#The Household Under Purity
The Dominion has no private household. It has parishes with cooking pots in them. The Rationalists dreamt of the home as a sanctuary, a place where the state took off its hat at the threshold. We kept the hat on and brought the ledger in with it. A marriage is registered in Strasbourg. Its two ledgers are bound together with scarlet wax, and bells carry the news into every parish hall. After so much trouble over the wedding, the Synod would be negligent to lose interest in what follows it.
It does not lose interest. The Bureau of Purity conducts the Bed Audits. Its inspectors enter the domestic life of married couples to confirm that husband and wife have shared a bed at least thrice per week. Where they have not, the offence is entered as theft of fertility, and the household's rations are reduced.
That is the whole of the rule. It fits on one line of one folio, which is how you know professionals wrote it.
#On the Weekly Requirement
Precision is a sacrament, and I shall be precise. The Bureau's measure is shared beds. The number is three, and three is a minimum. It is no schedule of visits. The inspectors are under no obligation to call three times a week to verify three nights. The number belongs to the couple. The inspection belongs to Purity, and it comes when Purity comes. A couple who share their bed seven nights of seven have committed no excess the Bureau has troubled to name.
What happens in the bed lies outside the audit's stated remit, and outside this article. The Bureau counts shared nights. I leave the rest to the Bureau of Doctrine, which holds opinions on everything and publishes some of them.
The cleverness lies in the classification. By the Bureau's arithmetic, a husband who sleeps by the hearth because his wife snores has stolen, and his wife is not the injured party. The Dominion is, because it holds a lien on every cradle not yet filled. A theft requires an owner. The owner of a married couple's fertility, it turns out, sits in Strasbourg and keeps accounts.
The Rationalists once mocked the practice as absurd. Then their parliaments crumbled and their bedchambers lay ash-stained. Nobody laughs about it now, least of all in bed.
Earlier editions of this Codex described the Bed Audits as "voluntary compliance checks."
The word "voluntary" has been stricken, here and anywhere else it may have crept in. The Bed Audits are compulsory. They have always been compulsory. Any reader who acted on the earlier wording and declined an inspection should present themselves to the Bureau of Purity at their earliest convenience. The Bureau will determine the convenience.
#Inspectors at the Bedchamber
A marriage chamber in the western heartlands is seldom a chamber. It is a curtained corner behind the stove, or a box-bed built into the wall, or a straw tick the children are sent away from. The Bureau sends its inspectors into this space, and the space, never large, gets smaller. The room smells of tallow and damp wool. The inspector's cloth, as pale as the Bureau prefers, brushes a doorframe that has never met anything so clean. Then comes ink, because Purity writes down everything it does, and wax, because Purity seals everything it writes.
I will not describe how an inspector satisfies himself that a bed has been shared. It is set down in no folio I am cleared to read. Long years in the corridor beside the Bureau have taught me that the documents I am not cleared to read are the ones I would least enjoy. What I can say is this. The inspectors carry Purity's authority, and every lesser writ-bearer in a city learns the same lesson when the white mantles arrive: that authority makes other writs decorative. A householder may object. The objection will be written down.
Where the Bureau learns which households to audit, I decline to guess. Its Penitential Shadows might supply the names, or the parish rolls, or a neighbour with a grievance and a quill. Guessing about Purity's sources is itself a source of Purity's work.
#On the Ration Sanction
The documented penalty is a reduction of rations. The Lictors keep their irons for other offences. For this one, the Bureau reaches for the bread.
The sanction suits the Dominion perfectly. Here a family eats by entitlement, and an entitlement exists only where it is written. Every mouth in a Synod household is registered, counted and allotted as a line in some ledger. The Bureau of Records keeps the wider record of marriages, identities and entitlements. The Mothers of Plenty manage births and the family food, forecast the sons owed to the levies, and keep their own reckonings of which households comply. I do not claim that either body administers the Bed Audit penalty. I observe only that in a realm where bread moves by paper, a mark against a household's name needs no cudgel to reach its table.
How much is taken, for how long, and on what terms it is restored, the sources I may cite do not say. I will not make up a percentage to please the curious. The Bureau has never needed a published scale. An unpublished one frightens better.
Here the sanction shows its elegance, or its idiocy, depending on whether you write it or eat under it. The Dominion wants more children. It punishes a couple suspected of withholding them by feeding them less. A hungry wife is urged to fertility over a thinner bowl. A hungry husband is urged to share a bed he is too tired to reach. Doctrine calls this correction. In the kitchen it is simply Tuesday.
#Marriage and the State's Future
The audits would make no sense anywhere a marriage belonged to the married. In the Dominion, a marriage belongs first to the register. The Bureau of Oaths holds that a vow not recorded in Strasbourg is no vow at all. Lovers who pledge themselves in secret are heretics sharing a blanket. From the altar onward, the couple is a joint entry, and joint entries get audited.
Purity is not the only office that takes an interest in the neighbourhood of the marriage bed. Couples are also put through the Confessional Conjugations, a separate rite in which spouses are ordered to confess their sins to one another. Doctrine regards the resulting wreckage as healthy pruning. Keep the two practices apart. The Conjugations examine what a marriage has done wrong. The Bed Audits examine whether it has done enough of the one thing required.
The children, when they come, are already spoken for. At baptism they are entered in the Book of Promise, and their futures are written as quotas: one for the levy, one for the choir, one for the ledger. The Bureau of War does not conduct the Bed Audits, and I will not pretend it does. Still, a realm that stamps a newborn's vocation before the child can hold up its head treats an empty cradle as an unfilled post. The Mothers of Plenty forecast the levy. The Bed Audits guard the spring that feeds the mill-race.
That reading is mine, and I sign it. No founding decree I have handled says so in as many words. The Holy Bureaus seldom write down their reasons when their results will do.
#On the Present Application
In the present survey year, the Bed Audits remain what they have been. They are compulsory, administered by Purity, measured in shared nights and answered in bread. They govern the married households of Synod territory. The Isles and the Netherlands keep their own beds and their own counsel, and they are welcome to both.
In the kind of tavern the Censorium fines, I have heard it argued that the audit is beneath the dignity of the Bureau that keeps the Index Damnatus. That argument misunderstands dignity. A Bureau that can reach into a book can reach into a bed, and one that can reach into a bed can reach into a bowl. A people who know all three reaches are possible need very few of them performed.
The husband by the hearth has been warned. He will go back to the bed. The Bureau will write it down.