Memories on Silver Trays

POV: Roz

There were two hundred and twelve hearts in the Great Hall, and Roz had counted every one before the first waltz ended.

It was a habit, not a talent. When she was a girl in the bayou, her grandmother had taught her to sit on the porch at dusk and sort the sounds: the frogs from the crickets, the crickets from the cicadas, the heron's wingbeat from the wind. Everything has a pulse, cher. You just have to be quiet enough. She had been quiet ever since. In a room this size, with this much glass, the sound came at her from every direction at once, a vast soft thunder, a shifting field of wet, rapid, living drums.

Most of them were the same.

That was the first thing she noticed, and it chilled her. In any crowd, at any ball, you would expect a dozen different rhythms: the skipping flutter of a debutante, the lazy thud of a drunk, the clenched hurry of a man with a lie. Here, in the gilded center of the Charter Houses, nine in ten of the hearts beat in a low, regular, almost sleepy swing, a slow rocking pulse like a cradle. They were calm. They were all so terribly calm. She could hear the same rhythm in the footmen against the wall, in the matrons, in the old men with their medals. It was the heartbeat of people who have been told everything is fine.

Evening Lamp, she thought, and her mouth went thin. They all drink it. Even the rich.

She plucked a long clear run on the harp and listened further.

The twelve guards were easy to find. They stood in pairs along the colonnade with their hands behind their backs, and their hearts were compressed, tight and even, like men holding their breath: soldiers waiting for an order. She tagged them, one by one, and put the sounds away. Two at the east door. Two at the west. Two at the Gallery. Six more patrolling the corridors.

And then she heard one that was wrong.

…

It was across the room, under the great electric chandelier, in a little ring of bowing men. She would not have picked it out if she had not been listening for a different wrongness. It did not stand out by being loud or fast or odd. It stood out by being nothing at all.

Steady.

It was steady the way a metronome is steady. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Sixty beats to the minute, to the second, without a flicker. There was no rise at a joke, no catch at a pause, no tiny shiver of acceleration when someone he disliked came near. The man was laughing. She could see him: tall, spare, silver-haired, in a plain gray evening coat of exquisite cut, with a face like a good bank. His head was thrown back, his teeth were white, and the little circle of men about him roared with obedient mirth. But the heart in his chest did not so much as skip. It beat on like a clock in an empty house.

That's not a heart, she thought. That's a decision.

Beside her, the second violin sawed on, and the Maestro's baton made its small neat arcs, and the waltz rolled to its end in a flutter of applause. She let her hands drop to her lap.

"Who is that?" she murmured, to nobody. "The gray coat."

"Whitcomb," said Josiah, from behind her left shoulder, so low she felt it more than heard. "The Chairman."

The name went through her like a cold finger.

She had known it, of course. She had known it for six years, as one knows the name of the river, or the weather. But she had never seen the man. He had always been a signature on a paper, a stamp on a warrant, a face on the front of the Courier that she turned over to wrap fish. She looked at him now. He had stopped laughing. He had turned his head, quite slowly, toward the stage.

For a moment she thought he was looking at her. He wasn't. He was looking at the Maestro, with mild, polite, interested courtesy. Then he turned back to his companions, and the cold went out of her, a little, and left her limbs weak.

His heart had not changed at all.

…

The band got a quarter hour at ten. A long table had been set for them in an alcove off the Hall, behind a screen of potted palms, with sandwiches, a decanter of wine, and a footman posted at the door to see that nothing was stolen. The footman was a girl.

She was about twelve.

Roz noticed her last, which she would remember afterward with a small sharp shame. She was a thin small thing in a gray livery gown a size too big, with a white cap over pale hair, and she stood by the door with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the middle distance. A very good servant. Perfectly quiet. She did not shift her weight. She did not look at the sandwiches, though the band had been playing for an hour and it was plain from the set of her narrow shoulders that she had not eaten since morning.

"Are you hungry, sweetheart?" said Roz.

The girl turned her head.

Her eyes were wide, and clear, and brown. They rested on Roz's face with perfect courtesy, and there was nobody in them.

"No, ma'am," said the girl. "Thank you."

It was a lovely voice. It was entirely without inflection. Roz looked at her, and for a moment the pulse in her ears went out of tune. She heard the child's heartbeat then, clearly: slow, and soft, and smooth, so smooth, with nothing in it, like water in a pipe. A heart with nothing to say.

"What's your name?"

"I am Number Seven, ma'am."

"Your name, cher."

A little pause. A frown, so slight it might have been a ripple.

"I don't think I have one, ma'am," said the girl, politely, and turned back to the door.

Roz set her glass down. The wine, she found, tasted of nothing.

"That's what I reported."

Josiah had come up behind her. He was standing with his back to the potted palms, in the dim green shade, looking out through the fronds at the child. His mask was off. His face was so white that the shadows under his cheekbones looked painted on. "Quarter Four. Girl, nine, foundling. Tithed fifty-five percent. They place them in the great houses. They're docile. They're discreet. They are cheap to keep, and nobody asks them to be anything." His voice was quite flat. "I did not know it was this. I knew the numbers. I never saw the face."

"Don't," said Roz.

"I'm not asking for—"

"I know what you're not asking for." She did not turn. "Just look at her."

They looked at her together.

The silence between them was not the old one. She felt it as a difference in the air. It was not forgiveness; she wanted that perfectly clear to herself. But it was something like the quiet of two people in a church who have both seen the same terrible thing in the same window.

…

The Memory Tasting began at half past ten.

She heard it before she saw it: a stir in the Hall, a tinkle of glass, a rising ripple of delighted voices. Roz moved to the edge of the screen and looked out. Along the north wall, where the long mirrors hung, the footmen and maids were coming out in a procession, bearing silver trays.

On each tray stood a row of tiny cut-glass goblets. In each goblet was a thread of light.

It was like looking at a lamp-lit mist. A pale shimmer, gold or blue or green or rose, hung suspended in the bowl of each little cup, turning and trembling, alive. Where the footmen passed, the ladies lifted them. They sipped. A little sigh went up. A woman in peacock silk closed her eyes and swayed, lips parted, like someone hearing a favorite song.

"A storm at sea," she said, in a dreamy voice. "A sailor's first storm. The wind. Oh, I could drown in it."

"Try the green," said the lady beside her. "A child's first day at school. The smell of the chalk. It is so fresh."

"Is it a real one?"

"My dear, they are all real. Donated, of course. Quite properly, under the Tithe."

"Of course."

Roz's gorge rose. She gripped the edge of the screen.

They were drinking them. They were passing the stolen mornings of other people's lives from hand to hand like canapés. A man at the end of the table tipped back a cup of crimson and laughed out loud: "A wedding night! Splendid! Whose is this?" And a servant, hollow-eyed, answered, in the sing-song of a catalog: "A stevedore from Pier Four, sir. Twenty-three years old. Tithed in the spring."

"Marvelous. Marvelous. He must have been very much in love."

He was, thought Roz. He was. And now someone else has had it, and he doesn't even know what's missing.

She had thought she knew the Tithe. She had thought she'd learned its measure, five years ago, in a kitchen, with potatoes on the floor. But she had known it as a theft. She had not known it as an appetite. She had not known there were people who tasted it.

The trays moved on. A little girl in a gray gown came along the wall, carrying one.

It was Number Seven. She walked in step with the others, small and exact and expressionless, her pale hair tucked under her cap. A dowager reached out and took a cup of silver, and sipped it, and said, "Oh. Oh, how lovely. Somebody's mother, singing." She smiled. She did not look at the child.

Roz's hands closed on the palm leaf and tore it.

"Roz," said Josiah, quietly.

"I'm all right."

"Your heart is—"

"I know what it is."

She breathed. In for four. Out for six.

Not here, she thought. Not now. Mama is in a vial, in a room under this floor. If I strike one person in this room I never see her again. She held it like a stone in her hand until the nausea passed, and the roaring in her ears sank down into the old, patient, listening quiet.

…

At eleven thirty-five, the Maestro raised his baton.

It was not a signal. It was only a pause, a tap of the stick on the stand, to call the quintet back from its recess. But Roz saw him look at the clock above the gallery arch, and look at the first violin, and slide his gaze, with great lightness, along the wall to a serving girl in a gray gown and a white cap, who was holding a tray of champagne a little too still.

Five minutes, thought Roz.

She sat. She laid her hands on the harp.

"Waltz," said Dex, softly, to the quintet, and brought the baton down.

It was a long, slow, rocking tune, the sort played near the end of a ball, when the candles are guttering and the older couples begin to nod. Felix's bow squeaked. Josiah's viola poured out its dark honey. And as the sound rose to the glass of the roof, she let her mind go loose, as her grandmother had taught her, and drifted out over the Hall, listening.

There.

Two guards stood in the north corridor, outside the Gallery. She marked them from the beat of their hearts: one old and rough, with a catch in the upstroke; one young, quick, eager. They were bored and a little cold, and they had been standing for four hours. She did not want to hurt them. She wanted them to be slow.

She found the thread of them. She reached.

It was never easy. A heart is not a lock. It is a muscle, and a habit, and a hundred thousand tiny arguments with the blood. But she knew the trick of it now. Not to push. To lean. She laid her attention against the old man's pulse the way you lay your hand on a tired horse, and let her own heartbeat drop, drop, drop, down into the slow warm well of sleep.

Easy. Easy now. You're tired. It's a long night.

The old man's heart slowed. It sank into a sleepy roll, lub... dub... lub... dub... The younger followed. In the corridor, she felt the drowsy thickening of two minds. One guard leaned against the wall. The other shifted on his feet, blinking.

Good.

And something, deep in her, let go.

It was not painful. It never was. It was only a quiet little tearing, as a seam gives under a hand, and a rush of cool air through a place that had been warm. She stopped breathing for a second. She knew exactly what she'd done.

Gone.

She did not dare reach for it. Not yet. She finished the bar. She turned the page of her music with a hand that did not tremble, and played three more phrases, and then she let herself, very gently, look.

A laugh.

It had been a laugh. A low, rich, wheezing laugh, with a cackle at the top of it and a little cough, the laugh of an old woman on a porch, rocking, when something struck her as funnier than it should. Mawmaw. Her grandmother. She had heard it every day of her life for fifteen years. She had known it in the dark. She knew precisely what it had been.

She could not hear it.

She sat at the harp, and played, and in her mind there was nothing there at all, a quiet in the shape of a laugh. She knew the porch. She knew the rocking chair. She knew the old woman's face, the one eyelid that drooped. She could not hear what had been so funny.

Say the price out loud, said a dry voice in her memory, and she nearly laughed herself, and didn't.

She would tell him afterward. My grandmother's laugh, she would say. And he would write it down.

…

Whitcomb came across the floor at eleven forty-four.

She heard him from forty feet. The steadiness of him came first, the clean, flat, metronome tick of the heart, cutting through the muddy swell of the crowd like a cold current through warm water. Then the click of his heels. Then something else, faint but unmistakable, under the music, a small bright sound like a cricket in a pocket.

Tic... tic... tic.

A watch. A pocket watch, she thought. It was ticking a hair too slow between beats, as if, at every second, it paused to consider.

He was heading for the stage. A little court of men fell back for him. He walked easily, one hand behind his back, smiling the faint public smile of a host. The quintet played on. The Maestro lifted his baton, and brought it down, and did not turn.

Whitcomb stopped.

He had stopped directly behind the podium, perhaps two paces from the Maestro's back, to speak to a lady in a gown of cloth of silver. It was the most casual of pauses. He bent his head to listen. He murmured something. She laughed.

And Roz heard Dex's heart blow apart.

It was like a gun going off in a closed room. For two hours it had been a low, slow, locked, compressed thing. Now it erupted. It went from a crawl to a gallop in a single stroke, thundering, wild, uneven, with a kind of broken stagger in it, as of a creature that has run into a wall at full speed. Not the quick sharp fright of a man caught with stolen goods. She knew that rhythm. She'd heard it a hundred times, in a hundred thieves. This was something older and much worse.

It was the heart of a child in the dark.

She looked up.

The Maestro stood at his podium, with his silver mask and his raised baton. His back was perfectly straight. His arm moved in the same neat arcs. His face, from where she sat, was invisible. But the cane, propped against the stand at his side, was shaking: a fine, fast, invisible quiver that ran from the rattlesnake's head to its tail. The fingers of his left hand had closed on the edge of the podium so hard the knuckles were white.

Tic... tic... tic.

The watch ticked behind him.

Whitcomb straightened. He made a small, gracious bow to the lady in silver. He looked at the Maestro's back for a mild half second, as a man looks at a clock he doesn't mean to consult. Then he moved away, across the glass floor, and the steady heart went with him, and was lost among the others in the great soft thunder of the room.

Dex's heart did not slow at once. It went on pounding, for six long bars, seven, eight, as the baton rose and fell. Slowly, deliberately, as though pulled down by a rope, it dragged itself back to the low, slow march.

The waltz played on.

Roz sat with her hands on the strings, and her eyes on the narrow rigid back of the boy on the podium, and thought: No.

A man did not shake like that for money. A man did not shake like that for fear of the law. She had listened to the hearts of the condemned, and the bereaved, and the mothers of the stillborn. She knew what grief did to a pulse. And she knew what hate did, which was another matter, a fast hot clean current that ran under the skin.

This was neither. This was recognition.

Whatever he is hiding, she thought, it is in that man's pocket.

She looked at the clock. It was eleven forty-seven.

She played the next bar.