The palace keeps one document that matters. It is copied out fresh each morning and nailed to the panelling outside the presence chamber: ten names, top to bottom, in order. Where your name sits is where you stand, who you walk out behind, and whether the sovereign's eye ever gets as far down the room as your face.

It is not amended by merit. It is amended by outcome.

Twice a year, if that, a man carries in his accounts and there is nothing whatever wrong with them. No coin left in a strongbox at his lodgings. No asset held back for a better morning. Sixty-five times in one thousand and ten presentations has anyone come to that table with their pockets genuinely turned out.

It happened twice before noon.

Justin laid down 137.68 and, when the clerk turned the page to look behind the total, there was nothing behind the total. He walked out of the chamber first in FantasyWorld, which is where he had been trying to get since August.

Bill did precisely the same thing.

Understand who this is. For three months Bill has come to this court with two men in his household and has walked the wrong one down the corridor, every single time, and has been waved through anyway. He has left better men shut in upstairs rooms in this palace and been advanced for it while they hammered on the doors.

This time he brought all of it. Every coin. 122.38, and the page behind it clean.

He lost by 19.14.

The man across the table from him was Gabes, who had come from apartments in which a drawer was locked. DJ Moore was in the drawer, worth 18.9. Gabes had instead brought Emeka Egbuka into the presence chamber and set him down in front of the clerk, and Egbuka was worth 3.7.

Nobody opens the drawer. That is the whole architecture of the place. The clerk records what is on the table and the chamberlain amends the sheet, and Gabes went up to third with seventeen and a half points of household goods sitting in the dark two streets away.

Bill did not move at all.

Now. Bryan.

For a season and a half this column has watched Bryan arrive with the tidiest books at court and leave without so much as a nod. He wastes less than any man here. He has spent the autumn being immaculate and being ignored, and there is no clause in the order of precedence that covers being right.

This time he arrived behind Jahmyr Gibbs.

51.9. Three times what the man is ordinarily good for, carried into the chamber in daylight, and behind it the largest sum anybody in the palace produced all morning.

153.12.

There was no courtier in FantasyWorld who could have stood against it. Nine out of nine.

The one actually set opposite him was Eric/Blakey, who came in with 90.64, the smallest offering in the building, and were beaten by 62.48 while every other man present would also have beaten them. There has been a case made in this column that their season is a matter of who they keep being paired with. Not this morning. This morning they were simply the poorest men in the room, and there were nine witnesses.

Bryan is 5-7. Eighth. He produced the finest morning's work at court and rose exactly nowhere, because the sheet does not backdate.

Which brings us to the wealthiest man in the palace.

Mario has 1720.04 this season. No one is close. Set him against the whole court, week upon week, and he beats it three times out of four. He arrived expecting the customary formalities.

Jonathan Taylor came in with 7.6 in his hands. He is a man who has averaged better than triple that all year, and he walked the length of the chamber and put down almost nothing, and the silence in that room was worth the price of admission.

Across the table stood Bolek, who is 3-9 and last in every column the palace keeps.

Mario lost by 8.

He had left 16.3 at home, which is what earns a man the black ribbon in this house, and the ribbon was tied on him without ceremony while he was still explaining. He came in first in FantasyWorld and left it fourth, three places lower, beaten by the poorest courtier present and wearing the badge of a man who did it to himself.

In the corridor outside all of this, Nate is still waiting.

There is a gallery here where the portraits hang, and a man's portrait goes up when he has a hundred victories against his name. Jack and Daniel were both hung in the autumn. Nate's frame has been standing against the corridor wall so long that the servants have stopped moving it to sweep behind.

Ninety-eight. Two more.

Jack, who put 145 on the table and took Nate apart by 32.72, has already been up there for weeks and had no particular use for the frame.

Justin, meanwhile, is on ninety-seven, and he has just taken the top of the sheet with a presentation nobody could fault.

Three men now stand at 8-4 and only the counting of coins separates them. Beneath them, holding more money than any of them, stands Mario in a black ribbon.

And Bill, fifth, exactly where he was, having finally done the thing the court claims to want.

The chamberlain nails up a fresh sheet in the morning. Bill's name will be in the same place it was, one line below a man who never came back for the drawer.