DR. CALDER’S MIRROR

Day 35 of 100

The Director of Special Dispositions arrived at Merrow Falls in a private railway car the color of a bruise, drawn up on a siding under the water-tower like a funeral barge at a landing.

Rooke watched it from the platform with his hands in his pockets. He had been told at nine. A telegram, in the Bureau's flat blue stamp, handed over by the station-master with the careful blankness of a man who has been reading other people's mail for thirty years: DIRECTOR HALLORAN ARRIVES NOON THURSDAY STOP ACCOMMODATION FOR SIX STOP DR I CALDER AND EQUIPMENT STOP NO ESCORT REQUIRED STOP. No escort. A man who sent that was a man who intended to be met by a brass band.

At four minutes to twelve the car door opened.

The first person out was not the Director. It was a wiry woman of fifty with iron-gray hair scraped into a bun, in a gown the color of dried blood, who got down the steps without taking the hand held out to her and stood on the cinders surveying the town as though pricing it. She carried a black leather bag. Behind her, four porters in Bureau gray came out bearing a long crate of oiled wood, like a coffin, braced with iron and padlocked at either end; and at the rear, taking his time, a man in a long traveling coat of silvery cloth.

Rooke had seen the portrait. He had not seen the man.

Augustin Halloran was sixty or a little over, tall, spare, and very beautiful, in the manner of something old and expensive and cared for. His hair was a pure silver, brushed back from a high forehead. His face was long and fine and sorrowful, with a mouth made to say I regret, and eyes of the clear mild blue of a summer sky after rain. He came down the steps slowly, leaning on a stick of black wood, and stopped at the bottom, and looked at Rooke, and smiled.

It was the smile of a priest at a deathbed. It said that everything was understood.

"Captain Rooke," said Halloran, in a low and gentle voice. "How very good to see you at last."

…

He put them in the Faculty Hall.

It was the Dean's idea, or so the Dean maintained, a plump quivering figure at the Director's elbow, wringing his hands, who kept up a stream of anxious hospitality all the way across the quad. The Hall was the largest room in the Academy that could be cleared: a long oak-beamed chamber with stained-glass windows and a dais at one end. It smelled of beeswax and chalk. By two o'clock the benches had been shoved to the walls, a rug rolled up, and the long crate carried in and set on trestles at the foot of the dais.

By three, they had gathered.

Rooke stood at the back with Okafor at his shoulder. Before him were the Dean and Dr. Veldt; Professor Pryce in his black gown, gray as a ghost; a half-dozen Academy fellows in rows; the Bureau's four porters at the wall. A little apart, by the window, Josie Tull in her apron, looking rigid, and beside her, in a gown of dove-gray silk with her hands folded, the full bright figure of Mara Ashgrove. Rooke did not look at her. He was extremely conscious of her.

And in the shadow of the east gallery, half-hidden behind a pillar, where she had slipped in at the last with her folder pressed to her chest and her spectacles gleaming, stood Miss Fenwick.

He had not asked her to come. He had said nothing at all to her since the cave. She'd worked at her desk, and had been correct, and silent, and gray; and each morning there had been a pot of tea on the corner of her blotter, which he had not put there, and which Okafor swore he had not put there either. She had not looked at him once in seven days.

She was looking at him now. It was an effort to look away.

"Gentlemen," said Halloran. "Ladies."

He had mounted the dais. He stood on it without any apparent effort to be seen, leaning on the black stick, and the whole room settled.

"I am the bearer of an unwelcome duty," said the Director of Special Dispositions. "I shall be brief. You will all have heard that the Bureau has been troubled by events at this Academy. A Doppel has manifested here. It has not yet been identified. It has been suffered to remain among you for thirty-five days, in the presence of children, and has already, I fear, been the occasion of grief." His gaze rested for a moment on the Dean, who flushed. "I do not blame the Wardens. They have worked, I understand, with great diligence and very little guidance. But the Act is the Act. The hundredth day is not so far off. And it falls, as you may know, on the occasion of a total eclipse."

A murmur ran along the benches.

"The Bureau cannot afford to wait for it," said Halloran gently. "We have, therefore, taken the liberty of bringing assistance."

He lifted a hand.

…

They took the lid off the crate with a shriek of nails.

Inside, packed in straw, lay a slab of black stone.

It was seven feet high and three across, a thick polished slab of what seemed to be obsidian, flat and dull and cold, framed in a rim of dark iron etched with a pattern of fine lines. The porters raised it with ropes and a pulley and set it upright against the wall behind the dais, and Dr. Calder stripped away the last of the wrapping with a brisk movement, like a surgeon uncovering a wound.

It did not shine.

That was what was wrong with it. It stood there in the light of the stained windows, red and blue and amber falling over its face, and gave none of it back. The colors went into it and were lost. The air in front of it seemed to thin. Rooke felt, between his shoulder-blades, a faint and distinct pull, as a man feels at the edge of a deep well.

"The Mirror of Truth," said Halloran softly. "Dr. Calder will explain."

Calder stepped forward. She had a dry quick voice with no softness anywhere.

"The Mirror is a device developed at the Bureau's laboratories in 1889. It reflects not the body but the soul. In the presence of a Doppel and its original, the Mirror draws both lights into its surface. One is held. One is released. The one that is held is, in every case, the false." She paused. "The procedure takes four minutes. The subjects stand before the glass, each at the side of the other, and are invited to look. There is some discomfort."

"What kind?" said Rooke.

His voice was quite level. It surprised him.

Calder looked at him as at an irrelevance. "I beg your pardon?"

"What kind of discomfort?"

"I do not see that—"

"Doctor," said Rooke, "you said in every case. How many cases are there?"

…

There was a silence. It was not quite the silence of a room waiting for an answer. It had a different grain: the dry attentive hush of an audience at a play, when a clumsy actor has trodden on a line.

"Nineteen," said Dr. Calder.

"Nineteen trials."

"Nineteen."

"And in the nineteen, Doctor, how many survived?"

"The device is designed to identify, Captain, not to—"

"How many?"

"I would not use the word survive."

"What word would you use?"

"Captain Rooke," said Halloran, very kindly.

He had not moved from the dais. His hands were folded on the head of his stick. His eyes, in the colored light, were a pale mild blue.

"The Captain is anxious," he said. "I think we may forgive it. He has been among these children for a month, and has grown to feel for them. It does him credit." He smiled. "But let us not put Dr. Calder to a quarrel. The procedure, Captain, is perfectly safe for the original. The false is held. The true is released. That is the whole of it. There is, I grant you, a strain upon the parties, and a certain fatigue for some hours after. But that is all."

"You have records."

"Naturally."

"I should like to see them."

"I'm sure you would." The smile did not change. "In due course."

"I would like to see them today," said Rooke, "before any person in this room is placed in front of that glass."

There was a pause.

He could feel the weight of the Hall on his back. He could feel the Dean's horrified eyes. He could feel the Professor's, which were quite different: dark, burning, with an expression he could not read, something like a man watching a child step toward a cliff. And he could feel, behind the pillar, a small, quick, silent presence that had gone entirely still.

Nineteen, he thought. She would not give me a number for the living.

"The records," said Halloran, "are at Washington. I can have them sent for. It would take, I imagine, three weeks."

"Then the trial will wait three weeks."

"Captain—"

"I am the Warden in charge of this district," said Rooke. "Under Section Nine of the Act, no device of the Bureau may be employed on a citizen of the United States within my jurisdiction without the written order of the Captain of Wardens. I have not written one. I do not intend to."

The silence deepened.

"I see," said the Director of Special Dispositions softly. "How very correct."

…

They took tea in the Dean's study afterwards, the three of them, with the door locked.

It was a dim room hung with portraits. A fire burned. The Dean, who had bleated himself into a state of collapse, had been dispatched to lie down. Calder sat very straight in a wing chair, her hands round a cup, saying nothing. Halloran stood at the window, looking out at the quad, where the students were crossing the grass in twos and threes in the late sun.

"I knew your father," he said.

Rooke went still.

"A fine man. A sailor. He had the lake-keeper's cottage, I believe, on the north spit." Halloran did not turn. "A tragic matter, that complaint. I was a junior commissioner in those days. I was the one who took the deposition."

"You were—"

"Oh, yes. I have a very good memory." The long silver head turned. The blue eyes found his, and held. "He was a gentle soul. I was sorry for what became of him. It's one of the regrets of a long career. One does what the law requires, Captain. One is not always thanked."

Rooke said nothing. His hand had closed on the back of a chair. He was aware of the carved oak under his fingers, quite distinctly, and of a ringing in his ears, as of a bell struck very far away.

He was the man who came to the cottage.

He is the man.

"I mention it," said Halloran, "only so that you may know I take no pleasure in thwarting a Warden whose family has served the Bureau. I would much rather work with you than against. I have, I think, a great deal to offer a man of your abilities. A Directorship, in time. The Soul-Sight is a very rare gift."

"I am not for sale, sir."

"Of course not." He sounded amused. "I am not a man who buys. I am only one who asks, courteously, that those whom he has tried to help should help him in return." He leaned on the stick. "You shall have your records, Captain. In three weeks. In the meantime, I will not press the Mirror. I will be your guest. I shall observe."

"Observe what?"

"The parties," said Halloran gently. "You have two, I believe. Miss Ashgrove, and a certain clerk."

…

Rooke did not move.

He did not know how it showed. He kept his face as he had been taught to keep it, in a hundred interviews, in a hundred bad rooms. But something in the long quiet blue gaze changed, a very little, and he saw that he had been read.

"A clerk of the Wardens," said Halloran. "Nell Fenwick. A young woman from Concord. She has no family there, I find; it is rather odd. She came to you with excellent papers on the very week of the Ascension, and you took her in. You have been seen with her. On the road to Burlington. At Fox Hollow, in a storm." He paused. "Captain, I am a man of the world. I do not judge. But I would beg you to consider whether a Warden who has grown fond is in a position to give his best counsel."

"My conduct—"

"Is exemplary. I have seen the file." The smile came back, kind, rueful, endlessly patient. "That is the pity. I do not doubt you are an honorable man. I only fear that you are an honorable man who has lost his eyes."

He set down his cup.

"I shall give you time," said the Director. "The Dean has been generous. I'll stay until Sunday. And then I should like your answer, Captain, in writing. Which of these two young women is the Doppel."

"I do not know."

"Then find out." He rose. The stick tapped once on the floor. "Before the solstice, I want to know. If you cannot tell me by then, why, I shall have to do it in my own way."

"The Act—"

"The Act, Captain," said Augustin Halloran, "is a very elastic thing. I know. I wrote it."

…

"You've gone white," said Okafor.

They were in the passage outside the Dean's door. The big man had waited there all this time, with his back against the wall and his arms folded, like a sentry. He pushed himself off and fell into step beside the Captain without a word, and they walked together down the long dim corridor toward the quad, and the light.

Rooke said nothing.

He walked with his eyes on the flags. He was aware of his own pulse, loud as a drum in his ears. He was aware, too, of the faint ugly nausea that had been rising in him since Halloran said your father, and was now up to his throat.

"It was him," he said at last.

"What was?"

"The man at the cottage. The one who came with the paper." He drew breath. "It was Halloran."

Okafor made a low sound in his chest.

"I was ten," said Rooke. "I was in the loft. I looked down through the hatch and I saw a man in the doorway in a gray coat. I never saw the face. I saw the hands. They were white. They had a ring." He stopped dead in the passage. "He had a ring on the third finger. A black stone."

"Callum—"

"He had it on his hand just now."

The passage was very quiet. At the end of it, through an open door, the sun fell in a long golden bar over the grass.

"Listen to me," said Okafor.

He took the Captain by the shoulders and turned him round. His broad weathered face was close and grave, and the eyes in it were not the eyes of a clown.

"I've watched you for eight years, Callum. I've seen you in a good deal of weather. And I have not once seen you act against your own interest in the matter of the Bureau." He gripped harder. "Until that Hall, just now."

"I was right."

"You were right. And you were reckless. You stood up in front of the Director of Special Dispositions and refused him to his face, on a point of law, in front of a roomful of witnesses. For what? For a clerk."

"It isn't—"

"It is," said Okafor. "I'm not a fool. I saw you look at the pillar. I saw her face. And I am telling you this as a friend, and as the man who has fed you for eight years: you're being led by the heart in this, lad. And a man led by the heart is a man with a rope round his neck, and the other end in somebody else's hand."

He let go.

"I'll back you," he said, more quietly. "I will. To the wall. But I'd be a poor friend if I didn't say it. You've lost your judgment. And Halloran knows."

Rooke stood a moment, with his hand pressed hard against the cold stone of the wall.

Then he lifted his head and looked down the passage, to the quad, and the bright green grass, and the long gray finger of the clock tower standing against the sky.

"I know," he said. "I know he does."

Before the solstice.

Sixty-five days.

And a man who wrote the Act, and a black stone mirror, and two women with one face.

He turned up his collar and went out into the light.