THE STALKER WHO WASN’T

Day 16 of 100

She came to the Post at nine on Saturday morning, and she came alone, which was the first thing that was wrong.

Rooke saw her from the loft window. He was shaving, one side of his jaw still lathered, the razor stropped and the basin steaming on the sill, and he saw a figure in a dove-gray cloak come through the gatehouse arch with the stiff, quick, hunted walk of a woman who has been told not to run. She held her hood close with one gloved hand. She looked back twice over her shoulder at the empty drive. At the foot of the Post stair she stopped, put her hand to her throat, and stood with her head down for a count of perhaps ten.

Rehearsing, said a cold voice in him, and he was ashamed of it at once.

He wiped his face, put on his coat, and went down.

…

"Miss Ashgrove."

"Captain." She had turned at the sound of his step. The hood had fallen back. "I'm so sorry. I know it's early. I know you must think me a perfect nuisance. I couldn't think where else to—" She stopped. Her voice cracked on the last word like thin ice.

He looked at her face.

She had not slept. That much was plain. There were violet marks under the gray-green eyes, and her mouth was pinched and pale, and the long hair had been pinned up in haste with the pins crooked. She wore no color but the cloak. She looked, in the light of the stairwell, like a girl who had been frightened for days and had kept it up with courtesy until the courtesy gave out.

It was an utterly convincing picture. He thought: Whatever else she is, she is a better actress than anyone I ever interrogated.

And then, because he was a fair man and the thought was cheap: Or she is simply afraid.

"Come up," said Rooke. "There's a fire."

He took her into his office. He sat her in the good chair, the one by the stove, and poured her tea from the pot Pip had left, and put the cup into her hands, and she held it as though it were the only warm thing in the world. Okafor, who had been at the long table with the Vane depositions, rose without a word and carried his papers into the passage. At the east window, behind her screen of files, a small figure in gray went on writing and did not look up.

"Now," said Rooke, sitting on the edge of the desk. "Tell me."

…

She told it well.

He would grant her that, afterward, walking up and down the loft with his hands behind his back. She told it as a frightened but intelligent woman tells a thing that she has not yet quite brought herself to believe. She began with small matters, and let the small matters pile.

A notebook had gone missing from her rooms on the twenty-sixth of March, she was almost sure, the days were all a blur; a brown calf notebook, a gift from her mother, that she carried everywhere. She'd thought she had left it in the belfry. She'd gone back and it wasn't there. She had put it down to grief, to the shock of Ascension. And then the letters had begun.

"Letters?"

"Notes. Pushed under my door." From her sleeve she drew three slips of paper and laid them on his blotter, smoothing each with a trembling finger. "I've been so stupid, Captain. I didn't want to trouble anyone. I told myself it was Tobias Marsh, or some idiot of a first-year, playing at ghosts. But they're in my hand."

He looked.

They were. That was the thing that made the hair stir on his neck. Three torn leaves of cream paper, written with a steel nib in a fine upright script, the capitals plain, the g closed. He had seen her signature on the Ascension register. He had seen the same hand on the library slip. Meet me at the boathouse. Come alone. And, You will not be believed. And, on the last, written large and wild, as though in a fever: I AM STILL HERE.

"I didn't write them," said Miss Ashgrove. "I swear to you I didn't."

"I don't suppose you did."

"There's a woman." She drew breath, and he saw her gather it. "I've seen her three times. Once from my window, across the court, at night, standing under the lamp by the chapel. Once in the cloister, on the evening of the dinner, as I was going back to my rooms. Just at the end of the arcade, quite still, looking at me. And once—" Her voice shook. "Once on the north road, as Josie and I came back from the village. She was by a hedge. I called out. She was gone."

"What did she look like?"

"Like me."

The room was very still. Somewhere in the passage Okafor's boots stopped.

"I know how it sounds," said Mara Ashgrove, and her eyes brimmed, and spilled. "I know. You're a Warden. You've seen what a Doppel does, and I've read the Act, I know exactly what you must be thinking. But I swear by my mother I'm not—" She broke off. A tear ran down the side of her nose and she dashed it away with the heel of her glove. "She wasn't quite like me. Her hair was brown. She wore spectacles. She was thin, and stooped, and shabby. But the face, Captain. The face under it was my face. As if someone had taken a likeness of me and drawn it out and left it in the rain."

Brown hair. Spectacles. Thin, and stooped, and shabby.

He did not move his eyes. He did not look at the east window. He did not need to; he could feel the stillness of the figure behind the files like a hand on his neck.

"Someone is wearing my face," whispered Miss Ashgrove. "And they have my notebook. And they are writing to me in my own hand. And I don't know what they want."

…

It was a good story.

It was, that was the odd, ugly thing, nearly a true one. He sat on the edge of the desk and turned it over, as he'd turned over a thousand depositions, looking for the seam. He found none. The notebook was real, because Mara Ashgrove had owned a calf notebook; Josie Tull had mentioned it. The notes were in her hand. The woman at the lamp would have been real, too, if a certain clerk had walked the cloister at night.

And she has, said the cold voice. Hasn't she? You have heard her come in at two.

It was not impossible. A woman of good family, born on the wrong side of the blanket. Resentful. Sharing the face, the father's mouth, the flaw in the light; driven to the gate of the sister who had everything. She might haunt the court by night. She might steal a notebook and copy a hand. It was not impossible. It was only ugly, and he did not want it to be true.

Why not?

He knew. He would not say it.

"Miss Ashgrove," he said gently. "Who else knows of this?"

"Only Josie. And now you."

"You've told no one at the Academy? The Dean?"

"The Dean would send for my uncle. He'd have me in a sanatorium by Wednesday." A faint, shaky smile. "I've heard how they treat girls who see themselves in the cloister."

"Yes." He had. "Is there any more?"

"One thing." She hesitated, and her hand tightened on the cup. "It's small. It's nothing. But a bill came yesterday, to the Bursar, for a gown. A gray wool gown, made up in the village, in a plain cut, with a collar and a row of buttons. Charged to my name. I haven't ordered a gray dress in my life. The seamstress is a Mrs. Pellam, in Tanner's Row."

…

He felt it land.

It was not the name; it was the thing behind it. He had written that name himself, in the black daybook, at the end of the interview: Who bound your ankle? Ruth Pellam, Tanner's Row. He had looked at the clean bandaging on the stable bench that day and thought, an uncommonly skillful hand. And in the last fortnight he had seen, on a certain clerk, a certain gray dress, high-collared and plain and made with great care, that did not look to have come from a rack.

He did not turn his head. He didn't need to. Behind the files, the pen at the east window had stopped.

"I see," said Rooke.

"Do you?" She looked up at him. The wet lashes. The red-rimmed eyes. "Oh, Captain, I'm so afraid. I don't know what to do. If it's something—if I've been—" She swallowed. "If I am being taken, I don't know how to be taken. I only know that I must tell someone. You were kind to me on Ascension. You looked at me as if you could tell what was the matter. And I thought, if there is anyone who can see what is real—"

She did not finish. She pressed her fist to her mouth.

He sat there. He had never felt so large and so clumsy. He was a man twice her weight, in a gray coat with a number, sitting on a desk over a weeping girl, with the whole of the cold clean world arrayed behind his eyes: I do not believe her. I do. She is lying. She is not. She is a Doppel. She is not. The Sight itched at the back of his skull. He did not use it. He had a feeling that if he did, he would see exactly what he had seen at dinner, that great clean brilliant flame, with no flaw in it anywhere, and he'd not be able to say what was wrong.

She came to me, he told himself. Whatever she is, a woman who comes to the Wardens is not hiding.

It was a thin comfort. He took it.

"Miss Ashgrove," he said, "I'll look into it."

"Will you?"

"I'll put my best clerk on it."

…

He said it without turning, in the same quiet voice, and heard the silence change at the window.

"Miss Fenwick."

"Captain." The chair creaked. She stood. She came round the screen of files, with a folder pressed to her chest, her spectacles flashing, and her face, when she stopped in front of the desk, was as smooth and blank as milk.

Don't, he thought at her, absurdly. Don't hide from me.

"You've heard Miss Ashgrove's account."

"I have, Captain."

"I'd like you to take it up. The notes, the sightings, the dressmaker. You'll want to interview the seamstress, the porter at East Court, the girl who does the lamps. Find me this woman." He kept his voice even. "A person who wears Miss Ashgrove's face, and a hand like hers. I want to know who she is, and where she's sleeping, and what she wants."

"Yes, Captain."

"Report to me alone."

"Yes."

She took the notes from the blotter. Her fingers did not shake; he watched them. She turned them to the light, one by one, with a clerk's brisk professional air, and her mouth tightened a very little on the last, I AM STILL HERE, and then she laid them in the folder.

"There's a thing I'd ask," said Miss Fenwick.

"Ask."

"The notebook. The brown one. May I have a description?"

"Calf, about so large," said Miss Ashgrove from the chair, in a small flat voice. "Seven pearl buttons on the cover, in a row. I used to count them."

There was a pause. Perhaps a second.

"Pearl," said Miss Fenwick.

"Yes."

"Seven."

"Mother sewed them on."

He saw it then. He saw it clearly, and only for an instant, because he happened to be looking at the right moment and would never afterward be sure he had not imagined it. Something went through the plain face of his clerk, from the brow to the chin, like the shadow of a bird crossing a wall. It was gone before he could name it. The gray eyes were lowered. The mouth was composed.

But the hand with the folder had gone white at the knuckles. And she said, in a voice with no air in it, "I'll find her, Captain."

…

Miss Ashgrove rose to go.

She did it gracefully, with a hand on the arm of the chair. She thanked him in a whisper; she thanked him again, with a squeeze of his fingers that left a faint vanilla on his glove. She drew her hood over her bright disordered hair and turned to the door, and Josie Tull, who had been standing on the stair landing these twenty minutes with her curls in a knot and her jaw set, came in at once and put an arm around her waist.

"All right?" said Josie.

"All right."

"Come away, then. We'll have you a hot brick and a bit of toast." Josie's eyes slid to the Captain. They were hard and bright and worried. "You've been decent, Rooke."

"Miss Tull."

"If anything happens to her—"

"I know."

They went out, the two of them, arm in arm. Rooke turned to the window to hide his face. It looked down on the Post yard and the gate; in the old wavy glass he could see the room reflected, dim and green as the bottom of a pond. He saw the door, and the dark shape of the stove. He saw the two women pass the screen of files.

He saw the gray figure at the east window. And he saw, in that mirror of green glass, as Miss Ashgrove went by, her head turn.

It was the smallest movement. She did it in passing, as one glances at a clock. Her hood slid; her face came round, in the dim reflection, to within a hand's breadth of Miss Fenwick's, and the pretty, tear-stained mouth moved.

He could not hear it. He saw only the shape of the words, and then, across the room, with the stove's low ticking and the draft in the glass, one clear phrase fell into the quiet like a coin into a well.

"—whichever way you choose, sister. I'm already a step ahead."

The door shut behind her. Josie's voice faded on the stair.

The Captain of the Wardens stood quite still before the window with his palm against the cold glass. In the room at his back, nobody moved. Nobody breathed.

Sister, he thought.

Slowly, with an effort, he turned round.

Miss Fenwick stood where she had stood, in the middle of the floor, with the folder in both arms. She had not moved. The spectacles were fixed on him. Behind them her eyes had gone huge and dark and still, with the awful brightness of a deer's at the edge of a road; and he saw that the hand at her side, the free one, the left, was pressed flat against her own wrist.

"Captain," she said. It was barely a voice. "I'd like to begin at once."

He looked at her.

What do I say? he thought. What do I say to a woman who has just been called sister by a girl who says she doesn't know her?

What do I ask?

"Then begin," said Rooke.

She turned and went to her desk. He listened to her go, and to the small dry rustle of paper; and he stood a long time at the window while the wavy green glass filled slowly with the morning.