Hands That Know Hearts

POV: Roz

The baby's heart was the wrong speed.

Roz Boudreaux heard it before she saw the child. She heard it through the swollen belly under her palm and through the sweat-slick bones of the girl on the cot, a small, flickering, fish-quick patter, and then, between one beat and the next, a gap. A long one. She counted the gap the way her grandmother had taught her to count the space between lightning and thunder. One. Two. Then the patter again, weaker than before.

"Is it coming right?" The girl on the cot was perhaps seventeen, red-haired, freckled, with a Cork accent so thick it had to be pried apart. "Miss Roz, is it right? Only it's quiet. It was kicking all the day, and now it's gone quiet."

"It's coming fine, Maeve," said Roz, in the voice she kept for exactly this, low and warm and a little bored, the voice of a woman who has done this a thousand times and has never once lost one. "Breathe for me. In through your nose. Good. Now let it go like you're blowing out a candle."

Her hands were already moving.

The Tallow Street Dispensary had one room that mattered, at the back, behind a curtain made from a Union Army blanket. It had a cot, a stove, a basin, and a lamp with a green shade. It smelled of carbolic and boiled cloth and, tonight, of the particular iron-and-salt smell of a body doing its oldest work. Somewhere beyond the wall a Watch patrol was going by in the alley: four men, slow boots, and four hearts she could hear as plainly as she could hear the rain. Steady. Bored. One of them was a little drunk. She marked them and put them away, as she'd marked and put away every patrol in this neighborhood for six years. They didn't care about a midwife. Midwives were useful. She had never given them a reason to look at the back room and wonder what else was in it.

She laid two fingers on Maeve's belly, low, where the child was turned.

There.

It was like finding a thread in a dark room. She followed the patter down into herself, past the part of her that was a woman in an apron with her sleeves pushed up, to the part that was only listening. The baby's heart was a bird in a closed fist. It was tired. It had been squeezed, she thought, by the cord, for too long, and had forgotten how to hurry. She leaned on it, gently, the way you lean on a stuck door. Come on, little one. Come on. Up. Faster. Listen to me. Up.

The gap closed. The patter climbed. It stumbled, caught, and ran.

And something went out of her, like a breath going out of a room.

She did not see it go. That was the trouble with a Cost. You never saw the thing leave. You only knew, afterward, by the shape of the hole. She finished the delivery with hands that did not shake, and caught a slippery, furious, bawling girl in a clean towel, and heard a heartbeat like a fast little drum, and said, "There's your daughter, Maeve. Listen to the mouth on her." And Maeve laughed and sobbed, and Roz wiped the child's face and laid her on her mother's chest, and only then, when no one was looking, let herself reach for the thing that was gone.

She had been thinking of the bayou.

She'd been thinking of it for no reason, in the minute before, the way you do. A smell. Brown water in August. Cypress, mud, the thick sweet rot of the swamp after rain, and the particular green-gold dampness of her grandmother's porch at dusk. She had carried it for twenty years. It had been the smell of being small and safe.

She reached for it now and found a clean white wall.

She knew the bayou had a smell. She knew the words, cypress, mud, rot. She could see the porch and the lantern and the old woman rocking. But where the smell had been, there was only knowledge, flat and polite, like a label on a jar.

There, she thought. That's the price of one little girl. A bayou.

She breathed in. Carbolic. Blood. Wet wool.

"Thank you," Maeve whispered. "God keep you."

"He's got his hands full," said Roz. "Eat something."

…

She had a rule about the door, and the rule was: lock it after the last patient. Tonight she forgot. She was rinsing the basin when she heard the heartbeat on the stair.

It was a strange one.

She had listened to ten thousand hearts. She could tell a liar by the hitch in the upstroke and a lover by the skip, and a man who was about to hit somebody by the way the beat began to crowd itself. But this one was slow, and it was compressed. There was no other word. Each beat landed hard and short, like a fist closed on something, and then released all at once. A heart held in a vise. A heart that had practiced, for a very long time, not to be heard.

It was coming up the stair one step at a time, with a thump between the steps.

She dried her hands. She did not turn around.

"The dispensary is closed," she said. "If it's a fever, there's a doctor on Cinder Street. If it's a bullet, there's a different doctor. If it's something else, you can sit down, and wait, and be quiet."

"It's something else," said a voice. "I'll be quiet."

When she looked, he was sitting in the chair by the door with a cane across his knees. A boy. Twenty, perhaps. Thin, pale, ink to the knuckles, in a waistcoat that had been somebody else's and taken in. His eyes were gray and entirely too calm.

"Dex Hallam," she said.

"You know me."

"I know the name. Everyone on this street knows the name. They say you can buy a man's debts and sell them back as gifts." She turned the basin over to dry. "They also say you'll ask for a favor, and the favor will cost more than the debt."

"They're mostly right."

"What's the favor?"

"The Archive of Tithes," said Dex. "Your mother's vial."

The basin hit the shelf harder than she'd meant it to. In the green lamplight she saw him watching her: not her face but her throat, where the pulse beat. He was a man who studied hearts, too, she thought, only with his eyes instead of his ears.

"I don't know what you've heard."

"Delphine Boudreaux. Gray Willow Asylum. Tithed five years ago, in the sweep of the Cinder Line." He said it gently. "The vial was filed in the Archive at the end of that week. It's in the Undervault. Row 114, shelf F. I can get you to it."

She had not told anyone about Row 114. Row 114, shelf F, was a number she had found by bribing a clerk at the Registry for the price of two years of her wages, and she'd never said it aloud, not even to herself, in the dark.

"How do you know that?"

"I read what's in the Registry." The gray eyes did not move. "I pay people who do. I read it all, Miss Boudreaux. Everyone's. Because the Registry is the only place in this city that writes down what the Council has taken from the people who can't stop it, and someone should keep count."

She did not say thank you. She did not trust him enough. But the knot at the back of her neck, the one she'd carried for five years, shifted a fraction.

"Who else is on this job?"

"There's a thief," Dex said. "A girl who walks through mirrors. A gambler who can bend a bullet. A chemist, a boy, who is in fact the Chairman's son. And a man who knows the Undervault from the inside."

"A man."

"A former Captain of the Lamp Order. He was in the Palisade for treason. I'm getting him out." He said it as though it were a line in a ledger. "Josiah Pruitt."

She did not move.

It was a very small thing, the name. Two syllables and a surname, set down on the air between them like a coin. And yet the room went silent in the way a pond does before a snake: the stove ticking, the rain on the window, the whole world drawing back a hand's breadth.

Lieutenant Pruitt.

She had been nineteen. She had been peeling potatoes in the kitchen of the house on Mercer Lane, and her mother had been at the stove, singing something low and sweet in the old French, the one with no ending. There had been a knock, and then there had not been a door. A boy in a gray coat, not much older than she. Hands in black gloves. Dark curls cropped short, regulation, and eyes that were frightened and trying not to be. Delphine Boudreaux, by the authority of the Council of Charter Houses. The handcuffs had rattled. She had thought: his hands are shaking. And she had screamed at him, in the kitchen with the potatoes spilled all over the floor, and he had taken her mother out into the rain.

She heard her own heart now, thundering. She drew it down. She was a midwife. She had gotten very good at that.

"Get out," said Roz.

"Miss Boudreaux—"

"Out. I'll have no part of anything he's part of."

"He knows the Undervault," said Dex. "Every stair of it. He trained there. He's the only one alive who can lead us to Row 114." He did not raise his voice. "I won't pretend he's clean. He did what you think. But he's spent eight months in a cell for trying to stop what he found out he'd been doing, and I'm not asking you to like him. I'm asking you to decide whether you want the vial more than you hate him."

She stood in the green light with her hands braced on the shelf. The gap, she thought. The gap between the beats. She counted it. She had been counting it for five years.

"Conditions," she said.

"Name them."

"If he touches me, I'll stop his heart." She said it flat, as one reports the weather. "I can. You know that, or you wouldn't have come. And when I get my mother's vial, he does not say he's sorry. Not to me, not near me, not in my hearing. I don't want to hear it. I don't want it spent."

Dex looked at her for a long moment. Then, solemnly, as if she'd named a price in gold, he said, "Done."

…

Gray Willow sat on a bluff above the river, an hour and a half by the milk cart, a long low building the color of wet paper with a hundred and forty windows and not one view. She got there at dawn. The sky was the color of oyster shell, and the gulls were screaming over the water, and the keeper at the gate, who liked her, took her basket and winked and said she was early, and she said she always was.

Her mother's room was at the end of the east ward, with a window onto a gray tree.

Delphine Boudreaux sat in a chair with a shawl over her knees, small and straight-backed, her hair gone white in places where five years ago it had been black as a crow. She was fifty-one. She had the same long hands as Roz, and the same cheekbones, and Roz could hear her heart from the door, a soft clear patter, slow and sweet, like rain in a gutter. It was a good heart. It had always been a good heart. It just didn't know where to put anything.

"Morning, Mama."

Her mother turned her head. The eyes were dark, polite, and puzzled.

"Cher," she said. "Are you my daughter?"

It had been four hundred and some mornings. Roz had stopped counting around the two hundredth. She crossed the room, set down the basket, and knelt, so that her eyes were level with her mother's. "Yes, Mama," she said.

"Ah." A small, satisfied nod, as though this had been a question about the weather. "I thought maybe. You have a look of someone."

"I have your look."

"Do you?" She seemed pleased. She reached out and patted Roz's cheek with two fingers, very light, and then took her hand back and folded both in her lap, and her eyes went away somewhere over Roz's shoulder, to the gray tree. "It's a nice morning."

"It's a nice morning."

"Do I know you?"

Roz took a breath. "You will," she said. "You'll know me soon."

She unpacked the basket, the pralines she'd bought from the Creole woman on Cinder Street, a wedge of cheese, a clean nightdress, a comb. She combed her mother's hair. She hummed to herself while she did it, or tried to, and halfway through she found that she wasn't humming at all, because her mother was.

It was soft. It was hardly a sound. It was a tune with no words and no beginning, a tune that wandered along and then turned back on itself in a long slow curve, and Delphine hummed it with her eyes half shut and her hands moving a little in her lap, as though she were stirring something. She had hummed it every day for five years. She did not know what it was. She did not know where she'd learned it.

Roz knew. It was what Delphine had been singing in the kitchen. It was the last thing her mother had been before the Council took the rest.

I'm coming, she thought. Hold on. I'm coming.

…

She was a hundred yards from the gate when she heard the other heart.

It was behind her. It was slow, and compressed, and it was keeping a careful distance, the stride of a man who didn't want to be noticed and had never in his life managed not to be. Thump, step, drag. She stopped. The road ran down between the stone walls and the stunted pines, wet and empty, with the river showing silver at the bottom. She did not turn around.

"You followed me."

"I thought you might want someone to walk with," said Dex.

"I don't want anything from you."

"I know." He came up beside her, a little out of breath, a hand pressed to his left hip, and did not look at her. "I'm not offering anything. I'm just walking."

They went down the road in silence for a hundred paces. A cart rattled by with a load of turnips. A boy on the cart stared at them, and she stared back until he looked away. She knew what she looked like: a tall woman in a worn gray coat, with her hair tied up in a rag and her face closed like a door, and next to her a limping kid with an expensive cane. Mother and son, perhaps, or the other thing.

"Does she know you?" Dex asked, at last.

"No."

"Does it hurt?"

"Every time." She said it without bitterness. It was just the fact. "She asks me every time if I'm her daughter. And I say yes. It's the only thing I can say. If I say no, she believes me, and if I say yes, she believes me too, and it doesn't make any difference at all." She breathed. "And I'm not going to lie to her. Even if it'd be kinder. So I say yes. Because it's true."

Dex was quiet.

"You should know," she said, "that I'll have the vial. Whatever it takes. I don't care what's in the safe, or what's on the stair, or who walks in front. I'll have it."

"I believe you."

"Don't be kind to me."

"I wasn't. I was agreeing."

She nearly smiled. She felt it start, and stopped it, and was a little ashamed.

Down in the town, a church bell began to ring the hour. It was a deep, ugly, single note, with a flat edge on it, from the tower of St. Aldous. It rolled across the water. And she heard his heart jump.

It was a small thing. Another person would have missed it. But she heard the whole beat leap and crowd, three sharp strokes where there should have been one, the pulse of a man who has put his foot on a stair that isn't there. Then he swallowed. His hand tightened on the cane. Gradually, deliberately, the beat dragged itself back down to its low, locked, compressed march.

"Mr. Hallam," she said.

"It's nothing."

"That was not nothing."

"It's a bell," said Dex. "I don't like bells." He lengthened his stride, grimly. "I'll walk you to the cart."

She let him. She did not ask. She'd learned a long time ago that you could not pull a story out of a heart. You could only listen to the place where it hurt, and wait, and see if its owner decided to put it into words.

But she marked it. The way she marked everything.

…

She got back to the dispensary at noon and slept for three hours on the cot with her boots on. When she woke the light had gone yellow and the stove had died. There was a prescription pad on the shelf, the cheap gray paper they gave away at the Registry, with the little perforated stubs along the edge, and a pencil on a string.

She sat down. She didn't know why. She tore off a stub, and held it, and wrote on it in her slanting midwife's hand: Delphine.

She looked at it for a long time. Then, underneath, because it was the other name, because it was the one she would have to carry whether she liked it or not, she wrote: Josiah Pruitt.

The pencil was blunt. The letters looked heavy, a bruise on the page.

She drew a line through the second name.

She sat with the stub in her hand while the light turned from yellow to orange. Out in the alley the Watch went by again, four hearts, slow and steady. Somewhere beyond the wall a child was crying, and someone was singing it to sleep in a language she did not know.

Row 114, shelf F.

She picked up the pencil.

And, beneath the line, in the same slow, careful letters, she wrote it again.