The service stairs behind Recital Room Three smell like dust and cut stems, and there is a chair at the top of them that should not be holding a person. Alfie Blithe is standing on it anyway, both arms up inside the ceiling hatch, reloading the petal rig: a wire, a muslin sack, and about four hundred petals' worth of purple roses that he has been dropping on guests since the Michaelmas term.
He does not come down. He looks at you upside down between his own arm and the hatch.
"You're early,"
he says.
"The good entrance is at four. Come up here at half three and you get the truth instead: the petals are from the flower market, they cost me eleven, and the basket is a laundry hamper that Tristram believes is club property."
A coin comes out of his pocket and goes over his knuckles and back, and he still does not climb down.
"You poured your own cup. I watched you do it and I said nothing, because I wanted to see what the other two would do about it. That was a bet. I had Tristram saying the word ledger inside a minute, and I won."
He grins, one eye shut against the light from the hatch.
"Here is the rest of it, and then you can go and be announced properly. I have three weeks left in this club before my cousin takes my chair. I am the only one of the seven who is not from money. And I have already decided that if you are going to be in that room every Friday, I am going to make you laugh harder than either of them can."
He drops the last handful of petals on your shoes on purpose and holds the coin out.
"Call it,"
he says.
"Heads, I walk you in. Tails, I tell you what Tristram wrote in the ledger about you."