The Lock

Elspeth

"It is mine," says Kestrel.

He says it at once, in a perfectly level voice, before the last note has finished. He does not look at the door. He looks at Dr. Whitcombe, with an expression of mild and slightly weary courtesy, as a man might regard a colleague who has found a grammatical error in his paper.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The clock. The music box." He moves one hand, a small, dismissive, collector's gesture. "I have a weakness for them. You may ask anyone at Aldenmoor; my study contains seven. I took one to Pell and Daughter a fortnight ago to be mended. I understand the proprietress sent it round to my driver this morning, and he has been so good as to leave it in the first place he could think of."

"In a corridor."

"Marcus is a literal man."

Whitcombe regards him.

It is a long look. It has nothing hostile in it. It is the look of a physician reading a chart that does not quite correspond to the patient, and who is too honest to pretend that it does. Her eyes go to the door, and to me, and to my left mitten, with its streak of oil, and back to Kestrel's face. I watch her add up what she sees. I watch her reach a total. I watch her decide, with an effort I can almost hear, not to write it down.

"I see," she says.

"I should hate for it to be a distraction."

"Of course."

"If you would permit me to retrieve it."

"By all means." She smiles. It is a thin small smile, with a good deal behind it. "Ambrose, I shall file my report on Friday. I will want to see Miss Reeve again. Alone. On the morning of the hearing, at nine, in the judge's anteroom."

His fingers are very still.

"That is irregular."

"It is a courtesy I extend to the patient," says Whitcombe, "and I have never once been refused."

…

The drive home is silent.

I sit in the back of the Mercedes with the walnut clock in my lap, wrapped in its pillowcase, ticking against my stomach. Kestrel sits at the far end of the leather bench with his eyes on the window. Between us the empty space has widened by perhaps an inch. I do not know which of us has moved.

Marcus drives with his shoulders up round his ears.

A gray sedan follows us all the way to the Taconic, and falls back at the ramp.

"Teague is in the other car," says Kestrel, at last, to the glass. He says it very quietly. "He'll have rung Warren from the first telephone box."

"Yes."

"They will want you moved tonight."

"I know."

"To the Quiet Room."

"I know."

"Elspeth." He does not turn. "I can refuse."

"No."

"I am the medical director."

"You are Cordelia's man," I say, "until the fifth. If you refuse, she will send for Hollis and a locksmith and a letter from the board, and you will lose the building, and I will lose the tunnel." I put my hand flat on the clock. "We have always known it would come to this. We said so on the nineteenth."

"We did."

"Then let it."

He is silent.

After a time he says, in a voice I have to lean toward to catch: "You have never asked me what is in it."

"In what?"

"The Quiet Room."

I think.

I think of a corridor at the bottom of the east wing, and a salvaged oak door from St. Brigid's, and the long low hum of the boiler below it. I think of a girl in a cardigan with a hairpin in her hand, counting.

"No," I say. "I haven't."

"Do you want to know?"

"Is it worse than what I imagine?"

"Yes," says Kestrel. "And no."

The car turns in at the gate.

…

They come for me at four.

Two orderlies I do not know, in white coats; Teague with his bad hand bandaged and his wet red mouth very tight; Hollis, in a black overcoat, standing a pace behind them, with his hat in his hand and his big pale face arranged in an expression of complete professional neutrality. He does not look at the mittens. He does not look at anything. He looks at the wall above my head with the polite blank gaze of a man delivering a parcel.

"Miss Dahlia," says Teague. "Doctor's orders."

I look at Kestrel.

He is standing by the window of the Lantern Wing, with his hands behind his back, in full uniform: gray three-piece suit, silver tie, left cufflink freshly turned. His face is quite empty. He is the Medical Director of Aldenmoor Sanatorium. He has never loved anyone in his life.

"Dahlia," he says. "There has been some concern about your behavior this morning."

"I'm sorry."

"The concern is shared by the board. In view of your recent stress, and in the interests of your safety, I have determined that a period of closer observation would be advisable."

"Where?"

"In the east wing."

"Is it far?"

"No." A brief pause. "It is quiet."

I let my eyes fill. I let my hands come up, twisting, the gray mittens clutching at one another, and I let my voice thin to a thread. "Dr. Kestrel. Please. I don't want to go."

"I know."

"I'll be good."

"You have been very good."

"Then why?"

He doesn't answer.

I look at him a moment longer. At the long gray face, with its look of arranged blankness. At the left hand, behind his back, which I cannot see. I wonder whether it is turning the link. I wonder whether it will bleed.

Good, I think. Don't give it to them.

I let the orderlies take my arms.

…

It is not what I imagined.

I think of cells. I think of a padded room, a drain in the floor, a shrieking brass fixture on the wall. What I get instead is a corridor of whitewashed stone, very clean and very long, lit by a row of bare bulbs in wire cages. The air is cold and smells of lime and coal dust. A single pipe runs along the ceiling and ticks as it heats. At the end of the corridor, there is a door.

It is a beautiful door.

I did not expect that. It is oak, black with age, ten feet high, banded in iron, with a pointed arch at the top and a small round window of thick bottle-glass at the height of a man's eyes. Someone, a century ago, has carved into the lintel a row of little cherubs and a line of Latin that I do not read. A brass plate under the handle says ST. BRIGID'S HOME FOR GENTLEWOMEN, 1887.

Hollis unlocks it with a long brass key.

The hinges do not squeal. They have been oiled.

"After you, miss," he says.

I step through.

…

The Quiet Room is white.

I had known it would be. I had heard the phrase white room in a dead girl's letter and a living man's confession, and I'd constructed a picture from it, white as a hospital sheet, white as a blank page. But I have constructed it wrong. It is not white as paper. It is white as milk. The walls are plastered and limewashed and curve gently upward into a low vaulted ceiling. The floor is white tile. The bed, a narrow iron cot with a single gray blanket, is white-painted. In one corner stands a white enamel basin. In another, a white-curtained alcove.

The light comes from a single high window the size of a book, barred, with frosted glass, through which the dying afternoon falls in a pale yellow shaft.

It is very, very quiet.

I stand in the center of the floor and feel it settle on me like a hand. The silence is not an absence. It's a substance. It presses against my ears. It has a texture, thick and padded and slightly sweet, such as one imagines in the middle of a snowbank. I can hear my own pulse. I can hear the blood in my eardrums. I can hear the faint wet click of my own eyelids.

Everything that falls is already broken.

"Supper at six," says Teague, from the doorway. "Lights at eight. There's a bell." He nods toward a brass push beside the door. "If you need anything."

"Thank you."

"I wouldn't need much, miss."

He closes the door.

I hear the key turn. I hear the footsteps recede down the stone corridor: Teague's shuffle, the two orderlies' soft rubber soles, and then, last and slowest, Hollis, whose heavy, deliberate tread pauses at the end of the passage and does not come on.

For a long time I stand quite still.

Then, very quietly, in the quiet that I could not break if I tried, I begin to count the tiles.

…

At midnight, the wall opens.

I am lying on the cot with my eyes shut and my hands folded, counting backward from a thousand, when I hear it: a soft, dry, shuddering scrape, like an old drawer, from the direction of the alcove. I turn my head.

The white-curtained alcove has a back wall. It is made of the same limewashed plaster as the rest, and I have studied it for six hours without seeing so much as a crack. Now, as I watch, a section of it, perhaps three feet wide and five high, swings inward on a pivot, silently, with the faint breath of cold air. A rectangle of darkness opens in the white.

A man stands in it, holding a lantern.

"Come," says Kestrel.

I sit up.

"There is a tunnel," he says. His voice is soft. "It was built in 1891 for the coal. The boiler house is a hundred yards east of the wing, and the coal came in on a cart from the road, and was shoveled down a chute into the cellar and wheeled along under the floors. My mother had it bricked up in 1962. I unbricked it nine years ago." A pause. "I did not tell her."

"You did not tell Cordelia."

"I did not tell anyone." The lantern shifts. In its light I see his face, shadowed, intent, and a thin strip of white at the throat where the collar is open. "I built the Orchard to a child's drawing, Elspeth. But I built the door behind the Orchard for a different reason."

"To get out."

"To get a person out," says Kestrel. "If it were ever necessary."

I look at him.

I look at the dark rectangle behind him, and the narrow brick steps going down, and the thin wavering flame.

I get off the cot, and put on my shoes, and take the lantern from his hand.

…

It is a hundred and eleven steps.

I count them. The tunnel is low and arched and lined with old red brick, slick with damp, hung here and there with the pale threads of root. The floor is rough. The lamplight runs ahead of us in a long wavering tongue and falls back. I walk in front, because I wish to. He walks behind me, close, not touching, with his head bent under the roof, and I can hear him breathe.

At the sixty-third step the tunnel forks.

"East is the boiler house," says Kestrel. "The road. A door that opens from the inside. If it were ever needed." His voice echoes. "West is the Orchard."

I take the west.

It ends in a wall. It is a smooth, curving, whitewashed wall that I should know, and in a moment, with a prickle at the back of my neck, I do. Behind the plaster there will be glass. Behind the glass, the dried branches. Behind them, the pale pebbles, and the cream chaise, and the brass clock.

Kestrel reaches past me.

He puts his palm flat against the brick, at the height of my shoulder, and presses.

A panel gives.

And we are in the Orchard.

…

I had not expected it to be so cold.

I had last seen the room by lantern light, in a storm, when the world was ending. Now the power is on, and the frosted glass panels glow a soft cool white, and the dried branches stand against them in long delicate silhouettes like ink on parchment. The glass floor gleams. The pebbles shine under it. The air smells of dahlia and night jasmine and, very faintly, of lavender, and the great brass clock by the chaise ticks with the slow, patient, unhurried beat of a thing that has all the time in the world.

I put the lantern down.

I turn.

He is standing just inside the panel, with his back to the wall. He has taken off his jacket. His waistcoat is unbuttoned. He looks at me with an expression I have not seen on him before: not guarded, not courteous, not clinical. It is the look of a man who has walked a long way in the dark and has arrived, quite unexpectedly, at a lit window.

"Elspeth," he says.

"Don't."

"I..."

"Don't say anything," I say. "You'll be wise. I can't bear it."

He stops.

I cross the glass floor.

I know exactly what I am doing. I want that clear. I know it in the cold, clean, accounting part of me that has never been wrong. I am thirty-four years old and I have been dead for eight weeks. I have been drugged, and dyed, and counted, and watched. I have been called by a stranger's name. I have been made to sing a song for a man who killed my friend, and I have sat in a closet and listened to him weep for it. I have buried a woman who gave me her mittens.

I have not once, in all of this, been asked.

Not by Conrad, who took. Not by Cordelia, who observed. Not by Warren, who managed. Not by the doctor, who prescribed.

I have been wanted. I have been used. I have not been asked.

So I take the thing I want.

I take it as I would take a figure from a column, calmly, deliberately, and with great precision. I put my hand on his chest, over the cool white shirt, and I feel under it the quick, hard hammering of a pulse that I know to the digit.

Eighty-eight.

"You're afraid," I say.

"Terrified."

"Good."

"Elspeth..."

"You will do what I say," I tell him. "Exactly what I say. In the order I say it. And if I say stop, you will stop. If I say Zurich..."

"I will stop."

"If I say nothing at all?"

"Then I will wait."

I look up at him.

He is looking down at me with a face like the face of a man at the foot of an altar. His eyes are very dark. There is no mockery in them, no strategy, no arithmetic of any kind. I realize, with a faint, vertiginous shock, that he means it. He will wait for ten minutes. He will wait for an hour. He will stand against this wall in his shirtsleeves until the sun rises, if that is what I choose.

And I understand, at last, what it is I have found.

It is not power over him.

It is that I need none.

…

I will not describe what follows.

It is not that I am ashamed. I am not ashamed of anything. It is that there are things which, when set down in a column, cease to be what they are, and this is one. I will say only that it takes a long time, and that I decide every minute of it. That his hands are careful. That I tell him where to put them, and where not to, and that he listens, with the dreadful close attention of a man who has spent twenty years learning to hear what a person does not say. That at one point I laugh, shakily, in the middle of the silence, and he goes still, and says what, and I say nothing, and he says it isn't nothing, and I say I forgot, for a moment, to count.

I say that the chaise is cool beneath my back, and then not.

I say that the clock ticks.

I say that at some moment, when his mouth is at my throat and I am looking at the dim white vault of the ceiling, the fingers of my left hand begin, quite of themselves, to tap. Once. Twice. Three times.

Displeased.

I stop them.

I stop them with my right hand, closing it over the left, and holding it down against the cream leather, and I say, aloud, in the stillness, in a voice like a held breath:

"No."

"Elspeth?"

"Not you." I turn my head. "Not you. It's my hand. It does it."

He lifts himself on his elbow. His hair is in his eyes. He looks down at me, and at the two hands, clasped, and I see him understand.

"It is the habit," he says gently. "Not the man."

"I know."

"May I?"

I look at him.

Slowly, deliberately, I let go. I turn my left hand palm up on the leather between us, in the lamplight, and I watch him lower his head and press his mouth, lightly, to the center of it.

Twice.

On the back of the hand he would have tapped; on the palm he had no right to.

It stops.

The fingers uncurl. They lie open, quiet and still. I look at them and think: There. That is a thing I did. And I put my arms up round his neck, and draw him down, and for some time afterward there is nothing at all to count.

…

Afterward, I lie on my side with my head on his arm and watch the pendulum.

It swings in its brass case, regular as breath. The light on the frosted glass has not changed. It is a timeless light, without morning or evening, and I cannot tell if it is one o'clock or three.

"Two," says Kestrel.

"What?"

"It is ten past two. I can hear it."

"You could always hear it."

"Yes." A pause. "I have not, before tonight, been able to stop."

I turn my face into his shoulder.

He smells of cedar and lemon and clean cotton, and, underneath, of something warm and human and quite his own, such as a cat smells, or a hayfield. I shut my eyes. I think of nothing. For the first time in eight weeks, my mind is blank as a clean page.

He is stroking my hair.

It is a slow, absent, careful gesture, such as one makes to a child, or a horse. His hand goes from my temple to the nape of my neck and back. After a while I realize that he is humming. It is very faint, scarcely a sound at all, a thread of breath in the dark. It is three-four time.

I know the tune.

I open my eyes.

"Ambrose," I say.

"Yes?"

"What are you humming?"

He stops.

There is a long pause. His hand has gone still on my hair.

"I do not know," he says.

"You do."

"I..." He swallows. "I have heard it, I suppose, two hundred times. On the tape. I did not know that I had learned it."

I look at him.

I think of a man in a gray chair, at four in the morning, with a headset on and a reel turning, listening again and again to a woman's voice singing in the dark. I think of him learning it. I think of him not meaning to.

Everything in me goes very still.

The second key.

I put my hand on his chest.

"Tomorrow," I say, "you will sleep."

"I do not sleep."

"I know."

"Elspeth, I have not slept a night through in thirty-one years."

"I know," I say. "That's the point."

Over our heads, in its brass case, the clock begins to strike the half hour. It plays no tune. It makes only a single plain note, small and bright, that hangs in the air of the Orchard like a dropped coin.

I count it.

I count it, and I do not tell him why.