BURLINGTON EXPRESS

Day 20 of 100

The Burlington Express left Merrow Falls at ten past seven in a rising wind, with a locomotive named Perseverance, four carriages the color of old liver, and a conductor who said, as he punched their tickets, that he didn't like the look of the west.

"It's April," said Captain Rooke.

"Yes, sir. That's what I don't like about it."

Mara sat by the window with her case on her knees and watched the town fall away: the red brick of the Athenaeum, the white steeple, the long dark shoulder of the Academy on its hill. Beyond them the lake lay flat and pale as a tin plate. In the north the sky had the dull yellow look of a bruise a few days old. She had never been so happy to leave a place in her life, and she hated herself for it.

She had a reason to go, of course. She had a very good reason. She'd given it to the Captain two days before, with a folder under her arm and her spectacles flashing: that the cases of '93 were filed at the Burlington office, that the Vane report required the Bureau's countersignature, and that a woman with a Doppel's face and a Doppel's handwriting could scarcely have escaped some notice in the Regional Archive, if she were what Mara thought she was.

All of which was true. It was only that Mara had no hope whatever of finding the veiled lady, and every hope of finding the rest of Warden Hollis.

Sixty-seven cases, she thought, and one man who would not sign.

She turned from the window. Across from her the Captain sat with his long legs stretched into the aisle, reading a sheaf of reports, with a pencil behind his ear and an unlit pipe between his teeth that he did not smoke. He had not looked at her since the platform. She was grateful. It was easier to breathe.

He took my hand, she thought. Two days ago, on a ridge, in the snow. And neither of us said a word.

She had spent two days not thinking about it. She was becoming rather expert.

…

The snow started at Hinesburg.

It began as a few fat flakes against the glass, and then a flurry, and then, in the space of twenty minutes, a white wall: sheeting, slanting, roaring, so thick that she could not see the telegraph poles. The locomotive slowed to a crawl. The lamps were lit in the carriages at half past nine in the morning. At a quarter to eleven, with a long shuddering groan, Perseverance stopped altogether, and a lurch ran down the train from the engine to the tail.

Men shouted outside. A door banged.

"Drift on the line," said the conductor, white to the eyebrows, putting his head into the carriage. "Cut at Calloway. Four feet and rising. The company's sending a plow from Burlington, but they'll not get it through till tomorrow at the soonest. There's a way-station a half mile down the track. Folks'll have to walk."

"The ladies—" began a stout gentleman.

"Walk, sir," said the conductor kindly, "or freeze."

So they walked.

…

It was the longest half mile of her life.

The wind drove at them from the side with a force that took her breath. She had put on every layer she owned; it didn't matter. The snow came through the wool as if through muslin. It stung her cheeks, and clogged her lashes, and filled her mouth when she tried to speak; and in a few minutes she had lost sight of the passengers ahead and the train behind, and was walking in a white roaring nothing, with the rope of the Captain's coat-skirt clenched in her left fist, and his hand, closing round her right, a hard dark fact in the middle of it.

"Keep your head down," he shouted. "Don't let go."

"I won't."

"Don't let go of me whatever happens."

"I won't!"

She did not. She remembered it afterwards as the single clearest thing in the whole white day: his grip, through two layers of leather, and the heat of him in front of her like a stove. She thought of nothing. She counted steps. Four hundred and twelve, to where a yellow smear of lamplight swam out of the storm and turned into a long low building with a sagging porch and a signboard that said, in letters half buried in drift, THE DROVER'S REST.

…

There was no room.

The innkeeper was a lean, harassed woman with a ladle in her fist, and she said so in ringing tones to the crowd of white-caked passengers who filled her tap-room, wringing out hats and shouting for brandy. Forty souls, give or take; eleven rooms, two of them already let; the rest she was dividing between the hay-loft, the kitchen floor, and the Methodist minister's kindness. She'd had no word of the train. She'd had no word of anything. She was very sorry. Perhaps the ladies—

"We've two beds in the long room," said her husband, in the tone of one who knows he is tempting Providence. "And a cot."

"The long room's gone to the drummers."

"There's the little one under the stairs."

"With the one bed?"

"With the good fire."

The innkeeper looked at the Captain. She looked at Mara, who stood dripping in the doorway, blue to the lips, with her spectacles frosted white. Something passed over her face; Mara guessed, with a flush that burned even through the cold, that it was a kind of tired charity.

"You'll be man and wife," she said. "Won't you?"

"No," said Rooke.

"Brother and sister?"

"Colleagues," said Rooke. "Of the Bureau." He laid his badge on the counter. "Madam, we'll take any floor you have."

She read it. She sighed through her nose.

"Number nine, under the stairs," she said. "The mattress is on the bed, and you'll find blankets in the chest. I'll bring you hot water and a bite. And Captain—" she lowered her voice— "I'll thank you not to be particular."

…

Number nine was very small.

It had a slanted ceiling that followed the stair, and a window the size of a book, packed with snow. It had a washstand, a chair, a three-legged table, and a tall iron bed with a patchwork quilt. And it had, as promised, a fire: a brick hearth as wide as the room, with a log the size of a man's leg burning on the irons, and the whole of the little space was filled with its low, golden, shifting light.

"I'll take the floor," said Rooke, closing the door.

"You'll do nothing of the kind."

"Miss Fenwick—"

"There are two blankets and a quilt," said Mara. "The hearth rug is thick. We'll lay it at either side of the fire, and that way neither will be cold, and neither need be a martyr." She heard how brisk her voice was, and winced. "I've slept on harder."

"On what?"

"On the floor of a hay barn," she said, before she could stop herself.

He gave her a long look.

"It was a — it was a school trip," said Mara. "When I was a girl."

"I see."

He did not. She could see him not. But he turned, with that quiet grace, and began pulling the blankets out of the chest.

…

They ate on the floor.

The innkeeper's husband brought a tray: bean soup, a loaf, a rind of cheese, a flask of whiskey that he set down with a significant cough, and a kettle of hot water. They ate with the tray between them, cross-legged on the rug like children, in the light of the fire. The storm beat at the little window. The beams creaked. Overhead the stair thumped with the boots of drummers.

She had taken off her spectacles to dry them. She had forgotten she'd done it until she looked up and found him watching her over the rim of his cup. His eyes went to the bare face, and he looked away, and drank.

"Have some," he said, and held out the flask.

"I don't—"

"You're shivering."

She was. She took it. It was raw stuff, harsh and smoky; it burned all the way down, and spread out under her breastbone in a slow warm tide. She coughed. He took back the flask with the corner of his mouth moving, and she thought, Oh. Oh, that's dangerous, and could not think what she meant.

"Miss Fenwick," said Rooke.

"Yes."

"May I ask you something? Not as a clerk."

"You may ask."

He turned the flask in his scarred hand. The firelight picked out the white seam across the back of it, and the groove in his palm, and the long line of his jaw.

"What do you think makes a person real?"

…

She had been waiting for something. She had not expected that.

"Real?"

"I've had the question in my head since the dinner." He did not look at her. He looked at the fire. "My profession depends on an answer, and I've never been sure of it. Take the Doppel. There are two people, the same in every particular. The same face. The same voice. The same memories, down to the last pin. If a man came to you and said, one of these is the true woman, and one is a counterfeit, what is it you would look for?"

"Memory," said Mara.

"Both have it."

"The body."

"Identical. Down to the scar."

"The — the light." She had to say it. "You see souls. Is there any difference in the light?"

"None that I could swear to." He turned the flask. "I've looked. At Ashgrove, at the end of the first week, I thought I saw a flaw in her. A lean. A tear. I wondered if there was an extra thing beside her. And then it was gone, and she was whole, and I told myself it was a trick of the candles." He paused. "I have a very real fear, Miss Fenwick. I've never said it aloud."

"Say it now," said Mara softly.

He was quiet for so long that she thought he would not.

"That I will be asked to choose," said Rooke. "Some day, in a room, with two women before me. Two, with the same eyes. And the Act says I must name the real one. And I will look, and look, and there will be nothing to see. Nothing at all. And whichever I name—" His voice did not change. It dropped, only a little, on the last words. "Whichever I name, I'll have put the other in the Vault."

The fire cracked.

"And the worst of it," he said, "is that I would be right to be afraid. Because in all of the sixty-seven cases of the Act, no one was ever right. Not once. I have read the Hollis summary. You left it open on the table, the other night. Forgive me."

She went cold from her scalp to her heels.

"You read it," she said.

"Every word."

"And you said nothing."

"You didn't ask." He met her eyes. "I thought it was yours to speak of."

…

She could not breathe.

It was all there. It was all in her mouth. She could feel the words lined up behind her teeth like soldiers in a pass: I am the one who fades. I am Mara Ashgrove. I am the real one. Look at my hands. She had only to lift them to the fire. The light would go straight through the palm. He would see it, because he was a man who saw, and he would know.

And then?

And then he'd have to choose. That was the whole of it. If she told him, he'd be Captain of the Wardens, with a number and an oath, and a Doppel Act that said report. If he believed her, he'd be bound to bring in the other, and the other would be sealed with her. If he did not believe her—

He loves the other, said the small hard voice. Or he has begun to. You saw him at the dinner.

He doesn't. He looks at her as one looks at a very good painting.

He looks at you as if you were the only warm thing in the room.

And what will it be when he knows that you've lied to him since the day he hired you?

She took a long breath. She put the cup down on the tray, very carefully, so that it would not shake.

"Captain," she said. "If there were a way to tell."

"There isn't."

"If there were. If, say, there was a difference you'd not known to look for. In the memory. In the body. Somewhere. Would you want to know it?"

He was silent a moment.

"It depends who it would hurt," said Rooke.

"And if it would hurt no one?"

"Then it would be a miracle." He smiled faintly. "And I don't hold with those."

"But if it would hurt you?"

He looked at her.

It was a strange look. Level, tired, entirely unarmored. It went over her face as the firelight did, and stayed there. She had the sudden awful feeling that he was not seeing Nell Fenwick at all, but something behind her: a pale shape at the edge of a dock; a girl in a wet black dress; a light on the water.

"I think, Miss Fenwick," said Rooke slowly, "that I should still want to know."

…

The fire sank.

He banked it before midnight, and laid his blanket on the hearth rug at the far side, and said good night with a courtesy so grave and gentle that she could have wept. She took the near side. She lay on her back with the quilt to her chin and her eyes on the slant of the ceiling, with the wind shouting overhead, and listened to him breathe.

It was a long time before she slept. When she did, she dreamed of the lake.

She woke at what must have been three. The fire was a bed of red embers. The wind had dropped. In the sudden hush the whole inn creaked and ticked like a cooling stove, and she lay with her heart thumping, blinking at the ceiling, with the dream going out of her like water out of a hand.

Something was wrong with the light.

She turned her head. The embers glowed. And on the quilt, where her right hand lay open on the cover, she saw the red of them through her palm. She saw the bones. The long delicate shadows of them, laid like fine lace in the glow. She saw the quilt's pattern, the little blue triangles, shining through the flesh as through a pane.

She snatched the hand under the cover.

Her heart was going like a hammer. She lay with her fist against her mouth and her eyes squeezed shut, and she did not dare to turn.

"Miss Fenwick."

The voice was low. It came from the other side of the hearth.

"I'm all right," whispered Mara.

"You made a sound."

"A dream."

There was a silence. In it she heard the rustle of the blanket, and the slow creak of a man sitting up. She lay perfectly still. Through her shut lids she felt the faint red light of the embers, and the weight of his regard.

He's looking at me.

He's looking at the quilt.

"I'm no good at this," said Rooke, very quietly. "I have never been. But I've sat up with a good many people, in a good many rooms. And I know the sound of someone keeping a thing to herself."

She said nothing.

"Is there something you're hiding from me?"

It was out. The question lay in the dark between them, as plain as a coin on a table. And she thought, with the dreadful clarity of the half-awake, Now. Say it now. Say, I am Mara. Say, Cal, it's me.

She opened her eyes.

She did not turn her head. She looked at the ceiling, at the long black slope of the beam; and her voice, when it came, was small and steady and perfectly true.

"Yes," said Mara. "But not yet. Not now."

The embers ticked.

"Thank you," said the Captain, after a long time. "For not lying."

He lay down. She heard the blanket settle. She lay with her fist against her mouth, and the hand within it, and the red light going through her bones, and the storm gone still outside; and she did not sleep again until it was light.