The candle stand is counted: candles out of the box, coins into the slot, and the two are reconciled weekly because the candle money pays for the candles. Every morning there are between three and six burned down to the cup that were not there at locking, lit in the night, in a church with one door and an alarm, and the coin box has taken nothing.
I am the verger, and the candle stand is on my morning list because the wax has to be cleaned out before the cups crack.
How it is counted.
Candles in the box beside the stand, a slot for coins, and a sign. I count the candles into the box on a Monday and the stubs out through the week, and I empty the coins on a Saturday, and the treasurer reconciles the two. People are honest about candles, on the whole, and the count has agreed for years to within a candle or two.
The church is locked at five and unlocked at nine, by me, and the alarm is set.
Every morning there are candles on the stand that were not there at five.
Three to six of them, burned down to the cup, the wax pooled and set, the wick gone, the way a candle looks when it has burned its whole length undisturbed.
The box has that many fewer candles in it. The coin box has taken nothing.
A candle burns for about four hours. Three to six of them, lit after five, would be out by midnight, and the alarm, which has a sensor that looks straight at the stand, records nothing between five and nine on any night.
What has been checked.
The door, the alarm, the sensor. All as they should be, and the sensor has been tested by me walking past the stand with the alarm set, which set it off.
The box. I put a strip of tape across the lid one night. In the morning the tape was intact and the box was four candles short, and there were four stubs in the cups.
The stubs. I have sent one to the supplier, who confirmed it was their candle, ours, burned normally, and asked whether there was a problem with the batch.
The wax. It is set hard in the morning and cold, which means the candles were out by the small hours, which means they were lit not long after I locked the door, in the dark, by nobody, without a coin.
The cups.
The stand has forty cups and the same cups are used. Not the front row, which is where people put candles in the day. Six cups in the back row, on the left, in a group, the way a family lights candles together, and always those, and on the nights there are three it is three of the six.
I have taken those six cups off the stand and put them in the vestry. In the morning there were four stubs in four of the empty holes where the cups had been, burned down on the bare metal, and the metal was scorched, and I put the cups back.
What is done about it.
The treasurer knows there is a shortfall of about a candle a night, and it is in the accounts as breakage, and the candle money still covers the candles because people are generous.
I have not put a coin in for them. I thought about it, and decided that whoever lights them is not paying because they are past paying, and that the candle stand has never turned anybody away.
What I do.
I clean the cups in the morning.
The one thing I have changed is that I light one myself, at five, before I lock up, in the back row on the left, and leave it burning.
I started that in the winter, and since then there have been two or three stubs in the morning rather than four to six, as though my one has been counted.
The reason I started is a morning in the winter when I came in at nine and the six cups on the left had six stubs, and the church was cold, and in the dust on the stone floor in front of the stand, where I sweep, there were the marks of knees, six pairs, in a row, close together, in a line where nobody had knelt since I swept the evening before.