On Thursday the Concord Infirmary asked the Wide Hold of Leth for the remainder of a file the evening's program had already praised as complete. The praise was set in type under item four. The file, left at the legation on Tuesday, ran to three lines.
The lines concern a suspected case of breath-plague, the lung kind, which travels in a closed room on a cough. A loader at the weighing shed in High Cress woke hot, and a pony in the next bunk woke hotter before noon. Leth's note calls the trouble a chest complaint of the dry season. It supplies a wind direction, a temperature, and the age of the cart-mare that had stood at the post. The Shared Breath Rule gives a hold two days to answer when a cough may have passed to a second pony. Thursday was the second day.
The ask came to Table Wren, the long table under the west glass in the Canterlot Royal Gardens, second from the citrus pots. Fourteen covers. Lord Pellick Bram, Master of the Thursday Board, set Count Rask Halven at the center, back to the lamps and face to the room. Lavender Bloom wore the ash-silk the program called unstudied grey, the frost-bell of Leth sewn at the hip. She stood while the placement was admired, then took the chair widened for her train.
The cover on Halven's left was carded Clinical Particulars. It belonged to Dr. Ansel Watt, the physician named in the first dispatch. Watt came as far as the citrus pots, read the card, and left before the fish. Keelwick, who has the west glass on Thursdays, set a full plate at the empty place. Bram had asked that the chair look occupied from the door.
Sella Marsh, registrar to the Concord, carried the seven particulars the Rule lists for a breath that may have passed: the test, the hour of onset, the bunks, the route the loader had worked, any pony who had gone from the shed to the train, the fate of the cloth, and the name of the second case. Bram put her at the service end, behind the fern, on a chair turned a quarter toward the door. During the soup a new card was set at her place, reading Friend of the Service. The card that had read Questions was slid under the glass cake stand.
Halven's secretary turned that chair himself and called the turn airflow. He told Keelwick the stand would stay through item six, the program's place for a spontaneous thanks over Leth's candor. The sentence of thanks was locked in the same type as the soup.
"They told me to feed the empty chair so the door would see a full table," Keelwick said. "I set the fish down. I took it away cold."
Mareline Verdict had held the chair nearer the lamps until Wednesday, when the Board moved her two covers toward the pots to clear Bloom's train. She kept the superseded card in her sleeve. "I have been moved closer than that for a lost glove," she said. "The mare carrying the list was behind the fern, and they called the fern a protocol."
Marsh stayed in the turned chair. Through the glass the top line of the questions remained legible, and it asked for the second name. The icing on the stand carried the Concord knot and the words Already Shared, which a kitchen pony had copied from item four at Bram's request. Bloom's sleeve took the near edge of the piping. Keelwick lifted the curl with a warm knife and put it on the side plate. The compliments book records the silk. The knife stayed off the page.
Bram rose for the toast that has been on the pasteboard since Monday. Halven received it seated. He told the covers on his right that a friend needs only the shape of a thing, and that Leth had sent the shape. What he had sent was the wind. Marsh's folio, declined at the legation that morning by the same secretary, lay against her foreleg the whole course. The folio still asks who kept the samples and whether Watt signed the clinical note.
Watt's plate went out with the fish. Under the rim Keelwick found a sugar wrapper with a time and a count of beds, and he passed it to Marsh at the service door while Bloom was being walked to her carriage. The wrapper puts the second cough at the second bell and the beds at four. The folio is still short a test. The Concord's ask stays open.
