The Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice filed a weather note at the Clerk’s office on Saturday morning. She files in a fixed form now, often enough that custom will soon stop remarking on it. The note ran to a single leaf, both sides. “In the form to which the office has by now grown accustomed,” the Clerk said on receipt, which from the Clerk is high praise. This paper read the note at the reeds a little after the second honk and sets down its substance here.
Humidity at the sluice, by the principal gauge, stands at eleven drakes. “Consistent with the season at this stage,” the Deputy’s note reads, and she does not regard the figure as cause for concern. The gauge has not been calibrated since the Warden installed it some seasons back. The Deputy gives the reading and lets the gauge’s standing alone.
Water at the lower sluice is down about one feather-width on the same hour last Saturday. “Of the order one would expect from the present weather,” her note has it, “and not the occasion for any operational adjustment.” The Warden has not visited the gate since the rematch of the eighth. He turned up briefly at the finish line that day. Then, as is his way, he turned up nowhere else. The Deputy records his absence in her usual manner. She lists the visits the sluice received, and who made them. The visits it did not receive she records by leaving a name off the list and saying nothing.
In preparing the note the Deputy sought, as the office requires, the observations of three pondside parties. The eldest of the dabchicks of the west pier reports that the water is “as it generally is, and the family is not unsettled by its condition.” That is the family’s settled style. The older drakes of the south bank reported through whichever of their number consents that afternoon to be approached. The weather, they hold, is “the weather, and not the weather of three winters past.” The long-resident frog of the southern waters was asked on Friday evening whether he cared to offer anything on the season. He did not care to be drawn. The Deputy enters his silence as his “considered position,” which is the courtesy the frog is owed and the honest word for it besides.
Set the note down and a pattern stands clear, the one the season’s reports have been walking toward for weeks now. The Deputy is the officer who files the weather, the officer the parties who depend on the weather now address, and the officer at whose name the sluice’s business is in fact conducted. None of this is new. The gazette has reported every piece of it before. It is only the first time the gazette has set the pieces side by side and said the plain thing they add up to. The principal weather authority of the pond is the Deputy of the Warden of the Sluice, and has been for some time.