FIRST KISS

Day 44 of 100

The second snow of the month came down on the cabin on the night of the fourth of May, and it was a snow with a purpose.

It began after supper. Mara was at the table with the lamp pulled close and her feet in a pair of Rooke's wool socks, working through a stack of papers he had brought from his trunk in the Post, and she did not notice it until the window went white. There was no sound. That was the odd thing. A wind-driven storm has a voice; this one had none. The flakes simply came, large and slow and straight, filling the dark outside until the lake and the shore and the black pines vanished, and the little room with its lamp and its fire hung in the middle of nothing, like a lantern in a well.

"It won't last," said Rooke.

"It's May."

"It's Vermont."

He was at the other end of the table, in his father's sweater, with a pencil behind his ear. He had been reading for three hours without moving. In the lamp's glow his face was drawn and quiet and extremely tired, and the scar through the left brow had gone a little white; and she had sat across from him for three evenings now and had not yet learned how to look at him without feeling the floor of her stomach drop.

Forty-four days.

Fifty-six left.

And six, seven, of those he has promised me.

She turned a page.

…

They were the Bureau's papers on his father.

He had not said so at first. He'd come in on the second night with a flat tin dispatch-case under his arm, and set it on the table, and said, in a tone as dry as paper, "I said I would help you remember. It occurs to me that I have never looked at the thing properly myself." Inside were forty sheets in a clerk's copperplate. A summons. A deposition. An Examination under Standard Procedures, with Section and sub-section. A discharge.

Thaddeus Rooke. Lake-keeper. Age 44. Examined at the Burlington Office, 14 October to 29 November 1875.

It was a very ordinary document. That was its horror. It said that the Subject had been questioned, in the presence of two clerks, concerning a drowning at Lake Merrow on the 9th of September; that he had given an account consistent with the facts; that he had been found to be in sound health, of sound mind, and of no danger to the Peace. It said he had been discharged with the Bureau's thanks. It said nothing whatever of what happened between the fourteenth of October and the twenty-ninth of November.

"Six weeks," said Rooke.

"Yes."

"No record of the examination itself. No transcript. No physician's note." He took the pencil from behind his ear and laid it down, very precisely, parallel to the edge of the page. "I have read it two hundred times. I used to think I was missing something. The truth is, there is nothing there."

"There's a signature."

He didn't answer.

"At the foot. Examining officer." She held it to the lamp. "It's smeared. But I think I can read the capital."

"It's an H."

"Yes."

"I knew it was an H." His voice was flat. "I've known it for ten years. I thought it was Hartley, or Hobbs. A name you'd find in any county. And last week I stood in front of the man, in the Dean's study, and he told me to my face that he had taken the deposition." He laughed shortly, without any mirth. "And the whole time I thought I'd been looking for a stranger."

"Cal—"

"Say it again."

She stopped.

"Say it again," said Rooke, very quietly. "I find I have grown used to it."

She said nothing. She sat with the paper in her hand and her face burning, and he did not look at her, but down at his own hands, which lay open on the table with the palms turned up.

"Callum," he said. "My mother called me Cal. My father, when he knew me. No one else. No one else for ten years." He drew breath. "Say it, if you like. I should be glad."

"Cal," said Mara.

It was a very small word. It came out of her barely above a whisper. And as she said it, a thing went through her that she had not been ready for: not a pang, nor a fear, but a kind of long, deep, silent ease, as of a held muscle let go. She had been saying it in her head for forty days. She had said it on a ridge and in a cellar and in the dark of a cave, and bitten it back each time. It was the first time she had said it on purpose.

His eyes closed.

"Thank you," said Rooke.

…

They worked on until midnight.

It was strange work. They did not talk much. He read, and made notes, and passed her a sheet; she read it, and passed it back. Now and then one of them said a word. Here. Look at the date. That's the same ink. The fire burned low and she fed it. The snow went on falling. At eleven, without speaking, he rose and went to the hearth and made tea, and she watched him do it with a gravity that was almost comic: the kettle, the pot, the cup. He did it like a man defusing a bomb.

He put it down in front of her.

It smelled of honey. She looked up.

"Pip says it's good for a cough," said Rooke.

"I haven't a cough."

"You will have, if you go on like this."

She took it. It was hot, and sweet, and a little smoky from the kettle, and she held it in both hands and felt it go down into the cold place under her ribs like a small round sun. She did not know why it made her want to cry. She drank it slowly, with her eyes on the page.

He went back to his chair.

"I have never," he said abruptly, "been in love."

Her cup stopped halfway to her mouth.

"I want you to know that." He was not looking at her. He was looking at the papers, and his voice was perfectly flat and perfectly steady, the voice in which he'd have read a charge. "There was a girl in Burlington, once. She sang. I walked out with her for three months and could not have told you the color of her eyes. I thought, this is what it is, then, a sort of pleasant affection, and I was relieved. And afterward I thought it did not matter. I was a Warden. I had a great deal of work."

"Cal—"

"I'm not asking for anything." The pencil turned between his fingers. "I only wish you to know. That whatever else is true. Whatever you are, or are not, or have done. I did not know, until this month, that it was possible to look at a person and feel the whole floor of the world go out from under." He took a breath. "It is very unpleasant. I do not recommend it."

She laughed. It broke out of her, wet and shaky, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth.

"I don't care who you are," said Rooke.

The laugh stopped.

"I've thought about it for four nights," he said. "I've tried to care. I've told myself it is my duty to. That a Warden must not be moved by a face, a voice, a kindness. That a thing is what it is, and the law does not bend for what we would like." He looked up. His eyes were very bright. "And I find I can't. You may be a Doppel. You may be the devil. You may have stolen the name of every woman in Vermont. I look at you, and I see the one I would rather be wrong with than right with anybody else. I'm sorry. I know what it makes me."

She could not speak.

He means it, she thought.

He believes I'm a counterfeit. He has watched me flicker out on a stair. He thinks I am the thing he has spent ten years hunting. And he's offering me this, over a pot of tea, in his dead father's sweater, as plainly as he'd offer a chair.

And I cannot tell him.

She had tried. She had gone over it in her head a hundred times. Cal, I am Mara Ashgrove. I'm the one on the dais. The woman in blue is the copy. And each time the words went out in the air, she heard them as he would, and they sounded exactly like the thing a Doppel would say.

I am the real one. She is the false. Believe me.

It was what Vesper would say. It was what she must have said, for all she knew, in the library, over the book. And he had heard it from both, now, and had no way to choose; and had chosen, instead, to choose nothing.

She set down the cup.

…

She did not remember rising.

She was on her feet, and then she was on the other side of the table, and he had stood up too, and was looking down at her with a face so quiet and so open that it hurt to see. He did not touch her. He had his hands at his sides. He stood in the lamplight with the snow at the window and his chest rising and falling, and waited, as one waits for a verdict.

"I can't tell you," she said.

"I know."

"I want to. You don't know how I want to."

"I know."

"It would sound like—"

"Like what a Doppel would say." His mouth moved. "Yes. I have thought of that too."

"Then—"

"Nell." The name came out of him with a kind of tender helplessness. "I have been a very patient man all my life. I can be patient with this. If it's a week, or ten days, or two months. I'll not ask you to say what you can't. I'll only ask—" He stopped.

"What?"

"If I might be allowed to be wrong," said Rooke, "in your company."

She put her hand up, and laid it flat against his chest.

She could feel his heart. It was going hard and fast, like a thing in a trap, against her palm; and through the wool of the sweater she felt the warmth of him, and the cedar, and the faint smell of woodsmoke and honey. She looked up. He looked down. In the silence between them the lamp burned steady, and the snow fell, and the whole room seemed to lean inward like a held breath.

She did not know which of them moved.

It was gentle. That was what she would remember. She'd imagined it a hundred times, in a hundred versions, in the dark of the loft; and in every one it had been fierce, and fevered, and a little frightening. It was nothing of the kind. He kissed her as he did everything, with a careful grave attention, as though he were learning a language from the root; and his hand came up, very slowly, and cupped the side of her face as though she were made of glass.

She made a sound.

It was a small sound, and it undid him. His arm went round her, hard, drawing her up against him, and the kiss deepened and changed. Her fingers closed in the wool. She felt the table's edge at the back of her thighs. She felt the heat of the fire on her right side and his heat on her left, and a thing began to open in her chest, slowly, with a strange sweet pain, like a fist unclenching after a very long time.

Oh, she thought. Oh. This is what it was for.

It was not the soul-tearing. It was not the loss. It was something she had not known she owned: a great quiet door in the middle of her, swinging open on a lit room.

And through the closed lids, in the bright red dark behind her eyes, she saw, for an instant, a dock. A gray sky. A boy's face turned toward her, wet with tears.

She pulled back.

…

"I'm sorry," said Rooke. "I'm sorry. I should not have—"

"It isn't that."

"You're crying."

"I know." She put up her hand. Her cheeks were wet. She had not felt it begin. "It's all right. I'm not — it isn't that you did anything. I only — oh, Cal."

"What is it?"

"You're in love with someone you believe is your enemy," whispered Mara.

He was silent.

"You think I'm the thing you swore to put in the Vault. You said it yourself. You've seen me go out like a lamp. And you kiss me anyway, and say you don't care." Her voice shook. "Do you know how that— Do you know what it—"

She couldn't finish. She turned away. She stood with her back to him and her arms around herself, in the middle of the lamplit room, shaking with great silent sobs she tried to swallow; and she felt him come up behind her, and stop, and not touch her.

"Tell me what to do," he said.

"I can't."

"Then I'll stay here."

"You'll—"

"I'll stay as long as you like. I'll say nothing. I won't ask." His voice was low and gentle. "But I should like it if you'd let me hold you. Only that. If it's a crime, it can wait till morning."

She laughed, damply, through the tears.

She turned. She put her face in his shoulder. His arms came round her, strong and quiet, and he held her; and she stood there in the warm wool and the cedar smell, in the middle of a snowstorm, with a man who thought she was a counterfeit, and she wept as she had not wept at her mother's grave. He did not speak. He stroked her hair, slowly, over and over, and she felt the tension go out of her inch by inch, as the warmth of the fire sank into her bones.

I'm going to tell him, she thought.

I'm going to tell him all of it. Tomorrow. Whatever happens.

And I'm going to let him have this first.

…

She woke in the loft, under three quilts, with a bar of gold across her face.

The snow had stopped. A strange clean light filled the cabin, ringing off the white outside, and in it the lake lay like a sheet of beaten silver. Somewhere below, a kettle was singing. There was a smell of coffee, real coffee, strong and black, and under it, faintly, of toast.

She lay quite still, and listened to him moving below.

She felt, for the first time in forty-four days, well. It was an unfamiliar sensation. She wiggled her toes; they answered. She flexed her hands on the quilt, and looked at them in the bright morning, and they were solid. Pale, ink-stained, a little thin, but quite opaque. She could not see through them at all.

How strange.

She came down the ladder in her stocking feet.

He was at the hearth with his back to her, in his shirt-sleeves, toasting bread on a fork; and he turned at the sound, and the fork hung in the air. He looked at her. She saw his eyes go very wide. She saw them go soft, and strange, and out of focus: the way they had gone in the dining room, and on the stair, and in the cave.

"What?" she said.

"Wait."

"Cal—"

"Wait. Please." He had set the fork down. He took a step toward her, with his head a little bent, and she felt the quiet touch of the Sight pass over her like a draft. "Your light."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing." He sounded stunned. "Nothing. It's—" He swallowed. "It's brighter."

"Brighter?"

"Not by much. A shade. But it's—" He lifted a hand and let it fall. "The cut's still there. The seam. But it's clearer. It's as if someone had put a lamp behind it." He met her eyes. "I don't understand it. It oughtn't to be possible. Nothing I've read—" He broke off. "What did you do?"

"Nothing."

"You slept."

"I slept."

"That isn't enough." His face had gone white with something that was not fear. "Nell, there's no precedent for it. A Doppel doesn't recover. It doesn't—"

"Perhaps I'm not what you think."

"Perhaps," said Rooke slowly, "you are not."

They looked at one another across the width of the cabin, in the clean white morning, with the smell of toast on the air and the lake shining behind them through the window. And in the silence, in the little rift of calm between his words and her answer, she heard it.

It was inside her head.

It was soft, and amused, and a little cruel, and a little sad; it spoke in her own voice, in her own warm husky tones, with a trace of wine in it. It came from a long way off, and was perfectly distinct.

How sweet, said Vesper. He kisses you, and he still doesn't know who you are.