THE PEARL WHISTLE

Day 46 of 100

Hubbard's Bakery stood on the corner of Church and Mill, under a green awning, and had smelled the same for forty years: of yeast and cinnamon and hot sugar, and something underneath that Mara had never been able to name, which was simply the smell of being warm.

She stood across the street and looked at it for ten minutes.

It was a quarter to four on Thursday. The streets of Merrow Falls were washed with sun. A dray went by with a load of barrels. A girl with a hoop. A pair of old men on the bench outside the barber's, arguing over a newspaper with the heat of men who had been arguing for decades. Everything was bright and ordinary and brimful of life, and she stood in the shadow of a doorway in her gray cloak with her spectacles in her pocket and her heart going like a little drum.

She had two hours.

The Captain had given them to her, quite deliberately, without a word of what they were for. He had driven her to town in the gig on Wednesday evening to fetch her things from the Athenaeum, with a story ready for Okafor and a look in his eye that said he knew she'd want to see someone, and would not ask. He had left her at Winnie's door at noon. "I'll be at the Post till six," he'd said, and added, in a voice carefully without expression: "The back stair at the Athenaeum has a door onto Mill Street. I'm told it sticks."

She had stared at him.

"You needn't tell me where you go," said Rooke. "You needn't tell me why. I'd only ask that you come back."

She'd said that she would.

She meant it. She had never meant anything so much. And she stood now at the edge of the pavement with her fists clenched in her cloak and thought, with a kind of wonder, I have a man who gives me a door.

And I am going to use it to deceive him.

No. She put the thought away. Not to deceive him. To save him. There's a difference.

She was fairly sure there was.

…

Josie came at four.

Mara saw her from half a block away. It was the walk first: that quick, determined, slightly pigeon-toed stride, the walk of a girl who has never in her life been late for anything she cared about. Then the curls, crammed under a straw hat. Then the apron, because she had come straight from the infirmary, and the basket on her arm, and the long tired sag to her shoulders that she always wore at the end of a day on the wards.

And the ribbon.

It was tied around the brim of her hat. Narrow, white, in a flat neat bow. It fluttered as she walked.

She wears it every day, thought Mara. She has worn it for three weeks, and nobody has asked her why.

Her throat closed.

She waited till Josie had gone in. She counted to sixty. She crossed the street, and pushed open the door under the green awning, and the bell over it gave its small silver jingle that she had heard a thousand times and had not expected to hear again.

It was warm inside. It was close and golden and noisy with trade. Mrs. Hubbard, huge and floury, was shouting at an apprentice. Behind the counter hung racks of loaves, in rows, like a congregation. And at the end of the long glass case, with her basket on the floor and her hat pushed back, Josie Tull was bending to inspect a tray of apple tarts with the thoughtful scowl of a woman choosing a husband.

Mara stopped in the doorway.

She had rehearsed this. She had rehearsed it on the cot, and in the gig, and on the Athenaeum stair. She'd had speeches. She had a whole account, tidy as a ledger, with dates. And standing there, with the smell of the tarts in her nose, and the back of Josie's neck before her, round and brown and freckled, she found that every word was gone.

She pursed her lips.

She whistled.

…

It was a very small tune. Two short notes, rising, and a long one, falling. Pee-wee. Pooooo. It was nothing. It was what a child does to call a dog. It had been invented in the second week of their first year, in the library, when Josie was crouched under a table in a fit of homesickness and Mara had wanted her to know she was there; they had used it ever since, across lecture halls and quads and crowded wards, for I'm here and come away and rescue me from this man. They called it the Pearl, because Mara had been wearing her mother's pearl buttons.

Nobody else knew it. Not Tobias. Not Pryce. Not a soul in the world.

Josie went rigid.

She did not turn. She stood with her hand on the glass case and her back to the room, and Mara saw the whole of her body stop, as a clock stops. The apprentice dropped a pan. Somebody laughed. The bell jingled over the door as a customer went out. And through all of it, Josie Tull stood quite still, as one stands who has been struck from behind and does not yet know that it is a blow.

Mara whistled again. The second time, the long note wavered.

Josie turned round.

…

She had known her face for seven years. She'd have said she could not be surprised by it. But she had never seen it like this: stripped, white, with its mouth open and its eyes huge, in the golden light of the bakery, among the loaves. It was the face of someone who has been told that the dead are at the door.

"Mara," said Josie.

It was hardly a sound.

"Yes."

"No. Don't. You aren't—" She put a hand up, as if to ward off a blow. "You're the clerk. You're the one at the Post, with the spectacles. I've seen you. I never— I thought—"

"I know."

"You're thin."

"I know."

"Your hair."

"It's dyed."

"It's awful." Josie's voice cracked straight down the middle. "It's the worst hair I've ever seen. You look like a wet mouse. Oh, God, you absolute idiot—"

She flung herself across the floor.

It was not an embrace. It was an assault. She hit Mara in the chest with the force of a small, enraged cannonball, and wrapped both arms round her, and held on; and the whole bakery went quiet. Mara felt a hundred eyes. She felt Josie's hat go over, and the tarts rock in their case. She felt, against her neck, the hot wet hard shaking of a person who has held something in for two months.

"I knew," Josie was saying. "I knew. I knew it. Oh, you fool, I knew, I told myself I was mad, I told myself it was grief—"

"I'm sorry—"

"Don't you dare apologize. Don't you dare."

"Jo—"

"Three weeks I've been walking round with a ribbon on my head like a lunatic."

"It was a good ribbon."

"It was a terrible ribbon," wept Josie. "Everybody asked."

They stood in the middle of Hubbard's, clinging, with the bell jingling and Mrs. Hubbard bellowing from behind the counter, "Is somebody ill? Girls? Is somebody dead?" and Mara thought, through the blur: I haven't been held by a friend since before the tower. She did not let herself think of a pair of arms in a snowbound cabin. She only felt Josie's heartbeat against hers, a quick fierce familiar rhythm, and put her face in the shoulder of the apron, and let it come.

…

Mrs. Hubbard put them in the back.

She did it without inquiry, with the strong wise practicality of a woman who has seen every sort of girl in her shop. She hustled them through the flour-white kitchen to a room off the pantry, a little windowless place with a table and two stools, where the ledgers were kept, and said, "I'll send in a pot of tea and a plate of the broken ones, and no one shall trouble you," and shut the door.

It was dim and warm. It smelled of sugar. There was a lamp. They sat on the stools, knee to knee, hands clasped across the table, and looked at one another.

"Test me," said Mara.

"What?"

"You'll want to. You're not a fool. You've been burned." She drew a breath. "I would."

"Mara—"

"Test me, Jo. Please."

Josie bit her lip. Her eyes went over Mara's face, feature by feature, with the dreadful clinical thoroughness of a woman who sets bones for a living.

"The Fourth of July," she said, "when we were eleven."

"Yes."

"What happened?"

"You set your braid alight."

"With what?"

"A sparkler. From the Merrills' box. You were holding it upside down." Mara smiled, painfully. "You'd just told Tobias Marsh's sister she smelled of boiled cabbage. You were looking at her. You had it pointed at your own head."

"And who put it out?"

"I did."

"With what?"

"My pinafore."

"What did I say?"

"You said you were going to be sick. And then you said you'd never forgive me for burning the pinafore, because it was the one with the strawberries and your mother had made it."

"It was your pinafore."

"Yes. It was mine. I'd lent it you." Mara held out her left wrist. She pushed back the cuff, and the white ribbon, and the faint gray band beneath, and laid it on the table in the lamplight. "And this is where it burned me."

A small, white, puckered scar, no larger than a grain of rice, lay on the inside of the wrist just below the sigil.

Josie looked at it.

She looked for a long time. Then she picked up the hand in both of hers, quite gently, and laid her thumb on the scar, and bent her head.

"She didn't have this," she said, in a muffled voice.

"No."

"I looked. I looked at the Ascension. I looked at her arm when she changed for the Gala fitting. She hasn't got it. I thought it must have healed." She raised her face. It was wet. "I thought I was imagining things. But she said lemonade. She said I said I'd never forgive her for the lemonade. And you know, in all the years I've known you, Mara, you've never in your life got a story wrong. You're the one who remembers. You'd have said it right. And I looked at her, across my own broth, and I thought—"

"That I was dead?"

"That something was," said Josie, and wept.

…

Mara told her everything.

It took an hour and forty minutes. She told it in the dim room, with her hand in Josie's, over a plate of broken tarts that neither of them touched. She told the Ascension, and the crack, and the second self that came out of the broken sigil with her face on, and her laugh. She told the tower, and the fall, and Ruth Pellam's kitchen, and the notice nailed up outside the tavern. She told Winnie. She told the interview, the dyed hair, the Archive. She told the flicker on the stair; she said, shortly, that the Captain had seen. She told about the hundred days and the eclipse and the iron doors.

She left out the cabin. She said that the Captain had "become kind."

Josie did not interrupt. She sat with her chin on her fist and her eyes enormous, and now and then she said, "Oh, Mara," or "That absolute cow," or "Say that again." When it was over she was silent a long time. She wiped her face on her apron and blew her nose in it.

"I'm going to be sick," she said.

"Don't."

"I'm going to be sick, and then I'm going to kill her."

"You can't."

"I can. I'm a healer. I know where everything is." But the fire had gone out of it; she drooped, and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I held her hand, Mara. When she was sick. I put a cold cloth on her head. I loved her, a bit, I thought it was you, and she let me—"

"I know."

"She let me."

"She isn't wicked," said Mara slowly. "Not all through. I met her. In the clock tower." She stopped. "I don't know what she is. But she is in terrible pain, Jo. I think she's as frightened as I am. And she has just as much right to be."

"That's the most infuriating thing you've ever said."

"I know."

"You are too good."

"I'm not," said Mara. "That's the whole trouble. I'm exactly as bad as she is. We have the same heart."

Josie said nothing. She looked at Mara with her red eyes, and then, abruptly, she laughed: a short, wet, shocked laugh, like a hiccup.

"You are still you," she said. "Oh, thank God. I was afraid you'd come back improved."

…

"Here is what I want," said Mara.

They had put their heads together. The lamp had burned low. Through the door came the muffled bustle of the shop, the clank of pans, a shout for more flour, and neither of them heard any of it. She spoke in a low fast voice, as she did when she was plotting.

"I need you to stay where you are."

"With her?"

"With her. In her confidence. At her table, in her room." She gripped Josie's hand. "She trusts you. She has no one else. She needs you, I think, more than she knows. And I need someone who can hear what she says and tell me what she means to do."

"A spy."

"A friend."

"A spy," said Josie, with satisfaction. "I've always wanted to be a spy. I'd be marvelous. I'll be so nice to her you'll want to vomit."

"Josie—"

"No, no, it's perfect. She thinks I'm stupid. Everyone does. I let them." She sat back, with a look of secret glee. "I'll find out what she's up to. I'll find out everything. What does she want?"

"I think she wants to be me."

"She can't."

"No."

"And the Captain?"

"What about the Captain?"

"Well, which of you does he—" Josie stopped. Her face sharpened. "Mara Ashgrove. You've gone red."

"I haven't."

"You've gone as red as a beet. You've been holding something back for an hour, I could feel it. It's him, isn't it? It's Rooke."

"I don't—"

"He kissed you."

"Josie!"

"Oh my God," said Josie. "Oh my God. He kissed you, and he thinks you're the— and you're the— oh, that's awful. That's the most awful, romantic—" She put both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were dancing. "I don't know whether to laugh or to scream."

"Both," said Mara. "I generally do."

They sat there, flushed and helpless, holding each other's hands across the table, and for one blessed minute the whole weight of the hundred days was gone.

Then Josie sobered.

"There's one more thing," she said.

…

"What?"

"I didn't want to say. I thought it was nothing." She frowned. "But I've been turning it over since Monday."

"Tell me."

"She asked me about the notebook. Your brown one."

Mara went cold.

"She's had it for weeks. She told me she found it in the belfry, the day after the Ascension, and I thought, well, naturally. She's been carrying it about. Reading it, I suppose. But on Monday night she came into the infirmary with the thing in her hand and a look on her face I didn't care for, and she asked me—" Josie hesitated. "She asked whether I'd ever seen you open the buttons."

"The what?"

"The pearl ones. On the cover. Seven of them." Josie's brow creased. "I said I didn't know what she meant. She said, 'There's something inside one. I can feel it. I've tried every one, and the thread's too strong. Did she ever say how to open it?' She was most particular. She wanted to know if your mother ever told you anything about the notebook. Anything at all."

Mara sat motionless.

She had the notebook before her eyes, as vividly as if it lay on the table. The soft brown calf, rubbed pale at the corners. The seven pearls in a row, small as peas, each sewn with a double knot of cream silk. The long autumn evening in which her mother, with her sharp little embroidery scissors and her fine tired hands, had sewn them on, one by one, saying nothing, humming under her breath.

Seven, she had said at last, biting off the thread. Seven is a good number. It's the one in the middle that matters, Mara. Remember that. If ever you need me, and I'm not there. The one that counts.

Mother?

Hush. You'll understand.

And then the lake. And a long white fever. And a blank.

She had forgotten it. It had gone with the rest, into the room without a door. She sat in the little back room of Hubbard's Bakery, with her pulse thudding in her ears, and the whole thing came back to her whole and entire, as clear as a bell: her mother's hands, and the scissors, and the middle button.

"She's looking for something," whispered Josie. "Isn't she? Something your mother left."

"Yes."

"Do you know what?"

"No." Mara's voice was strange. "But I think my mother knew what was going to happen."