VESPER

Day 6 of 100

She woke in a bed that smelled of someone else, and it was the best sleep she had ever had.

That was the first thing. Before the fear, before the memory, before the cold slide of what she had done: a simple animal gladness, rolling and warm, like a cat in a patch of sun. She lay on her back under the patchwork quilt in the room under the eaves of Corbin House, with her hair spread over a pillow that was not hers and was, and looked at the sloping whitewashed ceiling, and felt her own body for the first time as a thing that belonged to her.

She had slept eleven hours. She had never done that. In the first five days of her life she had not slept at all, not really; she had crouched in the belfry of the Old Bell Tower, in a nest of stolen blankets, with a lamp and a stolen loaf, and watched the lake, and thought. She had gone down in the dark to haunt the corridors of Corbin House like a draft. She had read the journals. She had studied the face in the glass. Every night she had slipped into this room, and sat at that desk, and learned the owner of it the way a thief learns a house.

But she had not slept in the bed. She'd not dared.

Last night she had. She had come in at two, from the tower, with her hands still shaking, and her hem torn, and the sound still in her ears, and she had taken off the red velvet, and folded it, and put it at the bottom of the wardrobe under a stack of petticoats. She had put on the thin cotton nightdress from the drawer. She had pulled the quilt to her chin. And she'd lain there, shivering, with the whole of the night in her mouth like ash, and said aloud, to the ceiling, in a small cracked voice:

"I didn't mean it."

Nobody had answered. After a while she had slept.

…

The sun was well up. Through the little window the sky was a hard clear blue, and the light fell in a yellow slab across the foot of the bed. A sparrow hopped on the sill and eyed her.

"Good morning," she said.

It flew off.

She laughed, and the sound startled her. It was a good laugh. It was low and warm and a little rough, and it ran up the scale at the end with a catch like a hiccup; it was Mara's laugh and not Mara's, in the same way that a hand is the same hand in a glove. She tried it again. She tried a smaller one, a polite one, the one Mara gave to tutors. It was dry and brief and slightly disapproving. She tried a third that she had never heard, and which came straight up from her stomach: a great loose whoop of a thing, delighted and quite unladylike.

She lay there laughing at the ceiling until she had to wipe her eyes.

I am alive, thought Vesper.

It was a ridiculous thing to be so surprised by. But she had not known, for certain, that she would be. She had come up out of the dark in the Great Hall on Ascension Night, standing in the shadow behind the Founder's Stone, with a gasp in her throat and a strange cold ringing in her ears; and the first thing she had seen was herself. A tall girl in a pale-blue gown with her hand on the granite and her face turned up, white, astonished, afraid. She had thought: That's me. And then, with a horrible lurch: No. It isn't.

Then the memories had come.

They had come in a flood, from the back of her mind, like a house full of furniture being switched on at once. A mother with fair hair and a straw hat. A white room with a coughing child. A boy in a punt, reading poetry. The second year. The third. Ten thousand afternoons, each one distinct, each one hers and not hers, in a sequence so perfect and so complete that for a minute, a long dreadful minute, she had not known which of the two of them she was.

I am Mara, she had thought. I am the one at the Stone. I am standing in the Hall.

And then the girl had turned round, white-faced, and looked straight at her, and not seen her at all.

That was how she had known. It was the not-seeing. A girl with a face like a lantern had looked through her as through a pane of glass.

…

She got up.

She did it slowly, savoring it, in the way of a person who has been told she is free to explore. She crossed the cold boards in her bare feet. She opened the wardrobe and looked, with gradually deepening disgust, at what Mara had thought fit to hang there: six gowns in gray, brown, and navy, three of them very nearly identical; a black wool cloak; a straw bonnet that looked like something a nun would put on a donkey. She pulled out the blue silk, the pale one, and held it to her shoulders in the glass.

It was a good dress. It was the best that Mara owned, and she had bought it for the Ascension, and worn it for ten minutes. It made her skin look like milk. She turned this way and that. She put her hair up, and took it down. She put it back up with two pins in a way that Mara never would, loose at the neck, with a curl falling forward. She looked at herself.

Oh, you're pretty, she thought, with an odd, shy, dizzy wonder. You're so pretty. Why did she never see?

The glass said nothing. The girl in it looked back with an expression of intense, amused, guilty speculation, and a mouth that wanted to smile and was trying not to.

There was a knock at the door.

…

It was Josie.

She had known it would be. She had known, in the dim cold way that she knew things from the other's head, that Josie Tull knocked three times fast and once slow, and then came in without waiting. She had time to put down the blue silk. She had time to rearrange her face. She did not have time to think.

The door burst open.

"There you are!" cried Josie.

She stood in the doorway, in a green wrapper over her nightgown, with her curls in papers and a half-eaten bun in her hand. Her face was blotched and pink. Her eyes were huge and swollen. She looked as if she had not slept either; she looked, in fact, like a person who has been up all night in a state of unremitting terror, and has been forced to accept in the morning that the thing she feared has not occurred.

"I thought—" said Josie. She stopped. Her mouth wobbled. The bun fell out of her hand, and she did not notice. She said, in a very small voice, "Mara?"

She's weeping, thought Vesper.

It struck her like a slap. She had not prepared for it. She had imagined the confrontation, a dozen times, in the long nights in the tower. She had practiced her lines. I'm so sorry. I went for a walk. I fell asleep. A little shamefaced laughter. A little charm. Josie was a creature of warm impulse, easy to lead. She would scold, and forgive.

She had not imagined the face.

It was not a face of fury, or relief, or confusion. It was simply naked. It was the face of a child who has wakened in the night and found her mother standing at the door. Josie was looking at her as if she were the most precious thing in the world, and the tears were running down her cheeks, and she was not even trying to wipe them.

I did this, thought Vesper, with a thin cold shock. I made her cry. It was me.

"Josie," she said.

It came out wrong. It came out in the wrong key. She had put into the one word too much feeling, too much of her own self, and she saw Josie's head go back a fraction, a small quick check, like the start of a deer. Josie's eyes narrowed. For one terrible second the girl in the green wrapper looked at the girl in the blue dress with her head on one side, and Vesper felt the whole delicate structure of the lie begin to tilt—

—and then she did the only thing that came to her. She opened her arms.

Josie fell into them.

She came in a rush, like a thrown thing, and clutched, and hid her face in Vesper's neck. She smelled of chestnuts and soap and lamp-oil. Her shoulders heaved. She said, in a muffled, ragged, furious voice, "You awful girl. You awful girl. Where did you go?"

"I'm sorry."

"I looked everywhere."

"I know."

"I went to the Wardens!"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You utter—"

"I know." She was holding Josie. She did not know how it had happened. She had her arms round another person, and a wet cheek against her collarbone, and a small hot hand wound in the back of her gown; and she was not pretending. That was the dreadful thing. She felt it come up through her chest like water through a floor, a hot, raw, wholly unexpected tenderness, a love so enormous and so entirely not hers that she couldn't breathe.

Her friend. Not mine. Hers.

It's mine, too. I have her whole head.

It's mine, and it's stolen, and I can't stop.

"I'm all right," she heard herself say. "I'm all right, Josie. Really."

…

She said it again at supper, and at breakfast, and in the corridor, and in the library; in a thousand small ways over the course of that long bright day, she said it to all the people who came up to her with their faces open and their hands out, to say how glad they were, and how worried, and how silly she'd been. She was surprised how many there were. She'd never imagined that Mara had been loved. A tutor patted her arm. A porter, a man she had never noticed, took off his cap. Three first-years, solemn as owls, presented her with a pressed flower. And everyone, everyone, said the same thing, with the same little puzzled tilt of the head.

You seem different.

Do I? she said. How?

I don't know. Happier.

Perhaps I am.

She burned Mara's letter in the common-room grate while Josie was out of the room.

She had found it at nine, in the envelope under the clock, in the very place Josie had said it would be: If I'm not back by two, go to Captain Rooke. She had read it once, standing, with her pulse in her ears. The handwriting was small and neat. The tone was calm. It was a letter of the sort one would write if one had thought of everything, and she thought, with a quick bitter flicker of admiration, Of course she did. Of course.

She put it in the fire. It curled and blackened and flared. She stirred the ash with the poker, thoroughly, and stood a moment watching it go.

Josie never saw it, she told herself. Josie went to the Wardens anyway, out of love, and came back with nothing, and now she doesn't need it.

But she knew that wasn't the whole of it. Josie had gone to the Wardens. She had stood in the doorway of the Post, at four in the morning, in her nightgown and a coat, and asked for the Captain by name.

And what did he say?

She did not know. Josie hadn't said. She'd only said that the Captain had been out, and a large man with a mustache had taken the details, and promised to look.

A large man with a mustache. Okafor. The deputy. A man with a good dry eye who didn't say much. She had marked him already.

And the Captain himself, thought Vesper, looked at her. In the Hall.

…

By evening, the pain had begun.

She had not expected it. She was sitting in the common room with a glass of the Dean's good claret, which Tobias Marsh had stolen from the buttery in honor of her return, being charming to six people at once, and she felt it start: a dull heat in her left ankle. It spread. It became a bright bar of agony along the shin. She nearly dropped the glass. She put out a hand to the arm of the sofa and gripped, and then, as she drew a breath, a second pain stabbed her in the ribs, on the left side, so sharp and so exact that she gasped aloud.

"Mara?" said Josie, from across the room. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. A stitch."

"You've gone white."

"I'm all right. I've drunk too fast."

She smiled. She sat very still, and the agony ebbed, and returned, and ebbed again. She knew what it was. She had known it from the first twinge. She sat with the glass cold against her cheek and the room swimming gently, and thought with perfect clarity:

It isn't mine. It's hers.

It was the oddest sensation. She had read of it in the girl's memory, in the way one reads of a thing in a book: the phantom limb, the amputee who feels the toes of a foot that is gone. But it was the other way about. She was the limb. She was a thing that had been cut away, and she could feel, along some thin fine nerve of connection, where the other hurt. A broken ankle. A cracked rib. A bruise on the shoulder, like a thumb pressed into clay.

She's alive.

The thought flooded her. It was not relief. It was something much more complicated, and she turned it over in the dark of her head as one turns a stone that has a coin on the underside. She had pushed her. She had let go. She'd stood on the parapet with the wind in her hair and watched the black shape go down, down, down, into the white; and she had run, run the whole length of the spiral stair, with her heart in her mouth, and arrived at the foot of the tower, and seen a hole in the snow. And in the hole a face.

I was so afraid she was dead, she thought.

And I was so afraid she wasn't.

She had stood at the edge of the pit, shaking. She had said the words. And then she'd heard a sound, far off, on the path, a cart, a jingle of harness, and she had run again. She'd left the girl in the snow. She had gone into the dark and crouched behind the chapel wall with her fist in her mouth, and listened to a woman's voice raised in alarm, and the scrape of a shovel, and a creaking of wheels going away.

Someone had taken her. Someone had been good.

Thank God, she thought. And then, with a bitter smile: Thank whom?

…

She went up at midnight.

She said goodnight to the common room, with a kiss for Josie and a joke for Tobias Marsh. She climbed the stairs with a hand on the rail. She let herself into the room and locked the door and set her back against it, and for a moment stood quite still in the dark, with her eyes shut.

Then she lit the lamp.

The room leapt out of the shadows, small and neat and warm. The desk stood under the window. The quilt was pulled up straight. On the pillow, where she had left it, lay the brown notebook with its brass catch, which she'd taken from the belfry boards and carried down in her cloak like a stolen child. She picked it up. She turned the pages, slowly, by lamplight, one after another, in their rows of small upright script.

It was extraordinary. Every line was dated. Every note was in two inks. She saw, on page after page, in the careful margin, a string of little flags, numbered, with arrows. See p. 14. Cf. p. 61. Query? The whole book was the product of a mind that could not bear to leave a thing unexamined, that wrote its doubts down in a column and answered them in the next. It was almost unbearably touching. It was like reading the diary of a small, precise, valiant animal.

She's so frightened, thought Vesper. She's been frightened her whole life.

She turned to the last written page. There it was: the unfinished entry, in pencil, the last line half-formed. Hypothesis three: and a single word, struck through and rewritten, as if the writer had wanted to be rid of it.

Doppel.

She put the book down.

She went to the window and pushed it open. The night air came in like a hand: black, dry, scented with snow and pine. Beyond the roofs the town lay in the valley, a handful of yellow lights along the river. She saw the white ribbon of the road. She saw, far off, the pinpoint glow of a lamp in a window on Tanner's Row, where an old woman was drawing the curtains on a sleeping girl.

She did not know that. She only felt it. She stood there with the cold on her face, and the pain going in her side like a faint slow pulse, and it came to her that the pain was a kind of thread. It ran from her ribs, out through the window, over the dark lawns and the frozen river, to a place she could not see. She could follow it. If she closed her eyes she could feel the other end: a small flicker, a tug, a presence, very faint and very stubborn, like a candle lit in the next room.

It was moving.

She opened her eyes.

She's up, she thought. She's walking. She's got a broken leg and she is walking.

Where is she going?

A laugh rose in her, unbidden, and she put the back of her hand to her mouth to hold it in. It was a strange, wild, shaky, rueful thing; half grief, half delight. Her whole life was balanced on the edge of a knife, and she was happier than she had ever been. She was a thief, a murderer, a liar, in a dead girl's dress. She was six days old.

"I know you're alive," she whispered.

The wind took the words and carried them out over the roofs.

"I know. I can feel you." She leaned her forehead against the cold glass. "I'm so sorry. I'm not going to stop. But I am so sorry."

Far away in the dark a lamp went out.

She smiled.

It was not a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who has made a bet she cannot afford to lose, and has just heard the wheel begin to turn.

"Come and find me, Mara," said Vesper softly, to the night. "I'd like to see how you do it."