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Fall-Winter, 365 M.E.
The front lobby was the pride of the Procellus Bank. Even compared to the other great financial institutions of the Empire, it looked unusually impressive. From the gilded mosaic to the marble columns soaring on either side to the dome overhead, lit by skylights, with its depiction of Pecunius, god of commerce, dispensing his bounty on merchants, it gave the bank a solid, reassuring quality. A sea captain or silk trader who walked through the doors would receive a clear message: “You can safely leave your money here. We’re not going anywhere.”
The brass and gilding and acres of polished walnut spoke words of reassurance to prospective borrowers, as well. They said, “You can trust us. We’ve got plenty of money.” The people who worked here weren’t like the sharks who circled in the back rooms of taverns and inns down by the waterfront. If you didn’t repay a loan from this bank, they didn’t send hulking men to break your kneecaps. They sent lawyers. So perhaps the opulence of the front lobby held a warning, as well.
Quintus sat behind one of the larger desks, off to the left side as one entered the lobby. He kept his desk obsessively neat, as required by Mr. Megalos, the branch director, but with his ink and quills in easy reach, and the long rolls of parchment, too, on which he could draw up the terms of loans. Somebody had worked out precise formulae for interest rates and payment periods, and a fat book, chained to a brass rail on his desk, contained them all.
Not that he had much occasion for checking the book or writing out formal loan documents. In his five months as a junior loan officer with the Procellus Bank of Presidium, he had only been permitted to lend out money twice. Every other time, the word had come down from the managers above that either the loan was bad, or it was too important to be entrusted to someone as new to the job as Quintus.
And yet, he continued to hope. He thought of his job as a noble calling—helping people achieve their dreams. A bank, he thought, was fundamentally in the business of making people happy.
On this particular day in late September, the Friday before the Equinox, he glanced up from his desk to see a small blonde woman approaching over the gleaming mosaic floor. She looked very pretty, with wide green eyes and a dimpled smile. She wore a somewhat faded black wool dress and an embroidered headscarf, and he knew, even before she opened her mouth, that she was a Myrcian refugee. There had been an increasing number of these unfortunate souls in Presidium over the summer, ever since the assassination of the Myrcian king had plunged that country back into civil war. The Proconsul of Presidium had set up charities to help them, but Quintus felt people should do more.
“I was told you’re the person I should talk to about getting a loan,” the pretty woman said. She gave her name as Lady Dagra Yates. The way she emphasized the “Lady,” along with the color of her dress, told Quintus her unfortunate husband was no longer among the living. Poor woman—widowed and friendless in a foreign city.
He told her to have a seat in the little hard-backed chair across the desk from him. “Now, what precisely do you want the loan for, and how much would you require?”
At this point, generally, merchants and traders would produce some sort of written prospectus showing their business plan. But Lady Dagra smiled and said, “Oh, I suppose I could start a bakery. How much money would that take, do you think?”
He adjusted his spectacles. “It’s...um, not exactly my area of expertise.” He tried prompting her. “But you’ve got to rent a building, yes? And then buy supplies...salt and flour and yeast and what-have-you, right?”
Her face fell. “Oh, I suppose so. It’s just...Mr., um...I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”
“Quintus,” he said. “I’m Quintus Verrus. If you need me, be sure to ask for ‘Quintus,’ because my brother Lucius works here, too.” He pointed across the lobby to the junior floor manager’s desk, where Lucius sat scowling at his account books.
“Mr. Quintus Verrus, then,” said Lady Dagra. “You have to understand that we’ve been through the Void and back, me and my two children and my sister, ever since...,” her eyes glistened, “ever since my dear Wyatt was killed by those horrid Sigors.”
She told him how she had learned of her husband’s death in battle, and she hinted at a narrow and dangerous escape for her family through Odeland and Denizvatan.
“By the time we reached Priena,” she said, “we didn’t even have money left for the ship, so Caitlin and I—that’s my younger sister—had to work for three weeks at a laundry.” She said this in the same tone of voice that someone might use to say, “I had to go diving in a privy pit.” She held up her hands, red, raw, and cracked, as proof of her story.
He handed her a handkerchief to dry her eyes and said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
Then he opened the big, chained book to the section called, “Commodatum et Creditum,” pulled out a blank sheet of parchment, and started filling out her application for her. He put down her name and age (21—a year older than he was) and the names of her two children (Anita and Clayton). After some quick math in his head, based on his knowledge of rents in the city and the cash flow of your average baker, he settled on 50 aurei as the amount of money necessary. For collateral, he put down, “future earnings,” and for her work experience he wrote, “laundress in Priena, Denizvatan.”
“And what did you do in Myrcia before you...um, left?” he asked.
“I was at court,” Lady Dagra said, with a touch of bitterness. “My Wyatt was a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber and a knight. He commanded a brigade at the end, and we should have had a new estate in the Crown Lands, but then he was killed, and his brigade was wiped out, and I had to come here.”
Under “Occupation,” Quintus wrote, “homemaker.”
“This will take at least a day or two,” he told her. “It’s Friday, so hopefully we’ll know by sometime early next week.”
She gave him the name of her inn, and he promised to send her word when her application had been reviewed.
“Do you think I stand a good chance of getting the loan?” she asked, with a watery, hopeful smile.
Quintus wanted to say “Yes,” but he hated to lie, and he didn’t want to give this woman false hope. “I will do my best to make the case to my manager,” he said. His manager being his older brother, Lucius.
Quintus adjusted his spectacles and watched her leave, admiring her figure, with his heart full of a mixture of pity and other, somewhat baser emotions. Only after she was out the door did he realize she’d taken his handkerchief.
“Ah well,” he thought. “That’s what a handkerchief is for.”
When he handed her application over to Lucius, his brother took less than a second to find the crucial flaw. Lucius was remarkably good at doing that.
“No collateral of any kind,” he said. “Former homemaker. We might as well take the 50 aurei and dump them in the harbor.”
“She really needs help,” said Quintus.
“Perhaps, but that’s not our job,” said Lucius. He ran a hand over his prematurely-balding head. “For the last time, Quintus, this isn’t a damned charity.”
Lucius said that a lot, whenever Quintus dared to suggest that profitability shouldn’t be the sole concern of the Procellus Bank. He’d said it a lot more since Quintus had been promoted to junior loan officer. It sometimes seemed as if Lucius didn’t really want the bank to give money to anyone, ever.
“It’s not charity,” Quintus insisted. “She’s proposing to start a business.”
“A business,” Lucius said, “in which she has no experience at all.”
Quintus pointed at the parchment. “She’s a former homemaker. Surely she has some sort of experience baking things.”
Lucius rolled his eyes. “That’s like saying anyone who ever loaned money to a friend can run a bank.” He pulled out a bottle of red ink and reached for his quill. All he had to do was write the word, “Negavit,” and poor Lady Dagra would lose her dream of a bakery. Her poor children would be out on the street, and she and her little sister might be forced to do something desperate to survive.
“Wait.” Quintus put a hand on Lucius’s arm to stop him from reaching the quill. “Can we go ask Mr. Megalos?”
“We can,” said Lucius, “but you know what he’ll say.”
Quintus did. The branch director liked to tell anyone who would listen that his family had fled to Presidium a century earlier from the wars in Thessalia, and that if the Megalos clan could make it on their own, without charity, then these newcomers from Myrcia could do the same thing, by the gods.
But the alternative was to let Lucius reject the loan on the spot. And who knew? Perhaps their director would be in a generous mood today.
All the way up the long marble stairs and down the long blue carpet to the iron-studded black door, Lucius kept muttering under his breath. Quintus only caught a few words, like “irresponsible,” “need to grow up,” and “childish,” but those were enough to give him the general tenor of the monologue.
The director, a round little man with a pointed black beard, sat behind a huge, marble-topped desk at the far end of the giant office. Cushioned leather chairs and thick rugs were arranged artfully around the room, with orchids on brass stands near the window, and a pair of huge, painted Thessalian vases.
“What is it?” demanded Mr. Megalos, without looking up from the set of enormous ledgers before him.
Quintus turned to Lucius, who merely motioned for him to hurry up.
“Sir, I’d like approval for a loan,” said Quintus.
The little Thessalian man looked up, frowning, and pulled on the end of his beard. “Did Lucius already tell you ‘no’?”
Another look at Lucius, silently pleading.
His brother sighed and said, “I hadn’t quite made a final determination yet, sir.”
“It’s a refugee widow, sir,” Quintus went on. “She’s a very hard worker.” He didn’t know that for certain, but he was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. “She worked in a laundry in Priena to get money to feed her children.”
Mr. Megalos sat up a little straighter. “So, she wants to open a laundry?”
“Um...a bakery, sir.” Quintus walked up to the desk and set the application on top of the giant ledgers.
It took the director even less time to spot the flaw than it had taken Lucius. “No collateral. No experience. No detailed plan to build the business. We might as well drop the 50 aurei down the privy.” He reached for his quill, and Quintus didn’t dare grab his arm to stop him from writing the dreaded word of rejection.
“Could I...perhaps work with her to improve the application?” asked Quintus.
“You can do whatever you like in your free time,” said Mr. Megalos. “But while you’re here, you’ll confine yourself to making loans that might have a prayer of being repaid.” He nodded to Lucius. “I want you to keep a closer eye on your brother. He’s not making satisfactory progress.” A scowl at Quintus. “Not satisfactory at all. You’re on probation, young man. I’ll expect a report by the Solstice from your brother showing that you’ve figured out how to do your job. Otherwise, you can go home to...wherever it is that the two of you are from.”
“Albus Magnus,” said Quintus, miserably.
“I don’t actually care,” said the director. “Now get back to work. Both of you.”
Neither of them spoke on the long, mortified walk downstairs, until they got to the main lobby again, and Lucius said, quietly, “I told you so.”