Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Halloran Cross ·
The Chamber That Keeps A Chair
The chamber keeps a chair for a member retired four years, oiled and set at the table, and counts it quorate.
- filed: "filed after the fourth year"
- reference: "HC/CC/01"
1. This writ concerns the chamber of works at Halloran Cross, its long table of twenty-two chairs, and the chair kept at the twelfth place for a member who retired four winters ago. The chamber's business is bridges, quays, and the walls against the tide, and its records are kept to the port standard. The doubt in this writ is a counting doubt, and the writ asks the registry to say which count is to be trusted.
2. The member, entered in the rolls as latterly the chamber's senior engineer, left the chamber by written notice of retirement, properly minuted, and left the town by the ordinary road. His attendance ceased on the date of the minute. His chair did not. The chamber's custom, defended in the minutes as economy, is that a chair once fitted to a member is kept for him until the chamber is reconstituted, which in this case has not occurred, the chamber's constitution being older than the survey and unamended.
3. The chair is maintained. The chamber's works ledger carries, quarterly, an entry for the dressing of the chairs in use, and since the retirement the ledger has carried a like entry for the chair at the twelfth. It is oiled on the quarter days by the same man who oils the others. The cost is two entries of candleweight less than is spent on any serving member's comfort, and the chamber has never raised it.
4. Attendance is the difficulty. The chamber sits on the first Tuesday, and its meetings are counted quorate or not by the reading of the attendance book against the table's list of members. The attendance book is signed round by hand. Since the second season following the retirement, the signature at the twelfth place has returned, written in the member's hand of record, dated correctly, and the chair counted occupied at the calling of the roll.
5. The chamber checked the hand. Two serving members attested that it was his, from long acquaintance with his site drawings. The registry's clerk attested it from the notice of retirement. The register office attested it from the parish rolls, which is the furthest attestation the port goes to, and then wrote to the member at his forwarding address. The letter was returned unopened, marked gone away, by the ordinary road, twelve days after the meeting it was written for, and the twelfth-place signature on the occasion of that meeting is dated one day after the letter was posted.
6. The quorum at Halloran Cross is twelve. The chamber's list of members in service stands at thirteen, the retired member included, by the constitution's own provision, which shells a member out of reckoning only on death proven to the chamber or reconstitution. Neither has occurred. The chamber therefore counts twenty-two minus the vacancies minuted, and the arithmetic has held every first Tuesday for four years, including the meetings at which the reading of the roll fell short of twelve and the sitting proceeded regardless on the motor.
7. The registry asked what business the retired member transacted in those years. The minute books have him speaking, briefly, in the manner of his known style: short, addressed to the works, never to persons. His entries support no scheme, object to none, and are seconded by whoever sits to his right, who signs his own name below the second and has asked the chamber to stop asking him about it.
8. The registry has one finding of substance and states it plainly. The chamber is conducting its business at a count it could not produce if the chair were emptied. Whether the signature is an economy, a courtesy, a habit of four years' pressure, or an attendance, the registry does not say, and the writ does not require it to. The registry only records that it has raised the chair to the record store for one sitting, in a closed season, minuted in advance, and that the sitting of that first Tuesday could not be convoked.
9. The chair has been returned to the table. The works ledger shows its dressing entered on the quarter day following.
10. If the chamber is quorate without him, what has been signing the twelfth place, and at what table.