The Letter

By morning, Blackthorne was silent.

It was Sunday, the first of November. The sun rose pale and cold over the hills and lit the frost on the lawn, and nothing moved. The windows of the dormitories, which had blown out in the night, had been mended in some way no one could explain; no glass lay on the floors. The cracked bell hung whole in its frame. Three hundred boys came down to breakfast in neat rows, ate their porridge, and went back to their rooms. Not one of them spoke of the night. When they were asked, they said they had slept badly.

In the chapel, Rector Kell sat in the first pew.

He had been there since dawn. He sat quite upright with his hands folded in his lap, and his dressing gown had been exchanged for a black cassock, and his hair was combed. His spectacles were back on his nose. His face was calm. He looked at the altar and the empty Hearth, and the red lamp that had been lit again, and the pew where a boy in a gray cloak had once sat, and did not blink.

The Deacon found him at nine.

She stood beside him a long time. He did not turn. At last she sat down at his side, in the cold, and they remained like that, the old man and the woman, while the sun climbed through the broken tracery and laid long bars of light across the stone.

"It held," she said, at last.

"Yes."

"For seven years."

"Yes."

"It cost us a great deal."

"It always does," said the Rector. He sounded very tired. "We shall need a new Hand."

She said nothing. Neither of them mentioned the boy who had gone down the stair.

In the school register, a clerk entered a line, in a neat round hand.

Hale, C. Transferred. Reason: family circumstances. Effective 1 Nov.

…

Leo got Ronald out by noon.

He had done what he was told. He had run to the infirmary and shaken Mrs. Abbott awake. He had gone round the dormitories, one by one, in the roaring dark, and counted heads, and sent them out into the yard in their blankets. When the roaring stopped, at the end of the night, he had stood in the middle of the lawn among three hundred shivering boys, with a swollen lip and a torn sleeve, and felt something in his chest, a knot that had been there so long he had stopped noticing, come quietly undone.

He knew then what had happened.

He took a bus on Monday with Ronald and a nurse. They went to an aunt in Dubuque, a sharp-faced woman in a flowered apron who took one look at the boy and put both arms round him without a word. Ronald hummed. He smiled his sweet vague smile. He let himself be led to a kitchen, and seated, and given a glass of milk.

Leo stood in the door a minute.

"Goodbye, Ronald," he said.

Ronald looked up. His eyes were mild, faraway, kind.

"Cassian," he said.

It was the first word he had said in three days. Leo stared at him. But he said nothing more. He turned back to his milk.

Leo went out into the street.

…

The letter reached Ottley on the fourth of November.

He had walked into Mercy Hospital in the middle of a drizzle, in a borrowed coat, and asked at the desk for Nurse Dana. He had given her a folded hymn sheet. He had said four words, from Cassian, please, and she had looked at him, and at the paper, and her face had gone pale. She took him by the arm. She led him down a corridor and up a stair to a small bright ward where a woman sat by a window, with a crossword in her lap and a man in a work jacket beside her.

She read it in her room, alone.

She read it once, and put it down. She picked it up, and read it again. Then she lay back against the pillows with the paper pressed to her chest, and shut her eyes, and her face crumpled.

Daniel came to her side. He did not ask what it said. He put his big arms round her and held her against his shoulder, and she wept, silently, with great shuddering sobs, for a long time.

"He's gone," she said at last. "Isn't he? He isn't coming back."

Daniel's own face was wet.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know, Marianne."

She did not speak again that day. But that evening, when the orderly came with the tray, she looked up and said clearly, "Put it by the window." And when it was dark and the ward lights had been dimmed, she turned her head on the pillow toward the glass, and began, very softly, to sing.

It was an old song. It had a lot of verses.

…

Leo went back to Blackthorne.

He didn't have to. Nobody asked it of him. His father, who had come up from the vault at dawn on Sunday, white-haired overnight and unable to speak, had told him to go. Go to your mother, he had said, in a cracked voice. Go anywhere. Don't come back. And Leo had kissed him, and gone, and then, a week later, come back.

He took a room in the east wing, Room 104, the one he had shared. He put his books on the shelf. He went to classes. He ate in the hall, and sat in the back of the chapel on Sundays with his hands in his lap, and stared at the altar.

Every night, at the seventh bell, he went up to the roof.

He sat on the parapet, where he and Cassian had once sat, and looked down on the chapel, with its single red slit, and the Hearth beneath, and the thing in the dark. He did not speak. He did not pray. He only sat, and watched, and counted.

Seven years.

He had made a promise. He had not said it aloud; there was no one to say it to. But it burned in him like a small hard coal. He thought of a boy with big hands, saying I'll do it. He thought of three pages laid side by side on a packing crate. He thought of how close they had come.

I'll finish it, he thought. I'll find out the part we missed. I'll be ready next time.

The wind came over the roof. The stars turned.

Some people save the whole world by vanishing from it.

And some stay, and wait, and keep the lamp lit for them.

THE END. If you want to find another way, turn back to Chapter 72 and choose again.