Chapter 6 Grace
When the magnetic lock unseals, the sound it makes is a hiss.
Mrs Vale enters first, as she always does, not because she leads but because she has to be in charge here, and has to ensure everyone knows it too.
Her body is a set of straight lines drawn with a ruler: shoulders squared by good tailoring, a waist that does not dare to swell, a neck set on a hinge so it can tip and take note.
She wears navy today, a suit that eats all the artificial light. Her hair is the white of teeth bleached too often. She glances not at me but at the corners, at the camera, at the bed I have made; inspecting.
“Stand,” she says, quiet and precise, like the word might bruise if raised. “Hands at your sides, Miss Ratcliffe. Face the door.”
I do as I’m told, setting my hands the way one sets cutlery in a place setting. My palms face my thighs, and each fingertip knows its neighbour. I face the door because it is easier than facing her.
“Remember,” she says. “No raised voice. No dramatics.”
I remember all the rules. It’s hard not to when there is nothing to your existence but rules. It has been more than a year now, and I remember everything. I am a model prisoner. The perfect image of submission.
I never beg.
I never run at the door when it opens.
I do not ask to see my mother.
I do not say my father’s name, even in my head.
Someone else comes in behind her, and more someone else’s, a small procession of dark suits and polished shoes. The temperature drops a half-degree. There is the scent of wool from garment bags and the fine chemical of new leather. It makes me think of chapels, and of morgues.
He enters last, of course. The man I used to believe would be my husband, by contract if not by affection. The man I have not seen in more than a year, and yet could sketch his profile with my eyes closed: the cut of the jaw, the pale clean shaven cheeks.
Gideon Harrow. The name sits on my tongue like a bad taste lingering too long. I do not speak it. He has always looked like winter distilled into a man. His irises are a colour I used to call grey until I discovered that grey has a hundred names in this place.
Behind him floats a man with a tablet and a stylus, a man who is almost decorative, and another one with a leather folio so soft it practically begs you to reach out and touch it.
Mrs Vale takes up a post near the foot of the bed, directly where I would have to look to find comfort.
“Miss Ratcliffe,” Gideon says. He does not add ‘Grace’. He does not add ‘I am sorry’, because he has never been a man careless enough to waste words on lies. He acknowledges me the way one acknowledges a painting in a corridor hung there for tradition, not pleasure.
“Mr Harrow,” I return, because we are formalities now. I do not bow. I do not lower my eyes. I do not reach. I hold my own spine like a staff refusing to bend, refusing to show anything for these men.
He places the folio on the table. He remains standing, the table between us like a small white altar.
The man with the tablet taps the glass twice. The one with the folio opens it without sound.
No one mentions the ring. It is on my finger, a thin white gold band with the Brethren’s crest sunk into it like a fingerprint. It looks like nothing, the sort of thing a girl might purchase with her first impulsive wage.
And then he looks at me. Meets my gaze, holds it for a moment and I wonder what it is he sees, what it is this man thinks of me now.
I was a prize, a great fucking prize. I would have made his family.
I would have made his entire bloodline… but not now.
No, now I am a tarnish, something to be scrubbed out, buffed out.
Does he regret this? Does he have even an inkling of compassion for where I have ended up through no fault of my own?
I feel the briefest rush of heat in my throat, ridiculous as a schoolgirl’s blush. For a heartbeat, my body betrays something like relief that he at least has the humanity to look me in the eyes.
“We should proceed,” The man beside him says quietly. “Her overseer has made provision for the room to be used for ten minutes.”
I glance at Mrs Vale who inclines her head a fraction, as if to say see, even your dissolution has a schedule.
Gideon unlatches a pen from the folio. He turns documents without rustle. There are stamps in the leather, embossed and blind, like the bones of some flayed animal. He does not look up at me while he speaks, instead, he addresses the page.
“As you are aware,” he says, “the engagement agreement drawn between the house of Harrow and the house of Ratcliffe included stipulations contingent upon the continuance of the Ratcliffe line’s privileges within the Chapter.
With the recent…formalities regarding the headship and the subsequent restructuring by the Senate, those contingencies have failed.
The Senate approved dissolution last week. We have obtained all necessary seals.”
He slides a paper forward, as if I have all the time in the world to review it.
“I am required by protocol,” Gideon continues, “to deliver the notice in person.”
He is telling the truth now. The Brethren prefer their cruelties enacted face to face. They call it honour.
“Per clause twelve,” the man with the tablet murmurs, though I don’t hear the words he speaks.
Something in my head starts to scream, like the hot air being forced out of a kettle. It’s growing louder and louder, and all I want to do is squeeze my skull and let it all out.
“We will require the return of tokens,” Gideon says. His eyes fall to my left hand.
I slide the ring from my finger by feel alone, unable to look at it as it moves and when the cool band meets the knuckle there is a faint suction, as if my skin had been holding its breath.
He does not receive it from me. He nods to the man with the folio, who steps forward with a small velvet tray, black as a hole, and I place the ring on it. The sound it makes, a small metal kiss, is enough to make my throat burn.
To my right, Mrs Vale’s eyes glitter a fraction. I imagine what she will write afterward: Subject surrendered token without incident.
“There is one signature required,” Gideon says, after a beat. He slides the pen toward me and turns the page with two fingers, as if it might burn him. “An acknowledgment that you’ve received notice. It binds you to nothing. It is a formality for the registry.”
It binds me to nothing. He says it like a kindness. God, it’s so hard not to sneer, not to show on my face all the contempt I feel in this moment.
I step to the table, and the three of them move almost imperceptibly, recalibrating the geometry of space so that nothing of them touches me.
I bend over the paper. It is full of deliberate language, curlicued and chaste.
Somewhere on it is my name, printed in legal type so neat it almost looks like affection.
The signature line is naked. I take up the pen and scrawl my name as quickly as I can.
As I set down the pen, I ensure my hand doesn’t shake. It is the rest of me that trembles, a shiver that is purely interior, like something in the wall’s wiring gone amiss.
Gideon inclines his head. “Thank you,” he says, as one thanks a functionary who has handed back a mislaid piece of rubbish. His eyes flick again to my throat; no, not to my throat, to the hollow above my collarbones.
And then as quickly as he appeared, he turns on his heels and exits. Job done. Mission accomplished.
The worst of men, I once thought, were the ones who enjoyed cruelty.
Today, I think I have been corrected. The worst of men are indifferent to it. They are not wolves. They are the ones who stand placidly to the side and allow the violence to occur, and then they reap the benefits, picking off the juiciest cuts of meat left on the bodies still slowly dying.
I expected…did I expect anything? A small excuse to linger?
The grace of a second look? In the nights when sleep refuses to come, I have entertained the romance of my own pity: that he might be compelled by something as undignified as affection to make a small rebellion on my behalf.
The Brethren speak of sacrifice; I had in my unguarded moments entertained the fantasy of a man breaking one small twig off the great tree of their law for me.
I was na?ve. So fucking na?ve.
I had not yet learned the strong taste of hope when it rots, but today, today I know it only too well.
At the door, my ex-fiancée pauses. Mrs Vale seems to draw herself up, as if she believes he might just transform into my saviour after all.
“Be well, Miss Ratcliffe,” He says, so devoid of emotion. Like a tick box. A nice little generic passing to ease his own pathetic conscience.
The phrase goes through me like a needle in a doctor’s hand. It is neither blessing nor threat, it is closure sewn with an invisible stitch.
Some traitor in me wants to reach out. Not for him, God, no. But to snatch back the ring, the pen, the paper, something. Some human scrap that says I lived a different life than just this white sterile box.
But I don’t.
I keep my hands at my sides.
Pride holds me upright; pride puts its hand between my shoulder blades and says, steady now.
The weight that falls into the room once they are gone is extraordinary. The air returns all at once, and rushes into my lungs. The brightness of the ceiling strip flares and then dims in a way I know is almost certainly a figment of my imagination.
I do not move. To move would be to confess how much I want to move, to throw the table at the wall, to slam my forehead into the door, to press my thumb into the indentation the ring has left until I bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
“No dramatics,” Mrs Vale says, in the same tone she would use to remind me to wipe a drip of milk from the lip of the glass.
I feel the corners of my mouth answer, a shape that is not a smile.
“Why would there be? It is merely a formality.” I say.
My voice is steady. I think it might be the last steadiness in the room.
I think my words might be the only truth spoken too, because we all know the deed was done.
Our engagement was broken weeks ago. This paperwork is simply the final rubber stamp, the smashing of a champagne bottle over the hull of a new ship as it gets ready to leave the dock and go out into the world.
“You are fortunate,” she says, stepping into my space, invading it. Clearly, she is taking pleasure in being able to twist the knife a little more today “Lord Harrow arranged to attend personally. Some girls receive their notices on a screen.”
I do not look at her. If I look at her, I betray the exact place to strike. “How intimate,” I say.
She hums a little mocking tune and then looks at my hand where I’m absentmindedly already rubbing out the indent, as if I could scrub all the memories from my skin. “Leave the mark alone,” she says. “It will fade in a time.”
She turns to go, then pauses so casually I know it’s a ruse.
“We’ll need measurements soon.” she says.
“There is great interest in you already. Our Chapter Lord wants a detailed catalogue of your attributes. There will be photographs. Your teeth will be examined. Your body too. No one wants to take the risk you might be carrying something contagious.”
I swallow the fury I feel at that name being spoken out loud, but I can’t contain it. “Do they catalogue cows as carefully?”
“More,” she says. “Cattle can run.”
She leaves me with that little cruelty as a parting favour, or perhaps because she is as bored by all of this as I am.
The door shuts. The lock’s click is louder with fewer witnesses. The room recovers its hum and all I can hear is the scrape of my own blood in my ears, the tasting of my own name as a flavour I cannot spit out.
I am not crying. I will not cry.
I will not give them that satisfaction.
But all the while the camera watches, recording my composure for every one of those viewers to pick over.