The Deacon's Tea

The Deacon's office was the warmest room he had been in since Iowa.

That was the first strange thing. The second was that it was so small. He had expected a high stone chamber, an altar, a dozen candles. Instead she led him through a plain door at the end of the administration wing into a room the size of a pantry. A cast-iron stove glowed in one corner. A desk. A single hard chair. Shelves of ledgers bound in black cloth. On the wall behind the desk hung a small framed engraving of a valley in snow, and nothing else.

"Sit," said Deacon Thorne.

He sat. The chair was straight-backed and uncomfortable, and he was grateful for it. His legs were still trembling.

She did not sit. She set the lantern on the desk, took a kettle off the stove, and poured something into a chipped white mug with her back to him. Her movements were precise. The key ring hung from her belt, and when she bent, the long black key swung and tapped her hip like a pendulum. Cassian watched it, because it was easier than watching her.

"Drink."

The mug was placed in his hands. It was too hot to hold. It smelled of chamomile and, beneath that, something sharper, a medicinal bite like cloves.

"What is it?"

"Tea." A thin, dry pause. "With a little something to quiet the shaking. It will not harm you, Mr. Hale. If we wished to harm you, we would have had ample opportunity."

It wasn't much of a comfort. He drank.

The heat went down his throat like a hot wire and bloomed in his chest, and the tremor in his hands began, finally, to ease. She unwrapped a roll of gauze and a small tin of salve, and when she took his injured hand and began to clean the cut, he flinched. Her fingers were hard and cold and astonishingly gentle.

"The Night Law," Cassian said. "I broke it. I was out after the bell."

"You were."

"I'm supposed to be punished."

"By whom?" She dabbed the cut with a rag that smelled of vinegar. "The Prefects who administer punishment were in the hall with you. The Dean of Student Discipline is under my authority. The Headmaster does not ask. You will not be punished, Mr. Hale, for being in the right place at the right time. In my experience, that is a rarer thing than courage."

"What was it?"

She did not answer.

"The thing in the hall. The thing that was holding Albert."

"I heard you the first time."

"Then tell me." His voice cracked. "He's fifteen. He's in this room, he sits at the table across from me every day, and it nearly killed him. I want to know what it was."

The Deacon tied off the bandage with a small, hard knot. She released his hand and stepped back, and for the first time her eyes met his straight on. They were gray, like old iron. There was a fine line of red around the rims, as if she hadn't slept in a very long time.

"You are a brave boy," she said. "And an uncommonly stupid one. You ran toward it. Do you know how many people have done that in the history of this school?"

"No."

"Neither do I. I have been here thirty-one years and I have never seen it." She turned away and stood looking at the stove, her thin back straight as a rail. "What is your father's trade, Mr. Hale?"

The question came from nowhere. His fingers tightened on the mug.

"Why?"

"Humor me."

"He works at a packing plant." It came out harder than he meant. "Ottley, Iowa. Hog processing. Sticks them on the line. He's done it twenty years."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"Have you ever done the work?"

He didn't answer. In his mind, unbidden, rose the memory of his father's big callused hand wrapped around his own, at nine years old, on a gray March morning in the back lot of the plant, guiding the blade. Here, boy. Feel that? Right under the jaw. Quick, and don't hesitate. Hesitating's what hurts them. The warm smell. The surprised quiet in the animal's eyes. He remembered being sick in the gutter afterward and his father laughing and saying, Good. That means you're not stupid.

"Yes," he said. "Since I was nine."

The Deacon nodded slowly, like a woman confirming a figure in a column.

"Thank you."

"That's it? That's what you wanted?"

"That is what I needed." She returned to the desk and took up a pen. "You will go back to Room 104. You will say that you were taken ill in the night and treated by the Deacon. That is even true. You will not speak of what happened in the hallway to anyone. Not to your roommates, not to your friends in the kitchen, not to the old man in the library who lends you his telephone."

He went rigid.

She did not look up from the page. "Yes, Mr. Hale. We know about Mr. Pike. We have always known about Mr. Pike. We permit it, as one permits a draft in a house with too many windows. He is an old man, and a harmless one, and it has been convenient to let the children believe they have a secret." The pen scratched. "That will change if you speak carelessly."

"Are you threatening him?"

"I am informing you." A flicker of dry irony. "There is a difference. You will come to appreciate it."

"And Albert?"

"Mr. Sterling will recover."

"Is he..." He searched for the word and hated it. "Is he still marked?"

The pen stopped.

In the stove, a log shifted and sent up a shower of sparks. The Deacon set the pen down very carefully and looked at him for a long moment, and Cassian had the sensation, again, of standing at the edge of something large and dark whose shape he could not see.

"You listen well," she said at last. "Better than we expected. That is something else to be taken into account."

"That's not an answer."

"No. It isn't." She lifted the lantern. "Go to bed, Mr. Hale. The six o'clock bell will ring in two hours. If you are wise, you will sleep. If you are not, you will lie awake going over everything you heard tonight. Either way, you will be sent for."

"By who?"

She opened the door.

"By the man who answers questions."

…

The dormitory was dark. The hall was empty. There was no frost on the stone, no sign of any struggle at all. He walked the length of it with his bandaged hand pressed to his chest and passed the place at the east end where the thing had stood, and felt nothing, no cold, no whisper. The cloister door was shut. It might never have opened.

He slid into Room 104 as quietly as he could.

It didn't help. Four pairs of eyes opened in the dark.

"You're back," said Ronald, in a high strained whisper that cracked on the second word.

"Go to sleep."

"I heard it. I heard everything. I heard the scream, and then a lot of people, and then it went quiet and I thought—" He sat up. "Where's Albert? His bed's empty. Where is he?"

"Infirmary."

"The infirmary?" Karl's voice was cool, flat, brittle. He hadn't moved. He lay on his back with his hands folded over his chest like a boy on a tomb. "Nobody goes to the infirmary after the bell."

"He was sick."

"So were you."

"Yeah." Cassian sat on the edge of his bed and began, very slowly, to unlace his boots. "Same soup."

Nobody laughed. Nobody spoke. Karl turned his head on the pillow and looked at him for a long time, and Cassian could feel the look like a finger on his face. Not fear, he thought. Not quite. The brightness of it, the hot black glitter, was something else, something that made his skin crawl: calculation, and underneath it, a hard, cold, thin-lipped envy.

He knows I wasn't sick. He knows something happened. And he knows I'm not hurt.

"Your hand's bandaged," Karl said.

"I cut it."

"On what?"

"On a bed frame. Weeks ago. It reopened."

"And the Deacon fixed it."

"Yes."

"Thorne doesn't fix anyone." Karl said it softly. "Thorne doesn't touch students. She stands behind the yellow line with the rest of them. I've seen her do it for two years."

Cassian said nothing. He pulled the blanket up to his chin, and the cold of the sheets bit through his shirt.

By the window, Leo had not moved. He lay on his side facing the room, the gray dawn just beginning to glimmer against the iron bars. His eyes were open. They were fixed on the bandage at Cassian's hand, and for a long time he did not look away. Then his gaze lifted, slowly, to Cassian's face.

The look held a question. Cassian saw it clearly. What did you do?

And under the question, so faint it could almost have been imagination, a kind of awful, tentative hope.

Leo's lips parted.

"It's warm," he said.

It was the first thing Cassian had heard him say in three weeks. His voice was low and cracked and hoarse with disuse. He seemed as surprised as anyone.

"What?"

But Leo had already turned over, his face to the wall.

…

The morning bell rang at six.

Nobody mentioned the night. Karl dressed in grim silence. Ronald, who was physically incapable of silence, managed to make it to the dining hall before he burst, whispering in Cassian's ear in a feverish stream: Did you see it, did you see anything, what happened, I won't tell, I swear, I never tell, you can trust me, is Albert dead? Cassian said no to everything. Ronald did not believe him.

At the doors of the dining hall they found Ms. Dunmore waiting.

She stood in her ash-gray dress with her hands folded, three paces from the threshold. Students flowed past her like water around a stone. Her bulging eyes picked Cassian out of the crowd, and she took a single step forward, which she never did, and then stopped herself as though remembering where she was. She held out a slip of heavy cream paper at arm's length.

"Mr. Hale."

"Yes?"

"Your kitchen duties are suspended until further notice. By order of the Deacon." The words fell flat and exact, but her gaze was fixed on the paper as if she did not trust it to stay still. "You are also excused from the five o'clock work bell."

He took the paper. The ink was black and fresh.

Ms. Dunmore opened her mouth as though to say more. Then she drew back her hand, and with an odd, stiff, formal little motion, so slight that he might have imagined it, she inclined her head.

It wasn't contempt. It wasn't pity.

It was a bow.

He stood in the doorway holding a slip of paper while the whole line of gray-cloaked students stopped and watched, and he understood, with a creeping, sinking feeling, that something between himself and everyone else in this building had changed, and that it was not a change he'd had any say in.

Across the hall, at the long table by the arched window, Silas Ward lifted his cup of tea and drank, his light eyes steady over the rim.