Epilogue: The Second Verse

Roz

January 1894

On the morning that Pruitt House opened its doors, it snowed on Soot Row for the first time in nine years.

Roz stood at the window of the front room with a cup of chicory going cold in her hands and watched the flakes come down. They fell thick and slow and gray-white over the chimney pots of Tallow Street, over the carts and the coal-dust and the Dispensary's green lamp, over the crooked line of washing that somebody had forgotten to take in. The Docks looked clean. They looked, for an hour, like a place where children might be born on purpose.

The house had been a chandler's warehouse. Big Ned's boys had gutted it in six weeks. The floors were scrubbed pine. The walls were whitewashed, and Penny Penhallow's girls had painted a long frieze along the passage, a procession of animals in red and yellow, so bright and badly drawn that nobody could look at them without smiling. There were twenty-two beds upstairs in two long rooms, each with a patchwork quilt. There was a kitchen with a stove the size of a locomotive. There was a schoolroom, with a slate for every child, and in the corner of the schoolroom a bookshelf, and on the top of the bookshelf, where the smallest ones couldn't reach, a green-clothed ledger with brass corners. Orphan Tithes, Quarter Four. Seven hundred and twelve names. They had been calling them in, one by one, since November.

Over the door, in black letters on a white board, it said: PRUITT HOUSE. For the Unchartered and the Taken. All are welcome.

She touched the badge on her collar.

It was a small thing, a pin of tarnished brass in the shape of a lit lamp. Dray had brought it to her the week after the funeral, wrapped in a handkerchief. He had it on his coat, he'd said, awkwardly. The Order's mark. I thought—I don't know what I thought. She had turned it over in her hand. A plain brass lamp, rubbed smooth by a thumb. She had pinned it to her collar and had not taken it off since. She had turned it, though, with a pair of pliers, so that the flame pointed down.

"Miss Roz?" said a small voice at her elbow.

It was Maggie Doyle. She was seven, with a gap in her teeth and a ribbon coming undone. She had arrived on Tuesday with a note from Sister Perpetua. She still did not know her mother's name, but she had been told that the Heart had sent it back, and that it was only a matter of finding the right door.

"There's a lady," said Maggie.

"A lady?"

"At the gate. She's got a basket. She says she's looking for somebody."

Roz set down her cup.

…

She knew before she reached the hall.

She knew by the sound. It was a small sound, dim and far, a heartbeat on the other side of a wall, but she would have known it in a thousand. It was a deep slow dark river-beat. It was going a little faster than usual. It was stumbling, over and over, like someone coming down a flight of stairs in the dark.

She opened the front door.

The snow was coming down thick. At the foot of the steps, in the gray swirl, stood a woman in a faded blue shawl.

She was small and broad and brown, with a face like a walnut. Her hair was iron-gray under a headscarf, coming down at the temples. She held a covered basket on her arm. Snow clung to her eyelashes. She was looking up at the house, at the board over the door, at the lamp on the lintel, with the wide, wet, bright-eyed stare of a woman who has walked a long way in thin shoes.

She turned her head. Her eyes found Roz.

Nothing happened for a moment.

"Cher," said Delphine Boudreaux. Her voice was dark and soft and it shook. "Excuse me. I am sorry. I do not want to trouble you." She wet her lips. "I think I am looking for my daughter. Are you—are you my daughter?"

The snow fell between them.

It was exactly what Roz had known she would say. She had lain awake and heard it a hundred times. After Black Noon the afternoon had come back to Delphine in pieces, and then the rest after it, room by room, like a house being relit. In November she had said Roz twice, to the wall. In December she had held out her hand across a narrow bed at Gray Willow and looked at her daughter with a polite, shy, searching look, and asked, Are you my daughter? And Roz had said yes, and the old woman had patted her hand, and gone back to the window to think.

She had been ready to hear it again.

"Yes, Mama," said Roz. "I am."

Her mother looked at her.

She looked for a long time. Her face did not change. Then something began to move behind her eyes. It was slow and dark and warm, like a tide coming in over flats. Her lip quivered. Her hand tightened on the basket. And the lines in her face, one by one, went soft.

"I know you are," said Delphine.

…

The basket fell in the snow. A dozen late oranges rolled out of it, bright as lamps, and went bouncing down the steps. Neither of them noticed. Roz was down the stairs in two strides, and her mother's arms came up, strong as a washerwoman's, and closed round her with a force that drove the breath out of her ribs.

She smelled of lye soap and woodsmoke and boiled cloth. She did not smell of jasmine. That was gone, and would stay gone, and Roz had made her peace with it. But under the soap, in the warm hollow of her neck, there was a smell that was hers. A smell like bread. A smell like a kitchen on a Tuesday.

"My Roz," said Delphine, into her hair. "My little heart. My cher. I remember you. I remember the potatoes. You were so cross."

"I was awful."

"You were impossible. You said my cures were out of date." She laughed, and it turned into a sob, and then into something halfway between the two. "And you were right. They were."

"Mama—"

"Hush now."

She held Roz at arm's length. She took her face in her two broad hands. She looked at her, the whole of her, from the dark hair to the plain black dress to the brass lamp with its downturned flame. Her thumbs moved on Roz's cheeks.

"Who is this man?" she said, tapping the badge.

"He was a friend."

"He was a soldier."

"He was both."

"Ah." The old woman's mouth twisted. "I remember a soldier. A boy, with a long face. His hands shook." She held Roz's eyes. "He was kind, in the end?"

"Yes."

"Good. I would hate to think I'd forgiven him for nothing."

Roz laughed. It broke in the middle. She pressed her face into her mother's shoulder and felt the snow falling on the back of her neck, and heard her mother's heart under her ear, deep and slow and steady and whole. She had listened to ten thousand hearts. She had never listened to one that sounded so much like home.

After a while, very softly, close to her ear, Delphine began to sing.

It was the old song. The low one, the slow one, in the river-French of the bayou. It had the dark in it, and the sweetness. It had every word. Roz stood on the steps of Pruitt House in the snow, with a crowd of curious children at the window and a basket of oranges rolling in the gutter, and let her mother sing her home.

Dodo, ti-pitit, dodo.

…

Felix

The sign over the door of the workshop on Dunmore Quay said THE OPEN HAND, and underneath, in smaller letters, Repairs, Inventions, and Honest Work. No Charter Required.

Felix stood in the middle of the shop, in a leather apron, with a pencil behind his ear and ink on his chin, and tried to decide whether to scream.

"It's a hinge," said Hollis.

"It is not a hinge. It is the wrong hinge."

"It swings."

"It swings badly. It has a tolerance of an eighth of an inch. It will bind in a damp season, and in this city that means all of them." Felix flung out a hand. "It is the third time this week I have been told that an eighth of an inch is near enough."

"Well, it is, if you're a hinge."

"Hollis."

"I'm only saying."

"You're saying it deliberately."

Hollis grinned.

He sat on a stool by the forge in his shirt-sleeves, with his boots on a crate, a cheroot in the corner of his mouth, and a half-finished brass door-fitting in his lap. His hands were bare. No: they were not. He wore, on his left, a gray kidskin glove, patched twice at the thumb, with a thin line of copper wire running down the back. He didn't remove it to work. He claimed it made him lucky.

The shop was long and low, with a skylight, and smelled of hot metal and lamp-oil and the sweet sharp tang of solder. It was full of the beginnings of things. A bench of half-built clockwork. A rack of lenses. A rain-gauge, a dozen pairs of spectacles, a boy's broken wagon waiting to be mended. Four Unchartered apprentices, aged fourteen to nineteen, worked at a long table at the back with their tongues between their teeth. The door stood open to the snow.

It had been his own idea. That was the astonishing thing. He had not known he had ideas. The lawyers had come to the Hall on the second day of December: a pair of tired, shabby men in black, with a bundle of papers and the stricken look of those who have just been told that the thing they spent forty years serving no longer exists. Mr. Whitcomb, they had said, the estate of your father is under sequestration. The Meridian Trust has been dissolved. By operation of the late Council's emergency act, all assets are forfeit to the city, subject to claim by lawful heirs. They had looked at him. You, sir, are the sole lawful heir.

He had signed it all away in an afternoon.

Every stock and bond. Every acre and warehouse. Every cabinet of gold. He'd signed it over, with a quill pen, to a new body called the Ash Docks Relief Fund, administered by a board of five: Sister Perpetua, Isidore Greeley, Penny Penhallow, Big Ned, and a mild old schoolmaster whom Ma Tilly had selected on grounds he could not fathom. He had kept a hundred dollars and his mother's piano.

The piano stood in the corner now, by the stove. Nobody played it. But on Sundays Hollis sometimes lifted the lid, and picked out a note with one finger, and said that's a C, and Felix said it's a B-flat, and they argued.

"It's an eighth of an inch," said Hollis. "I'll file it."

"You'll file it properly."

"I'll file it so well you'll weep."

Felix opened his mouth to retort, and found, to his annoyance, that he was laughing.

He crossed the floor and took the hinge out of Hollis's glove. He turned it in the light. It was, he saw, quite good. A better hinge than he could have made himself, in truth, because a hinge was a conversation, and Hollis could talk to metal in a way he never would. He put it down.

"I'm going to see him," he said.

Hollis looked up.

"Today?"

"This afternoon." He rubbed his chin and made the ink worse. "I've been, twice. He doesn't speak. He sits on his cot and he listens to the guard's footsteps on the stair. He has Mrs. Aberdeen's cocoa, every day, in a tin cup." He stopped. "The trial is in March. They've asked if I will testify."

"Will you?"

"I think so. I think I have to." He drew a breath. "I'd like to bring him something. A clock, I thought. He'd like a clock. He can hear them."

Hollis was silent for a moment.

"A slow one?" he said.

"A true one."

"Good," said Hollis. And reached out and put his hand on the back of Felix's neck, in the old rough way, and held it there. His glove was warm.

Felix leaned into it. For a while neither of them said a word.

He was twenty-two now. He had been twenty-one on the day the sun went out. His name was still Whitcomb, in the lawyers' papers. But on the brass plate on the bench, under the sign, in a neat engraver's hand, he had had cut a single line, and he looked at it every morning. F. Q. Whitcomb-Quade. It was a clumsy thing. Hollis said it sounded like a firm of undertakers. But it was his.

He had not been in his father's shadow since the Dome.

He walked in the light, now, and found it was not nearly so frightening as he had supposed.

…

Viv

The harbor was gray and gold at dawn.

Viv stood at the head of the gangway of the Wake, in a captain's coat of dark blue wool and a pair of boots that did not yet fit, and looked at the water.

It was a three-masted barque, black-hulled, trim and slim and a little weather-beaten, bought in November at a rather scandalous price from a bankrupt coffee merchant, with money that had once belonged to a man now sitting in the dark. Her name was on her stern in white letters. Ma Tilly had insisted on it. The Wake, said the paint. Merrick Bay. A nice double sense, Felix had said; a ship's wake, and the other kind.

Fourteen of the Saints had signed on as crew. Big Ned's nephew was bosun. Sister Perpetua's cousin was cook. The hold was full of casks and crates, flour and salt pork and quicklime and four hundred feet of good manila rope, and in the aftercabin, on a shelf above the captain's bunk, lay a red Loss Book with its pencil tied to the spine.

She turned her face to the sea.

It was low tide. A pale wind was blowing in from the east. The mouth of the harbor lay open before her, between the stone arms of the mole, and past it, as far as she could see, was a vast gray-gold plain, shifting, wrinkling, running to the edge of the world. It breathed. It moved. Waves rose out of it, one by one, long and slow, and came toward her and broke against the stones with a sound like a great animal turning in its sleep.

She had seen it every day for a month. She had stood on the pier and the quay and the end of the mole. She had been told that the sight would come to her, in time. That she would feel something.

Today she did.

It came on her all at once. The light. The scale. The smell, cold and clean and salt, with a thread of tar in it. The wind pressing on her face. It was enormous. It was so much bigger than anything she had known. It had no edges. She stood at the head of her ship with her hand on the rail, and her breath stopped in her throat, and tears ran down her face and blew away sideways.

Oh, she thought. Oh. It's so—

She had no word. She had no word for it at all. She had never seen it before.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

"Captain."

She turned.

He stood at the foot of the gangway, in a gray coat, with his cane in one hand and a black ledger in the other. The wind had got into his hair. He looked thinner than he had in the autumn, and healthier, and he was smiling in the shy crooked way that still caught her under the ribs every time. He had been up all night, going over the manifests. He looked as though he'd enjoyed it.

"What's the price?" she said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Of the passage. You're a passenger, aren't you? Cabin one. I don't recall you paying."

"I thought I'd negotiate."

"There's no discount for a cripple."

"I'm not asking one."

She laughed. She came down the gangway, three steps, and stopped in front of him, and he looked up, and the sunrise lay along the side of his face.

"No price," said Dex.

"None?"

"None. I'm told some things are given."

She took his hand. His fingers were cold, ink-stained, and entirely steady. She held them against the rail of her ship, and the two of them looked out together at the long gray swell.

"Tell me about it," she said. "Again."

"The sea?"

"Yes."

"It was blue," said Dex. "And loud. And bigger than anything. You were five, and you were cold, and your mother carried you up in a shawl." His voice was low. "She said, Look."

"Guarda," said Viv.

She tried the word on her tongue. It was a pretty word. It was a stranger's word, in a language she half remembered. But it fitted her mouth.

On the quay behind them, a hundred yards off, a crowd had gathered to see them go. There was a large woman in black bombazine, waving a handkerchief. There was a line of children in gray smocks. There were Longshoremen with their caps in the air. Ma Tilly cupped her hands round her mouth and shouted something that was lost in the wind, but it sounded like mind you write!

Dex lifted his hand.

Then, because he was happy, and because nobody could hear him but her, he began to sing.

He sang low and rough and a little off the note, as he always did. He sang to the tune his mother had sung. And this time it had words. He sang the second verse, the whole of it, without hurry, in the wind off the harbor.

Wake now, little rattler. You were never lost before.

…

Far beneath the Hill, in a vault of black stone, in the dark, a sphere of glass lay on a bed of felt.

It was very still. A guard stood outside the iron door, a thick-set man in a blue coat, with his cap beneath his arm and a brass lamp at his collar. He had turned the lamp upside down.

Down in the dark, the Heart beat once.

A pause. A silence like a held breath. And somewhere above, in the snow-bright city, a thousand people turned in their sleep and remembered a thing they had not known they had lost.

There are songs that can only be sung by someone who remembers everything. And there are people who only become themselves by agreeing to remember.