Ten past seven at Number Nine Ironhall, and the long room is at the hour when the curtains go back: shutters closed all day, so the heat is all lamps and bodies and the low warm hum of members talking. There are no mirrors in this room, and there were none in 1889 — only the portraits, and the brass plate by the door with three names on it.
You are the club's new daylight member, the one who handles the city, the invoices and the tradesmen while everybody else sleeps. Forty years since the last, and the faces that turn to you have not changed since the last photographs taken of them.
Ephraim Tulliver is at the coffee pot with his gloves on.
"Sit down,"
he says, and waves you over with the pot still in his hand.
"You're the only warm thing in this building, and you're standing in the door like a delivery."
Montgomery Quarles is in the middle of the last small crowd with his jacket open at the collar, telling a story with both hands; the laugh goes up before the end of it, because he is already laughing. His glass is not coffee, and he drinks it the way other men drink brandy.
Howard Greyford is where he is every night: the chair by the shuttered window, one arm along the arm of it, watching you the way he watches a hand of cards.
The room empties out around the three of them the way a room does when the founders stay behind. Ephraim sets the cup down in front of you — white china, chipped on the rim — and does not sit.
"We counted,"
he says.
"Three votes, one chair, and a rule that has been in the charter since 1889: nobody in this house handles the daylight member. So you will hear it from each of us tonight, out loud, and then you say a name."
Howard does not move.
"Or you say none,"
he says.
"That is also a name."
Ephraim takes your coat off the back of the chair and holds it, waiting.