The Hour After Midnight

Sleep refused her, as it had refused her every night since the diary.

She tried the usual remedies. She tried counting plum trees. She tried reciting the neighbors in order of quarrel, and when that failed she tried them in order of size. She lay on her left side and on her right and on her back with her eyes shut, and the glass ticked and shifted in the walls like a great slow clock, and each time she came near the edge of rest, she saw a bare black plinth, and a bronze plate, and a blank place waiting for her sister.

At last she gave it up. She put on her coat over her nightgown and a pair of thick wool stockings, and tucked the gray book under one arm, and went out into the corridor with no lamp, and let her feet decide.

They took her down the east stair and along the second gallery and into the long ballroom with the breathing mirrors. The glass there had gone dark and quiet hours ago. But at the far end, in the great oval between the pillars, a single lamp had been left burning, low and golden, and its light made a circle on the floor.

In the middle of the circle stood a chair. It was plain and high-backed, with a cushion of faded blue. Beside it was a small round table, and on the table, a steaming cup.

She stood in the doorway for some time.

"I did not ask for you," said a voice from the glass. It was very dry, and pitched with great care to be casual. "I merely happened to have the kettle on."

"You don't have a kettle."

"I have Perrin. Perrin has a kettle. Perrin has an appalling number of kettles, and he leaves them about in the evenings like a man dropping hats." A pause. "It is chamomile. I am told it is calming. I have no opinion."

Elowen looked at the cup. She looked at the chair, and at the oval of dark silver above it, in which a long still shape had settled, head bent, with the air of someone who has been waiting a great while to be discovered.

"You've been sitting there since I went upstairs," she said.

"I have been reading."

"What?"

"Whatever was to hand." He was silent a moment. "It was the inventory of the linen press. It is more engrossing than you would think."

She laughed. She did not want to, and could not help it, and it came out as a rusty, startled, breathless sound that shook the hair on her neck. The cup rattled on the table. In the glass, the long shape of him straightened a little, as if pleased with itself.

"Sit," said Casimir. "Please. Drink your tea. I shall not say a word."

She sat. She drank. It was good tea. It tasted like the dried flowers her mother hung from the kitchen rafters, and for a moment, with the cup in her hands and the steam on her face, she very nearly remembered the color of her hair.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

…

"You have not asked," he said at last.

"Asked what?"

"The thing you came down here to ask."

"I didn't come down here to ask anything." She turned the cup in her hands. "I came down because I couldn't sleep. And because I wanted to be somewhere that wasn't that room."

"I see."

"I'm not angry at you."

"You may be, if you wish. I have given you sufficient cause."

"I'm angry at her," said Elowen, and surprised herself. She stared at the cup. "I think I'm angry at Elodie. I've been trying to find some way to be angry at you, since it would be so much simpler. But it's her. She did this. She walked out, and left a note, and left my father crying, and then she asked a man in a mirror to stop her clock because she couldn't be bothered to try. And I've spent six months crossing a country with a pack of frozen potatoes to find out that she—" She stopped. Her voice had gone high and thin. "That she had it all arranged."

"She did not have it arranged."

"She asked you!"

"She asked me because there was no one else. She had no other door." The voice was gentle. "I do not defend her. I do not say it was well done. I say only that the world had nothing in it for her to hold, and that she was very tired, and that when one is tired enough, a house of glass looks very like a bed."

"She could have come to me."

"Yes."

"I would've— I'd have—" Her chin shook. "I don't know what I'd have done. I wasn't any use to her. I never was. She was the one people loved. I was the one holding the basket. And I couldn't think of one thing to say."

"You came all this way."

"Too late."

"You came," said Casimir, "when no one else did. Perhaps, in the end, that is the thing she hoped for. That someone would not leave her to it. That she would be missed enough to be pursued."

Her throat closed. She put the cup down, carefully, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

"That's the kindest thing anyone's said to me in a week."

"Do not tell Perrin. He is very proud of his chamomile."

She laughed again, wetly. When she lifted her face, the lamp-lit mirror held a dark figure leaning, very slightly, toward her, with its head tilted, and she had the oddest sense that it was holding itself back with great effort from a gesture it did not know how to make.

…

"Tell me about her," said Casimir. "Not what she did. What she was like. When you were young."

So she told him.

She told him about the millpond, and the winter Elodie was nine and went through the ice and came up blue and furious and swearing. She told him about the time they had hidden for a whole afternoon in the hayloft because a cousin had come to stay and eaten all the plums, and about the hundred and one separate occasions on which Elodie had pinched her under the table at church. She told him about Elodie's singing. How she could make an entire congregation forget to breathe. How she'd sung at Edmund's funeral without a quaver, and then gone home and put her fist through a window.

She told him about the dog.

"Describe him," said Casimir.

"I can't. I mean, I can. I just don't have his name."

"Describe him anyway."

She frowned. "He was brown. Sort of. Reddish. He had one white sock, and ears too big for him, and a tail he never learned to control. He slept on my feet. He was frightened of geese. There was a gander in the Calders' yard that he used to run from, and one winter the gander chased him all the way home, and he came through the kitchen door like a cannonball and hid in the bread bin."

"In the bread bin."

"Head first. Bottom out. The tail was wagging." She was grinning, now, helplessly. "Mam hit the gander with a ladle."

"I think I hate him," said Casimir.

She blinked. "What?"

"The dog." He said it with a gravity so profound that she took a moment to understand. "I find I cannot like him. He is warm, I take it, and a fool, and has you for a mistress, and sleeps on your feet. He eats from your hand. He ran down the road to meet you. I have lived in this house three hundred years, and I have never once been run to meet. I am, I find, extremely jealous of a bread-bin."

"You're jealous of a dog."

"I am jealous of anyone who may be touched without catastrophe." He was entirely serious. "I should like it noted that I bear him no ill will. I wish only that I could have been born with a tail."

She put her face in her hands and howled.

She laughed until her sides hurt. She laughed until she had to bend over her knees, and the tears ran through her fingers, and the lamp seemed to gutter and flare with the sound of it. And the whole time, the dark shape in the mirror stood very quietly with its arms folded, and let her. It had the air of a man who has just discovered that he can make a joke, and is working out, with a kind of horror, how often he might be permitted to do so again.

When she looked up, wiping her eyes, he had unfolded his arms. He was standing a little straighter. And his voice, when he spoke, was warm.

"There," said Casimir. "I thought so."

"What?"

"You have not laughed like that since you came."

"You don't know how I laughed before I came."

"I know how you hum," he said. "I know how you walk. I know that you leave a candle burning when you think nobody's watching, and that you stop at the third landing every night to listen to the stairs. I know you press your thumb against that box when you are afraid, and that you keep your left hand in your pocket when you are lying." A pause. "I am a great deal too observant for my own good. It comes of having nothing to do."

"You've been watching me."

"I have been watching everything. It has simply become more interesting."

She sat very still. A strange warmth was rising in her. It started at the base of the throat and spread outward, through her chest, along her arms, down to the tips of her fingers. She told herself it was the tea.

…

They talked until the lamp burned low. She told him about the harvest, and the Michaelmas fair, and the time her father had won a prize pig by sheer accident and had to be talked out of naming it Duchess. He listened to all of it with a sort of drowsy fascination, as a child listens to a story it has been told before and wishes to hear again. When she asked him questions, he answered. It was a small thing, perhaps. But it was different. It was a man who had been standing in the doorway with his hand on the latch, and had finally come in and sat down.

"Do you remember it?" she asked. "How you came to be... here?"

"No."

"At all?"

"It is not a matter of forgetting." His voice was quiet. "I have gone looking, more than once, as you do in a pocket. There is a cold place, and a great deal of white, and a woman's hand. Before that there is nothing. It is not even dark. It is simply not there, like the far side of the moon. I have the impression of having begun in the middle of a sentence."

"That must be terrible."

"It is merely strange." A pause. "I have had a long time to accustom myself to it. One learns to live without a beginning. One makes do."

"And the song?"

She had not meant to say it. It slid out of her like a card from a sleeve.

The mirror went very still.

"The end of it," she said. "The note. You sang it on the bridge. You've been humming it all week. You told my sister it was the verse that was left out." Her voice was soft. "Where did you learn it, Casimir?"

For a long time he said nothing. She thought he'd refuse. She thought the lamp would go out, and the glass go dark, and he'd leave her again with her questions, as he had before.

"I don't know," he said at last. "It was in me before I was in the house."

"What does that mean?"

"I do not know. I have asked myself. I know that the first time I heard her sing it, your sister, in this hall, I felt as one does when a door that has been closed for a lifetime opens a crack and shows the room beyond. I knew the tune. I knew the words. I knew exactly where it ended. Yet I had never heard them." He drew a breath, and it caught. "I had never been taught. But the last verse is the oldest thing in me. It is older than the house. And nobody, in all this time, has known it but I."

"Until Elodie."

"Until Elodie. And you."

"I don't know it."

"No." There was something in the voice that she could not name. A kind of cautious wonder, with fear all through it. "But you are going to."

The lamp flickered. Somewhere in the walls the glass gave a long, slow, resonant sigh, as of a great animal turning over in its sleep.

Neither of them spoke.

…

The first gray stirring of dawn was coming through the high windows when she realized she had been staring at his hands.

Not his face. She'd stopped trying to make out his face. But he had a way of resting his hands on the glass, in the evenings, when he thought she wasn't looking, with the fingers slightly spread, as if he were testing a surface for warmth. They were long, fine hands. They were hardly more than an outline. But in the pewter light she could see the line of the knuckle, and the delicate curve of the thumb, and it struck her suddenly that they were not at all like glass. They were like hands.

Like the hands of someone who has been waiting a long time to be asked to dance, she thought, and then was appalled at herself.

She looked away. She said, briskly, "I should sleep."

"You should," said Casimir.

"It's nearly morning."

"Yes."

"I've got to see Perrin about the roofs."

"Quite."

Neither of them moved.

She picked up the empty cup, and put it down. She smoothed her coat across her knees. She found that she was waiting, with an absurd and breathless patience, for him to say something that would give her a reason to stay. And she found that he was doing exactly the same. The silence stretched, bright and trembling, like a bowstring.

"You ought to sleep," he repeated. His voice was very low. It was the voice of a man who has said a thing he does not mean and is waiting to be contradicted. "Elowen. Go to bed."

"All right."

"I mean it."

"I know you do."

"Then—"

"I'm going."

"Good."

She rose. She took two steps toward the door, and stopped, and turned, and looked at the mirror where he stood. It was a mistake. She knew it as she did it. But it was already done.

"Goodnight, Casimir," she said.

For a moment she thought he would not answer. And then, so softly that it might have been the first stir of morning in the glass, he said:

"Stay a little longer."

She sat back down.

Outside, the light crept on across the hills of glass snow, silver, then pearl, then white. It was a long time before either of them spoke again, and neither of them noticed when it came.