THE INTERVIEW

Day 8 of 100

He had not intended to stand up.

That was the first thing he noticed, afterward, going over it in the dark with the thoroughness of a man who audits his own failures. He had been sitting at the long table in the Post's front room with a stack of overnight reports at his elbow, reading about a stolen mule in Rutland, and he had heard the plump young constable say Fenwick, and had looked up, and seen a thin woman in a gray bonnet standing just inside the door with her eyes on the floor. And he had risen. His chair had gone back with a scrape. His pen was still in his hand.

It was nothing. A courtesy. He rose for women. He told himself so, and sat down again, and watched her cross the room.

She walked with a stick. She favored the left leg, and bore it with care, as a person does who has been told not to put weight on it and has been unable to avoid it; she took the chair he indicated, and let herself down into it with her jaw tight, and laid the stick across her knees. She sat perfectly straight. Her hands were folded on a sheet of paper. She had the look of a very small clerk who has come to ask for an extension on a debt.

She did not look up.

He studied her. It was a plain face, brown-haired, pale, the nose slightly red from the cold; steel spectacles, a mouth held shut, the forehead high under a flat ribbon of dark hair that had been cut with evident haste. She was no beauty. She would not have caught his eye in a crowd. He ought to have been able to put her down, as he did a hundred such, in a dozen words: female, mid-twenties, genteel, nervous.

Why, he thought, do I feel as though the room has just been struck?

"Miss Fenwick," he said. "Thank you for coming."

"Captain."

"This is Lieutenant Okafor. He will sit in."

"Of course."

The voice was thin and flat and slightly nasal, with the clipped vowels of New Hampshire. It was a careful voice. It had been taken out and polished and set before him like a plate of cold meat. And it stirred, in the back of his skull, a faint, absurd, irritating echo, as of a note struck once before on a different instrument.

He pushed it away. "You have your papers?"

"Yes."

She passed them over. He glanced through. A certificate of baptism, in a good clerical hand. A letter of introduction from a Friends' meeting in Concord, signed by a person called Abiah Thorne. A diploma in library science, Harvard, with a seal. It was all in order. It was in a little too much order. The seal was a shade too crisp, the paper a hair too fresh, and he had spent eleven years among forgers.

He put them down.

"You are a cataloguer."

"By training, sir."

"And your interest in Soul Studies?"

"I have read widely."

"On what?"

"The metaphysics of the Sigil. Theories of the soul's architecture. Some of the older literature, Paracelsus, Agrippa. The early Bureau reports." A pause. "I find the subject—" She stopped. She seemed to choose the word. "Tractable."

"Tractable."

"It lends itself to order." The spectacles flashed as she moved her head. "One may assemble the evidence and see where it is thin."

"And where is it thin, Miss Fenwick?"

He had meant it lightly. He saw her flinch. She said nothing for a moment, and in the silence he heard the stove tick, and Okafor's pen scratching in the corner.

"I couldn't say, sir," she said. "Not without seeing the material."

"I'll show you."

He took a folder from the pile at his elbow and slid it across the table.

…

It was a test. He did not call it one. It was merely that, in the course of a long day's work, a man might be expected to show an applicant the nature of the job. It was a thin buff folder, stamped in red: SPECIAL CASES: DOPPEL. Summary, 1887–1893. It contained a typed digest of the fourteen recorded cases, with dates, and places, and the names of the Wardens in charge. It was the only version of the Bureau's records that was permitted to leave Montpelier. He had read it forty times.

She opened it.

She read as he had known she would, as people do who live in books: fast, with the whole face. Her lips moved. She turned the page and her finger went down the margin, tracking, and stopped at an entry, and went on. He saw her go through the digest in a little under three minutes. At the end she sat for a moment looking at nothing. Then she went back to the front and began again, slowly, with the point of a pencil that she had taken out of her sleeve.

He raised an eyebrow at Okafor. Okafor shrugged.

She read for ten minutes.

When she looked up her face had changed. It was not much. It was a tightening about the eyes. She laid the pencil across the page and said, in her flat careful voice:

"The dissipation interval is wrong."

He had expected a good many things. He had not expected that.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The — the fourteen days. The Bureau's position is that a Doppel is unstable and will fail within a fortnight, after which the original is restored." She turned the folder to face him. "That's the premise of the Act. It's in the preamble. It's the justification for the sealing. The Doppel will fail within a short period. But look at the dates, Captain. Here. And here. And here."

She was pointing. He leaned across.

"Case one. Boston, 1887. Appearance on the third of March. Sealed on the ninth. Six days. Case two, Providence: appearance on the fourth, seal on the seventh. Three days. Case three, Hartford—" She turned a page, quick. "Eleven. Case seven, nine. Case eleven, five. There isn't a single instance in the entire digest where the interval between appearance and sealing exceeds thirteen days."

"So?"

"So no one has ever observed a Doppel fail."

The room was very quiet.

"Not once," said the woman called Fenwick. She had gone pale, but her voice had steadied. It had become, he noticed, a little less flat; the New Hampshire was slipping. "The whole of the doctrine rests on the assumption that if the Bureau left them alone they would dissolve at fourteen days. But the Bureau has never left them alone. It has never waited. It takes them in at once, both of them, and by the time the fortnight would have run, they're in a cell. The theory has never been tested. It's an inference. And it's—" She swallowed. "It's repeated in every document as if it were an observation."

He stared at her.

She is right, he thought.

It was a plain, small, appalling certainty, like the sound of a stair that is not there. He had read this folder forty times. He had sat in the Albany cellar with a Sight-glass and a dozen Wardens and watched two women with the same face. He'd heard every Director for ten years say the same sentence. They are shadows. They fail. And it had never once occurred to him to ask: Have we seen it?

"Who told you the premise was in the preamble?" said Okafor from the corner. His voice was mild.

"I read the Act."

"The Act is not widely circulated."

"I'm a cataloguer, Lieutenant. I read what is put in front of me."

"And the whole of it, by heart, in a week."

"I was in Concord," she said. "We had a very small library."

Okafor said nothing. But Rooke saw, from the corner of his eye, the large calm man lay down his pen and fold his hands, which was what he did when he was going to remember something.

…

"Take off your spectacles."

She looked up.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The glasses. I should like to see you without." He heard his own voice, level, a little dry. "It's a routine matter. All new staff are looked over."

"By — by whom?"

"By me."

He saw it go through her. A flash, quick as a bird's wing. Her hand rose to the frame. Her face did not change, but her whole body drew in, very slightly, like a creature that has heard a twig snap. Then, with deliberation, she took off the spectacles and laid them on the folder, and raised her eyes.

They were gray-green.

He knew them. He had known them, he realized, from the moment she came in; he had only not allowed himself to say so. It was in the shape of the lid. It was in the dark ring about the iris. It was the face of a woman in a library, writing in a brown book with her sleeve buttoned to the wrist.

No.

Ashgrove has brown eyes. Hazel. I wrote it down.

He had not written it down. He found, with a faint lurch, that he couldn't remember. He had taken in her face on the dais and in the library, and what he had seen had been the light, the long leaning flame of her; the eyes had been secondary. He thought: Gray-green is a common color. He thought: It's a coincidence. And then he did what he always did, in the face of a thing he did not understand. He let the Sight come up.

It rose behind his eyes like a tide.

The room went soft. The stove and the map and the gray square of the window blurred and dimmed, and the weather came on: Okafor's solid, steady, earth-brown calm, with a thread of green in it that was something to do with his wife; the thin tobacco-yellow of the plump constable at the door. A few feet away, bent over the table, she sat in her plain gray bonnet.

And there it was.

He had braced himself. He thought he knew what it would be. A pale-blue flame, leaning; a ragged edge; a silver heart. He expected the same sad crooked candle he'd seen across the library table.

It was not.

It was dimmer. That was the first thing. The blue had thinned, the silver was nearly gone, the whole shape of her was drawn small and tight, close to the body, as a person pulls a shawl round her against the cold. It flickered. It guttered, in a draft that he could not feel. And it was half. No, it was less than half: it was a fragment, a slice, a single wing of a bird, the left side of a lamp with the right side shuttered. He could see the line where it stopped. He could see how clean it was, how old, how smoothly healed.

And yet, under the cold, under the thinness, there was something quite different.

He had not seen it before. Or it had not been there; or he'd not had the patience to look. It was a tiny thread of warmth, running through the center of the flame, golden-white, and so fine that it was nearly invisible. It was steady. It was the light that is seen in a window at the end of a long night, when the house is asleep and one person is still up, waiting. It was not the thing he had taken her for, a scholar, a coward, a clerk. It was stubborn.

She is exhausted, he thought. She's been hurt. She's afraid. And she has not given way.

He found that his hand, under the edge of the table, had closed on the arm of the chair.

"Captain?" said Okafor.

"A moment."

He looked a little longer. He looked at the line where the flame was cut off, and the empty space beyond it, and he thought, quite clearly, as one thinks in a dream: I have seen this light before.

It was Ashgrove's. It was the same.

The same blue. The same silver. The same tear.

But the torn light in the library had been strong. It had been a clear bright candle, bent but whole in itself. This was a thing at the end of its strength. It was the same flame, grown small. It was as if, in the week since the Stone, someone had taken Ashgrove's light and drawn it down to a wick.

A relation, he thought. A sister. A cousin.

A family trait.

It was the kind of conclusion a man arrives at when the alternative is unthinkable. He put it together, rapidly, in the cold room of his mind, brick on brick. There is an inherited weakness in the line. A flaw of the soul. It showed in Miss Ashgrove at the Stone, and it shows now, worse, in a woman of the same blood who has come, by chance or design, to this door. It was not a Doppel; a Doppel's light was whole and full. It was a sickness. It was a hereditary thing.

And he saw her, quite suddenly, as a patient. He felt something loosen in him that he'd not known was held.

"You are unwell," said Rooke.

She started. "I beg your pardon?"

"Your health. It isn't good."

"I— I have a sprained ankle."

"That isn't what I mean."

"Then I don't know what you mean."

"No," he said gently. "I don't suppose you do."

The Sight went out of him like a candle snuffed. The room came back, with its stove and its maps. He was looking at a thin woman in an ugly bonnet with her hand pressed flat against the folder, and her gray-green eyes enormous, and her lips parted. She was staring at him. She looked, for a moment, as though she had been struck.

She knows what I saw, he thought. She doesn't know what to do about it.

She put on the spectacles. Her hand shook.

…

He asked her a good many more questions. He asked about her father, the late Reverend Fenwick; about the Quaker meeting; about the library in Concord. She answered each one. The answers were smooth and a little stiff. When he asked what her father had preached, she said Silence, and nothing else, and he nearly smiled. When he asked whether she had a young man in New Hampshire, she colored to the roots of her hair, and said, "No, Captain," in a voice so exactly the voice of a clergyman's daughter that he felt a stab of pure, unexpected laughter somewhere under the ribs.

It was absurd. She was lying. Every word was lying, and he could see the ripples in the light, small bright shivers, each time she opened her mouth. He had seen men hanged on less. He should have called Okafor to put her in irons.

He found that he did not want to.

"That will do," he said at last. "Lieutenant, if you would be good enough to show Miss Fenwick the archive."

"The—" She looked from one to the other. "Does that mean—"

"The position is yours. Four dollars weekly and board. You will have the back room off the loft, which has a lock, a stove, and a bed. You will not discuss your work with anyone outside the Post. You will not leave the grounds without informing me. You will catalogue the material in the cabinets on the east wall in the order I give, and report to me directly." He took up his pen. "You'll begin tomorrow at eight."

For a moment she did not move.

Then she rose, with her hand on the stick. She stood there in her plain bonnet, small and gray and upright, and he watched an expression move across her face that he couldn't read. It was not triumph. It was not relief. It was something more like fear, and something like gratitude; and something else, behind them, hard and bright and brief, that looked almost like determination.

"Thank you, Captain," said Nell Fenwick.

"Don't thank me."

"I shall try to be useful."

"You have been," said Rooke, "already."

She bowed her head. She turned to go.

And he said, without having decided to, "Miss Fenwick."

She stopped.

"The ankle. Who bound it?"

Her shoulders went rigid. For a heartbeat he thought she wouldn't answer. Then, in a very low voice, without turning round, she said, "A seamstress."

"She's a good hand."

"Yes."

"I should like to know her name."

"Why?"

"Because I think," said Rooke, "she is someone who doesn't ask questions."

The shoulders eased, a fraction. He heard a sound that might have been a breath, or a stifled laugh.

"Pellam," said the woman. "Ruth Pellam. Tanner's Row."

"Thank you."

She went out.

…

The door shut. The stove ticked. The plump constable's voice came faintly from the step, saying something about the weather, and a second voice answering: Okafor's, as he led the new clerk away down the passage toward the loft. Their steps dwindled.

Rooke sat quite still.

He had picked up his pen. He found he was holding it as one holds a knife. He laid it down, deliberately, and looked at his hand, and flexed the fingers.

I should have refused her, he thought.

Every instinct I own says refuse. She's lying about her name. She's lying about her father. She is carrying a trouble that she doesn't want me to see, and she's taken a position in the one office in Vermont where it is most likely to be found.

And I hired her.

Why? He could say that he needed an archivist. That was true. He could say that she was clever, and she was, uncomfortably so. He could say that her observation about the fortnight was the most useful thing anyone had said to him in a year, and that it would be a folly to let such a mind go to waste.

That was true, too.

But it wasn't why. He knew it, sitting there in the cold light with his heart doing something unpleasant under his breastbone. He had sat in the front room of the Post for forty minutes, watching a woman with a flat voice and a bad haircut cross-examine the Bureau's history, and when she had put on her spectacles and said thank you, the whole of him had risen up in a kind of silent protest at the thought of her leaving by the door.

I did not want her to go, thought Rooke.

I don't know her. I've never seen her before.

And I did not want her to go.

He got up. He went to the window.

Below, in the yard, in the clean white morning, the plump constable was throwing a snowball at a post. Beyond him the drive ran down between the black pines to the gates. A thin figure in a gray bonnet was coming round the corner of the stables, with Okafor a few paces behind, going slowly, with a stick. She was looking at the ground. She stopped by the kitchen door, and stood a moment, and put her gloved hand flat against the stone of the wall.

He saw it. The small uncertain gesture of a person steadying herself, who has come a very long way and does not know yet where she is.

Then she went in.

He stood looking at the place where she had been.

He had not expected to see anything. It was broad day, and the Sight was down; the snow was white and plain. But there was a mark on the stone where her hand had rested. It was a faint thing, no larger than a palm, a smudge of cold blue light, barely visible in the glare, like the afterglow of a candle snuffed in a dark room. It hung on the gray wall for a moment, clean and silver. It trembled.

Then it faded.

Eleanor Fenwick, he thought. Daughter of a Quaker.

He took out his black book. He opened it, and under Ashgrove, M., the single entry, Torn, he wrote a second line.

Fenwick, E.

He looked at it. He looked at the gap between the two names. He frowned, and closed the book, and put it into his breast pocket, close to the star, where he kept the things he did not want to think about; and he stood for a while longer at the window, in the pale cold light, with his hand against the glass.