CHAPTER 5 #2
Cecily’s pen started before he finished. Thorne took his hands off the oak and put them in his lap, and that was the whole of what his face did.
I got both halves in one piece, which is worse than getting them one after the other.
The first half was that Thorne could not have me now.
He could not ask for me, move me, question me or contract with me without Julian’s name under it, and Julian would never put his name under it.
The second half came in on the same breath.
A patient of record does not own work. She is a person under care, and anything a person under care says about the people caring for her is a symptom before it is a sentence, in any room, to anybody, from tonight forward.
My jaw hurt. I said thank you and it came out level, and underneath it I hated him so hard that my ears rang.
Thanking him and hating him came up out of the same throat, one behind the other, with nothing in between them to keep them apart. I put my weight into my toes on the slope and let the pair of them stand, because knocking either one down would have taken the other with it.
“Is the item resolved?” Thorne asked.
“It is entered,” Cecily said.
“Then we are adjourned. Thank you all.”
Chair legs came back over tile, and there is no worse sound in that room.
They went up through the tiers to the high door at the back, row after row above me, and after the door shut the quiet came back down the rows toward the table, so that the room emptied from the top down.
Thorne stopped beside me on his way to the low door.
“Good evening,” he said. “You hear very well.”
He went out, and he held the door for the man behind him, and the man thanked him.
Julian came around the near side and stopped an arm’s length off, on the level tile, so that for once we were closer to the same height.
“You could have told me before you said it.”
“Yes.”
“Would you have, if there had been time?”
“No. You would have argued, and you would have been right, and it would have cost more minutes than I had.” He looked at the folder in his hand and not at me. “I will hold the signature myself. Nobody signs over me.”
“That was not the part I was worried about.”
“I know which part it was.” He went out by the low door, and the lamps on the table made two long shadows of him on the tile before he cleared them.
Alistair came around the foot of the table and stood beside me on the slope, which put him an inch shorter than he had been all evening.
“Go on,” he said. “Put it into words and it will hurt less by about a tenth.”
“He wrote my name into a file to keep it out of a worse one.”
“Close. Now the rest of it.” He waited, and when nothing came, he gave me the rest himself, in the tone other men use for the weather.
“You are registered now. Nobody in this Cell may move you or question you without his signature, and nobody outside it will ever again believe a word you say about us. That is what he did to protect you.”
“The doors downstairs are not locked,” I said. “I walked in through them on my own feet.”
“They have never been locked. Walk down the front steps tonight if you like, and nothing in this building will lift a hand.” He said it pleasantly.
“In the morning you are a young woman on a roster. On medical leave from her college, in the care of physicians, who left that care against advice. Talk to anybody you want after that. Talk to a dean, a reporter, a state trooper at a gas station. The first thing every one of them does is call here and ask after your condition, and we answer, and every word of our answer is true.”
“And Teddy’s paper.”
“And your brother’s marker, which an ordinary court will enforce without being asked twice. You have met the extraordinary part of us. The ordinary part is what keeps you.”
Two floors down, the front doors were oak with a brass push plate on each of them, and I had come in through them carrying my own suitcase.
“Then there is no door.”
“There are a great many doors and every one of them opens. That is the design and it is a hundred years old. A locked door gives a person something to be about in the morning. A roster gives her nothing to push against at all.”
The lamps had the table and the grate had nothing, and out past the clerestory the last of the gold was off the south wall. I kept waiting to be frightened in some large obvious way and what I got instead was cold ankles and a very clear head.
“I keep expecting somebody here to break something of mine,” I said. “Nobody has touched me. I would like to know what it is you do instead.”
“We do not break legs. We hold the file on every judge, dean and family head in three states, and we have held some of them since their fathers were boys. Legs heal.”
He said it beside me, in a level voice, looking down at the brass drain.
Cecily had not gone. She stood in the demonstrators’ door with the charter volume open along her forearm, and she read out of it in the voice she would use for a shipping list.
“The 1908 charter lets the Institute register a person into care and hold the work product of that care. It has been used twice in a hundred and seventeen years. Hollis Ware was the first.”
“Hollis Ware came in in 1911 and went out in 1919 in a box, and I can read his handwriting better than anybody now alive,” I said. “That is the company I am in.”
“That is the company,” Cecily said, and closed the volume against her chest.
“You are angry with the wrong half,” Alistair said.
“I am angry with both halves at once. He kept a man off me and he took my name off my own work in the same sentence, and he did it because there was no instrument on that table that would do one without the other.” My voice was doing fine.
My hands had nothing in them and did not know it.
“I would have let him do it again. That is the part I would like to put down somewhere and walk away from.”
“Then put it down.”
“I do not have anywhere to put it.”
Alistair looked at the grate for a while, and the cold ash in it did not have anything to say either.
“How did Thorne know my mother’s first name?”
“He knows a great many first names.”
“That is not the answer and you know it is not.”
“It is the part of the answer I am prepared to hand you while you are standing on a slope in a cold room,” he said. “Ask me again. I will still be here, and I will decline again, and one of those times I will not.”
“That is a terrible offer.”
“It is the honest shape of a terrible offer, which is more than you got from the man at the head of that table.” He put his coat over his arm. “He was kind to you tonight. He will be kind to you every time. Count that as data.”
It had gone past eight. Down on the floor the tile had taken all the heat out of me from the shoes up, and up in the dark of the tiers the top row was still holding the afternoon it had given me, and one bench in this building was warmer than I was.
Behind me the first south window went white, then the second, then the third, as headlights came up the drive and swung across the glass.