The crust inflation index filled a good part of the early April coverage, then quieted into a figure willingly called ordinary. It is ordinary no longer. Across the past three weeks the index has been climbing, and it is now climbing too plainly to ignore. Wednesday’s reading at the East Bank feeding point, taken in the usual way and checked against a separate count, stood at nine crusts to the hour. That is the highest figure recorded at any feeding point since the late-spring calming. The index had reached eleven on the thirteenth of April. It settled to eight in the week after the storm of the twenty-fourth, and until now it had not gone above eight.
The breakdown across the principal feeding stations, from the best accounts of the past several days, runs as follows.
- East Bank: nine crusts to the hour on Wednesday, up from seven the Wednesday before. The waiting line reached the third reed on two mornings this week.
- South Shore: eight. One of the regulars there put it that there were “fewer heels in circulation than is convenient.”
- The Old Willow: seven, recorded with the usual caveat. Bread at the Willow has always run a measured fraction below the East Bank rate, for reasons no one has cared to look into.
- North Bank: not reliably surveyed this week. A reading will follow when one can be had.
This paper’s view is plainly stated. The present rise is not yet the rise of the early spring. It is, however, the kind of rise that earns formal notice, and that notice is now given. The parties whose business touches bread distribution are owed, at the least, an enquiry. The formula above is the more solemn of the two held in reserve. This is only the second occasion it has had cause to be used.
The Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked on Thursday afternoon for a position, indicated through the Clerk that the matter was not yet before it and would be taken up at the next session in the ordinary course. The Clerk added, unprompted, that “the customary parties” had been told of an interest taken in the matter here. Which parties those were, the Clerk did not say.
The Travelling Drake, whose letter of the nineteenth of April is still outstanding in its principal demand, is understood to be on his way back to the pond, with a return looked for in the days before Lammas. His views, when he offers them, will get a hearing.
The new thing in this coverage, though, is that the question has at last gone to the Clerk of the Exchequer. The office is one suspected, back in the first bread coverage, of having been only recently invented, and unwritten about since. The Clerk of the Exchequer was found on Thursday morning at a spot best described, for the sake of his future availability, only as somewhere between the reeds and the eastern pondweed. To him went the question of the index.
The Clerk of the Exchequer took his time. Then he replied that he was available for comment but did not, on the matter, have a position. The matters bearing on bread distribution, he observed, had on past occasions been referred to a number of customary parties. He could name none of them. Asked whether his office would in due course arrive at a position, he said that any such position would depend on circumstances he could not at present foresee. He was thanked. He inclined his head. The conversation concluded.
The Clerk of the Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked afterward to describe how the Exchequer’s office stands to the Subcommittee on matters of this kind, said the relationship was “cordial but procedurally distinct,” and declined to say more.
So the bread climbs and the offices consider it. The index is at nine, the line is at the third reed, and the one official whose title contains the word for money has now been asked, in person, by this paper. He does not have a position. He could not, when pressed, name a single party who does.