TEN DAYS

Day 41 of 100

He lied to Okafor at six in the morning, over a plate of fried potatoes, and it was the easiest lie he had ever told.

"Rutland," he said.

"Rutland."

"The Vermont Superior Court has a set of depositions on the '91 Pomfret drownings. They'll not let them out of the building. Miss Fenwick will go down and copy what she needs, and stay till it's done. A week. Perhaps ten days."

Okafor chewed. He had a way of chewing that was a kind of commentary. He looked at the Captain over a forkful of potato, then at the stove, then at the window, where the gray lake lay under a gray sky and a few early gulls were turning over the water like torn paper.

"On her own," he said.

"She's a competent clerk."

"She's a sick one."

"Sick?"

"She's got a face on her like the underside of a plate, Callum—" The big man caught himself. "Captain. You'd have to be blind. She's not eating. She sleeps standing. Pip says she dropped a teacup yesterday and it passed through her fingers like she'd no more hold than a ghost."

Rooke put down his fork.

"It slipped," he said.

"Aye. It slipped." Okafor's blue eyes rested on him. "It's your affair. You've a right to send her where you please, and I'll hold the fort. I'd only say—" He stopped. He picked up the plate and turned it, studying the pattern. "I'd only say that if it were my sister, I'd want a doctor."

"She has a doctor."

"Has she?"

"She will," said Rooke. "I'm taking care of it."

It was the second lie. It came as smooth as the first, and he sat there with his coffee gone cold and thought, with a sort of wondering horror: I am very good at this.

…

He took her out of the Post at dusk, in the closed gig, under a rug.

She had not argued. That was the thing that frightened him. He had gone into the little room off the loft at five, with his heart beating high, and found her sitting on the cot with a carpetbag at her feet, quite dressed, her hands folded in her lap. She had looked up as he came in. Her face in the lamplight was thin and white and strangely calm.

"You have thought of somewhere," she'd said.

"Yes."

"Is it far?"

"Eight miles."

"Will they find us?"

"No."

"Then I shall come," said Nell Fenwick.

He'd waited for something else. A protest; a question; a plea. She had said nothing. She had risen, and put on her cloak, and walked out ahead of him down the dark stair, with a step so light it was hardly a step at all; and he had followed with the carpetbag and the sensation, which he could not shake, of walking behind a candle.

They drove north along the lake for an hour, by lanes he had known since boyhood, with the lamps unlit and the mare's hooves muffled in the moss. She sat beside him with her hood up. She did not speak. Once, when the road dipped into a hollow and the cold came off the water like a hand, he felt her shiver, and without a word he put the rug across her knees.

What am I doing? he thought.

It went round in his head to the rhythm of the wheels. What in God's name am I doing?

He had taken an oath, in Burlington, at nineteen, on a Bible and a copy of the Act. He had sworn to report to his superiors every manifestation of the Doubled Soul within his district, and to detain the same without fear or favor. He had kept it for ten years. He'd kept it through a hundred and seven warrants and the shut doors of the Vault. He had kept it at his father's grave.

And in the evening of the fortieth day, on a flight of stairs, he had watched a woman go out like a lamp, and had known with the whole of the Bureau's training that he was looking at the thing it had all been built to catch. And he had put the ledger in her arms and said ten days.

You are an oath-breaker, said the cold voice, without heat. You are no longer a Warden. You are a man with a stolen woman in a gig.

Yes, he answered.

You will be hanged for it.

Probably.

It is not even clear that she is worth it.

And at that, for the first time in forty days, he found that the voice had nothing at all to say; for beside him in the dark, small and quiet in her gray cloak, her breath making a thin mist in the cold, she turned her face a little and looked out at the lake. And he saw by the starlight on the water that she was smiling, faintly, with her eyes shut, like a child who has been carried out of a burning house.

…

The cabin stood at the end of the old ice-cutters' track on the west shore.

It had been built in 'forty-six by a man who cut blocks from the lake for the Burlington hotels, and abandoned in 'seventy when the trade moved north. It was a single room of squared logs, with a loft for a bed and a stone chimney the size of a small tower. The Academy owned the land. Rooke had leased the cabin from the Bursar for a dollar a year, in the first spring of his Captaincy, and told no one; and in the five years since he had been there perhaps forty nights, when the loft at the Post grew too small to breathe in.

He lit the lamp.

It was a plain place, and it was clean. A table of pine planks, two chairs. A shelf of books, and a shelf of tins. A kettle, a skillet, a bucket of water covered with a board. Beneath the window a long chest, and above the hearth a gun-rack, empty; he had taken down the shotgun in the first week and had not put it back. The chimney drew well. The floor was bare boards, scrubbed by hand.

He watched her look at it.

She stood in the door with her carpetbag, and her eyes went over the room slowly, from the hearth to the loft to the books; and he saw her take it in the way she took in everything, as a catalogue. Pine. Two chairs. Eleven books. A man who lives alone. He saw a thing change in her face.

"It's very like you," she said.

"Is it?"

"It's clean, and it's bare, and it has nothing in it that it doesn't need." She paused. "Except the books."

"I'm fond of them."

"Yes. I thought you might be."

She put down the bag. She crossed to the shelf, with her step like a breath, and ran one finger along the spines. Marcus Aurelius. Montaigne. A battered Gibbon. Two odd volumes of Thoreau. She stopped at the last.

"Walden," she said.

"My mother's."

"You read it?"

"Every winter." He crouched at the hearth and struck a match. "I find I like the part about the pond."

The kindling caught. He sat back on his heels and watched the little flame run along the edge of the bark, and heard behind him a soft sound he could not at first identify, a small dry catch of the breath.

It was a laugh.

…

He had not heard it in six weeks.

It was not the great ringing laugh of the girl at the dinner. It was something rarer, shyer, with a crack in the middle: a little half-laugh, quickly stifled, as of a person surprised into pleasure by a thing she'd no right to. He turned. She had one hand over her mouth, and the lamp was behind her, and her eyes over her fingers were bright and absurd.

"What?"

"The pond," said Nell.

"What about it?"

"It's just — you, saying it. In that voice. As if it were a person." She lowered her hand. "'I find I like the part about the pond.' You said it as you'd confess to a weakness for the Bureau's cook."

"I do like the part about the pond."

"I know. That's what's so—" She was laughing in earnest now, helplessly, with her shoulders shaking. "Oh, I'm sorry. It's only that you are so grave. And you've brought me eight miles under a rug in the dark, like a smuggled parcel, to a house with eleven books, and told me you're fond of a pond."

He stared at her.

She was laughing. She was standing in the middle of his floor with her hair coming down and her spectacles pushed up crooked on her nose and tears of laughter on her face, and the lamp lit her from behind in a thin gold edge; and for an instant, he saw nothing in the world but that. It struck him in the breastbone. It knocked the breath from him like a blow.

She is not cruel, he thought.

It was a very simple thought. It stood alone in his mind, bare and bright.

She is a Doppel. She is a creature of the Act. She is exactly what I was taught to fear, a thing that has taken a woman's face and stolen her name.

And she is the kindest soul I have ever seen.

He said, rather unsteadily, "I can cook."

"Can you?"

"After a fashion."

"I should like to see that," said Nell Fenwick.

…

It was not a success.

He made eggs. He'd been making eggs for ten years and considered himself a master of the form. But he had never made them under observation, and had never had to make them for someone who sat at the table with her chin in her hand and her spectacles off and watched his every movement with an expression of grave, delighted attention. He dropped the skillet. He mislaid the salt. He put in a handful of something from a tin that turned out, on investigation, to be bicarbonate of soda.

"It's the wrong tin," said Nell.

"I know it's the wrong tin."

"You might have looked."

"I was looking at the eggs."

"They're burning."

"I am aware."

The kitchen filled with the smell of scorched butter and woodsmoke and something unmistakably chemical. He scraped the whole sad mess onto two plates and set them on the table with a ceremonial air, and sat down opposite her, and they ate in silence.

She finished hers.

He looked at the empty plate, and at her, and she looked back at him with perfect composure.

"It was delicious," said Nell.

"That is a lie."

"It is the first lie I have told you in a week that I've entirely enjoyed."

He put down his fork, and laughed.

It startled him. It came out of him without leave, a short rusty bark, and went on and on, and he sat there with his hand over his eyes and his shoulders heaving while she watched him with her head on one side and a very small smile. It was a long time before he could stop. When he did there was an ache in his ribs like the ache after hard rowing, and he felt, absurdly, as though he had been let out of a cell.

"You have a nice laugh," she said.

"I have no laugh."

"You've just done it."

"A fluke."

"A good one." She rose, and began to clear the plates. "I shall make the coffee. You are not to be trusted with a tin."

…

They sat by the fire afterward.

He had changed. He'd taken off the Warden's coat, the gray one with the badge and the mended cuff, and hung it on a peg by the door; and he had put on, from the chest, a thick old sweater of undyed wool, patched at the elbow, that had been his father's. It smelled of cedar. It fit like a sack. He had not worn it in a year. He felt, in it, quite naked, like a man who has taken off his armor in the presence of an enemy.

She noticed. She said nothing. She sat on the floor with her back against the settle and her coffee in both hands, in the red glow of the fire, with her feet drawn up under her gown, looking into the flames. The smell of the coffee mingled with woodsmoke. In the hush the lake made a long soft sound against the shingle, as of someone breathing in sleep.

She was growing thinner, he saw.

He had been watching it for days, with the Sight and without, and had not wished to admit it. But by the firelight it was undeniable. Her wrists were bones. Her cheeks had gone hollow. The hand that held the cup was almost transparent against the white china, and when she lifted it to drink, the glow of the fire shone through the web of the thumb.

He looked at that, and then, because he could not help it, he let the Sight come.

It was not what he expected.

He'd braced for the thin haze, the cut, the drifting motes. He'd braced for the horror of the other morning on the stair. But what came to him through the half-shut lids was gentler than that. It was a soft pale radiance, steady and clear. Fine as moonlight on a pond. It leaned, as it always leaned, toward something he couldn't see; but it was warm. There was in it a quality he could not name, a sort of patience, a courtesy, a stubborn tenderness that seemed to flow out of her into the room, and fill it, and rest on everything it touched: on the books and the kettle and the cooling plates. On himself.

That is a soul, thought Rooke.

Whatever the Act says. Whatever the Bureau teaches. That is a soul, and it is not a counterfeit. It could not be.

A forgery does not take care of the furniture.

"Captain," said Nell softly.

"Yes."

"You're staring."

"I beg your pardon."

"It's all right." She turned her head. Her face in the firelight was very pale, and the eyes in it were dark and clear. "I'd rather you stared than looked away."

…

He didn't know how long they sat there.

The fire sank and rose. The tide of the lake went on. He could hear the clock of his own blood in his ears, and the faint tick of the cooling chimney, and he thought that if he moved, if either of them moved, the thing in the room would break. It was a delicate thing. It had taken them forty days.

"May I ask you something?" he said.

"Yes."

"I said ten days. I said you'd tell me who you are." He kept his eyes on the fire. "I'm not going to ask it tonight. I give you my word. Tonight I'm only a man in a cabin. But I should like to know, as a matter of—" He stopped. He began again. "What is it that you want, Nell?"

She was silent so long that he thought she had not heard.

"To remember," she said at last.

He turned his head.

"Not the way you mean." She was looking at her hands. "I remember most things. I remember my mother's face, and the smell of her hair. I remember a good deal that I'd gladly forget. But there are places in me that are—" She paused, and he saw her search for the word. "Blank. A room I've lived in all my life, and I've never been told that it had a door. I think there's something I have forgotten, Captain. Something large. And everyone I know, everyone who might say, has gone away or died or won't."

"What do you think it is?"

"I don't know." Her voice was very low. "But I think, if I could remember it, I'd know who I am. I'd know what I'm for. And I wouldn't be afraid." She smiled, painfully. "I'd like that. To be a person who isn't afraid. Just once. Just for an afternoon."

He could not speak.

A room with no door.

He thought of his father on a dock. A thing taken out and the skin sewn smooth.

He thought of the Director in the Dean's study, leaning on his stick. A tragic matter. I was the one who took the deposition.

They do it to everyone, thought Rooke. They take what they need, and they leave a blank.

"I'll help you," he said.

"You can't."

"I will find out who did it."

"Cal—" She caught herself. "Captain. It isn't something that can be—"

"I'll help you remember," said Rooke, "if it takes me every day I've got."

She looked at him, and her eyes filled. She turned her face away quickly, toward the fire; and when she spoke, her voice was thick.

"You keep looking at me," she said, "as if I might vanish."

He sat quite still. The fire shifted. A log fell into the coals with a little shower of sparks, and lit for a moment the whole low room: the books, the kettle, the empty gun-rack, the two long shadows on the wall.

"Yes," said Rooke.

"Why?"

He thought of lying. He thought of a hundred ways of putting it that would be easier on them both.

"Because I'm afraid you will," he said.