EPILOGUE: SPRING THAW

Day 140

The ice went out of Lake Merrow on the first of August, which the old men of the Falls said was a thing that had never happened in their lifetimes, and which everyone agreed, without saying so, was not a coincidence.

Mara stood on the new stone jetty at the foot of the Academy lawn with her skirts bunched in one hand and a folded paper boat in the other, watching the last gray plates of it grind slowly down the shore. The water behind them was a deep, clear, astonishing blue. It rocked a little. It smelled of pine and of rain that had not yet fallen. After a long cold season, with the whole country holding its breath, the lake had simply remembered how to be a lake.

You are standing too near the edge, said Vesper.

"I'm standing exactly where I should."

You will fall in, and I shall have to swim, and I am wearing silk.

"You are not wearing anything. I am."

It is a technicality.

Mara smiled and did not answer. She had learned, in forty days, that the way to argue with Vesper was to let her have the last word on the small things and to be quietly immovable about the large ones. It was not unlike the management of a very clever, very affectionate cat. She did not think she had ever been so exasperated, or so entirely unalone.

Behind her, up the lawn, they were coming. She heard the crunch of gravel and the murmur of a great many people trying not to be loud.

…

The memorial stood at the head of the jetty, under a young rowan that Josie had planted in May.

It was nothing grand. Rooke had cut the stone himself from the Academy quarry, a plain gray slab waist-high, polished on one face. Pryce had chosen the words. He had stood over the mason for two days, an old man in a stained waistcoat, forgetting to eat, until at last he had said, There, and gone off to weep in the chapel. They were cut small and clean:

TO THE DOPPELS OF THE UNITED STATES,

known and unknown, named and unnamed,

who were given a hundred days and no welcome.

You were never copies.

Below, in smaller letters, ran a column of names. There were a hundred and eleven of them. Calder had spent the summer in the Vault's records, with Okafor's clerks, tracing each one: the girl in Rutland who had died in the winter of 'ninety-one, the old man in Albany, the twins of Poughkeepsie. Some had been found. Most had not. But each was named now, in plain good capitals, in a place where the sun would reach it.

They filed past it in silence. Okafor, in a new blue coat that did not suit him, with the charter of the reformed Wardens folded in his breast pocket. Hartwell. Tilden, with his arm out of its sling at last, who touched the stone gently, as one touches a sleeping child. Pip, who had grown two inches. Dr. Calder, gaunt and quiet, with her black hat in her hand. Abigail Marsh, thin and straight in a plain dress, holding her double's hand, and Tobias at her side with an expression of such fierce, bewildered happiness that Mara had to look away.

Ruth Pellam had come up from Tanner's Row with Ptolemy in a basket. He was very annoyed about it.

Josie laid a bunch of late violets at the foot of the slab. She straightened, wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, and said loudly, to nobody, "Well, I think it's lovely." Then she began to cry in earnest, and Okafor, helplessly, handed her his handkerchief.

…

Rooke came last.

He walked up beside her without a word, hatless in the sun, in an old brown coat with the cuffs let down. He had not worn gray since the day of the Oath. He was lean and brown and rather quiet, and there was a stillness about him that had not been there before: the stillness of a man who is looking at what is in front of him because there is nothing else to look at. He took her hand.

"Pryce says the Smithsonian wants the Mirror," he said under his breath. "For a museum. In a glass case."

"Pryce has said no."

"Pryce has said, and I quote, over my dead body, sir, and I shall make a very ungracious corpse."

She laughed. It surprised her; it came out of her like water out of a spring. The lake was blue below them. A swallow stitched the air.

He turned her hand over and kissed the inside of the wrist, where the new mark lay, blue and red and whole. It did not glow now. It was simply there, a delicate pattern, like frost that had never learned to melt.

"Have you answered Washington?" he said.

"I answered in June."

"I know. I mean, have you answered yourself. You've been going about the house with a look."

"I've been thinking." She watched the lake. "I shall go. In the autumn. For two years, perhaps three, until the Office can stand by itself. I shall read every file, and meet every name that's still living, and tell them—" Her voice caught. "Tell them what nobody told me."

"That they're not copies."

"That they are guests. That they have a place at the table." She drew breath. "And you'll come."

"I thought you'd never ask."

"I'm not asking. I'm informing."

"Yes, Director."

Vesper made a small, delighted sound in the back of her head. I like him, she remarked. I did not expect to. It is most inconvenient.

…

They sent the boats at noon.

It was Josie's idea. A hundred and eleven of them, folded from the margins of the Vault's register, each with a name written on the sail. They stood in a long line along the jetty and the shingle, the living and the freed and the ones in between, and one by one they knelt and set their small white boats on the water. A breeze came across the lake. It took them, gently, all at once, and they went out together in a drifting white fleet, toward the middle of the blue, toward the place where the ice had been.

Mara knelt last.

Her boat was different. It was folded from a page torn from the brown notebook, the one with seven pearl buttons on the cover, the notebook she had carried for ten years. On its sail she had written no name. She set it on the water and watched it turn once and steady.

Do you want to say something? asked Vesper.

"I don't think there's anything to say."

There is always something. It is merely a question of whether one is brave enough.

Mara thought about it. The boat was already a long way out. Then she took the pencil from her pocket and the notebook from her satchel, and sat down on the warm stone, and opened to a clean page.

She wrote slowly. Beside her, over her shoulder, she felt the other one watching, light as breath, as one friend reads another's letter. When she had finished she looked at it for a long time.

I am two halves, it said. And I am one.

Yes, said Vesper softly. That will do.

…

The letter came that evening, in the last of the light.

It came by the post-boy from the Falls, who gave it to Josie, who gave it to Rooke, who found Mara on the gatehouse step with her shoes off and her feet in the grass. It was plain, folded, unsealed, with a Boston postmark and no return. The handwriting was a woman's, small and upright and frightened.

Mara read it standing.

Dear Miss Ashgrove,

I have read of you in the papers. I do not know whom else to write to. My name is not important. I am nineteen years old and I have lived in this city for most of my life. Last winter I began to dream of a house I have never seen, and a woman in it, who is me, and is not me, and who is very much afraid.

Three weeks ago I passed her in the street.

She looked at me, and she knew. I am certain she knew. And then she was gone, and I have not found her since.

Please, if you can. Tell me what to do.

The paper shook in her hand. She felt Rooke come to stand at her shoulder, quiet, warm, not reading, simply there. She felt Vesper stir.

Another one, said Vesper. Alone. Uncounted. In the dark.

Beyond the gatehouse, the lake had gone the color of a pearl. Out on it, very far, one last white boat still drifted, a pinprick on the water, turning in the wind.

Mara folded the letter. She looked up at the man beside her, and he looked back at her, with his own two eyes, steady and plain.

"Well," she said. "It seems the Office has its first case."

Say yes, said Vesper.

"I was going to," said Mara.

THE END