THE BLIZZARD (I)

Day 28 of 100

The report from Fox Hollow had been four lines long, and Mara had known before she finished reading it that it was nothing.

Hannah Crewe, 19, miller's daughter. Seen in two places at once. Mother swears the girl was at the churn and in the garden at the same moment. Father suspects Doppel. Requests a Warden.

"It'll be the sister," she said.

"What sister?"

"There's always a sister." She laid it back on the blotter. "Nine times in ten a country mother who swears she has seen a Doppel has seen a pair of daughters in the same apron."

"And the tenth?"

"The tenth," said Mara, "is why we go."

Captain Rooke looked at her for a moment over the rim of his coffee. Then he stood, took his coat off the peg, and said that it was thirteen miles, and the sky was clear, and he would have the gig round in ten minutes.

It was the eighteenth of April. It was not clear for long.

…

Fox Hollow lay in a fold of the hills where the Merrow River came down out of the mountains, a mill and eleven farms and a Congregational church with a squat white steeple. They reached it by noon. It had a single street. A woman was beating a rug on a porch; a pig lay in the road like a fallen sack. And in the miller's kitchen, scrubbed pink and smelling of woodsmoke and bread, two girls in identical aprons rose together from the table, curtseyed together, and said, "Good afternoon, Captain," in one voice.

"Twins," said Mara.

"Hannah and Hester," said the mother, reddening to the roots of her gray hair. "We didn't — Mr. Crewe thought it a shame to have them both put in the register when the Lord took the first one so near. We called the second Hannah, too. She's been with my sister at Rutland these seventeen years. She came home Sunday."

"And no one told the neighbors."

"No, sir. Not meaning anything, sir. We're quiet people."

It took half an hour to be sure. The Captain looked at the two of them, in turn, for a good long minute apiece, with his eyes gone soft and strange; and Mara, at the window with her pencil, saw his lips part a little in what could not have been wonder, for it was gone at once. Afterward, in the gig, he said that they were as like as two peas, and as different as two chords.

"Different how?"

"The light." He flicked the reins. "Hannah's is a straight line, like a candle. Hester's—" He paused. "Hester's wavers. She stammers, I think. Or is shy. It's all in how the thing is held."

"But the same color."

"The same color. As twin things are." He glanced at her. "You asked me once how I would tell. At the inn."

"Yes."

"I think I have the beginning of an answer. It isn't what is in the light. It's the way it burns."

She said nothing. She sat with her gloved hands clenched in her lap and looked at the white road, and felt her heart do something unreasonable.

The way it burns.

She thought of a great clean tower of flame in a blue silk dress, and of a pale thing leaning in the dark.

You know, she thought. You've begun to know. You just won't let yourself.

…

The wind came up at three.

It came out of the north-west, long and low, with a sound like a distant crowd; and before they had gone four miles the sky had closed over the Hollow in a lid of dirty yellow, and the first flakes were beginning to slant across the road. Rooke stood up in the gig and looked at the ridge. He swore, quietly, in a tone of weary courtesy.

"I don't like it."

"It's April."

"That," said Rooke, "is exactly what I don't like."

He turned the gig up a farm lane toward the lee of the hill. He had a notion of a barn, a mile off; but the snow came on faster than the notion, and in ten minutes the road was gone. The mare stopped in a drift to her hocks and would go no further. The wind screamed. Rooke got down, cut her out of the traces, and led her by the bridle with his coat flapping like a flag, and Mara went after him through a roaring white nowhere with her skirts crusted stiff.

Then the ground tilted. A black wall rose out of the whiteness, a face of limestone with a ragged mouth in its foot, and he turned and took her by the wrist and said into her ear, quite calmly: "In here."

…

It was a cave of sorts, or rather a deep rock shelter, as tall as a man at the lip and narrowing back into the hill. The floor was dry. There was a drift of dead leaves, an old heap of ashes, a bat's rustle in the dark. Rooke got the mare in under the overhang, tied her to a root, and threw a blanket over her; then he knelt at the ashes with a tin of matches and a handful of dried bracken, and in the space of a minute and a half had a fire.

Mara sat on a flat rock with her back to the stone.

She was not cold. That was what frightened her. She had come in with her teeth chattering and her fingers dead, as any woman might in a snowstorm. But in the quarter hour since, the chill had gone in. It had passed through the wool and the skin and the muscle; it had gone down to some deep place at the center of her chest and settled there, a stone of cold, and every minute it seemed to grow. She felt hollow. She felt like a bell. The fire was three feet away and gave no heat at all.

She began to shake.

"Miss Fenwick."

"I'm all right."

"You are not." He had risen. He crossed the little space in three paces, crouched before her, and took her hands in both of his. "You're like ice. Why didn't you tell me? Take those off."

"Captain—"

"Take them off, please."

He drew off her gloves.

She could not stop him. She tried to; her hands came up, clumsily, and he caught them. But the wet wool slid away from her fingers, and the little space was full of the light of the fire, and she watched his eyes go down.

She watched him see her hands.

…

They were pale. That was all. She'd looked at them herself, an hour before, in the glass of the gig's lamp, and they had been pale, and thin, and bluish at the nails. But in the leaping glow of the fire there was something about the edges that she couldn't hide. A softness. An absence of line. As if they'd been drawn in pencil and then rubbed by a careless thumb.

The Captain was holding them in his, and for a moment he did not move.

"They're very cold," he said, in an odd tone.

"Yes."

"The firelight does strange things." He turned them over. His thumb brushed her palm. "I have never seen it do that."

"It's the cold. The blood goes from the skin."

"Yes."

He did not release her. He sat back on his heels, with her hands between his, and began to chafe them, slowly, with a hard warm patient motion, as one rubs life into a drowned thing. She felt the heat of his palms go in. It didn't reach the stone in her breast. But it reached something else, a little frightened creature in the dark of her throat, and it began to unclench.

"Mother used to do this," said Rooke. "When I came in from the ice. She'd sit me on the settle and hold my hands in her lap till I could feel them."

"You said you were nine."

"I remember a great deal for nine."

The wind howled in the mouth of the cave. The fire spat. The mare shifted and blew. And Mara, who had faced a fall from the Founder's bell tower with less terror, sat very still on her rock and let the Captain of the Wardens warm her hands.

…

It was perhaps half an hour before he spoke again.

He had not let go. He had moved, at some point, to sit on the rock beside her, with the fire in front and the storm in the dark behind, and her hands were still in his. She could not have said how it happened. She had her head against his shoulder. He had his coat open and had drawn the edge of it around her, and the warmth of his body was coming through his shirt like the heat from an oven. She had stopped shaking some time ago. She was aware of the rise and fall of his breathing, and of the long low slow thump beneath it.

"Miss Fenwick," said Rooke.

"Yes."

"May I tell you something I've been meaning to say?"

She should have said no. She knew it with every cold nerve in her body. But there was a lullaby in his voice, and she had been alone for twenty-eight days.

"Yes."

"I can see you," he said.

"Yes. You see souls."

"No." The word was gentle. "I can see you. I don't mean the way I see the Dean, or Okafor. I mean that of all the people I've ever looked at, you are the only one whose light I can't stop watching." A pause. "It's very small. Very tired. It leans, like a candle in a draft. And it has a thread through the middle that I would swear by my father's grave is the strongest thing in Vermont."

She did not breathe.

"I thought at first it was pity," said Rooke. "I told myself that. I told myself it was a kind of professional concern. But I have been very honest with you, Miss Fenwick, and I should like to go on. So I will tell you what it is."

"Don't."

"I will tell you what I've seen." He turned his head. She felt his breath on her hair. "In the dining room, at the dinner. When I sat between you and her. I looked at her light, which is as fine as a thing can be. A flame. A miracle. And I looked at yours, which is a wound. And I felt—"

"Captain—"

"I felt that I was looking at a painting in the one case, and at a face in the other. And then I looked at your eyes."

She tried to lift her head. He did not let her.

"They are gray-green," said Rooke, very low. "Under the spectacles. I made you take them off, at the interview; you may not remember. I have thought of it every night since. And your soul, Nell, the light, the color, the faint blue-silver, the shape of the way it bends—" His voice caught, and steadied. "It's the same. It's exactly the same. As hers. As the girl I stood beside on the dais at the Ascension, when I saw her wrist."

"It is a family trait—"

"I have been telling myself that for a month."

"You said so yourself."

"I said a great many things." The arm around her tightened. "Look at me."

"No."

"Look at me, please."

She looked.

…

His face was inches away, in the firelight. She had never seen it so unguarded. He had taken off his hat and his hair fell across his forehead, and there was snow in it, melting. The scar through the left brow stood out white. His eyes were gray as winter water, and bright, and very steady, and fixed on her as if there were nothing else in the world.

"Why," whispered Rooke, "does your soul look exactly like the woman I thought I was falling in love with?"

She heard it. It went into her like a blade of ice, and then like a blade of fire, and she felt every inch of her skin wake at once.

The woman I thought.

He thought he was falling in love with her.

Not with Vesper. Not with that blaze in blue silk. With me. With the girl on the dais, in the torn dress, with her hand held out to the Stone. He saw me, that night. He looked at me, and he felt it, and he never knew.

And then I vanished and sent a clerk in my place.

She could have laughed. She could have wept. The whole of it was there, in the narrow space between his mouth and hers. She had only to say it. It's me. I'm the one. I'm the woman you saw on the dais. Cal, it's me, it's been me all along.

He was bending toward her. She knew it with her skin. He was so close that she felt the shape of his lips before they came, and her own had parted, and her eyes had begun to close, and a long low delicious weakness went down through her, like warm water down a stair.

And she saw, behind her shut lids, a dock.

A boy. A rope. A gray sky.

Soul-tear by external magic. Perpetrator: unknown.

Sigil-line severed.

Her eyes flew open.

She thought of the card in her case, which she had folded small and hidden in the lining of her Sunday boot. She thought of a bell tower and a woman in red. She thought, with a sick lurch, of seventy-two days, and a pair of iron doors, and a man who had said, with the whole of his face, I should still want to know.

What happens when he does?

What happens to him?

He would have to take her in. He'd have to sign the paper. And if he loved her, and he sealed her, it would be the second time he'd done the thing that broke him.

She pulled her hands out of his.

…

It was not graceful. She tore them free, and the cold went over them like water, and she rose from the rock with her back against the stone and her palms pressed flat to her chest.

"Don't," said Mara.

He was on his feet before she had finished. His face had gone white. "Miss Fenwick—"

"Don't do this." Her voice was a ruin. "Don't — oh, please, don't."

"I'm sorry. I should not have—"

"It isn't that."

"Then what?"

"You don't know me." She was shaking again; it was the cold, it was not the cold. "You don't know what I am, or where I come from, or what I've done. You think you know. You think I am a poor lost thing with a sister's face. You look at me and you see a — a wound you want to mend. And I am not that. I'm something else. I'm a — I'm a liar, Captain. I am the worst sort of liar."

"I don't believe that."

"You will."

"Nell—"

"When you do, you will hate me." She heard her own voice crack across the middle. "And I could not bear it. I could bear anything but that. Not from you."

The wind roared. A coal slid in the fire.

He stood with his arms at his sides and his hands, those big scarred capable hands, hanging open, and stared at her, and she saw the thing she'd dreaded come into his face: not anger, nor even hurt, but a dreadful gentleness, such as one shows a wounded animal.

"Nothing you can tell me," said Rooke slowly, "would make me hate you."

"You don't know that."

"No." He paused. "But I'd like to try."

She shut her eyes.

"Don't do this," whispered Mara. "Don't make me want it. You'll hate me."

The fire cracked. In the dark beyond it, the mare whinnied at the storm. And for a long, long while, neither of them moved at all.