17. Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
J essica
Hess puts a photograph of a page down in front of me.
"That's where they went."
It's a list. Somebody's ruled column, somebody's slanting hand, a village name at the top I can't pronounce and thirty-one households underneath it.
"Tithe roll. One parish. Second name down."
"They're in this one. And this one. And this—twenty-two years on, that's the son." Hess sits back. "Same parish, generation after generation, same borrowed surname. Children baptized under it. Marriages recorded under it."
"So that's where they hid."
"That's where they lived ," Faris says from across the table.
I look up.
"Hiding is temporary. This is a century in one village under a name that isn't theirs."
"Somebody built them a life," Hess says.
"So somebody was helping them."
"At the beginning, almost certainly," Hess says. "A servant with a frightened child doesn't simply arrive in a parish with a new surname and a history."
"But forty years later?" Faris says. "You have no evidence anyone outside the family was still involved."
"One person couldn't keep it going for a hundred years."
"No," Faris says. "A family could."
But what family would do that for the Fourth House after the Great Betrayal.
Hess lays out three more photographs.
"Here's the part that matters. For the first stretch after the war, somebody in that household is still being counted in the regional pack registry. Badly kept, incomplete, but they're in it." Her hand moves along. "The next generation they appear once. Then nothing."
"Nothing."
"They're in the tithe roll. They're in the parish register. They're in a probate inventory that lists three cows and a bed." She squares the photographs. "As far as every surviving document is concerned, from about that point on, they are human."
I sit there looking at three pictures of pieces of paper.
"When did they stop knowing?"
"We can't tell you. The parish records keep going and the wolf records don't, and that's all we've got." Hess shrugs.
Somewhere generations back is a person who decided not to shift or couldn’t shift and quit talking about it. Or told a child that's only a story and changed the subject.
"All that work hiding a little girl," I say. "Generations of people being extremely careful. And then I turn up and blow it all up in about four seconds."
"Miss Miller—"
"No, genuinely. I'd like to apologize to the person who saved a little girl."
Faris makes a sound that in a lesser woman would have been a laugh.
"Who was that woman that got her out?"
Hess doesn't answer.
"Six years old. Everyone in her house is dead and somebody puts her in a cart." I look round the table. "Who?"
"We don't know."
"The woman on the registration—"
"Is in that registry three times, and then she isn't. No burial under that name or any other." There's real frustration in it. "She may be the person who saved that child. She may be the fourth person who was handed a child at a crossroads and told to keep walking. There's no way to tell."
"I don’t understand." I put my finger on the tithe roll. "If the Fourth House were that bad — if this was the family everyone was so relieved to be rid of that somebody went out with a chisel and took the crest off their fence posts — then who bothered to keep one of their children alive?"
Faris takes her glasses off, which is how I know she's actually going to engage.
"You're asking a good question," she says.
"But it could be any of a number of reasons, a servant who loved that child and had a large family of her own to draw on.
A neighbor with an obligation nobody wrote down.
" She folds up the glasses on the table.
"Or a great many people who thought that House deserved every single thing it got, and still could not bring themselves to be part of killing a six-year-old. "
They start packing up at six.
Falken has something at seven. Hess has a train to catch. Faris takes her folder and her glasses.
Jon doesn't leave.
He's got the chronology open in front of him, wolf dates against parish dates, and he's been comparing the two for the last ten minutes.
"Jon."
"Mm."
"How long are we going to keep doing this?"
He goes still.
He doesn't look up straight away, and when he does, everything about him is tense.
"Doing what?"
"Don't."
"Jessica—"
"Don't do that." I close the photographs. "Don't ask me doing what like there's an actual question in it."
Jon puts the pen down.
"It's late," he says. "We can finish the chronology tomorrow, and I think it would be better if—"
"Oh my God. You're doing it now."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You've got the teacher voice." I stand up. "It's the one you use in the lecture hall when somebody interrupts with a statement and not a question, and I have been listening to it for a year and a half and I know what it fucking sounds like."
"Miss Miller—"
"Don't Miss Miller me."
"I am your professor."
"Yes. That's the fucking problem, Jon, and you keep saying it like it's an answer."
The room is very quiet.
“I can't be alone in a room with you and pretend I don't want you. How the fuck do you do it?”
He looks up.
“What do you want me to say?” Jon asks.
He closes his eyes and breathes out.
"Tell me one true thing," I say. "Something you actually did, about us, me . . .”
Jon looks at the chronology for a while.
Then he says, "I stood outside your work before I left and watched you for almost an entire shift."
"What?"
"In England." He still isn't looking at me. "After I talked to you in the shop. I came back to your work. I stood outside deciding whether I could walk away from you."
"You never came back in."
"No."
"I called you."
"You called me." He turns the pen over. "And we had coffee, and that was that."
I laugh. It comes out wrong.
"Why did you stop yourself?"
"Because I knew what it would cost you. Wolves. A new school. A new identity." He does look up then. "And apparently a fated mate almost exactly twice your age."
"That's a lot."
"Yes."
"What else?"
He puts the pen down flat and squares it with the edge of the table, which is a thing he does, and which I now understand is what he does instead of moving.
"I went to Falken twice," he says. "November of your first year, and again in March. I asked to be taken off anything to do with assessing you. Marking, evaluations, recommendations. All of it."
"You—"
"He said no. Correctly." He finally looks at me properly. "I was the person who'd found you and the person who knew your file. A professor with no history of asking for anything walks in and asks to be removed from one specific student, twice, and won't say why."
"You never told me."
"No, I kept marking your work, and I marked it fairly, and I have never once given you a mark I couldn't defend to anybody who asked." His voice hasn't gone up at all. "I have been scrupulous."
I'm standing up. I don't remember standing up.
"Do you want me?"
Jon doesn't answer for a second.
"You dodged that in October. You said that isn't the problem , which is the cleverest possible way of not saying anything, and I let you because I was too busy being angry." I take a step. "I'm not letting you have it tonight. Do you want me?"
"Yes," Jon says. "Since England. Every. Single. Day."
I cross the room and kiss him.
He doesn't push me away and he doesn't pull me in. One hand stays flat on the table and Jon Matthias does not move at all.
I think: oh, you absolute —
And then he breaks.
He comes up so fast the chair goes over. His hand is in my hair and his other arm is round my back and he lifts me clean off my feet, and my hip catches the edge of the desk and papers go everywhere and he slams me against the wall cradling my head.
His entire body is crushing mine into the wall. And I can’t help but rock against his hardened length. So good.
"Jessica—"
"Don't you dare."
"I'm not." His hand comes up under my jaw and tilts my head and he kisses me deeper, and I stop being able to hold on to anything at all.
I get two buttons of his shirt undone, and my fingers on bare skin at his collarbone, and he shudders — the whole of him, once, all the way through — and I have to stop kissing him to look at it.
His hair is wrecked. I did that. His collar's pulled sideways and his mouth is red and his breathing has completely gone, and Professor Matthias, who has never in eighteen months had one thing out of place, is holding onto me like the room's moving.
Well. That's going straight into long-term storage.
"You're pleased with yourself," he says, hoarse.
"Fuck yes."
"Somebody's going to walk past," Jon says, and thrusts against me.
My hands go straight back into his hair and his mouth goes to my throat and I make a noise I would be embarrassed about if I had anything left to be embarrassed with. One hand in under my shirt, pulling down my bra and teasing my nipple and I get both of my legs up around him and–
His grip slides down my thigh.
"Don't stop," I say.
"Jessica—"
"I mean it. Don't."
His forehead comes down against my shoulder.
And he goes absolutely still. Not a retreat, not yet — he's still standing pressed tightly to my core with his hands on me and his heart going like something trapped, and he stays there three or four seconds while I feel him haul it in.
Then he grips under my arms so I don’t slide down the wall and steps back.
"You have got to be fucking kidding me," I say.
"No."
"Jon—"
"No." He's holding the edge of the desk again. His shirt is open to the third button and his hands are visibly shaking. "No," a third time, mostly to himself.
"I started it. I walked across the room. You didn't do one single thing to—"
"I know exactly what happened," Jon says. "I was here."
"Give me something. A date. A condition. Anything."
"I won't do that."
"Why?"
"Because I don't know," Jon says.
"That's it?"
"That's the only answer I've got."
I try to support myself. My legs aren't brilliant.
"Okay."
"Jessica—"
"No, it's fine. You've been very clear. You're good at that. Everybody says so."
"That's not—"
"Do your shirt up."
He looks down.
He does the buttons, and gets the second one wrong, and I watch him do it and say absolutely nothing about it, because I'm not a saint.
I pick up my bag. I get the photographs off the floor and square them, badly, and put them back on the desk. My hands aren't steady either.
Good.
"Jessica."
I stop at the door and turn around.
Wrecked hair. Red mouth. A shirt buttoned wrong.
Then he straightens his cuffs, and it's Professor Matthias standing in a room full of paper.
"Good night," Jon says.
I look at his collar.
"Sure, Professor," I say, and go.