The Loveliest Voice

The iron door opened by itself.

It swung back slowly, as it had swung for Albert, on a dark that was no longer entirely dark. A pale light lay in it. It was soft and green and faintly warm, like the glow at the bottom of a pond, and out of it came a smell of bread and woodsmoke and rain. A kitchen smell. A smell of home.

Cassian turned.

In the arch of the Hearth, three figures stood.

They were small, and pale, and perfectly still. A round-faced boy in a nightshirt, with a cowlick. A tall thin one in a white robe, with his glasses gone, smiling shyly. And behind them, half in shadow, a third: a lean brown-haired boy in a gray blazer, with a pointed chin and a crooked, embarrassed smile.

They were singing.

It was no longer the hymn. It was something softer, simpler, a tune with no words, rising and falling like a lullaby. Ronald held out one hand. Albert nodded, kindly, as one nods to a friend arriving late at a party. And the third said, in a low, warm, unhurried voice that Cassian had never heard and knew down to the bone:

Hello, Cassian.

Come in out of the cold.

…

He did not look at the Rector.

The old man had risen. He stood beside the empty chair with his hands folded, and tears were running down his face, and he said nothing. In the red light he looked like a very old child at a window.

"It is better," he said, at last. "I promise you. It is much better in there."

Cassian smiled.

It was a gentle smile. He felt it on his face, and wondered at it. He thought of the plant, and the long cold morning of his ninth birthday, and his father's hand on the back of his neck. He thought of a boy in a bathroom with a cold cloth. He thought of a pair of cracked glasses on a pillow and a pen on a windowsill.

They made me, he thought. They bought me, and they bred me, and they trained me. I was never mine.

Everything I ever did was already written.

It should have broken him. Instead he felt only a great, plain, tired peace, such as a man feels who has set down a load he has carried so long that he forgot it was a load. He had been chosen. He had been chosen from the beginning. There was nothing to resist. There was nothing to fear. There was only a door, and a light, and three friends waiting in it.

It's the same thing, he thought. In the end it's all the same thing.

He took off the cloak.

He folded it, neatly, as he had been taught, and laid it over the chair. He took the silver clasp from his throat and set it on top. Then he stepped forward, past the Rector, who did not stir, and stood on the threshold of the Hearth.

The warmth reached him.

It was a beautiful warmth. It rose through his boots and his knees and the hollow of his chest. It was the warmth of a kitchen on a winter afternoon, of a woman at a stove, of a hand that never struck. It smelled of lavender. He let it close over him.

"Hold the door," said Cassian.

"Child—"

"Hold it for me. Please. I'd like to go in on my own."

The old man's hand shook on the iron. He nodded.

Cassian walked into the light.

…

The new boys came in the autumn.

They came by bus and by car, in the second week of September, with their trunks and their parents and their letters of admission. There were forty of them, aged thirteen to fifteen. They stood on the gravel in front of the main building, looking up, and a tall pale man with silver at his throat came out of the door to greet them.

They were put in rooms. They were fed. They were told, on the second night, that there was a tradition at Blackthorne: that at the seventh bell, every evening, the school gathered in the chapel to sing.

They found it odd at first.

It was a long, slow, strange old hymn in a language none of them knew. But the chapel was warm. The candles were lovely. The Rector was kind. And the singing, when it rose, swelled and filled the high vaults and seemed to lift them out of themselves. After a week they sang it without thinking. After a month, they sang it in their sleep.

One boy, a thin dark-haired child called Tom, from a town in Ohio, lay awake one night in the second week of October, in a bed by the window, listening.

The others were asleep. The room was black. Far off, across the lawn, the chapel stood against the stars, and the hymn was rising out of it, soft and distant, a hum of voices in the night.

He listened for a long time.

There were so many. There were forty, fifty, a hundred, a chorus, a congregation. But there was one among them that he could pick out, if he held very still. A baritone, low and steady and warm, which did not hurry, and did not waver, and did not break. It sang under all the others like a floor under a house. It sang loudest of all, and it never faltered, and there was something in it, he thought, that was almost like kindness.

Venite, it sang. Ad mensam nostram.

Tom lay with his hands folded on his chest. He felt his eyes grow heavy.

He thought it was the loveliest voice he had ever heard.

In the morning, at breakfast, he asked the boy beside him whose it was. The boy looked at him blankly and shrugged. He asked a prefect. The prefect smiled and said it was probably only the wind. He asked the Rector, a small round smiling man with spectacles and an unlit pipe, who set down his cup and looked at him for a long moment with moist, kind, tired eyes.

"Ah," said the Rector. "Yes. You'll come to know it."

"But who is he?"

The old man patted his hand.

"Nobody," said Rector Kell. "Nobody you'll ever need to be afraid of. Just a boy who stayed."

THE END. If you don’t want to stay, turn back to Chapter 85 and choose again.