The first tranche, executed on Friday the 17th at 648 florins per tonne, was a relief. The second tranche, executed on Wednesday the 22nd at 631 florins per tonne, was a vindication. The third tranche — approximately 920 tonnes, scheduled across two further executions in early May — will determine whether the blended cost comes in below 640. Holt does not expect that question to be settled until the morning of 8 May, when the Bobington Exchange opens for the second of the May contracts.

She is not predicting the close. She is, by the standards of her profession, refusing to predict it more loudly than usual.

“I do not have an opinion about copper at six twenty-seven,” she said on Friday, in the Treasury’s small briefing room, to a gathering of seven journalists and one trade attaché. “I have an opinion about copper at six forty-eight. The opinion is: it was a good price for the city to pay. I will form my opinion about copper at six twenty-seven when the third tranche has been executed and not before.”

The third tranche is presently expected on Tuesday the 5th of May (approximately 600 tonnes) and Friday the 8th (the remainder). The Bobington Exchange has been instructed to execute at market and to refrain from any attempt to time the daily session. Holt’s memorandum, which has now circulated to all eleven members of the council Finance Committee, is explicit: “The objective is certainty at a reasonable blended cost. It is not the lowest possible price. The lowest possible price is identified only in retrospect, and never by the people who needed it.”

The rating notification arrived on Thursday afternoon by sealed courier from the Continental Rating Agency’s Edgeminster office. The covering letter, signed by Lara Haughton — who spent five days in March in the Treasury’s records room and who asked, on day three, what the precise tonnage of expected scrap copper recovery was, and who received an answer two hours later that satisfied her — confirmed the upgrade and offered, in three short paragraphs, the agency’s reasoning.

The hedging strategy had been delivered in forty-five days, fifteen days inside the sixty-day window. Sixty per cent of Phase 1 copper exposure was now covered or scheduled for cover. The blended cost trajectory was within the bond prospectus’s baseline assumptions. The Treasury had demonstrated, in the agency’s phrase, “an institutional capacity for execution that the rating committee considered material.”

The new rating is AA-minus, with a stable outlook.

Five of the six financial institutions that submitted preliminary expressions of interest in March have now formalised their interest in the bond. The sixth — the Edgeminster Mercantile, which had been waiting for the rating — is expected to confirm by Tuesday. Combined preliminary commitments, on the basis of the institutions’ indicative letters, now stand at approximately 470 million florins, against a target offering size of 350 million. The bond is, in the technical language of municipal finance, oversubscribed before it has been formally offered.

What this means in practice is that the offering, when it takes place, will be priced at the lower end of the indicative coupon range. The prospectus had carried 3.85 per cent. The May offering will likely come in between 3.55 and 3.70. On a 350-million bond over twenty years, that difference is approximately seventeen million florins in saved interest payments — not transformative, again, but sufficient to fund the entire copper hedging strategy three times over.

The most expensive page in the prospectus carried the rating. The page next to it carried the hedging strategy. The page after that — the one that listed the institutions formally committing capital — was blank for almost three months. It is not blank now.

Holt was asked, at the close of Friday’s briefing, whether she was satisfied with the trajectory.

“I am satisfied with the work,” she said. “I will be satisfied with the trajectory when the bond is sold and the contracts are signed and the first copper has arrived at Greystone Wharf in November. I have been a treasurer for seventeen years. I have learned that satisfaction is a thing one feels at the end of a process, not in the middle of one. We are presently in the middle.”

She paused, then added — to the trade attaché, perhaps, or to no one in particular:

“Six twenty-seven is a very interesting number. I am trying not to be interested in it.”

Copper opened Saturday at 624. The Bobington Exchange’s commodity desk closed at noon. The Treasury, by long-standing tradition, does not execute on Saturdays. The third tranche will wait until Tuesday the 5th.

Until then, Prudence Holt will continue not to be interested in 624.