The Third Stroke

Elspeth

At ten minutes to nine, the window in the door goes dark.

I lie on the cot with my face to the wall, under the gray blanket, and I do not turn my head. I have made a sleeper out of two pillows and the spare blanket and my navy coat folded long. I have lain beside it in the dark with my breath slow and even, for the benefit of whoever is looking, for forty minutes. Now I lie quite still and feel the shadow stand at the glass.

It stays a long time.

Hollis does not knock. He does not speak. I hear him breathe, slow and deep, through his nose; I hear the very faint creak of a leather glove closing on a fist. He is standing a foot from the oak, looking through a round of old bottle-glass at a heap of gray wool, and I know as exactly as I know my own pulse that he is counting too.

One breath. Two. Three.

"Sleep well, miss," he says.

He says it softly, with no particular expression. It is a thing a man says to a dog.

His footsteps go away along the stone.

I count to three hundred.

Then I rise, and shove the pillows deeper under the blanket, and go to the alcove, and put the flat of my hand to the plaster where a man once taught me to press.

…

There are nineteen planks in the floor of the observation closet. I know because I have counted them four times.

It is a quarter to ten on the second of January, and I am sitting on the stool in the dark, with my shoulder against the horsehair wall and my eye to the small clear pane, watching Conrad Marrow come down the ten stairs into the Orchard. He moves like an old man. He holds on to the rail. He does not look at the glass trees or the pale pebbles under the floor. He crosses to the chaise and sinks onto it, with his coat still on, and puts his face in his hands.

Kestrel stands by the brass clock with his hands behind his back.

"You are late," he says.

"I got lost."

"In a straight line?"

"I drove for an hour. I don't know where." Conrad lifts his head. His new face is gray and sunken and slick with sweat, and the warm brown eyes are red-rimmed and wild. "I sat on a bridge. I thought of jumping. Then I thought it was too cold."

"That is generally the reason."

"Ambrose, I can't do it tonight."

"No?"

"I can't lie down." His voice breaks. "I came to tell you. I'm not going to be hypnotized. I'm going to sit here, and I'm going to talk, and you're going to listen, and if you reach for that bloody watch I'll throw it in the stove."

A pause.

"Very well," says Kestrel.

He crosses to the armchair and sits. He folds his hands.

"Talk."

…

I do not breathe.

I sit in the dark with my forehead on the cool glass and listen to a man I once loved tell the story of his week.

He tells it badly. He starts in the middle and goes back. He says that his mother is a monster. He says that his brother is a monster. He says that his father shouts a dead girl's name at the table and that the nurse in the pantry is dead and that there is a reporter in a green car whom somebody means to kill. He says that he rang Warren and said please and Warren said go to bed. He says it again, as though the words had no meaning: Please. Go to bed. Please. Go to bed.

"Was she killed?" says Kestrel. "The reporter."

"I don't know."

"Then why did you come here?"

"Because it's Friday." Conrad laughs, a wet, ugly, cracked little sound. "It's what I do on Fridays. I come to the doctor's house, and lie on the doctor's sofa, and the doctor makes me feel better."

"And did you hope to feel better?"

"I hoped to feel anything."

Kestrel is silent.

His left hand is lying on the arm of the chair. I can see it through the pane, long and pale. The cufflink is gone. The cuff is open. The hand does not move.

"Conrad," he says quietly. "I am going to ask you a question. You will not like it."

"Everyone's questions are like that."

"If you could undo it. Any of it. The whole of October. Would you?"

"Of course I would."

"Would you give up the money?"

"Yes."

"The name?"

"Yes."

"The face?"

Conrad laughs.

"I'd give up the face this minute," he says. "I'd give up every cent. I'd stand in the road and be run over by a lorry." His hands come down from his knees. "I'd go to a prison. I'd like to. I think I'd sleep in a prison. Do you know that?" His voice goes up. "I think I'd sleep like a child."

He stops.

The silence in the Orchard is vast. A thread of steam goes up from the little iron stove in the corner, and the pendulum swings, and I think, with a calm that astonishes me: there. There it is. That is the door.

…

"Her name was Nina Voss," says Conrad.

Kestrel does not move.

"The girl in the quarry. The one in the nightgown." He is looking at his hands. "I never knew. Warren wouldn't say. But I went down on the Wednesday, after, and I stood at the edge, and there was a thing lying in the mud. A paper cup. From a diner in Newburgh. The Starlite." A pause. "I went. I asked. There was a waitress who'd taken a week off, with money. A thin one, with fair hair. They said she'd gone to her sister's."

"In Newburgh."

"In Beacon. Her sister owns a nail salon. It's called Pretty Fingers." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "I don't know why I'm telling you."

"You are telling me," says Kestrel, "because you want it known."

"I want something known."

"Yes."

"It's the only thing I ever found out by myself." His face twists. "Everything else was brought to me. Wrapped. By Warren. By Mother. I was never anything but a kind of carriage. I sat in the back and was driven." He shuts his eyes. "But I went to that quarry on my own."

"Why?"

"Because it was raining. And Dennis had said, when he sat down in his chair, in the study, with the fire starting..." His mouth shakes. "He said: It was a clear night, you know. The stars are very fine."

I stop breathing.

"He said it to me. To me, Ambrose. Not to Warren. He looked at me and said it was clear." Conrad's eyes open. They're swimming. "And then they put up a film with rain. And I thought: that's wrong. That's wrong. They're making him a liar. And I went to the quarry on the Wednesday and stood in the mud."

"And what did you find?"

"A cup."

A long silence.

"That is all you found," says Kestrel softly.

"It's all I could carry," says Conrad Marrow, and puts his face in his hands, and weeps.

…

I should be moved.

I know that. I know exactly what the moment is. A guilty man has handed over a name, a town, a salon, a sister: the thread by which the whole weave can be pulled apart. He has done it without hypnosis. He has done it on his own legs, in the dark, with a face he hates. It is what I came here to get.

I am not moved.

I sit with my cheek against the horsehair and my fist pressed to my mouth and feel nothing at all. Not triumph, not pity. A cold, flat, lucid indifference, like the blankness of a white page. I look through the clear pane at the man on the sofa shaking with sobs, and I think: the stars are very fine.

He remembered the stars.

He remembered what Dennis said.

And he has done nothing with it for eleven weeks.

There is a thin silver sound in my ear, like a spoon on glass. It takes me a moment to understand that it is the brass tube. Kestrel has moved to the grille. He is standing with his back to the room, speaking so low that Conrad cannot hear.

"Sing it."

I look at him.

"Not for the key," breathes the tube. "For him. Let him have it once. As a kindness."

I draw a breath.

I put my lips to the cold brass mouthpiece, and I begin.

Little lantern, little light,

carry me home through the night.

The tube carries it. I feel the sound go out of me and along the wall and into the glass room, thin and sweet and small, a thread of light let down into a well. I see Conrad's head come up. I see his face change. I see the look of a man who is hearing the last sound he expected to hear again.

Where the stars are, where you go,

who will light the way? I know.

I let my voice fall away.

I wait in the dark.

"Els," says Conrad Marrow. "Els, I'm so sorry."

I do not answer.

I take my mouth from the tube.

I stand up, and put my hand flat on the pane, and look at him through it for the length of a long slow breath. And then I turn my back on him, and lean my forehead on the wall, and I let myself stand there, not crying, not thinking, not anything, until I hear a telephone begin to ring.

…

It is the red one.

I have seen it on a dozen nights in the study, a narrow black instrument with a scarlet receiver, bolted to the wall above the desk. I have never heard it ring. It makes a flat, hard, insistent clatter like a bell on a fire engine.

Kestrel crosses the Orchard in three strides and goes up the stairs.

I am out of the closet before I have decided. I am in the study, in the dark, at the bookcase, with my eye to the crack between the shelves; and I see him pick up the receiver and say, "Kestrel."

I hear nothing at all.

I see his face.

It goes slowly gray. Then slowly white. The hand on the receiver tightens, and the knuckles stand out, and a thin vein stands up in his temple. He says, "When?" He says, "How long?" He says, "I see." He says, "Is the doctor there?" He says, "Then who has seen him?" And finally, very quietly, in a voice I have never heard from him, a voice with no bottom to it, he says:

"I am coming, Cordelia."

He puts the receiver down.

He stands for a moment with his palm on it. Then he turns, and comes to the bookcase, and puts his mouth to the crack between the shelves.

"Augustin," he says. "A third stroke. About an hour ago. He is alive. She wants me there."

"Ambrose."

"I am a physician, Elspeth. I cannot say no." His eyes are shut. "It is the one thing I cannot say no to."

"It's a trap."

"Yes."

"She's drawing you out. So Warren can come in."

"Yes," says Kestrel. "I think that is exactly what it is."

…

We have six minutes.

I do not say so aloud. But I count them, as he moves about the room with the dreadful economy of a man who has rehearsed this scene in his head for nine years. He takes a black bag from a cupboard. He opens the chessboard on its hinge, and sets the dial with his thumb, and the door swings. He lifts out a long gray cardboard box and a short blue one. He lays them on the desk. He does it three more times. Four more. Seven.

"Where is Marcus?"

"In the garage. With the car."

"Can he be trusted?"

"He has driven for me eleven years, and for my mother before me. He is a literal man, Elspeth. He does what he's told." He loads the boxes into a canvas sack. "He will bring these to the east road. To the old coal gate, below the boiler house. He will wait with the lights off."

"And I..."

"Will go by the tunnel."

"Tonight?"

"Within the hour." He swings the sack onto his shoulder. "Hollis will come. Not on the fourth. Warren has moved it up; Conrad said so, before the session, in the hall. They know I'll be away. They'll take you out of the Quiet Room, and they'll put you in a car, and you will not arrive anywhere."

My throat is dry.

"Conrad told you."

"Conrad told me everything he knew, in the first minute, because he cannot keep a thing in his mouth." A thin smile. "It is his only virtue."

"You'd already planned for it."

"I have planned for it for nine years." He lowers the sack. He stands in front of me, with the bookcase between us and the crack of lamplight on his face, and for a moment he looks at me in silence. "I did not plan for you."

I cannot speak.

"There is a man in a garage," he says, "with an old car. There is a door at the end of a tunnel. There is a house in the hills where I was born. You will go to it. I will come when I have done what I must."

"And if you don't?"

"Then you will go anyway."

"Ambrose."

"I will come." He puts his hand through the crack. It is very long, and very cold, and trembling. It closes on mine. "I will come, because I have been asked. I have been asked by the only person who ever did."

He lets go.

The study door closes behind him.

…

I stand quite still in the dark.

The seven clocks tick. The brass pendulum on the desk swings. The chessboard lies open on its hinge, a black mouth, empty, with Rosalind's brown envelope gone from its shelf and the gray boxes gone and the three little blue ones. I look at the pinned queen on the board. White to move, still. It has been white to move for nine years.

I hear a car start in the yard.

I hear it go down the drive. I count the seconds: forty to the gate. A pause. Then the engine's growl is lost in the night.

I open the bookcase.

I go down the ten stairs, past the glass trees, past the chaise where Conrad Marrow wept himself to sleep and was shaken awake and sent away. I take the lantern from its hook. I take the walnut clock from the shelf, still ticking, and wrap it in the tartan rug. I put on the navy coat and the gray mittens. I stand for a moment in the center of the Orchard, in the soft white glow of the frosted panes, and look at it, all of it, one last time.

Everything that falls is already broken.

I put the clock under my arm, and the lantern in my hand, and set my shoulder to the secret door.

I do not get that far.

Behind me, in the study, up the ten stairs, a bolt shoots back.

It is a small sound. It is the kind of sound a latch makes, a metal tongue sliding in a keeper. But it carries down the stairwell like a pistol shot, and I stand with my hand on the wall and every nerve in my body drawn to a point.

Somebody has unlocked the study door from the outside.

Somebody has a key.

I hear a footstep. A slow, heavy, deliberate tread, in good shoes, placed with care. I hear it cross the carpet. I hear it stop before the bookcase.

And in the silence, in a gravelly, amiable voice, courteous as a bailiff's, a man says through the shelves:

"Miss Dahlia?"

I do not move.

"Doctor said you might be down there." A soft laugh. "I'd come out, if I were you. It's a long way back up the hill."