TWO WOMEN, ONE FACE

Day 12 of 100

The Dean gave a dinner for the Wardens, and it was a mistake from the first course.

Rooke had known it would be. He had said so to Okafor, in the loft, with his collar half buttoned and a stub of shaving soap drying on his jaw. We are being fed, he'd said, because we are a danger. The Dean's invitation had come on cream paper, in a hand like a row of pins: the pleasure of the company of Captain Rooke and his staff at the High Table, Thursday, seven o'clock, to consult upon the recent distressing events. It was a kindness, in the way that a gift of mutton is a kindness to a wolf.

He had meant to refuse. He had written the refusal. And then Miss Fenwick had said, from the table by the east window, without turning round, "They'll all be there, Captain."

"Who?"

"The faculty. The senior fellows. Professor Pryce. Everyone who knew Elias Vane." She had been writing. The pen scratched on. "A man tells the truth over wine that he wouldn't tell across a desk."

"You've experience of that?"

"I've read a great deal about dinners."

It had nearly made him smile. He'd torn up the refusal.

So here they were: the Captain of the Wardens, his Lieutenant, and his clerk, in the oak-paneled gloom of the Faculty Dining Room, at the center of a long white-draped table with forty candles and eighteen guests. A portrait of a dead Chancellor glowered from the end wall. A fire roared. Silver gleamed on the sideboard. The Dean sat at the head, beaming nervously, and below him a series of dry elderly men in black gowns, who spoke in low murmurs and looked at Okafor's mustache as though it were a rare disease.

He had been placed in the middle, naturally. On his right sat the Dean's secretary, a round, voluble woman in puce. On his left, Miss Fenwick. She'd been given a chair at the foot of the table's second arm, by a courteous mistake of the steward's, and had been in it, upright, silent, in her gray gown and steel spectacles, for forty minutes. She had eaten nothing. She had sipped her water. Her left hand lay in her lap; the right turned the stem of her glass, a quarter-turn and back, a quarter-turn and back.

She is counting, he thought. She does it when she's frightened.

And across from them, three places down, in a dress of blue silk that caught the candlelight and held it, sat Mara Ashgrove.

…

It had not been an arrangement. He wanted that clear, if only for himself.

He had not known she would be there. He had seen the list; it did not include the students. But she was a Fellow, apparently, a junior one, with rooms in the East Court, and the Dean had a habit of gathering in his clever young people for the sake of the conversation. She had come in on Pryce's arm at seven, laughing at something he had said, in a dress the color of a winter sky. She had made her curtsey to the Dean. She'd taken her seat across the table from him with a quick, bright, appraising glance that touched on his face and moved on.

Now she was talking to Dr. Veldt.

He watched her do it. He could not seem to help himself. It was a performance of a kind, easy and fluid, the full stream of a gifted talker. She had Veldt's whole attention; the plump anxious man was leaning toward her, flushed, with his napkin forgotten in his lap, and when she said something low and quick he gave a great honk of laughter that made two old fellows turn. She turned her wineglass in her fingers. She tossed her head. Her hair, which had always been bound, was loose tonight in a heavy twist, with a curl falling at the nape.

She looked like a woman who has been let out of school.

It is the Ascension, he told himself again. The sigil woke. She's free of it. It was a good explanation, and he had given it to himself forty times in two days. It explained the dimple. It explained the dress.

It did not explain why his skin prickled when she laughed.

He let the Sight come up.

He did it quietly, with the ease of long practice, behind the shield of his lowered lashes: a slow softening at the edge of vision. The candles bloomed into haloes. The portrait receded. And down the long table the people came alight, one by one, each in his proper weather: the Dean's fluttering, tender, anxious violet; the secretary's sunny, shallow gold; Veldt, an embarrassed pink. Beside him, Okafor, steady brown.

And Mara Ashgrove.

She was dazzling. He had to narrow his eyes. She burned across the table like a window with the sun behind it: a tall, clean, brilliant flame, nearly white at the center, rising straight and strong and utterly unbroken. It was the blue he knew. It was the silver. But it was filled. It had been poured full to the brim. There was no lean in it, no tear, no frayed edge; it stood in the air like a column of fire, and the whole length of the table was lit by it. Under the blue ran a faint warmth, a flush of rose, like the glow in a seashell.

Healed, he thought. She has healed.

And his heart sank.

He could not have said why. It was what he'd wished for. He had stood on the dais and seen a girl with a broken soul, and had felt a distant ache of compassion, and the Bureau's cold training whispering report; and now she was whole. He should have been glad. He was a man who sat on a cot at night with his hands behind his head and thought of every broken thing he had been unable to mend, and here was one that had mended itself.

And he felt nothing. Nothing at all. He looked at that glorious flame, and he felt as one feels on seeing a very beautiful painting in a stranger's house.

He turned his head.

…

Beside him, in the candlelight, Miss Fenwick sat with her hand on her glass.

He had not used the Sight on her since the interview. He had made a point of it. He had told himself it was a matter of courtesy: a woman had a right to be spared the scrutiny. He had kept his eyes on the files and the weather.

He looked now.

It was like stepping from a lit hall into a dark garden.

She was dim. After the blaze across the table the effect was nearly painful. The pale-blue light that surrounded her was no more than a haze, thin and cool, drawn tight against her body like a shawl. It leaned, as it had leaned before. It trembled. It was small, and quiet, and very tired, and it showed at its edge that clean-cut seam where the rest of it should have been. The silver was almost gone.

But the thread was still there.

That fine golden-white filament ran through the heart of it, steady as a taut wire. In the soft gloom of her, against the glare of the other, it seemed to him as bright as a star. It did not waver. It was as if the whole of the woman had been wound down to that single line, and the line had held.

Look at her, he thought.

He couldn't have said what he meant. He sat with the fork cooling in his hand, the Sight burning behind his eyes, and looked from one to the other: the blaze across the table and the ember beside him. The one, glorious and complete, laughing in blue silk. The other, crooked and small and silent, with a pencil-smudge on her thumb.

One is a miracle. One is a wound.

And I know which one I am looking at when I am not trying.

It was an appalling thought. He put it down at once. He was the Captain of the Wardens, with a number and a coat, and a dead pair of boys on a boathouse floor; he did not have the luxury of what he looked at when he was not trying. He drew breath. He made the Sight fall away, and the candles came back, hard and yellow, and the faces, and the clatter of forks.

"—and I said, Dr. Veldt, the Aristotelian position on the humors is simply untenable in light of the new cellular work—"

"Miss Ashgrove, you are too clever!"

"Not at all. I'm only well read. Isn't that so, Professor?"

"You're appallingly well read." Pryce, at her side, was smiling. It was a stiff smile. It sat on his seamed face like a tinted print. He had eaten nothing. Rooke had noticed it as soon as the soup came: the way the old man's spoon had gone down and up, down and up, and never reached his lips. "She has read everything I ever wrote and half of what I burned."

"The half you burned was the best."

"Hush, child."

"I read it in the ashes."

The table laughed. Pryce did not. He raised his glass and drank, deeply, and set it down with a hand that shook; and for an instant, across the candles, his eyes met Rooke's. They were old, bloodshot, and wretched. They flickered away at once.

What is it that you know? thought Rooke.

…

"Miss Fenwick," said the Dean's secretary in puce, leaning across him, "you're from New Hampshire, I understand?"

"Concord, ma'am."

"Such a pretty state. My cousin keeps a boarding-house in Laconia. Do you know Laconia?"

"I passed through."

"And you've come to the Wardens as a clerk! How adventurous. I always say, a woman ought to have occupation. Is it not tedious, though, all those gloomy files?"

"I find them restful."

"Restful!"

"They're orderly," said Miss Fenwick. Her voice was thin and quiet and level. "It's a comfort to read something that has been written down."

The secretary went off into a flutter. Rooke said nothing. He had caught the last words, and they hung in his head. A comfort to read something that has been written down. There was something beneath them, dry and aching, like a splinter under a nail. He stole a glance at her. She was looking at her plate.

And the voice from across the table said, very lightly:

"Fenwick."

He felt her go still.

"I beg your pardon," said Mara Ashgrove. She had put down her glass. She was leaning forward on her elbows, chin on her laced fingers, with the candlelight making a halo of her hair and her eyes fixed on Miss Fenwick with a look of open, friendly interest. "I couldn't help overhearing. Fenwick. Such an unusual name. I knew a Fenwick once."

"Did you?" said Miss Fenwick.

"A Quaker. By the lake. He built the fence on the north shore, I believe, in the old days." The dimple showed. "A rather grim man. He disapproved of dancing."

"Many Friends do."

"Are you a relation?"

"No."

"But you're a Friend."

"My father was."

"Ah. And you are not."

"I am—" The voice stumbled. "I am a quiet person."

"How restful."

Okafor, on the far side, cleared his throat.

Rooke put down his fork.

It was a small exchange. It was perfectly courteous. Nobody at the table had remarked on it; the Dean was telling a story about a goat. But he had watched it with his pulse beating high in his throat, and he had seen what passed between the two women, and he did not like it.

It was not hostility. He'd have known what to do with hostility. It was something far more peculiar: a kind of electric stillness, a charged and glittering attention, as though two cats had met at either end of a very narrow wall. Miss Ashgrove was smiling. Her eyes were bright and soft. Miss Fenwick had gone gray at the lips, and her hand on the glass had stopped turning.

She is afraid of her, he thought. She is afraid of a Fellow of the Academy with a pretty dress.

Why?

"Do you know," said Mara Ashgrove, in her low warm voice, "I think we've met."

"I don't believe so."

"Haven't we? I have such a feeling." She tilted her head. "You remind me of someone. It's the eyes, I think. Behind the spectacles. They're exactly like—" She paused. "Oh, but it's absurd. I can't think who."

"I have a common face."

"You haven't," said Ashgrove softly. "That's the odd thing."

The silence at their end of the table stretched. Rooke felt it settle on him like dust. He looked from one face to the other, the blazing one and the gray one, and saw something that he had not seen before, as clear as a sentence on a page.

They had the same mouth.

It was in the shape of the upper lip. It was in the way each pressed the lower, a fraction, when she was thinking. He had been looking at them for an hour and had not seen it, because one was always laughing and the other was never allowed to. But in this moment, in the pause, they wore the same small private hardening of the lips; and he thought, with a chill that ran from the nape to the heel, They are kin.

They are very close kin.

She is Ashgrove's sister. She must be. A younger one, a half-sister, an illegitimate. That is why the lights are the same. That is why the flaw.

It fitted. It was elegant. It explained every oddity in a single stroke, the likeness of the color, the family weakness, the secrecy, the false name. A woman of good family, born on the wrong side of a blanket, driven by some necessity to take a clerk's place under a Quaker pseudonym at the very gate of her sister's school. He had seen stranger. He seized on it with something very like gratitude.

And a voice at the back of his skull, small, cool, and unconvinced, said: Then why did Ashgrove not know her?

…

The ices came. The candles guttered. The Dean, flushed with Madeira, rose to propose a toast to "the gallant officers of the Bureau, whose vigilance protects us all," and the room stood and clinked. Rooke stood. He raised his glass. He felt the two lights on either side of him, the glare and the ember, like the heat of two fires.

"To the Wardens!"

"To the Wardens."

He drank. Beside him, Miss Fenwick sipped her water. Across the table Mara Ashgrove touched the glass to her lips, and over its rim her eyes came to his and held.

They were gray-green. They were warm and amused, and just a little inquiring. They gave him a look of such open, guileless friendliness that for an instant he doubted the whole of his reasoning. You are a suspicious fool, he thought. She is a girl of twenty-four who has been lucky.

Then she moved her wrist.

It was nothing. A tilt of the arm, to set down her glass. The lace of her cuff fell back an inch, and he saw, on the inside of the left wrist, in the candle's glow, a flash of light.

It was not the sigil. It was a thin band of gray silk, bound round the wrist and tied. A mourning band, a bandage, a fashion. It covered the place where the snowflake lay.

She saw him see it.

She drew her hand back at once. She laughed and said something about a burn, an accident with the kettle, so stupid; she tugged the lace down with her other hand. It was very smoothly done. Dr. Veldt murmured sympathy. The conversation moved on.

But Rooke was looking at the table cloth.

On Ascension Night, he thought, the sigil was bare.

A tri-radial crystal, silver-blue, with a crack across it. She rolled up the sleeve. She laid her hand on the Stone. I saw it as clearly as I see this glass.

She has covered it. In two days. And she has never, since, let me see it.

He lifted his eyes.

She was turned away, laughing, her profile lovely in the firelight, a tilt of the head, a gleam of throat. The most radiant creature in the room. He looked at the bright hair and the sweep of the lashes and the blue silk, and he felt, for the first time, a small cold stir at the base of his spine, like a thing woken in the grass.

A band on the wrist. A change of hair. A change of manner. A change of light.

A new laugh.

He did not finish the thought. He turned his head. Beside him, the gray woman in the steel spectacles had risen with the rest, her hand on the back of her chair, and was standing quite straight, looking at nothing.

She was trembling. He could feel it through the air between them: a fine fast tremor, like the vibration of a taut string. Her knuckles on the chair were white. She was breathing carefully through her nose, in, and out, in, and out, like one who is carrying a very full cup. And as he watched, her lips moved, soundlessly, on a count.

Seven. Six. Five.

"Miss Fenwick," said Rooke, very low.

"Yes."

"Would you care to go out into the air?"

She turned her head. Her eyes behind the spectacles were enormous and wet. They met his, and for one second, one brief naked second, she did not guard them. He saw there something quite unlike the clerk's composure: a naked, desperate, furious loneliness. A flash of recognition so strong it was almost a cry. It said, as plainly as a spoken sentence:

Look at her. Look at her, please. Look at what she has.

And look at me.

"Yes," said Nell Fenwick. "Yes, Captain. I think I would."

…

He took her out through the garden door.

It opened onto the cloister, a long arcade of frosted arches, silver in the moonlight. The cold struck them like a clean blade. Behind them the roar of the dining-room fell to a murmur, and was shut off by the heavy door; and in the sudden hush they stood side by side on the flags, and breathed, and watched their breath go up.

She did not speak. She leaned against a pillar with her eyes closed and her hand pressed flat to her breastbone. Her face in the moonlight was the color of tallow. She breathed for a long time. He stood a pace off, with his hands behind his back, and said nothing. It was the one thing he knew how to do.

At last she opened her eyes.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "It was very hot."

"It was."

"I felt faint."

"I understand."

"I don't usually."

"No." He considered the moonlit quad. "I imagine you've not much practice at dinners where one is being looked at."

She said nothing.

"She was a little cruel to you, I think," said Rooke.

"Who?"

"Miss Ashgrove."

"No." Quickly. "No, she was only — I'm sure she meant nothing."

"I'm not."

"Captain—"

"I'm not a fool, Miss Fenwick." He kept his voice level. "I don't ask what lies between you. I've no right. But I've sat at many tables, and I know the sound of a knife that is not quite put away." He turned to look at her. "You needn't tell me why she frightens you. I only want you to know that if anyone ever—"

He stopped.

She was looking at him. In the white moonlight, with her hair cropped and flat and her gray gown, with the steel spectacles gone silver, she looked young, and plain, and rather lost. Something in her face was struggling. He saw it come up and be put down, and come up again; and he saw her lip begin to tremble.

"Captain Rooke," she said, in a voice scarcely above a whisper.

"Yes?"

"When you look at us. At the two of us. At her, and at me." She swallowed. "What do you see?"

It was a question he had been asking himself for an hour.

He considered it. He found, with a kind of weary surprise, that he had no wish to lie. He stood in the cold in his gray coat, with the stars thick overhead, and looked at the small face turned up to his, and said the truth because it was the only thing he had.

"Two translations," said Rooke slowly, "of the same text."

She stared.

"One is polished," he said. "Fluent. Complete. It reads like an original. It's a joy to read." He drew breath. "The other is rough, and cramped, and full of gaps, and it was clearly made by someone in a great hurry who was afraid. But when I read it—" He stopped.

"Yes?"

"When I read it," said the Captain of the Wardens, "I can hear the voice of the author."

She made a small sound, half a gasp, half a sob. She put her gloved hand over her mouth.

He looked away. He looked at the stars, the frosted arches, the long black shadow of the chapel across the moonlit quad. He heard her breathing behind him, ragged, quick, and slowly steadying.

I should not have said it.

I should not have said anything.

The door opened behind them in a gush of warmth and noise. A voice called, "Captain! The Dean's asking for you." He did not turn at once. He stood a moment longer, with his shoulders stiff, and his hand on the cold stone of the pillar, and the words ringing in him like a dropped glass.

The voice of the author.

And whose is that?