Witness account · 4 min read · Set in Wexler Court ·
The Crier's Unmade Curfew
Every second of November the court pays its crier a guinea to proclaim a curfew that no ordinance in the minute books ever enacted, and the fee ledger balances to the penny.
- reliability: uncorroborated
- witness: "Wilfred Cobb, town crier"
I have been crier of Wexler Court for twenty-one years, holding the post by annual fee, and I cry in the bay voice trained into me and not the common one. The fee is one guinea, entered each year in the fee ledger against my name, and in twenty-one years the ledger has never once been out toward me by so much as a halfpenny.
The cry falls on the second of November, which the court keeps to whatever else has changed about the years. I take the steps of the court house at ten of the clock in the evening, ring the hand bell — it has a chip out of the lip that gives the ring a thin place, like a coin with the edge rubbed — and I deliver the words as they were handed to me. Oyez has followed oyez all this time: all persons within the liberty of Wexler Court to be within doors by eleven of the clock, by order. The words end on by order. They have always ended on by order.
Some years ago, meaning to be more exact in the accounts of my own post than the ledger was, I asked the second clerk, Mr Penhale, to show me the enactment. I wanted the number of it, the year, the order of names. He searched the minute books from the first bound volume forward and came back to the counter of the fee office with his cuffs grey from the pages, and he told me there was no enactment. Not lost — he was careful about that, and I will be careful to repeat it: not mislaid, not burned in the wet year, not filed astray. There is no curfew of Wexler Court. There never has been one on paper. The word he finally settled on, after we had stood a while, was unmade.
Yet the cry stands in my round, and the guinea stands in the ledger, and the two are entered as if they propped each other up. The ledger line runs: crier, curfew, one guinea, and opposite it in its column the balance of the fee account moves by one guinea exactly, so that the book stays true to the penny from year to year, as a weighed thing stays level. I have seen the ledger myself. The arithmetic is not merely correct; it is satisfied. Whatever it is that balances, balances on the guinea.
I have not dared the experiment of a silent year. I will give the reasons, because they are the truest thing I own for this record. If I kept my feet on the steps and held the bell and said nothing, and the words were nevertheless delivered over the court at ten o'clock by some other means of the same voice, I do not know what I would be required to enter in my round book, or whether a round book would take it. And if the words were not delivered — if the street went ordinarily quiet at a quarter to ten, as quiet as any street — then the guinea would come due at audit against a cry that did not happen, and the ledger would be out by one guinea for the first time in living memory, and I do not know what an unbalanced fee ledger does in a town like this but I am in no hurry to learn. Either way the account comes level. The bell and the words and the guinea hold each other up, and I am the middle of the three, and paid.
As to whether anyone else heard the cry, I have asked, in off years, the way a man asks about weather. Those who were indoors heard nothing, which is proper. Those who were out of doors on the second of November — the quay men, the night cab — will not say they heard anything at all, neither bell nor voice, and some of them begin, at the second asking, to look at me the way you look at a ledger you suspect. So the cry stands uncorroborated, by everyone but the one man paid for it.
The question I have carried up the court house steps for twenty-one Novembers, and can carry no higher than the record I am making now, is this: whose order do the words go out under, if no court ever made it — and why does the fee ledger balance it to the penny, every year, when by Mr Penhale's account there is nothing on the books for one guinea to be the price of?