CHAPTER FIFTEEN What Refusal Costs
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
What Refusal Costs
Threnn came up on the twenty-third of December, in daylight, in the grey cloak, and knocked on my front door at eleven in the morning like a woman collecting for the poor.
Elias let her in. The two of them had never been on their own in a room before.
I heard him offer her a chair and heard her take it, and by the time I’d got down the stairs they’d settled something between them that I’ve never properly understood, and it held for the rest of their lives.
He was over by the stove holding the kettle like someone had told him to guard it.
“Miss Angel.”
“You’ve brought something.”
“I have brought a date,” said Threnn, “which is worse.”
? ? ?
She put it down on my kitchen table. By then that table had held an invitation, six Keeper books, a bucket of wall mortar and more or less the whole course of my life.
“The Court has set a term. It is not an ultimatum, and I should like to be precise about that, because the language matters and will matter again. It is a term. The guest’s standing under precedent runs until the equinox in March. It does not renew.”
“And then?”
“And then you are not a guest.” Threnn folded her hands.
“That is all it says. It does not say what you become instead. I have read it fourteen times looking for that, and the document is silent, and the silence was drafted. I know the woman who drafted it. She does not leave silences lying about by accident.”
Elias put the kettle back on the hob, very carefully, like it might go off in his hand. “So the protection ends.”
“The precedent ends, Vale. The three named houses guarantee safe passage to a guest. The word appears eleven times in eleven lines. After the equinox those eleven guarantees describe a person who does not exist.”
“You might have led with that.”
“I led with the date. The date is worse. I should like that on the record.”
? ? ?
I went to the window.
Bright and cold out. Beyond the headland the sea lay flat and hard, the boats were in, and everything was getting on with the last week of December like it always does.
“What happens to the town?”
Threnn didn’t answer.
I turned round.
“You said it in October. At this table. You said I was difficult to reach and expensive to compel, and Duskmere was neither. You said it wasn’t a threat and you were aware it worked as one.
” My voice was steady and I still don’t know how.
“So say the rest of it now. I’ve got thirty-four days’ less patience than I had in October. ”
“I do not know.”
“That isn’t good enough.”
“It is not remotely good enough, and it is what I have.” She stood up, which is what she does when she means to be exact.
“I can tell you what I know. The northern quarter has been dark for eleven years. Two hundred yards of the lower terraces went in November, four days after your incident at the vents, and everyone has very carefully agreed the two are unrelated. The current through Ilmarren was thirteen per cent of the whole, and the loss is not linear, Miss Angel. That is the part nobody has said to you. A gate does not leak evenly. It goes slowly for thirty years, and then all at once it does not.”
“And the coast?”
“The coast is the part I am not qualified to speak to, and I am going to speak to it regardless.” Her hands had found each other again.
“Whatever comes through those gates does not stay down there. It moves. Four hundred years of records of the tides on your shoreline sit in the Vale family’s books, in a fair hand, twice a day, not one gap.
I should very much like to know why a family paid in blood to watch a coast was asked to write down the height of the water. ”
Over at the stove Elias’s hands had stopped. Behind him the kettle started, faintly, to sing, and he left it.
“They weren’t watching for ships,” he said.
“No. I do not believe they were watching for ships.”
? ? ?
She left after an hour and wouldn’t stay for anything. At the door she stopped and did something so unlike her I nearly asked if she was ill.
She turned round. “Miss Angel. May I say a thing that is not procedural?”
“Yes.”
“I have spent five weeks being scrupulous about giving you nothing but figures. I decided early on that you had a great many people wanting things at you, and the most use I could be was to be one person who did not.” She was looking at a spot somewhere past my left ear.
“I should like it noted that this was a choice. It was not an absence. I am sixty years old. I was junior in your mother’s household for nine years.
And every day since October I have wanted to say something to you that a figure will not carry. ”
“Then say it.”
“I have not worked out what it is,” said Threnn. “That is the difficulty. Good afternoon.”
And off she went up the lane in the cold, in her soft shoes, dry as a bone.
? ? ?
The first sign came on the fourth of January. Nobody in Duskmere tied it to me, and I didn’t tie it to myself for eleven days, which I still haven’t forgiven myself for.
The herring didn’t come.
On its own that’s nothing. The herring have failed before.
There’s a year in the parish book, 1822, with nothing written against it but the one word none, and everybody’s grandmother has a story about some winter or other.
The men came in on the fourth and the fifth and the sixth with clean nets and stood about on the harbour wall with their shoulders up round their ears the way they do.
By the second week the talk in Wren’s had gone quiet and practical and everyone was doing sums about February.
On the eleventh, Hallam’s boy went off the north jetty.
He didn’t drown. Three men standing right there had him out inside two minutes, and he was fifteen and livid about the fuss, and by the evening he was sat in the Gull and Anchor with a blanket round him and Wren feeding him pie and calling him her drowned rat, love.
“I never slipped,” Tom told the whole room. “I counted. Nine steps from the bollard, same as always. I was stood still.”
He kept on saying it. He was still saying it a year later.
He said the water came up.
? ? ?
I went down on the twelfth at low tide and stood in my own cove.
The reef was out, black ribs with the weed laid over them and the pools full of light, and the green crab, or its great-grandson, was going sideways about nothing much.
And thirty yards out, at the mouth of the cove, the water was doing a thing I’d never seen in thirty-four years of looking at that exact bit of sea.
It was standing.
It wasn’t rough and there was no wind. Past the last rib the surface had lifted into a long low ridge, maybe a foot higher than the water on either side of it, running parallel to the shore.
And it held. It didn’t break and it didn’t come in and it didn’t make a sound, and water always makes a sound, always.
When I finally made myself climb back up the steps forty minutes later it was still there.
I didn’t tell Elias that night. I told him the next morning, badly, and he didn’t say I told you so. He didn’t say anything at all for about a minute.
Then: “Show me the tide tables.”
? ? ?
He worked six days on them.
His family’s fair hand, four hundred years of the height of the water at the harbour mouth, twice a day. Next to it his own figures for the month, taken on the wall with a marked pole at six in the morning and six at night, in January, in a north wind, because he wouldn’t let me do it.
“I can hold a pole.”
“You can. You’d hold it at the wrong height out of spite.”
“That’s slander.”
“It’s a forecast.”
On the nineteenth he came into the kitchen with three sheets, put them down in front of me and said, “Don’t look at the numbers. Look at the shape.”
The shape was a line that wandered up and down for four hundred years inside a band about as wide as a thumb.
And then, in the last week of December, it came out of the band.
Only by about a finger’s width. But it went up and it stayed up, every reading, twelve days running. In four hundred years of that column it had happened four times before. Elias had found all four. Every one of them fell inside the fifty-one years.
? ? ?
“They’re not doing it.”
“No.”
“This isn’t Sevrid Anvarre leaning on a town to shift one woman. This is just what happens.”
“I think it’s just what happens. I think the gate’s been leaking for thirty-four years and something changed last month, and I don’t know if it was the term being set or if it’s only the next thing along.
And the reason I don’t know is sat in a rack somewhere between seventeen ninety-four and eighteen forty-five. ”
I put both hands flat on his tide tables.
“That’s worse.”
“Yes.”
“If somebody were doing it, there’d be somebody to bargain with.”
“Yes,” said Elias. “That’s what I’ve been sitting here not saying. For six days.”
? ? ?
He offered on the twenty-sixth of January. He did it in the cove at low water, standing on the black rock with his boots in his hand like a man about to go for a swim in the dead of winter.
I knew before he’d opened his mouth. He’d been wrong all day, far too polite, and he’d washed and shaved in the middle of the afternoon.
“Don’t.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“You crossed it off the list in pencil in December. You’ve had it back on since the eleventh of January. And you shaved at three o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, Elias. Men shave at three on a Tuesday to get married or hanged.”
He stopped. He put the boots down on the rock, toes to the sea, side by side.
“Right. Then you’ve had time to get your objection ready. I’d like to hear it. Then I’d like you to hear mine. Then I’d like the two of us to decide, instead of arguing.”
“We always argue.”
“I’m asking anyway.”
? ? ?
“You’d die.”
“Not from the transfer. If it exists.” He was looking at the ridge and not at me.
“From the pressure, over time. And I wouldn’t be down there for time, would I.
I’d be down long enough to take it, and then I’d be at the gate, holding whatever it is that keeps the water moving.
Kael says the ones who hold aren’t on the ordinary run of a life. ”
“Kael says. Four tellings of a nine-hundred-year-old story.”
“Yes.”
“Elias. Listen to what you just did. You took the least reliable source either of us has ever had and used him as your evidence for the bit where you survive.”
He looked at me, and I watched him turn it over and dislike it and go looking for the edge of it and not find one.
“That’s fair.”
“It isn’t fair. It’s true. It’s the first argument I’ve made in three weeks that you haven’t got round, and I’d like you to sit with it.”
? ? ?
He sat with it. He really did sit, down on the wet rock in his good coat with his forearms on his knees, looking out at the standing water at the mouth of the cove, which had been there a fortnight now.
“Here’s mine.”
“Go on.”
“Nine hundred years ago somebody bought my family.” He didn’t look up.
“Paid in blood, and we’ve been walking about inside the payment ever since, and not one of us ever agreed to it.
You said to me on the wall there’s no original underneath.
That they started before you were born. That there isn’t a version of you that wasn’t built to want this. ”
“Yes.”
“There isn’t a version of me either.”
The water stood where it was. A gull came down on the ridge and went straight back up again, like it hadn’t cared for the feel of it.
“So we’re both made things. Neither of us gets an unmade self to go and ask.
I’ve had two months on it, and the only thing I’ve got is that what counts is what you do after you find out.
And that’s yours, it isn’t mine. You gave it me in a kitchen in October and on a wall in December, and I’ve been living off it since. ”
“That’s not the same as.”
“I’d like to use mine,” he said. “For once.”
? ? ?
I sat down on the rock next to him, because my knees didn’t give me any say in it.
“You’re using my own argument to leave me.”
“I’m using it to do the one thing in nine hundred years a Vale could do on purpose. And yes, the consequence is I’d not come back up. I’ve thought about that every hour since the eleventh of January. I want you to know I’m not brave about it. I’m really not. I’ve been sick twice.”
My throat had shut. I put my hand on his cold wet cuff and couldn’t get a word out round it.
“But if it’s real, Rose, and if it’s mine to do, then somebody generations back cut it out of my family’s books so no man of my line would ever find out it was there to be done.” He turned his head. “That’s what I can’t get past. Not the cost. That somebody decided we oughtn’t to be asked.”
? ? ?
I said no.
I’m setting that down plainly because of what people said about it afterwards. It took me four days, and they were the worst four days of that winter.
I said it in the kitchen on the thirtieth, with the tide tables still spread out between us.
“Here’s why, and then I’m not arguing it again.
If you take it off me, I’m free. And I’m a woman who was made to want something and had it taken away by the only man who’s ever wanted her without being made to.
Do you understand what that does? I’d spend the rest of my life on that cliff path looking at flat water, knowing the one clean thing I ever had was the reason I lost the lot. ”
“That’s not.”
“You’d be doing to me exactly what they did. Deciding. In advance. For my own good. Because you loved me.”
Elias sat down, slowly, like he wasn’t sure the chair would be there.
“Mara,” he said.
“Mara. My mother. Your grandfather with a needle and good light. Every last one of them did it out of love, Elias. That’s the whole history, that’s what I’ve been reading in racks and books for four months.” I heard myself laugh, and it was an ugly noise. “Everybody in this story was kind.”
The fire settled. Neither of us got up to see to it.
“So no,” I said. “You don’t get to be the next one.”
He didn’t argue. He sat with his hands flat on the tide tables, just where mine had been, and he left them there.