There is a season in Bobington — it falls, roughly, between the March fogs and the April rains — when the city takes stock of what it owes. Not to creditors, but to itself.

This morning, at the Harbour Authority Board, a roomful of sensible people agreed unanimously that ninety fishing boats should carry a device that tells the shore where they are. The device costs two hundred florins. The agreement took four minutes. The argument about who should pay for it took an hour and forty minutes.

At the Markets Board, a roof was priced at 14,200 florins. At the Bellvue Theatre, a fly tower was priced at 180,000. At the Municipal Treasury, two assessors from Caldwell — one of them twenty-four years old, the other old enough to remember a time before assessors — were pricing an entire city.

Everything costs something. This is not news. What is news, or ought to be, is the way in which the question “how much?” has come to stand in for the question “how much does it matter?”

Percy Dalgleish, who fishes for a living and has done so since he was seventeen, made the argument as plainly as it can be made. We feed this city, he said. Help us come home. That is not a financial proposal. That is a moral one. And yet it was received as if it were a line item.

I do not blame the Board. The Board operates in florins. It would be irresponsible of them to operate in anything else. But there are moments — and Dalgleish’s was one of them — when the language of budgets is not merely insufficient but actively misleading.

Consider the theatre. The Bellvue needs 3,800 florins. In the scheme of municipal finance, this is the cost of four and a half fog horns. And yet it has required three months of effort, a benefit night, a cured ham, a biscuit tin containing 14 florins and 60 centimes, and the personal intervention of the most famous actor to have walked its stage. If the city can spend 940,000 florins on a ferry in a week, one wonders why a theatre must pass the hat for three months to mend its roof.

The answer, of course, is that the ferry is a necessity and the theatre is a luxury. I have heard this argument. I do not find it persuasive. A city that has ferries but no theatres is not a city. It is a logistics operation.

Upstairs in the Treasury, the rating men are doing their calculations. They are measuring Bobington’s capacity to borrow against its capacity to repay, and this is proper and necessary work. But what they cannot measure — what no graph paper can capture — is what a city is worth to the people who live in it.

Dermot Shale knows the worth of a beacon. Augustin Fell knows the worth of a fly tower. Pella Strand, somewhere beneath the brewery district, knows the worth of an eighteenth-century cistern that nobody knew existed until yesterday.

None of these things appear in a bond prospectus. All of them are the reason the bond is worth issuing.

I went to Rensler’s this morning. Coffee is still four florins. Felix tells me the price will come down when the strait opens. I told him I would pay it regardless.

“That,” he said, pouring, “is because you are a man of habit, Mr Pemberton.”

He is not wrong. But habit, like a cistern or a fly tower, is one of those things that costs nothing to maintain and everything to replace.

The fog lifted by quarter past eight. The horn stopped. The city went on.