The Door He Closed

He found the crack at noon, and by one o'clock he had decided what to do about it.

It was small. That was what made it so dreadful. It lay across the back of the hand he could see in the long glass of the east landing, as fine as a single hair, white against the pale blue of the skin: a line no longer than the first joint of a finger, running from the knuckle toward the wrist. He turned the hand in the light. He closed it, and opened it. The line moved with the bones as a scratch moves on a window when the sun comes round, and did not close.

For a time, he did not think at all. He stood in the great still house, behind forty panes of silvered crystal, and looked at it.

It is the first, he thought. And then, with the awful cold clarity of a man who has been lying to himself for centuries and has just run out of room: No. It is not the first. It is only the first that I have let myself see.

There had been the glass on the second gallery. The mirror in the hall. The little looking-glass on the servants' stair, and the pane in the west corridor, and one by one, over the last fortnight, every thread of white he had told himself was a defect in the silvering. There had been a girl, once, in a blue shawl, who had stood very near and said, in a voice like a bell, You're cracking, aren't you? and he had told her no. He had told her it was nothing.

He had been lying to her. He had been lying to himself.

He had danced with it, he supposed, in his fashion. He had sat up in the night and talked about dogs. He had laughed, which he had not known he could still do, and when the girl at the end of the hall had put her palm against the glass, he had put his own against it and felt, quite distinctly, in a body that could not be touched, the warmth of her pulse.

And now there was this.

It will go on, he thought. It will spread. A hand. An arm. Then the rest. She will sit across from me and I shall go to pieces under her eyes, one fine white line at a time, and she will watch it. She will not look away. She is not the sort.

He thought of the pedestal in the white alcove. He thought of a bronze plate with a name, and the silence in which the last cracks had run.

He thought: Not again. I will not do it again.

And he thought, with great and deliberate cruelty, because that was the only form of courage left to him: Then you will have to be unkind.

…

She came to the great hall that night in high spirits, which was the worst of it.

She had slept for most of the day, and woken rested, and eaten Perrin's plum tart and a second tart, and spent an hour on the stair writing in the gray book with her tongue between her teeth. She had hardly noticed the long gray light fade over the hills. She had a new song for the east gallery, a bright quick country thing about a miller and his goose, and she was humming it as she crossed the floor, with her lamp swinging, and her coat unbuttoned, and the smudge of ink still on her chin.

The hall was dark.

She stopped in the doorway. Every lamp along the wall had been put out. The mirrors were all unlit, black and blind and bare, and the great oval at the far end held nothing but a cold smear of starlight. There was no chair, no table, no cup. The room had the air of a place that has been tidied for visitors.

"Casimir?"

Silence.

"Casimir. I'm early. I know I'm early. I didn't want to waste the dusk." She came a few paces in, with her lamp held high. "I've got a new one for the east gallery. It's about a goose. Perrin says it's vulgar. I think you'll like it."

A pause. Then, from the farthest end of the hall, in the dark of the oval, a voice. It was level and cool, and so familiar in its polish that for a moment she did not hear what had been taken out of it.

"That will not be necessary."

"What won't?"

"The goose." A faint rustle, like a gloved hand turning a page. "I have been reconsidering our arrangement. I find that the east gallery may be left. The glass there has held up better than I expected. A fortnight of your attentions will carry it through the winter, I should think."

"A fortnight?"

"The terms were, I believe, a nightly warming."

"They were."

"They have been amended." The shape in the glass had resolved at last into a long dark outline with its back half-turned, as a man turns when he does not wish to be asked about his health. "I have no further requirement for the song. You are, of course, at liberty to continue as a guest, and Perrin will see that you want for nothing. But the evenings are no longer necessary."

She stood quite still.

"You're joking."

"I never joke."

"You told me you were jealous of a dog."

"I was speaking figuratively."

"You asked me to stay."

"That," said Casimir, "was a lapse."

It was so smooth, and so cold, and so completely, perfectly civil that she did not feel it for a moment. It was like a knife that has gone in so cleanly it leaves no pain, only a wondering sense of something wrong. She stood with the lamp in her hand and the goose song dying in her head, and her own heart thudding in her ears.

"What happened?" said Elowen.

"Nothing has happened."

"Something's happened. You're being horrible on purpose."

"I am being clear."

"No," she said slowly. "You're being cruel. You're very good at it. I wouldn't have known if I hadn't heard you not do it for a fortnight."

The outline in the glass flinched. It was the smallest movement. It was gone before she was sure she'd seen it. But the voice that came after it was a degree colder, a shade more brittle, like glass under the first frost.

"I have a further requirement," said Casimir. "You are no longer to enter the central tower."

"The what?"

"The central tower. The one that rises from the middle of the keep." He did not turn. "You have been in the habit of wandering, and I allowed it. I should not have. There is a chamber at the top of it, and a great deal of old machinery, and some of it is dangerous. You will oblige me by keeping to the lower galleries."

"There's a chamber?"

"There are many chambers."

"And what's in this one?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

It was a lie. She could hear it. She could hear it so clearly that she almost wanted to laugh, because he'd given himself away in the plainest and clumsiest manner imaginable. A man who forbids you a door is a man who has put something behind it.

Elodie, she thought. It's her. It's where she is.

The thought hit her like a cold hand, and she very nearly cried out.

She did not. She set the lamp down on the floor with care, so that it should not shake. She straightened. She raised her chin, which she knew was a mistake, because it was always the first thing that Elodie had noticed, and the last.

"Say it to my face," said Elowen.

"I beg your pardon?"

"If you're sending me away, say it. Don't hide behind the glass and talk about the east gallery. Tell me what you're afraid of."

"I am not afraid of anything."

"Liar."

"Miss Elowen—"

"Don't you Miss Elowen me!" She took two quick strides, and stopped a pace from the mirror. "For two weeks I've sat here and told you the whole of my life. You've seen me cry. You've seen me laugh like a donkey. You know what my father's face looks like when he's lying. And now you're standing in the dark with your back to me telling me I'm a lapse. What did I do? What did I say? What changed between last night and now?"

"Nothing."

"Something."

"You are a stranger," said Casimir, "to whom I have extended a courtesy. You are in my house under an agreement. I have allowed it to become a good deal more than it was, and that was an error, and I am correcting it. It is not an insult. It is merely the proper order of things."

"The proper order."

"Yes."

"You said you'd never lie to me."

"I am not lying."

"You said," said Elowen, and her voice was beginning to shake, "that you'd rather I were angry with you in this house than right about you outside it. You said that. I was there."

"I said many things."

"Did you mean them?"

He did not answer.

She waited. She counted to ten in her head, as she had once counted steps in the fog, and watched the dark shape in the glass, and the stillness of the shoulders, and the way the fingers of one hand were clenched against the other arm as though to keep it from shaking.

He's hurting, she thought. And the thought, instead of softening her, made her more furious than she had ever been in her life.

"You coward," said Elowen.

It dropped between them like a stone down a well.

"I have been called worse."

"Not by me. You've called me a hundred things, and you said I'd a crude hot-tempered fire, and a dreadful voice, and no sense. I took it. I liked it, God help me. But you can't be this afraid and call it good manners. You can't just..." Her breath caught. "You can't open a door for me and shut it again in the same week and expect me to say thank you."

"I expect nothing."

"Good. Then you won't be disappointed."

She picked up her lamp.

Her hand was shaking so badly that the flame jumped. She steadied it. She turned and walked the length of the hall, back straight, boots ringing, in a silence so deep that she heard each separate step, and she did not look at a single mirror. At the door, she stopped, one hand on the frame.

"I'm going to find her," said Elowen, without turning. "I'm going to find my sister. I'll look in every room in this house. I'll go up your tower if I have to climb it on the outside. And I'll do it without your help, since you don't want to give it."

"Elowen—"

"Don't."

"Elowen. Please. I am asking you not to—"

"Goodnight, Casimir," she said.

She went out. The door closed behind her with a soft, final chime.

…

She made it as far as the second landing before her legs gave out.

She sat down on the cold glass stair, in the dark, with the lamp at her feet and her hands over her face, and let the fury go through her like a fever. It lasted a long time. When it had burned itself out, there was nothing left underneath but a dry, hollow ache, the size and shape of a man's voice saying a lapse.

"Miss."

Perrin stood three steps below her. He had a tray, with a pot of tea on it that nobody had asked for, and he was looking at the wall to her left with the stricken courtesy of a man who has overheard a great deal and would give a year of his life to have heard none of it.

"I'm fine," said Elowen.

"Naturally."

"Tell me about the central tower."

The tray rattled. It was the smallest sound, a cup shifting against a saucer, but she was looking at the copper kettle on the wall, and in it she saw his long glass face go quite still.

"I am afraid I am not at liberty—"

"Is it a room with a chamber at the top and a great deal of old machinery?"

"It is," said Perrin carefully, "a tower."

"Does it have a name?"

A very long pause. "In the old days they called it the Heart, miss," said the steward. "Because it stood in the middle. Nothing more than that. It is a plain sort of place. I would not trouble to go up."

"Perrin."

"Miss?"

"Is my sister in the Heart?"

He didn't answer. He set the tray down on the step, very gently, as if it were something that might break. He stood up. His hands were folded in front of him, and she saw that the fine silver threads in his wrists had begun, very slightly, to shake.

"Drink your tea," said Perrin, and she knew that she had her answer, and that he would never in a hundred years be able to say it aloud.

She drank the tea. It was hot and sweet and tasted of honey. She sat on the stair and held the cup in both hands, and looked up the long dark shaft of the tower toward a place she couldn't see, and made herself a promise she had no business making.

I'll find the door.

And when I do, I won't ask permission.

…

For a long time, he did not move.

He stood in the dark, in the oval at the end of the hall, with the starlight on the floor in front of him and his two hands pressed to his chest. The house was entirely silent. It had never been so silent. It was the quiet of a held breath, of a roomful of mirrors all waiting at once to see what a man would do.

She is gone, he thought.

Good.

It is what I wanted.

He turned his head, slowly, toward the nearest pane. It was a tall one, set into the pillar, a little to his left. It had been given a hairline crack the night she wept in the west wing. He had not noticed it grow. He had not noticed that it had run, in the space of a quarter of an hour, from the top corner to the bottom, in a long clean bolt of white, as straight as a drawn line.

He looked at it.

He lifted his hand, the one with the thread of white across the knuckle, and laid the palm against it, very softly, as one lays a hand on the side of a sick horse.

The glass sang. It was a thin high note that ran up through the stones of the hall, and was answered from the farthest gallery, and the next, and the next, until the whole castle had taken it up like a choir in an empty church. The crack widened. A shard of silver came free of the pane, hung for a moment in the air, and fell, ringing, to the floor.

He did not move.

He stood and listened to it, the tiny glittering sound, and the long hollow quiet after, and the tick, tick, tick, of the panes cooling one by one in the dark.

Then, in a voice that no one in the world would ever hear, he said, "I am sorry."

The mirrors gave back his words, one after another, down the long hall.

None of them answered.