Salt Water in the Dark

POV: Viv

The bolt slid back with a sound like a held breath let go, and the door of the Quiet Room opened inward on a slice of lamplight and two faces.

Viv was standing in the exact middle of the floor. She had been standing there for twenty minutes, in the gray gown and the splinters in her hair, with her hands folded in front of her and her chin up, like a woman waiting for a train she did not entirely trust. She had told herself that she would not run to the door. She had told herself that she would be dignified.

Her knees went at once.

"Captain," she said, to the tall, grave, scarred man on the threshold. Her voice cracked in the middle. "You're late."

"Miss Marchetti." Josiah inclined his head. "I regret the delay. We were advised to arrive four minutes after the bell."

"You were."

"We took the east stair."

"Good."

"And I," said a rough warm voice behind him, "am only happy to see you in one piece, ma'am, because it's the only way I'm getting paid."

It was Hollis. He leaned in the doorway with a bent rifle on his back and a pair of gray kidskin gloves on his hands, and his face was streaked with soot and his grin was lopsided and glorious. His hat was gone. His shirt-front was torn. He looked at her with those warm light eyes, and the grin faltered, and he said in quite a different voice, "Hello, Viv."

She crossed the floor in three steps and threw her arms round his neck.

He caught her. He lifted her clean off the ground, in a smell of gun-oil and horse and wet slate, and she felt his big chest shake against hers, and she did not care in the least that she was crying into the collar of a man she had once threatened to stab. Josiah looked pointedly at the ceiling. She reached out one arm and dragged him in too, and he stiffened like a board, and then, after a moment, very carefully, patted her on the back.

"We should leave," said Josiah, into her hair.

"Yes," said Viv. "Yes, we absolutely should."

…

"I need a surface," she said.

It was the first thing that mattered. In the Quiet Room, her Gift was nothing but a cold ache behind her breastbone, a limb gone dead. She'd felt it come back the moment she crossed the threshold, a thin bright trickle, like blood returning to a numb hand. But the corridor outside was dark, paneled, lined with black crepe, and there was no glass in it anywhere.

"A mirror?" said Hollis.

"A lens. A window. A button." She held up her wrist, with the little brass servant's button at her cuff. "I can do a little with this. But not enough to carry three people."

"Not three," said Josiah. "One. We will manage the stairs."

Hollis was already unslinging the rifle. He undid the leather cap on the scope, thumbed a catch, and with a small grunt twisted the whole front lens free of its tube. It lay in his gloved palm, a disc of clear glass, round as a coin and big as a saucer. He held it out.

"Will it serve?"

She looked at it.

Her heart gave a great leap. The corridor lamps burned on the curved glass in two bright points. In the depths of it, upside-down and small, she could see her own face: a pinched white face with burning eyes. It was the first time she had seen it in eight days.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, yes. It'll serve."

She took it from him. It was warm from his hand. She held it up in front of her, and breathed, and stepped into it.

…

It went the way it always went, only more.

For one half-second she was nowhere. There was a cold bright rush, like diving into a clean lake, and the sense of being unlaced, thread by thread, from the world. Then the lamps of the corridor swam together into a single point, and spun, and dropped away beneath her. She came out on the far side of the glass with a gasp. She was standing on the servants' stair, six floors down, with the lens in her hand and her ears ringing.

She laughed out loud.

It burst out of her. It was the sheerest joy she had ever known, and it was almost obscene. She had not known how much she'd missed it. Her hair was loose, and her skin was singing, and there was a taste on her tongue like struck flint. She stood on the cold stair and felt her whole body hum with it, as though she had been underwater for a week and had just broken the surface.

Above her she heard the thud of boots. Two voices, one cursing, one calm. She heard Hollis shout Go! and then a flat hard crack, and another, and a long ugly metallic scream.

"The alarm," said her own voice, in her head. "They've found the guards."

She held up the lens, and stepped back into it, and went to meet them.

…

The next ten minutes were not something she'd ever be able to describe in order.

There was a corridor full of smoke, and a cry from the end of it, and the flash of a muzzle. There was a Watchman in silver livery who stepped from behind a pillar with his rifle at his shoulder. She saw it. She saw the barrel come level, and the line of fire, and Hollis, a yard from her, in a corridor too narrow to dodge. She saw him throw out his gloved hand.

The bullet came.

It bent.

She would remember that all her life. A thing the size of a finger-joint, spitting fire, going faster than eye or mind, curved in the air as though it had struck a wall. It wheeled in a short bright arc. It buried itself in the plaster a foot from the Watchman's ear. He yelled. He dropped the gun.

"Rule three!" shouted Josiah.

"I know it's rule three!" Hollis staggered back with one arm limp and the color gone from his face. "I'm only—bending them—"

"Window," said Viv. "Window, window, window."

There was one at the end of the hall. A tall casement, with leaded panes and a view of the starlit gardens, black on the black. She took Hollis's elbow, and Josiah's. She didn't have to think. She leaned into the glass with her whole body and pulled.

They went through together.

They came out of the casement of a lower window, in a drift of dead leaves, in the garden, with the cold air tearing at their clothes. Then another, a greenhouse pane, at the far end of the lawn. Then the dark glass of the carriage-house door. She jumped them from pane to pane, from lens to lamp to polished brass doorknob, down through the grounds, over the wall, across the lane, and the shouts of the Hall grew fainter behind them until all she could hear was her own breath and the beat of three pairs of boots in the night.

On the last window she stopped, panting, in the shadow of a chimney on Crown Hill, and laughed until she cried.

…

She did not realize what she'd lost until they were across the Terrace.

It was in a quiet moment. They had stopped in a laundry yard, behind a line of sheets, to catch their breath, and Hollis was sitting on an upturned tub with his head between his knees, and Josiah was binding a graze on his temple with a strip of torn shirt. Viv leaned against the wall. She was thinking about nothing. She was thinking that the stars were very bright.

She felt, then, the small cool absence.

She knew it at once. She had learned the feel of it: a smooth place in her mind, like a pebble worn flat. She looked inward. She felt carefully round the edges. What was it?

Something to do with the house. A man. A face.

She stood very still.

There had been a man in her mother's kitchen. A big slow man, with heavy hands. He had come into their lives when she was seven, in a smell of tobacco and wet wool. He had married her mother in a church she did not remember. And he had been, for four years, the shadow in the corner of the room. The reason for the lock on the inside of her door. The reason her mother laughed less.

She tried to see his face.

There was nothing. A blur of beard, a flash of eyes, but no features. She reached for the sound of his name, and found that was gone too. Only the weight of him remained. The tobacco. The footsteps on the stair.

She waited for the grief. She waited for the sick hollow lurch that came when a thing was taken.

It did not come.

What came instead was a vast, light, extraordinary relief, like a stone rolling from her chest.

I don't have to remember him.

She stood in the laundry yard, in the dark, with the wet sheets flapping at her shoulders, and for a long minute she felt happier than she had in years. It was horrible. It was like hearing a hymn in a house on fire. She put her hand over her mouth.

"Viv?" said Hollis, lifting his head. "You all right?"

"Fine," she said. "I'm fine. I'm—" Her voice cracked. "Give me a minute."

She slid down the wall, and sat in the cold dirt, and took out the red book.

She had carried it against her skin the whole eight days. They had never found it. It was creased and warm and small, with a stub of pencil tied to the spine. She opened it to the last page of entries, and wrote, in a hand that shook a little.

Cost: the face of Mama's husband. His name. I don't know what he looked like. I don't remember being afraid of him. I am not afraid.

She looked at it for a long time.

I was happy, she wrote.

That's how it starts.

She understood it, then, all at once. She understood why the Charter Houses did it. She understood why a woman would take a cup. The loss had not hurt. It had not hurt at all. It had been the best thing that had happened to her in a month. And if she had been a weaker woman, if she had been lonelier, if she'd had no one waiting, she might have done it again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left to be afraid of and nothing left to be.

This is the temptation, she thought. Not the pain. The mercy.

She closed the book.

…

St. Cinder's was lit like a ship.

It was past midnight when they came up the church steps. Every window blazed. A line of Longshoremen leaned against the wall by the door, with pipes, and she heard the sound of someone playing a fiddle in the nave. She came in through the big doors, in a gray dress that smelled of lavender, with a lens in her fist and a streak of soot on her chin.

The Saints cheered. Penny's girls whooped. Roz crossed the nave at a run and gathered her up, a small tight rib-cracking embrace that smelled of carbolic and bread, and said into her hair, you stupid, stupid girl, and Felix hugged her from the side with his spectacles askew, and Ma Tilly put a bowl of soup into her hands without a word.

She looked for him over their shoulders.

He was not there. The last she'd heard, he was still at the Customs House with the gold. She ate her soup standing. She kept her eyes on the door.

At half past midnight it opened.

…

He came in slowly, with his cane tapping on the flags.

He had changed out of the plum velvet. He wore his own coat again, the gray one with the torn pocket, and his hair was damp and standing up at the back. There was a bruise on his cheekbone that she didn't remember. He looked thin and white and exhausted and quite unreasonably young. He stopped in the doorway of the nave, with the whole busy room between them, and looked at her.

The fiddle stopped.

She had thought of a hundred things to say. She'd rehearsed them in the dark. She had planned the scorn, the cold anger, the cutting remark about people who lie to their friends. But in the event all she said, across forty feet of church, was:

"You came."

"It was on the schedule."

"Liar."

"Yes." His mouth moved. It wasn't a smile. "I'm told it's a bad habit. I'm trying to stop."

The room had gone very quiet. She heard Hollis clear his throat. She heard Ma Tilly say something low to Roz, and the scrape of feet, as one by one, in a hush of tact, the whole company found somewhere else to be.

They were alone in the nave.

…

"Tell me," she said.

He sat down on the end of a pew. He told her.

He told her all of it, from the beginning. He did not dress it up. He told her about the Stone and the woman in the blue shawl, and the man in the doorway, and the watch. He told her about Number Nine. About Ma Tilly. About the hand that had pushed a nine-year-old into the dark, and the lullaby that had put him to sleep. He told her about Wake. About the Heart in the bell. About the plan, down to the last bolt, as he'd told it to Hollis on the harbor stairs. About the Quiet Room, and what it had cost him to know she was in it. He told her what he'd written in the ledger, and what he'd crossed out.

She listened without speaking. When he finished, a long time had passed. A candle guttered. The wind was moving in the bell above them with a small ghostly hum.

"Say the price out loud," said Viv.

He looked up.

"You've said it for everyone else. Say yours. For me."

He was silent for a moment. He opened his mouth and closed it. His hands lay open on his knees, and she saw them shake.

"The price," said Dex slowly, "is that you stay."

"Stay?"

"With me. On the day. And after, if there is an after. It's a thing I've no right to ask of you. You've a ship. You've wanted it all your life. You'd go at once, and be right." His voice was very low. "That's the price. But I'm not going to collect."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't a price," said Dex. "It's just what I want."

For a moment the nave was perfectly silent.

Then she crossed the stones, and took his face in her two hands, and kissed him.

It was clumsy. It was salt. She could taste her own tears on his mouth. His hands came up, uncertain, and closed on her sleeves, and she felt him tremble, and she thought: Oh. He's been waiting for permission.

"Idiot," she said, against his lips.

"I know."

"You absolute idiot."

"I'm told it's a bad habit."

She laughed, helplessly, and kissed him again.

…

It was a long night, and it was not a tragic one.

They went up to the little room above the vestry, where Ma Tilly kept her linen. It was cold and narrow and smelled of lavender. There was a bed with a patched quilt. There was a candle, almost burned down, and a window that looked out over the harbor lights. He was shy. She found that she was too. He fumbled with the buttons of her sleeve and swore, softly and thoroughly, in three languages, and she laughed so hard that she had to sit down. When the time came to take off his boot, he went still, and looked at her, and she looked back, and she said, "Dex. It's a leg."

"It's a terrible leg."

"It's yours."

He stared at her. Something in his face broke, and mended, and was gentler than before.

After that, it was easy.

…

The candle was out. The room was dark and warm, and the quilt smelled of lavender, and the harbor lights lay in a gold smear across the ceiling. His head was on her shoulder. He was breathing slowly, and the beat of his heart against her ribs was an odd, uneven, comforting thing, a little too fast, a little too light, like a sparrow's.

"Dex."

"Mm."

"Do you want to know what I'll miss?"

"Miss?"

"If it goes. If I pay for it tomorrow. I've been thinking about it all night." She stared at the ceiling. "I've a lot I'd hate to lose. But there's one thing. It's the first thing I remember. I was five. We were on a steamer, coming from Naples, and Mama woke me before dawn and carried me up on deck. And there was the sea."

"The sea."

"It was so big." Her voice caught. "I'd never seen it before. I'd been on the water for weeks, in the dark, in the steerage, and nobody ever let us up. And she carried me up the stairs in a shawl. And the sky was the color of a pearl, and the water was blue and loud and it went on forever. And she said, in my ear, guarda. Look. This is what we're going to."

He said nothing. His hand moved, slowly, over hers.

"That's the one I'd keep," said Viv. "If I could keep one."

"Then I'll keep it too," said Dex, into the dark. "If you can't."

She turned her head. In the dim light she could see only the shape of his face, the line of his jaw, the gleam of an eye.

"You can't promise that."

"I'm not promising. I'm writing it down."

She laughed, softly, with her eyes shut. She was very tired, and very warm, and for the first time in her life she did not need to be afraid of anything in the room.

…

She woke once, near dawn, and found him sleeping.

He slept on his side, with one arm thrown over her and his face against her neck, the cane hung on the bed-post and his ledger under the pillow. He had pulled the quilt up over both their shoulders. His mouth was slightly open. He looked about fourteen.

She slid her arm out carefully, from under his weight. She reached for the red book on the floor. She had no light. She wrote by the pale gray window, by the first thin thread of the morning, in a hand that was not quite steady.

Today I remember everything.

And I want to keep it.

She sat for a moment with the book against her knees. She looked at the long dark shape in the bed. She looked at the harbor, going from black to iron to the pearl-gray of the hour before sunrise.

Then, from across the water, from the squat black tower at the end of the Cinder Line, the harbor clock began to strike.

One. Two. Three. Four.

She counted every stroke. She sat in the thin cold light, with the book against her heart, and listened as the last note rolled across the water and died.

Four o'clock.

In eight hours, the sun would go out.