Mirror, Mirror

Elspeth

By eleven the storm has taken the house in its teeth.

I can hear it from the Lantern Wing: a deep unbroken roar that comes up through the foundations, and under it the shrieks of wind in the chimneys, the tick of ice on glass, the long groan of timbers that have stood for a hundred and forty years and are beginning to wonder why. The lamp in my room has flickered three times. Twice it has recovered. The third time it stayed out for eleven seconds, and I sat in the blue dark with my hands on my knees and counted.

I put on the gray wool dress.

I do not take the pills in the hem. I do not take the pencil, or the mattress canvas, or the diagram of cameras. I take one thing, folded very small, in the pocket of the dress, against my hip: a prescription sheet gone soft as cloth.

Come as you are.

At ten past eleven, I open my door.

…

The corridor is dark. Mr. Teague's folding chair stands empty at the end of it, the crossword abandoned on the seat. Somewhere on the floor below, a generator coughs and catches, and the emergency lights come on along the ceiling, low and amber, casting my shadow ahead of me down the runner. I walk through pools of it. I pass the brackets that hold no lanterns. I take the south stair, and I do not take it softly.

For six weeks I have gone through this building like a thief.

Tonight I walk like a woman going home.

The study door stands open.

He has said it would. I have not quite believed it. A quarter-inch of amber light lies across the carpet, and in it I see the seven clocks on the wall, ticking, ticking, with the sound of rain on a distant roof. The desk lamp is off. The chessboard is in its place. The steel door behind it is shut. On the left, the long wall of books has been pushed back on its rails, and where the chestnut-colored volume ought to be there is a gap, and in the gap, a darkness with a shape in it.

Ten steps going down.

At the bottom, a yellow glow. Not the strip lighting, not the amber of the emergency lamps. A warmer light. A flame.

I stop at the head of the stairs with my hand on the cold stone and listen to my own pulse.

Seventy-eight.

I go down. I count them. One. Two. Three. At six, I feel the air change, the damp and the cold and the sweetness: dahlia, jasmine, and under them something drier and older. Paraffin. At nine, I see his shadow on the frosted glass.

Ten.

…

The Orchard is lit by a single lantern.

It stands on the glass floor in the middle of the room, a brass thing with a chimney, the one from the east corridor. Its flame is steady and small. In the frosted panels all round, the dried branches gleam, white and gold, as if the whole room were a frozen candle. The chaise lies in shadow. The pendulum clock beside it ticks, tick and tock, on the edge of audibility. The diffuser is dry. There is no lavender.

And he is sitting on the floor.

He has taken off his coat and waistcoat. He wears a white shirt open at the throat, cuffs unfastened and turned back to the elbow, no tie, no cufflinks. His hair is wet. He is leaning against the foot of the chaise with his legs out in front of him and his hands, palm up, on his knees, and beside him on the glass lies a bottle of Scotch with the seal unbroken.

He looks up.

I have seen this man in six weeks in nine different guises. The doctor. The savior. The shaking boy at the door of the green room. A man in a charcoal suit with a face composed like a clock. None of them looked at me as he looks at me now. His eyes are gray and tired and absolutely clear, and he does not rise.

"I wonder," says Kestrel, "if I might begin by saying your name correctly."

My throat is dry.

"Elspeth," he says. "Calder. Marrow."

It is very quiet.

For one second, I am Dahlia. It is a reflex. The shoulders curl in, the head bows, the eyes go to the floor, and a small broken voice begins in my chest: Doctor? I don't...

"Please," says Kestrel.

It is only a word. It is very low.

"I am so tired of the other one. For both of us."

I stand there in the lantern light, on the glass floor, above the shells and the pebbles, and I feel it come off me. Like a coat. A weight I have been carrying since the fourth of November, and have never once set down. My shoulders straighten. My chin lifts. My hands, which have held themselves for six weeks as though they had been taught to apologize, loosen at my sides.

I look at him with my own face.

"How long?" I say.

My voice is strange in my mouth. Low, dry, level. The voice of a woman at the head of a conference table.

"Since the fourteenth second," says Kestrel. "Of the first film. Your pupils."

"You struck it out."

"I struck it out." He almost smiles. "I have a talent for it. I struck it out a great many times. I wrote it, and I drew a line through it, and I wrote it again. I knew it in the notebook within a day. I knew it in my body within a week."

"And you did nothing."

"I did a great many things," says Kestrel. "All of them wrong."

…

I sit down.

Not on the chaise. On the floor, across the lantern from him, with my back against the glass. I draw my knees up and fold my arms round them. The cold comes up through the floor into my bones, and I welcome it. It is clean.

Between us, the flame stands in its chimney, motionless.

"Why am I here?" I say.

"Because I took five million dollars."

"That's not an answer."

"No." He turns his head, looks at the lantern. "Because Warren said, permanent. Because Cordelia said, kindly. Because I knew your face from the first moment they carried you in, and I could not bear the thought of any other man's hands on you. Because I told myself the hair was a coincidence." A long breath. "Because I am a coward who builds beautiful rooms."

"You knew me."

"I knew you."

"From where?"

He is silent for some time. Behind us, the clock ticks. In the glass above our heads I can see the two of us reflected, tiny and distorted, in the polished curve of the ceiling panels: a man and a woman on a glass floor, with a flame between them. Both thin. Both pale. Both with hair the color of crows, though only one of us has had to dye it.

It is a most unsettling thing to look up and see oneself in the company of an enemy and find that you resemble him.

"You were my patient before you were my prisoner," says Kestrel.

I do not move.

"Two winters ago. February. Three Fridays. A house on East Seventy-First Street, with a lamp with a green shade." His voice is quite even. "Cordelia Marrow's son had not slept for six months. He was losing weight. He was drinking. She asked me, as a favor, to treat him privately, in his own home, because he would not set foot in a clinic. I went on a Friday evening. And he said he would not do it without you."

The room is very still.

"He said you were the only person in the world who could make him feel safe. He sat on the end of the couch with his hand tapping his leg, and he said, Els has to be there. And you came in from the kitchen with a cup of tea and sat down at the other end, with your feet tucked under you, and looked at me."

"I remember cedar," I say.

"My cologne."

"A lamp."

"I used a green shade. It softens the pupil."

"And a clock."

"Yes."

"I don't remember your face."

"No." He turns his head. His eyes meet mine. "You were not meant to. I'm very good at that."

…

"You went under on the first night in four seconds," says Kestrel.

He says it plainly. He might be reading out a lab result.

"I have been practicing hypnosis for twenty years. I have never seen anyone fall as you fell. Four seconds from the first word. As if you had been waiting to be allowed. I took you down to the Orchard, because it's the induction I use, because it's the one I know, and I said, Tell me what you see. And you said, with your eyes closed, in a voice like a child's: Are you sad?"

My chest has gone tight.

"I had not been asked that since I was ten," he says.

I do not speak.

"You were exquisitely susceptible. You were also the most private mind I've ever tried to enter. In trance you told me nothing. You told me about your mother's kitchen, the dry cleaner, a piano. You hummed. And Conrad, in the chair beside us, in half-trance, with his head on your shoulder, said, Els. Sing the one with the lantern."

"Little Lantern."

"I didn't know its name. You sang it. You sang it twice. I recorded it."

I close my eyes.

I can feel the shape of it in the room. A tune in three-quarter time, tender as a thumb on a cheek. I can feel my mother's hands in it.

"He slept," says Kestrel. "That night. Eight hours. He woke and wept and could not say why. I had paired the song with the phrase, as one does. The old trick. Glass Orchard, and then the tune, together, each time, until the body learns that the two together mean: here you may rest. A conjunction. That was the word I used. A key."

"Phrase plus melody."

"You read the margin."

"I read everything in your library."

"Yes." A shadow of a smile. "I rather hoped you would."

My eyes open.

"I never played the tape to you," he says. "Not once. I want you to understand that. In all these weeks, I have not played you your own voice. I could have. It would have been the work of a minute. I could have put you under so deep that you'd never have come up. I took the tape out of the safe three times, and I put it back."

"Why?"

"Because it was yours."

…

The storm hits the house like a hand.

It is a long, shuddering blow, felt more than heard, a lurch in the foundations that sends a tremor along the glass. The lantern flame bends and rights itself. Dust sifts from the ceiling. For a moment, all the dried branches in the frosted panels tremble together, and the room seems to chime.

The lights fail.

They do not flicker. They go out, the amber glow from the stair cut off as with a knife, and the Orchard is dark except for the one small flame. Our shadows leap huge across the walls. The pendulum clock ticks on.

I hear his breathing. It is quick and shallow.

"Ambrose," I say.

I say it as myself.

He makes a sound. He puts the back of his hand against his mouth.

"It's the generator," I say. "It'll catch."

"I know." His voice is thick. "I know. It's only that I have not liked the dark since I was ten. I should like to have been braver for you."

I look at him for a long time.

Then, without thinking about it, without weighing it, I lean across the lantern and take his wrist in my hand. The left one. The one with the bare place where a silver cufflink ought to be. I turn it palm up. I lay two fingers on the pulse.

Ninety-six.

"Breathe," I say. "In through the nose. Slowly."

He breathes.

"You're a good doctor," I say.

"I'm not."

"No," I agree. "You are a very bad one. But you are a good listener."

A broken sound that might be laughter. His head drops. I feel the pulse under my fingers slow, by degrees, eighty-eight, eighty, seventy-four. The lantern burns.

At seventy-one, I take my hand away.

…

"Tell me what you want," I say.

It's the old voice. The voice that used to sit across a conference table from a man with a duplicate invoice. Level, courteous, entirely without mercy.

"I want," says Kestrel, "three things."

"Go on."

"I want my sister's file."

I wait.

"Cordelia has it. A police statement, given at the age of ten, in the presence of a district attorney who gave me a lemon drop. It says that on the night of the fourth of November, I stood at the door of the Quiet Room and saw my mother go in with a syringe." His voice does not change. "It was sealed. Augustin Marrow sealed it. It has sat in a drawer in Albany for thirty-one years, and Cordelia has it in a safe in her library, and every time she needs me, she says, Ambrose, the old files. I want it burned."

"Second."

"I want my mother's name out of the hospital that buried my sister. I want it known what was done."

"Third."

"I want to see Conrad Marrow in a cell."

The last is said very quietly.

I look at him.

"Not for you," I say.

"No. Not for you either. For a girl called Callie." A pause. "And for a man whose fingers were moving."

So he has heard it too. Every word. Every night, on the tape, in the Orchard. He has listened to it thirty-one times and said nothing, and he has carried it, as I have carried it, in a place where no one would look.

"And me?" I say.

"I would like to be forgiven."

"You won't be."

"No," says Kestrel. "I know. So I would like to be of use."

"Use."

"I have the tapes. I have the Orchard. I have nine years of Cordelia Marrow's private line, and thirty-one nights of her son. I have the Foundation's account of what it pays me, in cash, from a Cayman bank. I have what you cannot get. And you have what I do not." He lifts his head. "You know the numbers."

"I know the numbers."

"And you know how to make a man sleep."

I do not answer.

"I won't pretend I haven't thought about it," he says. "I've thought of nothing else since the day of the tour. The key exists. It has been in Conrad Marrow's head for two years. He falls for it as he falls for nothing else. I put it there. You sing it. Between us we could..."

"Put him to sleep in the middle of a ballroom."

"No." He shakes his head. "Not to sleep. That's the error everybody makes. It isn't control, Elspeth. You must understand that. I cannot make Conrad do anything he doesn't want to do. What the key gives him is a state: warm, deep, safe, and utterly unguarded. In that state, he does what he's done in the Orchard thirty-one times. He confesses."

"Because he wants to."

"Because he has wanted to for two months. Because he has no one to tell." A flicker of something like pity. "He does not want to say it to a policeman. He does not want to say it to a priest. He wants to say it to the person who sang to him. If you sing it, in the room, with the phrase, he will say it, in front of everyone, because it is you."

The lantern flame stands very straight.

"It requires an audience," I say slowly.

"The larger the better."

"It requires him to be afraid. And to be in a room full of people he has lied to."

"Yes."

"And it requires him to be sure that I'm dead."

"He thinks you are a ghost," says Kestrel. "I have thought of nothing else since he knelt in front of your bed."

I look at the flame.

I see it as I see everything: a ledger. A column of debits. A column of credits. And in the middle, a single line that I have been circling for six weeks, on which I have never had the courage to write a figure.

"Where," I say, "is Conrad Marrow most afraid?"

Kestrel looks at me.

"At his mother's party," he says. "Where the whole world is watching."

"The Evergreen Masquerade."

"On the fifth of January, at the Sable Court. The senator takes off his mask at midnight. There will be cameras. There's a live stream; the Foundation has had one for five years. Three hundred guests. A press room. Cordelia will make a speech about the Larkspur Fund."

Larkspur. My eyes close.

I think of a green velvet dress. Of a page of pledges, and a one that was not there.

"The Sable Court," I say.

"Does it mean something?"

"It's where I met him."

…

He lets the silence stand.

It is a thing I have noticed about him. He never fills a silence that another person has made. He sits in it with perfect composure, like a man sitting in a patch of sun.

"There's a difficulty," he says at last.

"Yes."

"The hearing."

"Warren has moved it."

"To the third."

I do the sum. It takes me less than a second.

"Two days before the gala."

"Yes. Judge Hale. Closed session. Warren has made representations. If it goes as he intends, you will be committed on the third for an indefinite term, and transferred on the fourth to the secure ward." He looks at his hands. "Cordelia telephoned yesterday. She asked me to see that the Quiet Room was made ready."

The cold in my body has a new texture.

It is not fear. I know fear; I have had it in my mouth for six weeks like a coin. This is cleaner and more exact. It is the arithmetic of a closing door.

"Fifteen days," I say.

"Fifteen."

"Then we'd better not waste the night."

I lean across the lantern.

I am not sure what I mean to do. I think I mean to offer him my hand, in the way of a woman closing a contract. Instead I find myself looking at his face, in the small warm light, the tired gray eyes, the faint lines at their corners, the mouth. A man I have wanted dead. A man whose wrist I would know in the dark.

I think of the kiss.

I think of fourteen seconds when I did not remember my name.

"I am not going to forgive you," I say.

"I know."

"I'm going to use you. I'm going to use everything you have, and when I've finished, I will not be sorry."

"Good."

"I will lie to you, when it's useful."

"I would think the less of you if you didn't." He almost smiles. "And I'll lie to you. And between the two of us, perhaps, we'll find out which of us is the better at it."

"A partnership."

"A mirror," says Kestrel.

He holds out his hand.

Not to take mine. He holds it out between us, over the lantern, palm up and open, with the long fingers a little curled, the way a man holds out a hand to a creature he does not wish to alarm.

I look at it.

In the dark above us, the wind takes the whole house in its fist and shakes it.

One by one, with a succession of small, sad clicks, the seven clocks upstairs stop.