at Murkminster, where a collector's return belongs and where the fair copy was duly lodged and duly forgotten, but among the estate papers at Castle Bastable — which is irregular, since the house had no business holding one. Somebody in that house kept a copy. Somebody in that house had read it.

What follows is the Murkminster fair copy, which is legible and which nobody ever read. The castle's copy — the one that was read, the one reproduced in the Folio — cannot be made out at all. See the note on the surviving leaf, below.

ROYAL EXCHEQUER · COLLECTOR'S RETURN · FORM 4 (LONG) Warrant: arrears of Castle Bastable, standing. Officer: Sallow. District: Drudgeford & the eastern rounds. Rendered: Rainmelt, in the ninety-eighth year.

BOX 1 — SUM COLLECTED.

Nil.

BOX 2 — SUM ASCERTAINED AS OWING.

The accounts of Castle Bastable are complete, competently kept, and closed in a ring: each book is reconciled against another book of the same house, and the chain returns upon itself, and no book is at any point checked against anything that is not also the castle. They are therefore internally exact and externally unauditable. No sum is ascertainable by any method known to me. I have not supplied an estimate. An estimate here would be an invention wearing the coat of a finding.

BOX 3 — WHETHER PAYMENT WAS REFUSED.

No. Payment was offered, unprompted, in full, in kind, and in a quantity I judge to be generous. I was unable to accept it, the tender being in potatoes and the statute being what it is. The household asked that the offer be minuted. It is minuted. The house is not in contempt and I will not have it entered as though it were.

BOX 4 — DEFAULTS, BY NAME.

Eleven households of the Lowmoss district, entered here in full, as the statute requires and as no other book in that district does:

Hettie Turnip · Marn Turnip · Dorcas Turnip · Wick Turnip (and seven more, entered in full upon the fair copy, with their fathers' names after them.)

Every one of these households has tendered its tithe every quarter within the memory of this office. The tender is in kind and cannot lawfully be received. They are therefore, by the working of the statute alone, in arrears, and I am obliged to enter them so, and I have entered them so.

Tithe tendered in full and refused for form. These persons are not in default.

BOX 5 — OBSTRUCTION ENCOUNTERED.

None. I was received with courtesy at every door, including the ones I had been warned about, and including the ones where I was expected to be hated and duly was. Nobody in this district lied to me. Several of them were the only honest answer I was given.

BOX 6 — REMARK OF THE RECEIVING OFFICER.

No collection. Nothing here can be brought to an end, and I do not believe this is a fault of the arithmetic. — S.

Endorsed at Murkminster, in a clerk's hand: Received. No action possible. File.

Endorsed beneath, in another: Not a document. Retain regardless.

And on the reverse of the castle's copy, in a small hand, in pencil, written by somebody who had plainly read the leaf more than once:

Eleven names. He was not obliged to give them, and the form did not require the fathers, and he gave those as well.

I have worked in this house thirty-one years and I have never once seen us written down like that. Not in the household book. Not in the wage book. Not on any sheet of mine, and I have drawn most of them.

A stranger came in off the road with the worst job in the realm and did the one thing nobody here has ever thought to do, which is to write down who we are, correctly, in the only column he had.

There must be a book they go into. I have started asking.

[a bucket, drawn] — A. Turnip (Assistant) (Temporary)

A NOTE ON THE SURVIVING LEAF

The leaf itself is in the Folio, and the reader should be warned before turning to it: it cannot be read.

It is a Form 4 (Long), certainly. The arms are at the head, the boxes are ruled and filled, the red STAMPED is struck twice, and a thumbprint sits in the lower corner where a thumb had no business being. But the hand — a fine, fluent, confident copperplate, the hand of a man who wrote well and wrote quickly — does not resolve into words. It has defeated every reader the Committee has put to it, including two who claimed otherwise and were asked to write down what they had seen and could not.

Three things on that leaf are legible, and only three.

The first is `Nil.`, alone in the top box, in the centre of the sheet, in a hand suddenly slow.

The second is the stamp, which says STAMPED, which is all a stamp has ever needed to say.

The third is on the reverse, below four lines of pencil that nobody has ever construed: a circle, drawn once, and underlined.

The Committee has catalogued the circle as an incomplete letter O. The clerks at Murkminster hold it to be a nought, entered by an officer who wished to say nil a second time in case the first was not believed. The house has never accepted either reading, on the grounds that A. Turnip drew a bucket at the foot of every sheet she ever touched, and that a bucket drawn quickly is a circle, and that a circle drawn by a Turnip is a bucket whatever the Committee files it as.

All three readings are correct, and the sheet is not obliged to choose. Nought collected, nothing owed, and a bucket at the bottom of it — which is, as it happens, the whole of the Drudgeford round.