The Room Without Mirrors

POV: Viv

There was nothing in the Quiet Room that could show her her own face.

Viv had checked. She had checked on the first night, on her hands and knees, with the patience of a woman who has lost something small and cannot afford to give up. The walls were plastered and painted the dull gray of wet slate. The floor was bare oak, sanded so rough it left splinters in her palms. The narrow bed had a wool blanket and an iron frame, painted flat black. The washstand held a tin basin with a rough brown glaze, and a wooden cup. The spoon was wood. The fork was wood. The lamp, hung from a hook in the ceiling, was shaded with a pierced cone of black iron, and its light fell in a hundred small dim coins across the walls.

No glass anywhere. No polished metal. Even the doorknob, a plain wooden knob, had been turned on a lathe to a dull matte finish. Someone had spent a great deal of thought on the Quiet Room.

She sat on the bed with her arms around her knees, and listened to the silence.

It was not the silence of an empty house. It was a thick silence, like wool, a silence that had weight. It pressed on her ears. It pressed on her thoughts. For the first day she had screamed into it, and beat on the door, and sung at the top of her lungs, and none of it had traveled more than a foot. The walls drank it. The room swallowed.

Her Gift lay inside her, cold and useless, like a hand in a plaster cast.

…

They had given her a stub of pencil on the second day.

A tall, soft-footed maid with a face like a boiled egg had brought it with the tray. The pencil was an inch long and so blunt that it barely marked. There was no paper. Viv understood after a moment that this was the point. It was a kindness set like a snare. Whatever she wrote, she would write on the walls, and they would let her, because a prisoner who writes is a prisoner who is busy.

She wrote anyway.

She chose the wall by the bed, in the corner where the light was dimmest, and began in small hard letters, one line to a thought. She wrote things that were not to be lost.

Mama's kitchen. Garlic and bay leaf and hot bread. Sunday.

The song Mama sang on the boat. The tune is still here. The name is gone. Hum it anyway.

The Polish pianist, the gray dress, the cane on the floor. "One two three. Again." Twenty-five cents a lesson.

Green dress. The night of the first waltz. Satin the color of an unripe pear.

She stopped and looked at them.

They were the things she had already lost. She had written them from habit, the way a woman counts her missing teeth with her tongue. The boat-song's name had gone for a ring of keys. The pianist's name, the one who had taught her the waltz at eleven, had gone in the Mirror Room. And her mother's laugh. Her mother's laugh had gone in the Undervault, and she had come out of that room with nothing but a feeling like a drawer pulled open.

But there were things she still had.

She went on writing. She wrote slowly, pressing hard, until the pencil's edge was a flat gray bar.

The first morning I saw the sea.

She stopped again, and her heart beat once, hard.

That was the one. She did not need to write it down to keep it. It was the thing she carried closest, the stone she held in her mouth when the world got loud. She had been five. The steamer from Naples had been two weeks out and everyone in steerage was green and silent. Her mother had woken her before dawn, wrapped her in a shawl, and carried her up the iron stairs onto the deck. The sky was the color of a pearl. The air was cold and tasted like salt. And in front of them, so wide that it had no edges, with the light coming up out of it in long gold bars, lay the ocean.

Guarda, her mother had said, in her ear. Look. This is what we are going to.

She had looked.

She wrote, in small letters, at the bottom of the wall:

The sea. Blue and loud and bigger than anything. Mama said, "Look."

Then she put down the pencil, and pressed the back of her hand against her mouth, and did not cry, because she had only so many tears and she was saving them.

…

She counted days by the meals.

Breakfast was a boiled egg and a slice of bread. Dinner came at noon, a bowl of broth with a wooden spoon. Supper was cold mutton and a cup of tea at six. She scratched a tally on the floorboards with the pencil's edge. Three days. Four. Four was the day she began, quite calmly, to talk to Dex.

She did not think she was mad. It was only that the silence demanded someone, and he was the person she knew best.

"You said I'd be fine," she told the bedpost. "You said the Palisade was a simple job. You said, and I quote, no one will get hurt."

That was before the pier, said Dex, in her head, in his dry flat voice.

"Yes. That's right. Before the pier." She pulled the blanket up. "I told you to run. Did you?"

I ran.

"Good." A long pause. "Idiot."

She laughed. It cracked in the middle. For a moment she thought she was going to be sick.

…

On the fifth evening the door opened and the soft-footed maid said: "Mr. Whitcomb requests the pleasure of Miss Marchetti's company at dinner."

Viv looked up from the bed.

She had not been outside the room in five days. She had not seen a face but the maid's, and the face of the footman who left the tray. She'd forgotten what a corridor was. The gray gown they gave her was too long and smelled of lavender, and it had been cut by someone who did not know her size. She put it on. She pinned up her hair with the splinters of the wooden fork. She went out.

The corridors of Whitcomb Hall were lined with mirrors.

She had expected that. What she had not expected was how it would feel. Pier-glasses in gilt frames, hall mirrors, a long Venetian looking-glass between the windows. Every one of them was draped. Black crepe hung over each surface, pinned at the corner, as in a house after a death. They had covered everything that could carry her. She walked down the corridor between them like a woman in a procession of ghosts.

Thorough, thought Viv. Of course you are.

The dining room was small and warm and quiet. A table for two. Beeswax candles. A silver service so brightly polished that she could not look at it without wincing. At the head of the table, standing, with one hand on a chair-back, was Augustus Whitcomb.

He was shorter than she remembered. In the pier's smoke he had been a giant, a figure of calm and flame. Here he was a spare, silver-haired man in a charcoal coat, with a pleasant tired face and very clean hands.

"Miss Marchetti," he said. "How good of you to come."

"As though I had a choice."

"One always has a choice." He drew out her chair. "Please."

…

He was an excellent host.

He poured the wine himself. He asked if the lamp was too bright. He talked of the soup, which was a white bean with rosemary, and of the weather, which had turned, and of a clock he was having mended in the library. Viv sat with her hands in her lap and ate nothing and watched him, the way she'd once watched a dog that bit.

"You are wondering," he said, at last, "why I have not been cruel."

"I'm wondering when you're going to start."

"I have no intention of starting." He smiled, mildly. "I was not cruel to your friend Mr. Hallam. He was not cruel to himself. We are, you see, rather alike, he and I. We are both only trying to protect what we love."

"Don't."

"Forgive me."

"Don't make it a kindness. He was nine. You buried a nine-year-old alive."

For the first time something moved in the pleasant face. It was very small, a flicker, like a candle in a draft. Then it settled.

"Memory is the cruelty, Miss Marchetti. Not forgetfulness." He took up his glass. "I have watched grief eat men alive. I have watched widows rot in their parlors with a handkerchief. If I could take the pain from every soul in this city, if I could give them one clean morning, would that not be mercy?"

"If they asked you to."

"Ah." He looked at her with something like approval. "That is the whole of it, isn't it? If they asked."

On the wall behind him hung a portrait in an oval frame. A boy of eight or nine, in a velvet suit, thin, with big earnest eyes and a cowlick. He was sitting very straight on a stool with a model ship in his lap. The portrait had been turned a little to the wall, as one turns a face from a draft.

"That is Felix," said Whitcomb.

"I know."

"A gentle child. He used to bring me things. Little engines, little clocks." His voice was quite even. "Gentleness is a luxury, Miss Marchetti. One is permitted it only if someone else is paying."

Viv said, "He's the best person I've ever met."

"Yes," said Whitcomb. "I believe he is. That is what makes it so difficult."

A silence. A candle sputtered. And in the hush, from somewhere in his waistcoat, she heard the small dry tick of a watch.

She had heard it on the pier. She heard it now. It was a perfect pocket-watch, she had seen it in his hand: gold, with an enamel face. And the beat was wrong. The ticks came a half-instant late, as if the movement were trying to catch up with itself.

"Your watch," she said.

"Yes?"

"It's slow. Why don't you have it mended?"

"It is not broken." He drew it out, and for a moment he held it in his palm, and the light ran along the gold. His face was quite blank. "It is a debt that has been paid. I keep it as a reminder."

"A reminder of what?"

"That everything has a price, Miss Marchetti."

He said it quietly, easily, as a man says a prayer he has repeated for years.

She felt the hair stand up on her arms.

She had heard those words a hundred times. She had heard them in a cellar on Soot Row, in a thin, dry, tired voice. Everything has a price. Say it out loud. She had written them in her own red book. And hearing them now in this quiet room, in this clean polished mouth, was like seeing a face she loved in a stranger.

He learned it from him, she thought, with a lurch. Or he learned it from the same place.

She picked up her glass and drank, because her hand needed something to do.

…

Over the cheese, because she was clever and he was talkative, she got the plan.

He did not mean to give it. He gave it in the way of a man who has been silent too long and has found an audience. He spoke of Black Noon as of a long-planned holiday. The Council would convene in the Dome. The eclipse would fall at noon. He, as Chairman, would bring forth the Heart, which he had "recovered from vandals," and return it to the people. He spoke of a Rite. A reading. A song.

"Mr. Hallam will sing it," he said. "He has the voice. It is, I think, the only thing his mother left him."

"And then?"

"And then the city will rest." He smiled. "And Mr. Hallam will have a small glass vial, the contents of which I'm told he's anxious to recover. I'm a man of my word."

"You'll let him go?"

"I shall let everyone go," said Whitcomb, "who is willing to forget."

She said nothing.

So that's the shape of it, she thought. He's going to make Dex sing him to sleep. And everyone in the city with him.

And Dex knows. Dex has always known.

And she felt, under the horror, something stubborn and bright. Then he has a plan. He wouldn't walk into that room without one.

…

That night, in the Quiet Room, she lay in the dark under the iron lamp and thought about the waltz.

She had not meant to. She had meant to think about the door, the guard, the wall. She'd spent the last hour pacing the cell, counting boards. But her mind kept slipping, like a foot on wet stone, to the Odd Fellows hall behind the Orpheum. To a thin boy in a borrowed coat, with a cane and a face of terrible concentration, counting under his breath. One two three, one two three. To the way his hand had felt at her back. Cold, light, uncertain, and fierce.

It'll warn first, he'd said of the cane, and strike after.

She had laughed. She had spun.

She pressed her palms against her eyes. For the first time in five days she let herself understand it.

There had been a ship. For eleven years it had been the only thing she wanted. A berth, a captain's cabin, a name painted on a stern. A long clean line of horizon. And she'd have given anything for it. She had given a good deal.

I don't want it, she thought. Not without him.

It came to her very quietly, in the dark. The thing she'd wanted all her life, and now the one thing she wanted more. It was an odd feeling. It was like putting down a heavy bag, only to find your arms were full.

She lay there a long time.

Toward midnight, she rose and went to the washstand. She had a strange wish to drink water. She lifted the wooden cup and the lamp light swung, a hundred small coins across the wall.

On the cuff of the gray gown, just above the wrist, she saw it. A small round button, sewn on by hand. A plain cheap thing, brass, the kind they use on a servant's livery. She had been looking at it all evening without seeing it.

She held it up.

In the lamp's glow it was dull, and fogged, and rubbed nearly smooth by a hundred washings. But on its curved face, at the very edge, where the metal still held a little of its first luster, was a streak of brightness no bigger than a grain of rice. It held a tiny crooked line. The lamp. The wall. A fragment of her own eye.

She stared at it. Her heart stopped.

Not enough, she thought. It's not nearly enough.

But it was something.

She curled her fingers over the button and lay back in the dark, and smiled.

Not a mirror, she told the ceiling. But the city is made of glass. And glass is patient.