NELL FENWICK

Day 7 of 100

The Merrow Falls Athenaeum had been founded in 1818 by a society of gentlemen who wished to improve themselves, and had been kept alive ever since by one woman who wished to improve everybody else.

It stood at the top of Church Street, between the apothecary and the Congregational chapel, a narrow red-brick building with a fanlight and a brass plate that had been polished so often the engraving had worn smooth. It had two reading rooms, a gallery, a cellar full of unbound periodicals, and an attic that no one had entered in twenty years. A card in the window said, in a copperplate hand, SUBSCRIBERS ONLY. THE LIBRARIAN IS NOT TO BE DISTURBED BEFORE TEN.

It was ten minutes to five in the morning, and Mara knocked.

She had not slept. She had spent the night in the loft of a hay barn behind the Pellams' neighbor, curled in the straw with Mrs. Pellam's gray shawl over her head, listening to the cows breathe, and trying to think what a person did next. She had no money. She had no papers. She had a bent paper-knife, a walking-stick, and a gown that had been let down at the hem by a woman who didn't ask questions. And at some point, around three, in the black hour when the straw rustled with mice and her ankle beat like a drum, she had thought of the only person in the world who might help, and had been so ashamed of not thinking of her sooner that she'd wept.

She knocked three times, fast. Then twice, slow. Then once.

Nothing happened. The street was empty and blue. A thin snow was falling, so fine it hardly seemed to fall at all, hanging in the lamplight in a glittering veil. She stood on the step with her hand raised, shaking, and told herself that it had been six years, that the woman was seventy-one, that she might have forgotten, or died.

The door opened a hand's breadth on a chain.

"The index," said a voice, dry as a leaf, "is never complete."

"And the catalogue," said Mara, through chattering teeth, "is never right."

The chain rattled and fell. The door swung wide.

…

Winnie Ostrander was a small woman who looked like a large one.

It was a matter of carriage. She stood barely five feet in her carpet slippers, a bent, frail, bird-boned figure in a dressing gown of purple wool, with a mob-cap tied under her chin and a pair of spectacles pushed up into a froth of white hair; but she held herself so upright, and looked at the world with such a fierce level eye, that the impression was of someone who had merely chosen, for economy, to occupy a small space. Her face was a map of fine wrinkles. Her hands were knobbed and spotted and perfectly steady. In the crook of her left arm she carried a poker.

She looked at Mara for a long time.

"My dear girl," she said at last. "What on earth have you done to yourself?"

"Winnie—"

"No. Don't. Come in. Mind the step, you'll go straight through it. Is that a splint? Who bound it? She's made a better job than a surgeon, I shall want to meet her. Lean on me. Lean, child, I'm stronger than I look."

She was. She got an arm under Mara's shoulder with astonishing speed, and the poker was set against the wall, and the door was shut and bolted behind them in a single movement. The hall was dark and smelled of leather and cold ash and old, good paper. A candle burned in a dish. Winnie hauled her along a passage, through a swing door, down three steps, into a kitchen at the back of the house where a fire was banked in an iron range and a kettle sang.

"Sit."

Mara sat.

It was an enormous relief. She hadn't known how tired she was until she was in the chair: a hard wooden armchair with a patchwork cushion, in front of a fire, in the warmth of a kitchen that smelled of toast. She put her head back. The room swam. She heard the clink of crockery, the scrape of a chair. A blanket was draped round her shoulders. A cup was put in her hands.

"Drink. It's brandy in milk. It's the only thing for shock."

"I'm not—"

"You are. You've the pallor of a candle and your hands are going like a pair of castanets. Drink it, and then tell me. Not before." Winnie sat down opposite, upright, hands folded on her knee. "Take your time. I've waited six years for you to come back through that door, and I can wait another quarter hour."

"You knew I would?"

"I knew someone would. It's the way of things." She tilted her head. "Every year, in the first term, one of the clever ones finds the way into the stacks. It's always a girl, as a rule. A lonely girl, with a mind too big for her skirts. She sits under the stairs with a pile of books and a candle-end and believes that she has discovered a secret. And I let her. I leave the door on the latch." The corners of her mouth moved. "You were the best of them, Mara. You found the fourth shelf of Paracelsus in nine days. It took the Chancellor's son a year."

Mara looked down into the cup. The steam rose, smelling of cinnamon.

"I've done something," she said.

"I should think so."

"I've done nothing. I mean — it wasn't I who— oh, it's absurd. It sounds like a fairy tale. I don't know how to say it."

"Then say it badly." Winnie's voice was brisk. "I've heard worse. I once had a man try to return a book he'd borrowed in 1847. He said the delay was caused by a war."

Mara laughed. It came out as a sob. She put her hand to her mouth. And then, because there was no one else in the world, and because the brandy had gone to her head, and because the kind old eyes across the hearth did not move off her face, she began to talk.

…

It took an hour.

She told it all, in order, as she would have told it in a lecture, with dates. She began with the Stone. She told about the crack, the breath at her neck, the gray man in the doorway. She told about the lost supper and the R with the flourish. She told about the note in her cloak; the Tower; the woman in the wine-red dress with her own face and her own voice, saying I want to live. She told about the fall. She told about Mrs. Pellam, and the window, and the two miles in the dark. She described, in a flat voice that broke only once, the sight of Josie on the steps with her arms round someone else.

She did not describe the notice. She found she could not. She only said, at the end, "And the Bureau will take us both."

Winnie said nothing.

She sat with her chin in her hand and her spectacles on her forehead and her eyes on the fire, and the light moved on her face. The kettle had stopped. A clock on the dresser ticked. Somewhere in the walls a mouse ran, and was still.

"I see," she said at last.

"Do you believe me?"

"I should be a fool not to."

"You aren't — it doesn't—"

"My dear, I'm seventy-one years old. I have kept this library for fifty. I have catalogued every grimoire in Vermont. I was in this house the winter of '62, when a young man in a Hessian coat walked into the Reading Room at noon and walked out again at one, and the second time he'd had no shadow." She lifted her head. "Of course I believe you. I only wish to put it in order."

"Then you'll help?"

"I haven't said so."

"Winnie, the penalty — you've read the notice. Seven years. I can't ask—"

"You have not asked. It is rude to make assumptions."

"But—"

"And I am seventy-one," said Winnie Ostrander, "what would they do, put me in a bigger room?" She stood up. "Now. You'll need a name."

…

She had the papers by noon.

It was not a thing Mara would have imagined. She had thought of forgers as sinister persons, with gloves, in alleys. But Winnie did it with a rubber stamp, a stick of sealing-wax, and a quantity of foolscap kept for the purpose in the bottom of the Linnaeus. She worked at the kitchen table in a pair of sleeve-protectors, a lamp at her elbow, humming. "Birth certificate," she murmured. "Baptismal. Letter of introduction from a respectable Quaker in Concord. We shall have you the daughter of a clergyman, I think. Clergy are above suspicion. Nobody looks at the child of a clergyman twice."

"What's the name?"

"That is the question." Winnie held up the pen. "I want one that sounds as though it has never been anything. Short. Dull. A name for a woman who sits at the back."

"Nell."

"Nell what?"

"I don't know. Nell—" She searched. Her mind was a blank. She heard, in her head, a whisper of old song, a bar from a tune her mother had hummed; a verse about a girl on a jetty. Nell by the water, Nell by the sea. "Fenwick," she said.

"Fenwick?"

"There was a Fenwick on the register, once. A Quaker. He built the lakeside fence."

"A Quaker Fenwick." Winnie wrote it down with satisfaction. "Eleanor Fenwick, twenty-six, spinster, of Concord, New Hampshire. Daughter of the late Reverend Josiah Fenwick, who is conveniently deceased. Educated at home. Certificate in cataloguing from the Harvard Library school. Interested in Soul Studies." She blew on the ink. "There. Nell. It suits you. It has a nice small sound. Nobody would suspect a woman called Nell of anything."

Mara looked at the paper.

Eleanor Fenwick. It was in a firm round script, the E with a curl, like the first letter of a stranger's name on a stone. The ink was still wet. It shone.

"That's not me," she said, in a small voice.

"No."

"I don't know how to be her."

"You'll learn." Winnie put the paper aside. "Now sit still. I'm going to do something about that hair."

…

She dyed it in the scullery with a bottle of walnut-juice and a tin basin and an expression of intense concentration. The smell was strong and bitter. Mara knelt on the flagstones with her head over the bowl and the old woman's knotted fingers working through the long chestnut mass, and watched the water turn the color of tea, and then of mud. "It will be rather dull," Winnie said. "I'm afraid it will be exactly the color of a mouse. But that is the point. Hold still."

She cut it, too. That was worse. She heard the scissors go, a clean small crunching sound, and felt the weight fall off her neck, and watched as it dropped in thick dark loops on the stone: a pelt of hair that she had worn down to her waist since she was ten. Winnie cut it to the jaw. She made the line blunt. She put a ribbon in the end of what was left.

"There," she said. "Look."

There was a glass over the scullery sink, small and speckled. Mara raised her head.

A woman looked back.

She was not unlike. That was the dreadful part. The bones were the same. But the hair, cropped and dark and flat, changed the whole proportion of the face. It made the forehead higher, the cheekbones sharper, the eyes larger and more tired. She looked plain. She looked, Mara thought, exactly like the kind of woman one passed in a corridor and forgot. A clerk. A governess. A girl who copied other people's letters.

Winnie set a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles on her nose. They were plain glass. The world did not alter.

"Good," said the old woman. "Now. Don't smile."

"Why not?"

"You have a face when you smile, my dear. It lights from the inside. It's not a face that goes unnoticed." Winnie stepped back. "No. Be mousy. Be grave. Look at the floor. A woman who looks at the floor is never looked at herself."

Mara looked at the floor.

"Better."

"I can't do this."

"You can. You're a scholar. You've spent your life learning to be invisible in a room full of people who had no idea you were there." The old voice was dry, but not unkind. "You're simply doing it with a purpose."

She sat down at the table, then, with her cropped head heavy as a stone, and laid her hands flat on the board. The sigil lay gray as ash on her left wrist. She had pulled the sleeve down. She would be pulling it down, she supposed, for the rest of her life, however long that might be.

"Where do I go?" she said.

"That," said Winnie Ostrander, "is the second question."

…

She had the answer by tea-time.

It came in the form of the Merrow Falls Courier, which arrived at four with the newsboy and lay folded on the hall mat. Winnie read it standing, as she read everything, with her spectacles down on her nose and a pencil in her mouth. She turned two pages. She stopped. She read a column, closely, with her lips moving. Then she carried the paper into the kitchen and put it on the table in front of Mara, her thumb on the notice.

It was small. It was in the Situations Wanted column, between a groom and a cook-general.

WANTED: At the Warden Post, Thornwick Gate, an ARCHIVIST'S ASSISTANT, to catalogue and index Bureau materials relating to Special Cases. Applicant must possess good hand, discretion, and knowledge of Soul Studies. Wages $4 weekly with board. Apply in person to the Captain.

N.B. No candidate with Academy connections.

"Oh," said Mara.

"I rather thought," said Winnie.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"It's the Wardens. It's the Captain. It's the one place in the county I—" She broke off. "I told you. He looked at me. He looked at my shoulder for a minute and a half and said it was not simple. If he sees me again—"

"He will see a brown-haired woman in spectacles called Nell."

"He'll see through it."

"Perhaps."

"Then I'm—"

"My dear." Winnie put her hand on the paper. "Think. Where is the single safest place in New England for a woman who is hiding from the Wardens?"

Mara stared at her.

"At the Wardens," said Winnie, "with a pen in her hand and a good excuse."

The kettle began to sing again.

"It's the only position in the district," the old woman went on, "that will give you access to the records you need. Not the Academy's, which are dull, and not the Bureau's published ones, which are lies. The private files. The sealed cases. The reports they don't print. If there is a way to undo what's been done to you, it is written down somewhere in the Bureau's cellar, in a hand no honest man has read. And they are asking for someone to read it." Her pale eyes glittered. "I am only an old woman. I've no idea how they came to be so careless."

"They're careless because no one else is qualified."

"Quite. And you are."

"But the danger—"

"The danger is the same in either case. You may sit in my attic and wait for your friend to be unmasked by someone else. Or you may go and find out what the Wardens know." She sat back. "You are the cleverest person I ever taught. I should be sorry to see you hide in a cupboard."

Mara looked at the notice.

She read it a second time, slowly, her eyes going over the lines. Special Cases. It was a polite phrase. It was the phrase on the spine of a file with fourteen names in it. She thought of the notebook, the brown one, with its brass catch. She thought of the little white flags down the margin, Query? Cf. p. 61. She thought of a man with a gray coat and a scar through one eyebrow, sitting across a library table, saying quietly: We don't know what we're doing.

He is the only person who has said that, she thought. To my face. In all of this.

And he is the one who would take me.

"I'd be working for him," she said slowly.

"Yes."

"I'd be in a room with him. Every day. With a pen."

"With a bad haircut and a Quaker accent."

"He has the Sight, Winnie. He can see inside a person."

"Then give him something nice to look at." The old woman's mouth quirked. "You've a sound heart, child. You're a deal better than you think. It will show. Perhaps it will be the one thing he can't see through."

…

Mara wrote the application that night, by candle, in the attic.

It was a small cold room under the slates, with a bed and a table and a skylight that showed a single star. Winnie had brought up a stone hot-water bottle and a pile of quilts. A tin tray stood on the boards, with a bowl of soup, quite empty. The wind had risen. It rattled the slates and moaned in the chimney, and under it, faint and clear, like a note struck on a very distant glass, she could hear the singing of the ice.

She wrote it in a hand that was not hers.

It took a long time. She had never imagined how hard it would be: to write a stranger's words with a stranger's letters, round and upright, without the flourishes she had worn for years. She wrote, Sir: I beg leave to offer my services. She crossed it out. She wrote, Captain Rooke: I understand you require. She tried a dozen versions. She laid the pen down at midnight and rubbed her eyes, and the star in the skylight swam, and she saw for an instant, as clear as a picture, a gray stare across a library table, and heard a low voice say: Do you have family in the town?

No, she had said. A friend. Josie Tull.

Keep her near.

She shut her eyes. The hurt came up like a wave, and she let it, and when it had passed she took up the pen again.

Sir, she wrote, I am a cataloguer by training and a student of the soul by inclination. I have no connection to the Academy. I am discreet. I do not ask questions that are not my business, and I am accustomed to working alone.

She stopped.

That's a lie, she thought. I ask questions all the time.

She crossed out the line. She wrote, in its place, I am accustomed to working alone, and in silence, and I do not mind it. She looked at that. It had a plain ring. It sounded like something a person might say who had been lonely a long time.

Yes, she thought. That will do.

She signed it in the round hand.

E. Fenwick.

She folded the paper and wrote the address. Then she sat for a while, with the candle guttering and the cold creeping up through the boards, and her cropped head in her hands, listening to the lake.

I have been Mara Ashgrove for twenty-four years, she thought. I have been Nell Fenwick for twelve hours.

It is not a great deal of practice.

…

The Warden Post at Thornwick Gate looked, in the gray of the morning, very much smaller than she had remembered.

It was a squat stone box with a slate roof and one chimney, set at the foot of the drive where the iron gates of the Academy opened onto the road. Its windows were barred. A blue lantern hung by the door, unlit in the daylight. Two Wardens in gray greatcoats stood sentry beside the step, stamping their boots in the snow; one of them was young and plump, and yawned.

She stood at the end of the lane with her application in her glove.

She had walked up from the town, a mile and a half, on her bad ankle and a new stick, in a gown of Winnie's and a bonnet of Winnie's niece's. The snow had stopped. The sky was a flat bright white. She had counted her steps all the way, and had lost count at three hundred, and begun again. Her heart was beating so hard that it shook the paper.

Don't smile, she told herself. Look at the floor.

She went forward. She said to the plump Warden, in a voice she scarcely recognized, a thin, careful, flat New Hampshire voice that she had practiced all the way up the hill: "I've come about the position. For the archivist. I was told to apply in person."

He looked her over. He saw a plain brown-haired woman with spectacles and a stick. He yawned again.

"Name?"

"Fenwick. Eleanor."

"Wait here."

He went inside. She stood on the step. She heard voices beyond the door, muffled; a chair scraped. She stared hard at the toes of her boots. The seconds went by, and every one of them was a drop of water falling on the back of her neck.

The door opened.

"Miss Fenwick," said the plump Warden. "The Captain'll see you now."

She walked in.

It was a low room with a stove, and a map of the district pinned over a deal table, and a rack of rifles along the wall. There was a smell of coffee and gun-oil and damp wool. A big man with a mustache sat at a desk by the window, writing. He glanced up, and nodded, and went on writing. And at the far end of the room, behind a second table heaped with papers, with the gray light from the window on his back and a pen stopped in his fingers, a tall man in a gray coat had risen from his chair and was looking at her.

She looked at the floor.

"Miss Fenwick," said Captain Rooke. "Please come in."

His voice was low. It was perfectly polite. It gave nothing away.

But she heard, as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud, what lay beneath it. She heard it in the pause before her name. She heard it in the small dry sound of the chair being pushed back, a half-inch too far, and in the way he did not sit again.

He has seen my face before, she thought.

He doesn't know where.