CHAPTER TWELVE — UNDER GLASS #2
"I don't know yet. That's a records question.
That's a Mara question." Philip sat back on his heels and looked at the tree, and the tree looked back with its decades of silence, offering exactly nothing.
"But Frances supplied this nursery. Frances had a holdover in this bed.
And Walter's knife matches a scar on the tree in Frances's bed, and Walter's knife is sitting in my drawer refusing to close for reasons I can't —" He cut himself off.
Not his to solve today. Not the tree's problem.
Simon was still holding the lens. He turned it over in his fingers, once.
"So we document," he said.
"We document."
They worked for another hour, and Philip let it happen because the work was good and the finding was real, but he watched Simon the whole time and did not like what he was watching.
It was small. It was always small with Simon, which was the problem.
A half-second delay when he reached for the sample envelopes.
A grip on the hand fork that had to be re-set before it committed.
When he wrote the bed and row and scar positions into his log, his hand moved fine, but his eyes tracked his own fingers doing it, checking on them like a foreman who didn't trust the crew.
Philip had learned what that checking meant at the market, over an underripe pear.
The glasshouse got no warmer and the light got no better.
By two o'clock the sun had gone behind cloud and the dirty panes gave everything the color of dishwater.
Simon's coordination was paying a tax on every motion now, and the logging had slowed to a crawl, and when Simon knelt to photograph the rootstock collar his knee went down on the gravel with less control than a man like him would ever spend on purpose.
"Enough," Philip said.
"I have four more scars to chart."
"You have four more scars to chart another day. The tree's been standing here for years. It'll stand for one more."
"You don't know that. The vole damage at the base —"
"— is healed, I checked it, it's my trade." Philip took the log out of Simon's hand, gently, the way you'd take a chisel off a tired man. Simon let him, which was its own kind of information. "You're cold."
"I'm fine."
"Give me your hand."
Simon looked at him. In the flat light his face was pale under the pale, and there was a crease between his brows that exhaustion had put there and wouldn't take back.
"That's a diagnostic request," Simon said, "dressed as something else."
"It's a request dressed as a request. You can say no."
Simon held out his hand.
Philip took it in both of his. The fingers were cold — not the sharp cold of damage, but the deep, dull cold of a body that had been spending heat it didn't have, standing still in a damp building, running something invisible on top of everything visible.
Philip chafed the hand between his palms, working from the fingers down, and felt the fine tension in the tendons, and felt, once, a tremor start and be stopped by force of will, which was worse than the tremor.
Simon didn't pull away. Then he did something Philip hadn't braced for: he turned his hand over, deliberate, unhurried, and threaded his fingers through Philip's.
Not a handshake. Not a diagnostic arrangement. Just a hand in a hand, cold fingers warming against warm ones, in a derelict glasshouse that smelled of old earth and rain.
"Better light than the workshop," Simon said, looking at the amber grime-glow instead of at Philip. "If a man wanted to hold someone's hand and call it ordinary."
"Considerably better," Philip said, and his voice came out lower than he'd planned. He didn't adjust it.
They stood like that for a minute that Philip did not count. The mist of condensation breathed down the panes above them. Somewhere in the bramble outside, a wren made its small irritated noise at the world.
They took cuttings properly, because Philip had standards even half-distracted.
Hardwood cuttings from the current season's wood, four of them, each cut with a clean single pass, labeled with bed, row, date, and the words Philip wrote himself: PYRUS SP.
— PROVENANCE UNVERIFIED — DO NOT DISCARD.
Simon bagged a curl of old bark from beside the largest graft scar and a small sealed envelope of soil from the root zone, and initialed the sample log with his own careful hand, slower now, but his.
"Documentation," Simon said, as the envelopes went into the rigid case. "Nothing else."
"Nothing else," Philip agreed. "Until we can prove a name. And after that, we decide together what a name obligates us to."
Simon gave him a look at that — brief, sidelong, unreadable — but he nodded, and shouldered the case, and let Philip re-lock the door with hands that were still half Simon's temperature.
Outside, the afternoon had gone the grey of unmade commitments.
Simon stood at the gate while Philip worked the padlock, and when Philip turned around, Simon was watching him with an expression Philip had learned to read only recently and only in this one face: the expression of a man assembling a sentence and refusing to use any of the easy ones.
"Come eat with me tonight," Simon said.
Philip waited, because there was usually more.
"That's the whole sentence," Simon said.
"I checked it for pretexts on the way out.
It's clean. Dinner. You and me. No stock cards, no ledgers, nothing I need you to identify.
" A pause, and then, quieter, with the ghost of the dry humor coming up through the tiredness: "Though I'll warn you I'm cooking, so the risks are real. "
Philip laughed, and it came out of him warm, and he found he'd already taken a step closer before deciding to.
"I'd like that," he said. "Risks and all."
Simon's mouth did the small, contained thing it did instead of smiling broadly, and his eyes went somewhere past Philip's shoulder, toward the road and the town and the evening coming on, and Philip watched him stand there in the cold with his sample case and his cold hands and his sentence that had finally said what it meant.