Debts

POV: Roz

Nobody looked at anyone, and the soup went cold.

Roz sat on the end of a bench in the nave of St. Cinder's with her hands wrapped round a bowl she had not touched, and counted the hearts in the room. It was an old habit, a way of not feeling things. Ma Tilly's, steady and enormous, over by the stove. A dozen children's, quick and light, tucked away in the pews. Josiah's, beside her, slow and held, like a man carrying a full cup across a floor. Hollis's, across the circle, with a hitch in it where the cold water had got into his chest. Felix's, next to him: small, fast, and silent.

Felix was still wet. Ma Tilly had thrown a blanket round him, and his hair stood up in dried salt spikes, and his spectacles, mended with a bit of wire, sat crooked on his nose. He hadn't said a word since he came in. He sat with his knees drawn up and his hand in his coat pocket, holding something, and he looked at the floor.

And in the middle of them, on a stool by the stove, with his ribs bound and his lip split and his bad leg stretched out on a crate, sat Dex.

He had washed. He had put on a clean shirt. He looked terribly young. His heart, to her ear, was doing something she had not heard from him before. It was not compressed. It was not locked. It was just beating, slow and plain and a little unsteady, like a man's at the end of a long walk.

"I'll say it once," said Dex.

…

He said it badly.

That was the first thing she noticed. For two weeks she had listened to him run a room like a conductor, every phrase placed, every pause measured, a voice like a hand on a ledger. Now he talked like a boy giving evidence. He started in the wrong place. He went back. He stopped, and cleared his throat, and began again.

"The client was Whitcomb."

Nobody moved.

"The man on the pier. Augustus Whitcomb. He came to my cellar thirty days ago and asked me to steal the Stone. He paid fifty thousand in advance. In gold." His eyes went to the floor. "I knew who he was. I told you it was Prescott's work. It wasn't. I made that up."

Josiah's heart thumped once, hard.

"I took the job because of what he was offering. A million dollars, when it was done." A dry breath. "That was what I told myself. I'd have taken the money. I'd have bought a hundred debts with it, and gone on."

"And then?" said Roz.

"And then I touched the Stone."

He told them about the table with the good cloth. The roses. The woman in the blue shawl. He told them about the man at the door, the hooded lamp, the watch that ticked late, and the boots, so clean. He told it flat and plain, in a dead level voice, and Roz, who had been trained to listen for the lie, listened for it, and found none. His heart did not skip once. It went on, slow and sad and steady, through the whole of it, like a bell tolling under water.

"My name is Nathaniel Aldridge," said Dex. "My father was Thomas. My mother was Marian. They were killed the night of the fire at the Aldridge house, eleven years ago, by the man who hired me. He took my memory and left me to die in Number Nine. Ma Tilly dug me out."

A log fell in the stove.

"It isn't glass," he said. "The thing in the vault. It's a heart. I don't know whose. It answers to a voice, to the voice of an Aldridge, singing a lullaby I used to know. Whitcomb wants me to sing it for him at Black Noon. That's why he hired me. That's why he let me live."

"And the real one," said Roz. "The Heart."

"Is safe."

"Where?"

"I'm not going to tell you."

…

She had expected the silence. She had not expected how long it would go on.

It was Josiah who broke it. He spoke very quietly, looking straight ahead, with his bandaged hands flat on his knees. "You said the client was anonymous."

"Yes."

"You said, in the Palisade, that it was House Prescott. You looked me in the face and said it. I asked a direct question, and you gave me a lie, and I took it, because I wished to." His voice did not rise. It had the dead flat politeness of a man reading a sentence. "I asked you again in this church. You said, the one who pays. I understood then that you were concealing something. I did not press. I thought, he will tell me when he can."

"Captain—"

"I believed you."

It was only three words. She heard the whole of him in them. She heard a man who had been told for twenty years where to stand, and had finally, at great cost, chosen a place of his own, and had put his weight on it, and felt it give.

"I know," said Dex.

"I do not think you do."

"Josiah—"

"You have not earned the use of my name."

Dex bowed his head.

…

"You knew," said Felix.

It was the first thing he had said. It came out in a small, cracked, careful voice. He had raised his head, and his eyes behind the mended spectacles were enormous, red-rimmed, and dry. He took his hand out of his pocket. In it lay a stubby gold bar. He held it up in the firelight, between thumb and forefinger, so that everyone could see the two letters on its face.

"You knew it was my father."

"Yes."

"When you came to the attic. When you looked at the picture on the wall. You knew whose money that was. You gave it to me. You watched me laugh."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you were the best chemist in the city," said Dex, "and I needed you."

"That isn't why."

"No."

"Why did you let me?"

He was crying now, silently, the tears running down his face and dripping off his chin, and he did not wipe them. "I thought it was funny. I stood in my attic, and I laughed. I thought, how clever, how strange, someone's using Father's money against him. I thought it was a, a sort of justice." His voice cracked on the word. "And it was him. It was him all along. I was working for him. I made the smoke. I made the glass. I burned a man for him. And you let me."

Hollis put an arm round his shoulders. Felix shook it off. Then, with a small broken sound, he leaned into it, and buried his face in Hollis's wet coat.

Dex did not speak. He sat with his hands clenched between his knees, looking at the boy who wept, and a muscle moved in his jaw.

"Rule five," he said, finally, hoarsely. "If the plan breaks, the plan was mine. I made it. I lied to you about the client and I lied about the Stone and I lied about why we were there. Every one of you walked into that vault because I told you something false. Every thing that has gone wrong since, the pier, the man on the planks, Viv—" He stopped. "It's mine. I'll carry it. I'm not asking you to forgive it."

"Good," said Roz.

…

She hadn't meant to stand. She found that she was on her feet, with the bowl clattering on the floor and the soup running across the flags, and her voice coming out of her in a low hard even stream.

"You put our lives on a bet."

"Roz."

"Not on a plan. A bet. A boy with a hole in his head and a grudge. You didn't know what the Heart was. You didn't know what it would do. You took six people into the Undervault to steal it, and you didn't tell any of them that you were looking for your own mother's grave." She was shaking. "I put my mother's life in my dress, in that place. I slowed my heart to four beats a minute, in front of a lock, because you said please. Josiah cut his hands to the bone. Hollis lost his father's whistle. Viv lost the sound of her mother's laugh. We paid. Every one of us paid, in pieces, and you never said a word."

"I wrote it down."

"You wrote it down."

"It's the only—"

"I don't want it written, Dex. I want it known. I want a man who says what's the price to tell us his." Her voice cracked. "You treat people like coins. You spend us. You carry us about in your waistcoat, and you know exactly what each one's worth, and you set us down on the counter, one at a time, when it suits. We trusted you. We thought you were counting for us. You were counting us."

He looked up.

It was a long, naked, awful look. His face was gray and exhausted and wet, and his lip was split, and the firelight ran along the bones. He did not defend himself. She saw him think of it and let it go.

"I'm out of coins," said Dex.

It was said very simply. It was the plainest sentence she had ever heard him speak.

"There's no more to spend. You're all I've got. And I've lost her." He swallowed. "I don't know how to say I'm sorry in a way that would be worth anything. I know I haven't the right. But I'm saying it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I lied to you. I'm sorry for every one of you."

Nobody answered.

Roz stood in the cold spilled soup, with her heart going like a drum, and found that she could not tell whether the thing in her chest was fury or grief. They felt the same, from the inside. They felt like a hand clenched round a bird.

She turned, and walked out.

…

She heard Josiah rise behind her.

He came as far as the door of the nave. She heard his boots on the flags, brisk, uneven, and then stop. She did not turn. She stood on the church steps in the thin gray morning with the rain on her face and listened to him not follow her. His heart was loud, and troubled, and kind.

"Roz," he said, from the dark. "I..."

"Not now."

"I only wished to say..."

"I know what you wish to say," said Roz, without turning. "I'll hear it later. I can't have anyone's heart beating near me right now. Not even yours."

A long pause. The rain pattered on the stone.

"Then I shall be here," said Josiah.

She went down the steps and into the street.

Behind her, in the church, she heard Felix get up. She heard a murmur, a scrape, the creak of the ladder to the roof. A moment later, another pair of boots, unhurried, following. She didn't need to look. She knew which heart it was. It had a hitch in it, from the cold water, and a steadiness under that, like a post sunk deep in a riverbank.

Good, she thought. Somebody should go.

Somebody should stay with him.

…

The back room of the Tallow Street Dispensary was exactly as she had left it.

The same green-shaded lamp. The same Union Army blanket drawn across the doorway. The same cot, narrow and gray, with its folded sheet; the same basin, the same shelf of brown bottles with their Latin labels, and the same smell of carbolic and boiled cloth, which she had once thought of as the smell of being useful. It had been two weeks. It felt like a year.

She sat down on the cot. She took the vial out of her dress.

It lay in her palm, small as a thumb. The red wax glimmered. The thread of gold inside it turned slowly, uncoiling, coiling, and as it moved, a faint warmth came off it, through the glass, into her skin. She could hear it. Not a pulse. A hum, as of a held note, with a tune in it that went round and round and had no end.

Mama.

She had not opened it. She would not. She had made up her mind in the Archive, and it hadn't changed: not until she knew how to give it back. A memory taken from a woman who could not hold it would be a cup of water poured on sand. It would run through her. It would be gone in a day, and her mother, who had had it for one afternoon, would lose it twice.

Dex knows how.

The thought rose from nowhere. She tried to push it down. He had said it, hadn't he? It answers to a voice. A lullaby. A song that could lock and a song that could, perhaps, unlock. A heart that kept every Tithe the Council had ever taken.

She hated that she was working it out. She sat on the cot in the green light with the vial in her hand, and her mind went on turning the pieces, quietly, as it had turned over the hearts of the dying, looking for the place where they would fit.

Out in the street a cart rattled by. Somewhere a child laughed.

She put her free hand flat against her chest.

It was beating. Of course it was. Steady, strong, unhurried, thumping away under her ribs like a drum in a procession. She listened to it. She heard it keep time. And with a flare of anger, hot and bright and entirely without dignity, she realized that it was beating to the plan. It was beating to a Black Noon that she had not yet been told, to a hill she had not yet climbed, to a song she had never heard. Her body had decided, without consulting her, to go on.

I should hate him, thought Roz.

She did. She did, sincerely. She hated the cold calculating boy with his ledger and his lies. She hated the wide gray eyes. She hated that he had said I'm sorry, and that she had heard in his heart, under the words, that it was true.

She closed her hand around the vial.

I do not forgive him, she thought. I will not forgive him until my mother knows my name.

And then, because she was a midwife, and had spent her life telling the truth to people who did not want it, she added the rest.

But I still want him to win.