The Pedestal with No One On It

This time she did not go in alone.

She went in with a rope tied round her waist, the other end made fast to the door-handle, with Perrin's grudging blessing and a flask of hot cider in her pocket. She went in with the gray book buttoned inside her coat. She went in with her sister's song on her lips, low and steady, a thread of warmth to keep the cold at bay, and with the stubborn conviction that if the thing she was looking for was in that hall, she was not going to be talked out of it by a few thousand glass faces.

"You can watch," she said, to the empty corridor, as the door swung open on the silence. "I know you're there. I'm not asking you to help."

The mirrors in the passage did not answer. They stood white and furred with rime from floor to ceiling, as they had the last time.

She took a breath of that dry clean air, and stepped through.

For ten paces, nothing happened. For ten more she could hear her heart. And then, a little to her left, so slowly that at first she thought she'd imagined it, a pane of frost began to clear. It cleared from the middle outward, in a ragged circle like breath fading off a window. It showed her nothing: a dim space, a pillar. But where it cleared, a faint light fell on the floor, and the light was a path. It ran across the glass in a pale ribbon, for a few paces, and stopped.

Another pane cleared. Another ribbon. It was pointing her to the right.

She stood for a moment looking at the floor.

"I said I wasn't asking," said Elowen. Her voice wobbled. "I didn't say I minded."

She followed the light.

…

The statues were as she'd left them. The laughing woman, the boy with the kite, the old men over the chess. She walked past them with her head bowed and her eyes on the floor ahead, and she did not let her gaze rest on any face for longer than the space of a breath. It was harder than it sounded. They pulled at her. She could feel it, all the way down the row: a faint cold tug, like a child's hand at a sleeve. Each time she began to slow, the song caught in her throat and shook her free.

The cleared panes went on ahead of her, one after another, laying their cool pale ribbons along the floor. She followed past the fountain with its three children, past the black-plinthed cartographer and his unfinished map, and on through a low arch at the far end of the hall into a part of the wing she hadn't known was there.

It was an alcove. A small round room, perhaps ten feet across, lined from floor to ceiling with a pane of frosted glass so thick that it made a soft white wall, like a snowdrift in moonlight. In the center, under a dome of ice, stood a single pedestal.

It was of the same black glass as the others. It was the right height. A plate was fixed to the face of it, in letters of bronze.

ELODIE OF SCENERY CHALK.

And on the plinth above the plate, where a figure should have been, was nothing at all.

Elowen stopped in the doorway. She could not make her feet go on. The song died in her throat. She stood looking at that blank black circle, clean and bare and waiting, and the silence rose around her like water.

Remained, said the plate, underneath, in smaller letters. Remained.

It was not there yet. Whoever had written it, they had written it ahead.

"She isn't here," said Elowen aloud. It came out cracked and small. "She isn't here. She isn't here." And she did not know whether it was relief or terror that sent her to her knees.

She stayed there with her forehead against the cold, until the shaking passed.

…

It was a good while before she noticed the box.

It stood behind the pedestal, shoved into the angle where the plinth met the wall. A flat tin box, no bigger than a hymn book, with a lid that had once been painted with roses. A bit of faded periwinkle ribbon was tied round it in a knot she knew. She would have known it blindfold. A double loop pulled slightly too tight, with the tail snipped on the left.

She untied it with fingers that would not work.

Inside lay a small book. It was bound in brown cloth, with the corners worn, and it was a good deal thicker than it ought to have been, stuffed with scraps of paper, pressed flowers, a lock of dark hair tied with thread. A needle-case, with three needles. A thimble. A half-finished piece of embroidery, a branch of white blossom in silk, with the needle still threaded and thrust through the last stitch.

Elodie's hand.

She had known it from the cover. Her sister wrote on the slant, as if running to catch a coach, and every t had a little hook at the foot. Elowen turned the page.

I have decided to keep a book, it said, because Mam always said I would be a better person if I did, and because there is nobody here to talk to but the glass. The glass listens, but it does not answer. I have begun to think this is a virtue in a friend.

It is the fourth day. I am not hungry. I am not cold. I have not thought about Edmund in nine hours, which I think may be a record.

She read the first page standing. She read the second sitting on the floor. After that she did not stop.

The steward is very kind. He calls me miss. He will not look at me, and when I asked why, he said it was manners. I said I did not think it could be manners to be so unhappy at it, and he said that the master had a rule. Who is the master? The master is the house. I said, that is not an answer. He said, no, miss. It is the answer I have.

The master spoke to me tonight. Through the long mirror in the hall. He has a beautiful voice and he is the most frightened person I have ever met.

He asked me what I wanted. I said, to stop the clocks. He said he could do that. I said I was joking. He said he knew, and he could do it all the same.

A fold. A pressed forget-me-not, blue as a bruise.

I sang to him. I had not meant to. I sang the song Mam used to sing, the one on the box, and when I got to the end I sang the other end, the one I always dreamed, and there was a silence like I have never heard. Then he said, very low, very strangely, "That is the verse." I said, what verse? He said, "The one that was left out."

Elowen stopped reading. She read the sentence again.

"The one that was left out."

She went on.

Weeks. I have lost count of them. I know he is not what he says. He does not say what he is, but he is never in the room, and he is in every room, and when I laugh the glass sounds as if it were laughing, and when I weep it clouds. I have asked him once whether he was a man, and he said, "I used to be." And then, "I think." And then nothing for so long that I thought I had hurt him.

I do not pity him. I want that written. It is not pity. It is something that I haven't a word for. It is as if I had come into a room that I'd lived in once, a very long time ago, and found my own chair.

Edmund's chair is still at the table at home. I could not stand to look at it. Mam laid his place for a month after the funeral. I thought, if I stay one more day in that kitchen, I will start to lay it myself.

Here no one lays anything. Here no one dies of fever. Here the lamps burn all night and the days do not fall one after another like leaves. Here the best thing I have ever had can stay exactly as it is, and no one will ask me to let it go.

She had to put the book down.

She sat for a time with her hands on her knees, looking at the dome of ice. It was beautiful. It was a lovely, soft, forgiving thing, a room made for grief to sleep in, and she understood perfectly why her sister had wanted it. She had wanted it herself, on the glass bridge, for nine minutes.

Oh, Elodie.

She picked up the book again.

I have asked him. I have thought about it for a long while and I have asked him, and he said, "Are you certain?" and I said yes, and he said, "It is not a thing that can be undone." I said that was the point. He asked if I would think a few days more and I said I had been thinking for months. He said, "You are the second to ask." I said, who was the first? He wouldn't say.

I am not afraid. I want that written, too. I am not afraid of the dark here. He leaves a lamp.

I hope Elowen will forgive me. She will be angry. She is always angry when she is frightened. She will come after me, I think, with her chin up and her fists clenched, and her pockets full of plums.

Elowen made a sound. It was not a laugh or a sob. It was both at once.

I want her to know it was not her fault. I want her to know it was not any of their faults. I have been a poor sister to her this year, I know. I could not bear to be seen. I could not bear that she should look at me and see how little was left. But if she reads this, I want her to know that I loved her more than I loved the rest of it put together, and I hope that she will go home and marry someone tall and learn to knit.

Tomorrow. He says tomorrow.

I will stop the clocks.

That was all. The rest of the page was blank. After it, she saw, a number of leaves had been torn out. A ragged stub of paper ran along the spine, close to the stitching. There was a last entry, a single line, written on the inside of the back cover in a very small hand, very faint, and it had been written so hurriedly that the ts had lost their hooks.

He is cracking, and I think it is because of me.

…

She did not know how long she sat there.

It was long enough for the lamps in the alcove to burn down. Long enough for the pale ribbons of light to fade off the floor. Long enough for the cold to come creeping back up through her boots, and the song, which she had stopped singing without knowing it, to leave the air entirely. Rime was forming at her ankle. She felt it, and brushed it away without a thought, and did not care.

She chose.

It was the thing she had feared most of all, and the thing she'd most wanted to be false. It was not a trap. It was not a villain's snare, or a curse, or a theft. Her sister had walked into this house of her own free will and asked a man in a mirror to stop her heart, and he had said are you certain, twice.

She asked him.

Elowen put the book inside her coat. She rose. Her legs shook under her. She went back through the white hall without looking left or right, and the rope tugged at her waist, and she followed it like a blind woman, down the corridor and out of the wing.

She did not remember opening the door.

…

He was waiting in the gallery.

Not in the dark. Not in a distant pane, or a cracked glass on a back stair. He was in the great mirror at the head of the long room, the huge oval with the silver frame, and every lamp along the wall had been lit. It was the first time he had ever taken such trouble.

"You found it," said Casimir.

She leaned against the door-frame. "You knew where it was."

"I put it there."

"You put her pedestal there."

"She asked me to." The shape in the glass stood very straight. "She did not wish to be placed among the others. She said she would rather be somewhere she was of use. I told her I had no such place. And then she..." He broke off. "I made the pedestal, nonetheless. I could not bring myself to take it away."

"You said you didn't know her."

"I said I did not know where she was."

"Do you?"

He did not answer.

The light in the gallery was very bright. It lay on the long dark outline of him, on the curve of the shoulder, on the line of the lifted chin, and it hurt to look at. She did not look. She watched the floor between them, a quarter-inch of polished crystal. She had a feeling in her chest like a great hand closing.

"She wrote that you said are you certain. Twice."

"I did."

"She wrote that you said it couldn't be undone."

"It cannot."

"And you did it anyway."

"She asked me." There was a sudden raw edge in the voice. "She stood in my hall, in the middle of the night, and she asked me. She said she could not bear the world, and that there was no place in it where she could set down what she carried. I told her the truth. I told her what it would cost. And she said it was a price she was glad to pay. What was I to do? Refuse? Tell her she was wrong?"

"Yes!" The word broke out of her. "Yes, you could have told her she was wrong! You could have told her to go home! You could have said it was grief, and it would pass, and her mother needed her! You could have said anything!"

"It would not have been true."

"What's true about it?"

"That grief does not always pass." He said it quite gently. "That some things do not fade. That a thing held in the hand may be kept, whereas a thing left to the world is lost. That there are people in this world, Elowen, for whom it is better not to be released."

"That's what you said to her."

"It is what I believe."

"It's what you need to believe."

Silence. A long one.

"Here," said Casimir, in a low unsteady voice, "one can keep the best of what one has. One may stand in the best hour of one's life, and it stays, and it does not fade. It does not rot, or sour, or leave. It is the only peace I have ever been able to offer anyone."

It was an extraordinary thing to hear. She had heard it, in nearly the same words, from her sister's pen.

And she saw, then, as one sees a lamp lit in a distant window, that he was not speaking of Elodie.

He was not speaking of the statues, or of the Land, or of the snow. He was standing in the center of his bright, cold gallery, with his arms at his sides, and telling her what he had been telling himself for three hundred years: that to keep a thing was better than to love it; that to stand still was better than to live; that the best of everything was the part that never changed. And that if he said it enough, it might come to be true.

It isn't for her, she thought. It's for him.

"Oh," said Elowen, very quietly. "Oh, Casimir."

The figure in the glass flinched, as from a blow.

"Do not," he said hoarsely. "Do not look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you."

"You are looking at me exactly like that."

She was. She couldn't help it. It was all there, in his outline, in the stoop of his shoulders and the clench of his empty hands: the whole of a man's long lonely life, shaped like a question.

What would it be, she wondered, to be loved by someone who wasn't going to leave?

She shut the thought away, and shut the door on it, and shot the bolt. It rattled the whole way down.

"I'll be in my room," said Elowen.

"Elowen—"

"I need to read the rest."

She went. She took the stairs one at a time, and in every mirror she passed, a tall dark figure stood with its head bent and its hands at its sides, and watched her go, and did not say a word.