Delphine’s Vial

POV: Roz

"I want you to be a witness," said Roz.

Josiah looked up from the cellar stairs.

He had come down with a lantern and a pail of water, because Ma Tilly had sent him to see to the leak behind the coal bin, and he stood now on the third step with the pail in one hand and the light swinging gently at his side. It was the fourth night before Black Noon. The cellar of St. Cinder's was cold and low, a vault of old brick with a floor of beaten earth, and it smelled of damp stone and candle-ends and the faint iron tang of the bell above. In the corner, on a plank table, stood the little oil lamp Roz had lit an hour ago. She had been sitting beside it ever since.

"A witness," he repeated.

"To what I'm about to do." She had not turned round. "I've had this a long time and I haven't opened it. I said I wouldn't, until I knew how to give it back. I still don't." Her voice was very steady. "But I find I can't wait. And I find I don't want to be alone."

The pail clinked softly on the stair.

"Then I shall stay," said Josiah.

He set the lantern on the step, and came down, and sat on an upturned crate a few feet from her, with his back straight and his hands on his knees. He said nothing more. She was grateful for it. In three weeks, she had learned that Josiah Pruitt's silences were the most restful thing in Merrick Bay.

She took out the vial.

…

It lay in the lamplight, small and warm. A sliver of green glass, no longer than her thumb, sealed with red wax. The label had been written in a clerk's spidery hand: BOUDREAUX, D. — Mercer Lane — 1888 — one afternoon — Aff: maternal. And inside, turning slow as a leaf on still water, lay a thread of gold.

She had held it every night for three weeks. She'd learned its warmth the way she'd once learned the heartbeat of a sleeping child. She knew it was something that had been taken from her mother five years ago, the day they came to the house on Mercer Lane, when Roz herself had been nineteen and had screamed at the door until a neighbor dragged her away.

An afternoon, she thought. They took one afternoon.

She had spent five years wondering which. She had made up a hundred things. A birthday. A quarrel. A kiss from a husband she'd never met. She had made up a dozen versions of the afternoon, each more tender than the last, and had held them in the dark like beads.

Now she would know.

She broke the wax with her thumbnail.

It gave with a tiny crack, like the first ice on a puddle. A thread of vapor rose, pale gold, shining. It hung in the lamplight a moment and curled toward her face. She drew a breath.

…

Jasmine.

It was the first thing: a rush of it, sweet and heavy, warm as a hand. It was coming through an open window. It was late afternoon. The light on the floor was the color of honey, and the boards were scrubbed white, and there was a smell of onions and bay and something dark simmering on a stove.

I'm in the kitchen, thought Roz. No. I'm in Mama.

She was looking out through her mother's eyes. She could feel the weight of her mother's arms, the ache in her back, the damp apron at her waist. She was sitting at the scrubbed table with a bowl of potatoes in her lap and a paring knife in her broad brown hand. And across from her, with her sleeves pushed to the elbow and her dark braid coming loose, a girl of nineteen was peeling too, badly, with her tongue between her teeth.

She was cross. She was thin. She was bent on becoming a midwife, and had been explaining for an hour why her mother's remedies were out of date. She looked up, and saw herself being watched, and scowled.

Roz, the word came up inside her mother like a bell. My Roz. My little heart. How she does carry on.

"What?" said the girl.

"Nothing, cher."

And Delphine began to sing.

It was a low song. A slow one, in Creole French, with the rise and fall of a river in it. Roz knew it. She knew it down to the bone. It was the song that had come to her in fever-dreams and in the hush of a lying-in room, a ghost of a tune with no words. And now it had every word. She heard her mother's voice, deep and dark and unhurried, come out of her own throat in a language she thought she had lost.

Dodo, ti-pitit, dodo...

"Mama, I'm not a baby."

"No," said Delphine, between verses. "But I sang it when you were. And it works on grown girls too."

The girl rolled her eyes. But the knife slowed. The scowl eased. And she hummed, under her breath, the last line.

Hush, thought Roz. Oh, hush, hush. Stay here. Please.

But the light was changing. The scent of jasmine was turning, under her mother's nose, to something else. Heavy boots on the porch. A rap at the door, three times, flat and polite.

…

They came in two by two.

Her mother put down the potatoes. She wiped her hands on her apron, slowly, and she looked at her daughter and said in an easy, ordinary voice: "Roz, ma chère. Go and sit with Sister Agnes at the church. Do not say anything to anyone."

The girl was already on her feet. "Mama—"

"Go."

But the door was opening.

There was a Council clerk with a ledger. There was a hard-faced woman in a Charter gray coat. And there was a young man in a gray coat and black gloves, with his cap in his hand and a head of dark curls, and a face she did not know.

He was perhaps twenty-two. Straight-backed, narrow-shouldered, with a long jaw and eyes the color of tea. He held a pair of iron cuffs. They did not look steady.

"Delphine Boudreaux," said the clerk, in a bored voice. "You are charged under the Charter Gifts Statute with the unlicensed practice of pulse-craft, to wit, the stilling of a mortal heart. You are required to attend."

"I have stopped no one's heart."

"The Council holds otherwise."

"I have slowed it. For the dying. So that they might go in peace." Her voice was quiet and clear. "I did it in the Docks, where there is no physician. I did it for nothing."

"Take her, Lieutenant," said the woman in gray.

The young man stepped forward. Behind her, the girl screamed. It was a raw, terrible sound, and it went through Delphine like a blade. She did not turn. She kept her eyes on the boy with the cuffs.

He's a boy, she thought. God help him, he's only a boy.

"You are shaking, child," said Delphine gently. "It will be all right."

He swallowed. He closed the first cuff on her wrist.

The iron was very cold.

…

They did it in a back room at the Station House, with a deal table and a lamp.

It was a small procedure. The woman in gray took from her bag a hollow needle and a vial with a rubber stopper, and the clerk wrote the hour in his ledger. She felt the needle, a tiny cold pinch behind the ear. She felt something loosen, like a tooth, and slide away, and dim.

What are they taking?

Oh. Oh, it's the afternoon.

It was the afternoon. The jasmine, the song. Roz with her tongue between her teeth, the potato peel curling. She felt it going, a golden warmth poured out of her into a bottle, and she could do nothing, nothing, nothing at all, but sit with her hands locked and watch it leave.

She thought: Not that one. Take anything. Not that one.

They did not hear her. They never heard.

Please, she thought. She did not know whom she was asking. She'd never been a woman to pray to the Chartered saints.

Please let her be hidden well.

Please let nobody find my girl.

Please let her remember my voice.

The vial filled. The woman in gray capped it with red wax. And the last thing in the world that Delphine Boudreaux knew, before the lights of her mind went out one by one, was the sound of her daughter screaming her name, somewhere far off in the Docks, and growing fainter.

…

Roz came back to herself on her knees.

She was on the cold dirt of the cellar floor, with her hands pressed over her mouth, and tears streaming down her face and soaking her collar. The vial lay empty on the table. The vapor was gone. She could still smell jasmine.

She had never made a sound like the one that came out of her.

She did not remember Josiah crossing the floor. But he was there, kneeling at her side. He did not touch her. He knelt very still, with his big scarred hands open on his thighs, and waited, as he had waited on the church steps. She saw that he was crying too, silently, without moving his face.

"You were there," she said, when she could.

"Yes."

"You were the one who closed the cuff."

"Yes."

"You were shaking."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He took a breath. It shuddered going in.

"I was twenty-two," said Josiah. "I had been in the Order eleven months. They told me that Gift-workers were unchartered, and the unchartered were dangerous, and that I was binding a wound." He looked at his hands. "I had seen her kitchen. I saw the potatoes in the bowl. I heard a girl scream. I thought, this cannot be right. And then I thought, the Colonel would not send me, if it were not right. And I closed the cuff."

"And you drank, that night."

"I drank, that night. And I slept."

The cellar was very quiet. Above them, faintly, the great bell shifted in its frame, and settled.

"I am not asking you to forgive it," said Josiah. "I want that understood. I only thought you should know that I remember. I did not, until this moment. I had it as a gray place. But I remember her voice. I remember that she said, you are shaking, child." His own voice broke, then, once, very quietly. "She was kinder to me than I deserved."

Roz looked at him.

He was a long, thin, grave man with a scar down his face, kneeling in the dirt. She had seen his heart in the dark for three weeks and it had never once lied. It was beating now like a man running. It was beating with shame, and it was beating for her.

"I know what I heard," she said. "She forgave you. She did it before you'd done it." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "She'd have forgiven anyone. It was the worst thing about her."

"And you?"

"I'm not my mother."

"No."

"I'm angrier."

"I do not doubt it." A ghost of a smile touched his mouth. It was gone at once.

…

She picked up the empty vial.

She turned it over in the light. It was a small thing, fragile as a quail's egg. A sliver of green glass. Hollow, now.

The song's still in it, she thought. Not the memory. The shape of it. The place where it was.

She set it gently on the table. She would keep it. She would keep it for the day Dex stood on a dais and sang a verse she had never heard, and the Heart woke, and all the vials in the Archive began to open. On that day, if the old stories were true, her mother would hear it. On that day Delphine Boudreaux would sit in a chair at Gray Willow and remember an afternoon, and a song, and a girl with a paring knife.

She had waited five years for it. She could wait a little longer.

"I still don't forgive you," said Roz.

"That is just."

"I won't pretend. I don't think I can." She took a breath. "But I'll stand beside you, Josiah. On the day. I'll be in the choir loft, beside you, and I'll listen to your heart, and I'll tell you if it's going wrong. Is that enough?"

He was silent for a long moment.

"It is more than I dared to ask," he said.

She held out her hand.

He took it. His fingers were rough, and cold, and a little unsteady. She felt, under her thumb, the hard, quick, steady pulse at the wrist. For a time they stayed like that, two people on the floor of a cellar, in the lamplight, with the bell above them, and neither of them let go.

"If I die in this," said Josiah, quietly, "do not waste your Gift on me."

"I'll decide that."

"Roz."

"It's my Gift. I'll decide."

He opened his mouth to argue. Then he closed it, and looked at her, and something in his face gave way. It was not a smile. It was something plainer and more naked than a smile.

She did not promise. She had never promised anyone anything she was not sure of.

But the heart in her chest was going hard and steady, and she knew very well that he could hear it, and that it was answering for her.