MIRROR, MIRROR

Day 31 of 100

There was a white ribbon in the Gossip Tree.

Mara found it on the Tuesday, in a dawn so thin and raw that the pasture steamed. She'd come out from the Athenaeum on a pretext, a book to be returned to the Falls rectory, and had turned off the north road with her heart in her throat and gone down the hedge to the oak. The hollow was as she had left it. The caramel wrappers, the dead mouse. And pinned to the bark inside, with a hat-pin she recognized, a narrow strip of white cotton, tied in a sailor's knot.

She had stood looking at it for a long time.

She believes me.

She believes me, and she is sitting at Vesper's side, and she knows.

It should have been a comfort. It was, in its way. But she had not slept properly since the cave, and the comfort had a hollow in it the size of a hand. She took the ribbon, wound it twice round her wrist where the sigil lay, and walked back to the village with the strange new sense of a thing begun. Tied. Set going.

That was Tuesday morning. By Tuesday night the note had come.

…

It came under the door of the little room off the loft, folded small, with no name on it. She picked it up from the boards with a hand that felt very far from her body.

It was written in her own hand.

The clock tower. Midnight. Come alone, and bring nothing, and I will do the same.

I have something to tell you, and I think you have something to tell me.

—V.

She read it three times. She turned it over. On the back, in smaller letters, scrawled almost as an afterthought, was a single line:

I am not going to push you.

She sat down on the cot.

She thought of the tower, and the iron rail, and the wind. She thought of a flash of red, and a pair of cold hands in the small of her back. She thought of the sound of her own ribs.

It's a trap, she told herself calmly. It is quite obviously a trap.

I'm going anyway.

It was an odd thing to know. She sat there and examined it, as she'd examine a result in a ledger that she had not expected. She had no reason to go. Every reason not to. She was a woman of intelligence with a lifetime's practice at being cautious, and some part of her, small, hard, and quite unafraid, had already begun to count the minutes.

Because she has the notebook.

Because I want to see my own face.

Because I am very tired of being the only one.

…

The Academy clock tower rose over the north court like a gaunt gray finger, a hundred and twelve feet of stone, with a face on each side as big as a cartwheel. By day it chimed the hours with a hoarse unmusical clang that the students had called "the Dean's cough." By night it was dark and silent. The door at the foot was never locked. Students climbed it on dares; Josie had once kissed Tobias Marsh in the clock-room, on a bet, and had boasted of it for a month.

Mara went up at five minutes to twelve.

There were two hundred and six steps. She counted them. The stair was a tight spiral in the thickness of the wall, with a rope for a rail, and arrow-slits where the moon fell in blue bars on the stone. At the hundredth, she stopped to breathe. Her heart was going. At the hundred and fiftieth, she took off her spectacles and put them in her pocket, and looked at her hands on the rope. They were quite clear in the moonlight. Clear as glass.

She put her gloves on.

At the top was a low door of black oak, and beyond it the clock-room: a square chamber with a stone floor, a stone ceiling, four little windows facing the four winds, and in the center the great machine itself. Wheels. Pinions. A pendulum like a long gleaming blade, swinging slowly in its slot with a deep, patient tick. Tock. Dust floated in the moonlight. The air smelled of oil and iron and old pigeons.

And against the north wall, where nobody had left it for forty years, stood a mirror.

It was tall, taller than she was, in a frame of black wood carved with oak leaves. It had been brought up here, no doubt, to be forgotten, by some Dean of a more elegant age. It was foxed at the edges and veined with age, and it caught the moonlight from the window and held it in a long cold sheet. In it, framed by the black leaves, stood a small gray figure in a shabby gown, with cropped brown hair.

And behind the figure, out of the dark between the pinions, stepped a woman in red.

…

She was taller than Mara remembered.

That was the first thing. She had always thought of Vesper as a smaller, quicker creature; the push had come out of nowhere, a rush, a flash of silk. But she stood now at the edge of the moonlight with her hands folded before her, in a dress of dark wine velvet cut low, with a high white throat, and a mass of long chestnut hair coiled at her nape: and she was Mara's own height to the quarter-inch. She stood just as Mara stood. Her chin was up. Her shoulders were square. Even the little tuck of the elbows was the same.

The pendulum went tick.

"Hello," said Vesper.

Her voice was Mara's. That was the second thing, and it was worse. It was Mara's voice, low and a little husky, which she had never heard from outside. She'd known it for twenty-four years from within, and been mildly ashamed of it. She'd thought it dull. And from the other woman it came out warm and dark and faintly amused, like a drink poured in a cold room.

"Hello," said Mara.

They looked at one another.

It was an extraordinary thing, and she was never afterward able to describe it. They did not move. They stood eight feet apart in the vaulted gloom with the great clock between them, and each took the other in, feature by feature, as one takes in a landscape revisited after twenty years. The brows. The jaw. The set of the eyes, gray-green, with a ring of brown at the pupil. The wide mouth. The long throat.

There was nothing different. There was only a great deal that was not the same.

She is lovely, thought Mara, with a sort of horror. She is what I'd be if I'd ever been looked at.

She is plain, thought Vesper, in the same moment, as Mara would see in her eyes. She is so plain, and so tired, and so brave, and I could break her over my knee.

"I told you not to bring anything," said Vesper.

"I brought nothing."

"You've a pistol in your boot."

"I haven't."

"No," said Vesper, and smiled. "You haven't. I wanted to see if you'd lie." The smile went. "You didn't. You never did. It's so wearisome."

…

"Why am I here?" said Mara.

"Because I asked you."

"That isn't a reason."

"It's the only one I've got." Vesper turned and walked a few paces along the wall, with the velvet whispering. "I have a notion that we could stand here and trade accusations until the clock strikes. I've rehearsed them. I'm told I do it well. You'd say I tried to kill you, and I'd say you'd have died anyway. You'd say I stole your name, and I'd say it was lying about, unused. You'd say I took your friend."

"You took my friend."

"I took a seat at her table. She's not a trunk, Mara; she has a mind of her own, and has been giving me the oddest looks for a week." A pause. "I assume it's you."

"I left her a note."

"I wondered." Vesper stopped by the pendulum, and put out one finger and let it brush the swinging blade. "The white ribbon."

"Yes."

"Clever."

"It was a child's trick."

"Most good ones are." The finger withdrew. "I came to say I'm sorry."

Mara stared.

"Not for everything. I'd be lying." Vesper was not looking at her. She was looking at the long dim shape of the clock, and her profile in the moonlight was very pure and very hard. "But for the tower, yes. I am sorry about the tower. I had a plan, and it went wrong in the doing, and I did a thing I haven't forgiven myself. I want you to know that I didn't mean you to die."

"You pushed me off a bell tower."

"I meant you to fall onto the roof of the vestry, and break an arm, and be found in the morning by a verger. I did not know about the slates." She shut her eyes. "I did not know about anything. I was four days old."

"And the note? Run, Mara?"

"I wanted you out of the way."

"Why?"

"So that I could have him."

…

Mara said nothing.

Vesper opened her eyes. They were wet and bright and unashamed.

"I know what you'll say," she said. "You'll say it's grotesque. That I'm not a real woman, that I haven't a right to want anything. I've said it to myself. I have said it into the pillow a hundred times." She took a breath. "But I looked at him on the dais, with his gray eyes, and I thought, oh, there's something that's mine. And it was only after, when I felt you go, that I understood. It wasn't mine. It was yours. It was always yours. I had your heart and your head and your memory of the way he stood, and I had never been asked."

"Vesper—"

"If I hadn't pushed you," said Vesper quietly, "you'd never have gone to him."

"What?"

"You'd have hidden in your room. You would have read about it. You'd have written a paper." The smile twisted. "You'd have gone to Pryce and sat in his office with the skull and cried, and he'd have put you in a sanatorium, and you'd have spent your hundred days wrapped in a quilt in Burlington, composing your own obituary. That's who you are. I know. I have your memory." She spread her hands. "I gave you a push. It was a wicked one, and I'm sorry for it. But look where you are."

"I am in a cellar, losing my hands."

"You are the Captain's clerk."

"I am his liar."

"Is that so very different?"

It was said so lightly that for an instant Mara did not feel it. Then it went home, and she heard her own breath catch.

"You were in the cave," she said. "You know."

"I felt it." Vesper's face changed. For the first time, she looked away. "I felt the whole night. I sat upright in bed at three in the morning with my hand over my mouth, and felt a man's thumb on my wrist, and the words 'the woman I thought I was falling in love with.' I couldn't breathe. I tried to hate you for it. It was a very fine hate." She laughed, a small unsteady sound. "I could not keep it up."

…

The pendulum swung. Tick. Tock.

"So what is it you want?" said Mara.

"A truce."

"A truce."

"Until the hundredth night." Vesper turned, and the whole of her was in the moonlight, red and white and gold, and her face was stripped of artifice. "Mara, listen. I am not your enemy. I think I have been, and I think I shall be again, and I'm quite sure that neither of us is a saint. But we are in the same boat. We have a hundred days between us, less thirty-one, and then two iron doors. The Act doesn't care which of us is the real one. It will seal us both in the same cell. We might as well live."

"Live."

"Together. In the open. You keep the Captain; I'll keep the Academy. We'll share the name. I'll be the blue gown at dinner, and you'll be the gray clerk in the Post, and on Sundays we'll swap and see if anyone can tell." Her eyes were enormous. "And at the end of it, if there is no way out, if the thing can't be mended, we walk into the Vault together, hand in hand, and neither of us has to be the one who is left."

"You're asking me to die with you."

"I am asking you not to die without me."

The room was very still.

Mara looked at the red figure in the moonlight, and a thing went through her, quick and bitter and entirely unexpected; and it was a pity so deep that she had to put her hand against the wall.

She means it.

She really does. She would walk into the Vault holding my hand. She would sooner share the cell than live in the sun alone.

And she has no idea that what she's asking is a lie.

"No," said Mara.

"Mara—"

"No. I'm sorry." The words came slowly. "It isn't a truce you offer. It's a surrender. You're asking me to go on being Nell Fenwick for sixty-nine days, to watch you wear my life, to let a man I—" She stopped. "To let a man fall in love with a clerk while you sit in his library. And at the end, to die with a smile, and thank you for the company."

"It isn't—"

"It is. You know it is. You've no more idea than I do what's going to happen to us. You don't want to live, Vesper. You want to be me. It's not the same."

"I want to be."

"You are."

"I'm not! I'm a copy! I am the leavings!" The cry tore out of her, and rang off the stone, and the pendulum jumped in its slot as though struck. "I have your memories and I haven't your past. I have your mother's face and she never looked at me. I have your whole life in my head like a stolen coat and I cannot take it off and I cannot make it fit. I wake in the night and I do not know whose bed I am in. I know the taste of the apple-cake your Aunt Cora made when you were seven and I have never eaten it—"

She stopped. She was shaking. Tears ran down her face, unchecked, and caught the moon.

"I have never been held," she said. "Not once. Not by anyone. Josie hugs me and I think, she is hugging you. The Captain stands beside me and I think, he is looking for you. There is no one in the world, Mara, no one, who has ever once looked at me and seen me."

…

Mara did not remember crossing the floor.

She was just there, at arm's length, in front of the mirror, with the cold glass at her back and the other's wet face before her. She was shaking, too. She had her gloved hands half raised, as though to fend something off, or take hold of it, and she had no idea which.

"I do," she said.

"What?"

"I see you."

Vesper stared.

"I do," said Mara, and her voice broke. "I see you now. I didn't think I would. I came here with a speech. I was going to tell you that you were a thief and a liar and a murderess. And I look at you and I see—" She swallowed. "My mother's funeral. The black dress. The way I stood at the back of the church with my hands in my sleeves and thought, I will not cry, I will not cry. And I did not. And no one ever once asked how I was. Do you remember it?"

"Yes."

"You were there."

"I was there," whispered Vesper.

"Then you know why I can't." She had begun to weep, quietly, without sound. "It isn't that I hate you. I should. I've tried. It's that I know exactly how much it hurts. And I can't say yes to a truce that ends in a Vault, because one of us is going to have to find another way, and I think it has to be me."

"There isn't another way."

"There may be."

"There isn't." Vesper seized her by the wrist. It was her left. Her fingers closed over the white ribbon, over the sigil under it, and the touch ran through Mara like a bolt, hot and cold and electric, the two halves of a single spark. They both cried out. They both snatched away.

They stood panting, staring at their hands.

"Did you feel that?" said Vesper.

"Yes."

"It was—" She did not finish. Her eyes dropped to Mara's wrist. The ribbon had slipped. In the moon's cold glow, the sigil lay bare: the little star, gray, with its crack down the center like a flaw in an ice-sheet. And beside it, as though painted on the air, a faint translucent shimmer where the skin had gone to glass.

Vesper's face changed.

All the heat went out of it. All the fury and the grief and the bright wet hunger. She looked at the wrist the way one looks at a stranger's grave, and her mouth went slack.

"Oh," she said, very low.

"It's not so bad," said Mara.

"It's terrible."

"I can still hold a pen."

"You can see the wall through it."

"Only in this light."

The pendulum swung. The mirror held the two of them, framed in black oak leaves: a gray woman and a red one, one with her sleeve rucked up and one with her hand over her mouth. In it, for an instant, as the moon came out from behind a cloud and the glass flared white, they looked like nothing so much as a woman and her reflection; and it was impossible to say which was which.

"You're fading," said Vesper.

"Yes."

"Faster than I thought."

"Yes."

"You haven't got much time." Her voice was hushed with horror. Then, in a different tone, a thin high note that was almost a plea: "Mara, you haven't got any time."