DEAL WITH THE DIRECTOR

Day 52 of 100

The note was on cream paper, in a hand like a row of pins, and it said: The Director would be obliged if Miss Ashgrove could spare him a quarter of an hour at six. Private. The Dean's study.

Vesper read it in the window seat of Mara's room with the cracked mirror at her back and the thread, that damnable thread, humming in her breastbone like a plucked wire.

Private.

She turned the paper over. There was nothing on the back. She held it to the light, and the light came through the cream and showed her the watermark: the Bureau's seal, a scale and a sword. The scale a little tilted.

"He has come back," she said aloud.

Nobody answered. Josie had gone to the wards at five. The room held only the late sun, red as a coal on the floor, and the faint smell of vanilla, and herself.

Of course he has. He said he'd be back before the solstice.

She folded the note. She put it in the bosom of her gown, against the skin, where it lay light and cold as a flake of ice. She got up, and went to the glass, and looked at the face in it: lovely, pale, composed, with a faint tremor at the corner of the mouth.

You are afraid, she told it.

Yes, said the face.

Good. Be afraid. It is sensible.

She put on the blue gown. She did her hair carefully, high, with a pearl comb; she chose, from the little cabinet, a single gold chain. She did not wear the red. Red was for the Captain, and for the dinner table, and for anyone she wished to unsettle. She had a feeling that against Augustin Halloran the best armor would be mildness.

Be Mara, she thought. Be good, and plain, and grateful.

It was strange how easily it came.

…

The Dean's study had been given up entirely to the Director.

It was a large room, paneled in dark wood, with deep windows and a fire. Someone had cleared the Dean's clutter; the dozen small portraits had been taken from the wall and a single large one hung in their place, a lithograph of a woman in a high collar, with a severe mouth and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. Vesper did not know the face. She felt it watching her as she came in.

A lamp burned on the desk. Two chairs stood before the fire. Between them, on a low table, was a tray with a decanter, two glasses, and a plate of thin sugared biscuits.

"Miss Ashgrove," said Halloran.

He rose from the chair. He did it with a slow courtly grace, leaning a little on his black stick, and held out his other hand; and Vesper took it, because there was nothing else to do, and found it dry and cool and curiously weightless, like a glove with nothing in it. On the third finger a ring of black stone caught the firelight and gave nothing back.

"Director."

"I trust I do not intrude. I hesitated to send. A young lady, alone, in the evening." The mild blue eyes smiled. "But I have been three weeks in Washington, and I wished very much to see you. Please. Sit."

She sat.

He poured. The wine was dark and heavy and smelled of plums. He gave her a glass, and took one for himself, and settled in the opposite chair with his stick across his knees, and for a minute they sat in silence, looking at the fire.

"It's a Madeira," he said. "Eighteen-twelve. A small indulgence."

"It's lovely."

"You do not take it."

She raised the glass, and sipped. It went down like warm velvet, and lay in her stomach, and a little of the tightness went out of her shoulders. She thought, Don't. She thought, He wishes you to. She took another sip anyway.

"You are wondering why I sent for you," said Halloran.

"Yes."

"It is simple." He turned the glass in his long white fingers. "I wished to ask how you do."

…

It was not what she expected.

"I—"

"I have been told you have had a hard season." His voice was low and kind. "A great shock, in the chapel. A loss of memory. Weeks of what I gather has been a rather strained convalescence, in a school which can hardly be said to understand. And all of it borne, I think, quite alone."

"I have Josie."

"A devoted girl." He nodded. "And the Captain."

"The Captain has been very good."

"I am sure." The eyes rested on her. "Does he see you often?"

"Often enough."

"And does he see you?"

She said nothing.

"I mean it quite literally," said Halloran gently. "The Captain has a rare gift. He can see the light of a soul. It's a matter for some admiration. But I have wondered whether, in the case of a particular soul, he has been quite as acute as he supposes." He took a sip. "You are aware, Miss Ashgrove, that there is another in the Post?"

Her fingers tightened on the stem.

"A clerk."

"A Miss Fenwick. Yes. A young woman with a limp in her light and no history to speak of." The smile was infinitely patient. "I have been looking into her. I find her a most interesting person. She came to the Post on the day after the Ascension. She appeared to know a great deal about the Act. And she is, in every respect that I have been able to examine, your exact double."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Don't you?"

It was said so softly that for an instant she did not feel the point of it. Then it went in, as a needle goes in under a nail, and she thought, quite clearly, He knows.

He knows what I am.

And he's been sitting here for ten minutes pouring me wine.

…

"I think," said Halloran, "that we may dispense with a certain amount of ceremony."

He set down his glass.

"You are not Mara Ashgrove," he said. "I do not say it as an accusation. I say it as a clinician, who has seen your kind a hundred times. You are a Doppel. A very remarkable one. You have the original's memory entire, and a vigor, a presence, a grasp of the world, that the common run of Doppels lack altogether. You have held your own among the faculty for fifty days. You have deceived the best Soul-Seer in the district." He smiled. "It is a creditable thing."

Vesper did not move.

She was aware of the fire. Of the lithographed woman on the wall, watching. Of a very faint ticking, from the clock on the mantel, and of her own pulse, which had gone slow and heavy and strange, like a drum heard through water.

Run, said a small voice. Now. Before he can stop you.

Where? To the Captain?

Anywhere.

But she did not run. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, as Mara would have sat, and looked at the man with the silver hair, and found that what she felt was not fear at all, but something far odder: a kind of dreadful, tender relief.

Someone knows.

Someone has looked at me and said what I am.

"What do you want?" she said.

"Ah." He seemed pleased. "That is the right question. I did not doubt you would ask it." He leaned forward. "I want your help, Miss Ashgrove. And I am prepared to pay."

"In what coin?"

"In the only one that matters to you."

…

He told it simply.

He did not make a speech. He spoke as a man tells a child what time the train leaves: quietly, plainly, as if the thing were self-evident. She listened with her eyes on the fire and the wine going warm in her hand.

"By the Act," said the Director, "when a Doppel is not identified by the hundredth day, both parties are sealed. You know this. You have known it from the first. It is the thing you have been running from, I think, all spring."

"Yes."

"I do not wish it. I do not wish it for you, nor for the other. I am not a cruel man, whatever you may have heard." He sighed. "But the law is the law, and the Captain is an obstinate officer, and between his scruples and the Act I have found no road. Until now."

"Now?"

"Now I have you."

She said nothing.

"The Mirror will find the Doppel," said Halloran. "It never errs. If it is used upon the pair of you, it will draw the false and release the true. I need only to put the two of you before it. Unfortunately, as you may have seen, the Captain will not permit. He has a certain tenderness for the clerk. A weakness, I fear. He will not give her to the glass."

The clerk.

She thought, He thinks Mara is the Doppel.

It came to her in a flash, with a kind of sick giddiness. The Bureau's doctrine: the Doppel fades, the copy flickers. The Director had seen the pale thing at the Post, the thin girl who could not hold a teacup. He had done the arithmetic in the usual way. The weak is the false.

He knows which of us is which.

It came to her in a flash, with a kind of sick giddiness. The Director had called her the Doppel to her face. He had called the clerk her double. He had said the Mirror drew the false, and that the Captain would not give the clerk to the glass; and he had asked her to prove, before witnesses, that the clerk was the Doppel.

He knows she is not. He knows the thin one is the real one, and he wants her put in front of that stone and called a counterfeit.

Why?

She could not follow it. Her head was spinning, the wine, the firelight. Somewhere in the muddle a cool voice said: It doesn't matter what he believes. Listen to what he is offering.

"You want me to give you the clerk," she said.

"I want you to do what you do so well." The Director smiled. "To make the world see. To reveal, before witnesses, in some public hour, that the woman at the Post is not what she seems. That her light is cut. That she is, in short, the Doppel. If the whole Academy has seen it, and the Captain has been shown, there can be no further objection. The Mirror may be used. The false will be drawn." He spread his hands. "And you will be Mara Ashgrove."

"For how long?"

"Forever."

…

The word hung in the air.

She looked at him. He looked back, benign and sorrowful, with his hands on the head of the stick.

"The Act has a provision," he said. "Section Twelve. It was a clause I framed myself. It permits the Director, in cases of extraordinary merit, to grant a surviving Doppel the standing of the Original, in perpetuity, with all the rights and records of the same. The Bureau erases the difference. Not a clerk in Washington will be able to say that you were ever anything else." His voice was soft. "You would have her name, her degree, her house in Concord if she has one. Her rooms in the East Court. Her place at the table. And you would be safe."

"Safe."

"From the Vault. From the Hundredth Night. From the Captain's conscience." He paused. "From her."

Vesper's mouth had gone dry.

Her name. Her rooms. Her place at the table.

It was the thing she had wanted. It was precisely the thing, set before her on a salver, with a silver spoon. A whole life, with nothing missing. No more hiding. No more bandages at the wrist. No more flinching when Josie said Mara, with that look of faint, troubled inquiry. A self, conferred by the one authority on earth that could confer it.

And somewhere, behind it, cold and clear as a bell, a voice said:

He is lying.

She knew it as one knows one's own name. She did not know how. She had no evidence; the voice was entirely level, the manner kind. But there was something in the very smoothness of it, in the way the offer had been laid on the table, ready, with the decanter and the biscuits, that told her it had been laid there many times before.

He has done this before. He has said this to other Doppels. To others like me.

And where are they now?

"I should like to think about it," she said.

"Of course."

"I mean to say—" She swallowed. "That it is a great deal."

"It is." He nodded. "You have until the Gala."

"The Gala?"

"The Winter Gala. On the sixteenth. The whole Academy will be there, and the faculty, and the Captain with his officers. It is the ideal hour." He rose, with that slow grace, and went to the desk, and returned with a small flat box of black lacquer. "I would not ask you to do it unaided. A girl cannot be expected to expose a rival by mere words. So I have taken the liberty."

He opened it.

On a bed of gray velvet lay a pendant. A drop of black stone, polished to a mirror, no larger than a plum, hung from a fine silver chain. It gave back nothing. It seemed to drink the fire.

"It is a resonance stone," said Halloran. "From the Bureau's laboratory. A cousin of the one I wear." He touched his ring. "When it is warm against the skin, and the wearer is in the presence of a divided soul, it will draw out the light. You will not need to do anything. You have only to stand near her. At the hour, at the height of the music, the stone will wake. Her light will rise, for all to see. And everyone will know what she is."

She looked at the pendant.

It lay there like a drop of ink.

It will draw out the light.

The light of the weaker.

It will draw out Mara's.

She thought of a pale shape in a cracked mirror, with a lamp showing through its hand.

…

"And if I refuse?"

She had not meant to say it. It came out in a small clear voice, quite calm.

"Why, then," said Halloran gently, "I shall be disappointed."

He closed the box.

"I should not be angry. Anger is for those who have a choice." He set the box on the table beside her glass. "But I should have to proceed otherwise. The hundredth day is not far. The Captain is tender, and the Academy is slow, and the Act does not allow for sentiment. I should be obliged to apply the Mirror to both parties, by order of the Director, over the Captain's head. I should draw the weaker; the stronger would be sealed. And as for you, my dear—"

He looked at her, quite kindly.

"I don't think you would care for the Vault."

She said nothing.

"I believe it is damp," said Augustin Halloran. "But I'm told one soon ceases to mind."

The fire cracked. In the long silence she heard the ticking of the clock, and the beat of her own heart, and the thread in her breast hum like a wire in a gale.

She is somewhere near, thought Vesper. I can feel her. She's awake, and she is afraid, and she is doing something. Something brave and foolish.

Mara.

What would you do?

But she knew. She knew precisely what Mara would do. Mara would stand up. She would say, No, with her spectacles flashing, and walk out of the door, and take whatever came.

And that was the whole trouble. Mara would. Vesper was not Mara.

She was the one who wanted to live.

"I accept," said Vesper.

…

The Director's smile widened, very gently.

"I knew you would be sensible."

"Section Twelve. In writing."

"Naturally."

"Before the Gala."

"At your convenience." He took up the box and put it into her hand, and closed her fingers on it. His own were cool and dry and light, like the touch of a dead leaf. "You will wear it, Miss Ashgrove. At your throat. Against the skin. It will do the rest."

"And the clerk?"

"Will be taken care of."

"She won't be hurt."

He considered her with his head on one side.

"She will be identified," he said. "As you would wish. What the Bureau does with the Doppel thereafter is, I fear, a matter of procedure."

She went out through the long dim corridor, past the porters in their gray, past the portraits of the dead deans, with the box in her fist and the wine like a fever in her veins. She went down the steps into the quad. The evening had come on, soft and violet, with a single star over the chapel; and a faint wind moved the new leaves in the lime trees, and she stood in it, at the edge of the grass, and for the first time in fifty-two days she did not know what to do with her hands.

Her name. Her rooms. Her place at the table.

Safe.

She opened her fingers. The black stone lay in her palm, warm from her skin, as heavy as a stopped heart.

Procedure, he had said.

She thought of an iron door. She thought of a man in a silver coat, smiling, with his hand on the head of a stick. Section Twelve. A clause he had framed himself. She did not know why the phrase turned in her mind like a key in a lock; but she stood in the violet dusk with the pendant in her hand and the cold gathering in the pit of her stomach, and knew, with a sudden terrible clarity, that she had just made a bargain with the one person in Vermont who had already decided how it would end.

He didn't promise to spare her.

He didn't promise to spare me.

I have just signed a death sentence for the two of us.