The Lantern in the Hem

Fog had come up from the ditches while they talked, and it beaded on the handcart's rails like sweat on a fevered lip.

Anselm sat on the cart's shaft with his ledger open across his knee, as if he meant to take minutes. The girl lay behind him under the sacking. Every time the wind turned, it brought the smell of her hair, green and rotten, the Saltmarket cistern still in it.

"Before I do anything," Ilse said, "you tell me why they threw you out."

"Who says they did?"

"You push corpses uphill at midnight. Nobody keeps a man like that."

He turned a page he wasn't reading. His thumb left a grey print on the corner.

"Counting," he said.

"Counting what?"

"Things that were supposed to add up." He closed the ledger on his finger to keep the place. "They didn't. I said so. Once too often, and in writing."

It was an answer the way a locked door is a wall. Ilse let it stand. She had her own doors.

"Then here's mine," she said. "You bring me your church's death ledgers. Every name they've burned since your counting went wrong. Who brought them in, who signed them off, what the cause was."

"And you give me?"

"What the dead saw."

"And how you come to know it?"

"No." She showed him the chipped tooth. There was no smile behind it. "You've got one secret of mine already, and I didn't hand it over. I'm not giving you the rope as well."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he took the pencil from behind his ear and wrote something small at the bottom of the open page. She could not read it upside down.

"Agreed," he said. "But I need this cart back in the Lantern's yard before the dawn bell, and her in the ground before anyone thinks to count the dead-house. If they come looking, they come here."

Ilse did the sum he couldn't. Dead since yesterday afternoon. By her own reckoning the girl would keep until the afternoon after tomorrow. He had guessed one day at the gate, guessing small to be safe.

She let him keep his guess.

* * *

She sent him outside.

He went without arguing, which she had not expected, and stood in the yard with his back to the hut, a tall black shape against the fog, like a gibbet somebody had forgotten to take down.

The girl lay on Ilse's own table, where the bread usually went. The boy held the lantern. He held it high and steady, both hands around the ring, and the light shook only a little.

Ilse opened the girl's mouth. The jaw was stiff and gave with a sound like a knuckle. The copper was Anselm's, newer than her own, and it sat cold on the grey tongue.

She bent, and swallowed.

* * *

Weight first. A basket on her hip, the wicker biting through her apron. Inside it, bandages, clean, folded in thirds and stacked so they would not crush. She had been told not to crush them.

Fish scales underfoot, slick on the Saltmarket cobbles. A gull screaming. Her shoes pinched. She was thinking about her shoes.

Then the bell.

It rang above her, right above her, so close the air pressed on the crown of her head. There was no tower over the Saltmarket. There was the haze, and the bell inside it, and her teeth humming.

She turned. The mask was there.

Pale and smooth and blank, close enough to touch. And not quite blank. A hairline crack ran from the left eyehole down toward the chin, and someone had mended it with gold, a thin bright seam that caught the last of the light.

A gloved hand came up holding a lamplighter's hook. Long iron, a brass ferrule, and near the tip a notch, square and deliberate, as if someone had filed it there to catch on something.

The hook went through the strings of her apron at the back of her neck and pulled.

The basket fell. Bandages unrolled across the stones like spilled milk. The cistern lip struck her hip, then her ribs. A breath at her ear, warm.

"Vigil."

Black water, very cold, and the bell ringing down through it, and her own hands white in the dark, reaching for nothing.

* * *

Ilse came back with her cheek against the table edge and the girl's cold shoulder under her hand.

She spat the coin. Warm. She closed her fist on it.

The notch. She knew that notch. Emil had filed it himself the winter he was nineteen, because the cradles on the Chandlers' Row lamps were badly cast and kept slipping off his hook. He'd shown it to her proudly, as if he'd invented fire.

So she still had that.

She lifted her head. The lantern was very close. A boy was holding it, small and thin, chalk dust ground into the creases of his knuckles, his hair cut badly with something that was not scissors.

Tobit. She knew him. Tobit, who dug the shallow end of every grave and drew instead of talking, who slept by the stove with his boots on. She knew all that the way she knew the weight of her spade.

Then she reached for the beginning of him, the night he came, and her mind closed on nothing.

Her hand was already moving toward the notebook before she stopped it.

He saw that. He saw everything. His face did something she would remember a long time: it did not crumple, it closed, the way a hand closes over a coin.

"Wait," she said. "Wait. Don't."

The notebook. Her fingers were clumsy on the cord. She went down the numbered list with her thumbnail, and she found him at twenty-three.

The snowy night the mute boy came to the gate. He ate half my bread before I could stop him, then held out the other half to me. I called him Tobit because he looked like a Tobit. He has never once disagreed.

She read it three times. It was a nice story. It was about two strangers.

"Tobit," she said. His name was still hers. The night that gave it to her was not.

He knew. He couldn't read the notebook, but he could read her, and she was not hard to read tonight. His eyes went from the page to her face and stayed there, and his chin came up, very slightly, the way a dog's does before it decides whether to bite or go.

He set the lantern on the table. Carefully, beside the girl's feet.

Then he took the chalk from his pocket, knelt, and drew on the floorboards between them.

A loaf. Round, with a split across the top, the way her bread always split in the oven. He drew a line down the middle of it.

He looked up at her. He held the chalk out.

It was a question, and she did not know the answer. That was the whole point of it. Whatever she had said or done on the snowy night, he was not going to tell her. He wanted to see what she would do now, with nothing to go on.

Ilse got down on her knees on the boards. She took the chalk. Her hand had dug a thousand graves and it was not steady.

She shaded in one half of the loaf. Then she drew a small rough hand reaching for the other half, and left that half empty.

Tobit studied it for a long time. He wiped his nose on his wrist.

Then he picked up the lantern again, and held it for her.

He did not go to his pallet. He stood exactly where he had stood before, and that would have to do.

* * *

She talked to Anselm through the door. She left it half open and stayed on her side, so he got a slice of her and she got a slice of him, and neither of them had to manage a whole face.

"It's the same," she said. "The bell. The mask. The word."

"Vigil."

"Vigil." She turned the copper over in her fingers. "The mask's been broken. Cracked down the left side, from the eye. Somebody mended it with gold."

His pencil moved. She heard it.

"Gold," he said. "Not lead, not glue."

"A thin line of it. Someone paid to have it done properly. And the hand that took her held my brother's lamp-hook."

The pencil stopped.

"You're certain?"

"He filed a notch in it. Square, near the tip. I watched him do it." She set the copper on the step for him. "Whoever drowned her took it off Emil's belt and kept it. Used it to pull her in by her apron strings."

Through the gap she could see one of his ink-black cuffs, and the hand at the end of it closing slowly on the ledger's spine.

"What did it cost?" he asked.

"That's on my side of the agreement."

"I didn't ask how. I asked what."

"Same answer."

He let it go. She would have liked him better if he hadn't, because then she'd have had a reason to shut the door.

"Your turn," she said. "You went down to my brother alone today. What were you doing down there?"

"Reading his toe tag." He turned the ledger toward the gap so she could see his writing, small, slanted, hundreds of lines of it. "Then I went up to the record room and read the certificate that matches it. Then I read hers."

He tapped two lines with one long finger.

"S-same hand." The stammer came up out of him like water out of a cracked pipe. "Brother M-Mattick. Lay brother, S-Saint Barrow's ward. He s-signed your brother plague at n-noon. He s-signed her plague the day b-before. He n-never went n-near either of them. He s-signs what he's handed, and then the p-papers g-go missing, and n-nobody asks him who d-did the handing."

He stopped. Breathed through his nose. Ilse waited, the way you wait for a horse to stop kicking.

"Brother Mattick," he said again, evenly now. "I'll find out who hands him things."

"And bring me the ledgers."

"And bring you the ledgers." He stood. The gap lost his face and kept his chest. "And the next one, when there is a next one."

"I know."

"Who were the bandages for?" he said. "Did you see?"

She thought of the folded thirds, the basket, the instruction not to crush them.

"No," she said. "Just that they mattered to her."

He went out through the gate with his empty cart. The wheels squealed all the way down the lane, and then the fog had them.

* * *

The girl had no name on any paper that still existed, so Ilse gave her the decent things instead.

Warm water from the kettle. A rag. She washed the cistern out of the girl's hair and combed it with her fingers, because her own comb had two teeth and wouldn't have managed. She did not touch the medal. She folded the right hand down over it, as she had done with Emil's, and left it for whoever was watching.

Tobit held the lantern. He moved it when she moved, without her having to ask, as though he had done this many times.

He probably had.

She began to fold the girl into her shroud. Feet first. The apron was coarse brown stuff, the hem gone stiff with salt, and it had to come off or the shroud would bunch.

Her thumb ran along the inside of the hem as she drew it up, and caught on something raised.

Stitches. Small and tight, done from the inside, where nobody wearing the apron would ever feel them.

She turned the hem to the light.

Yellow waxed thread, the same thread that held the medal. A tall glass shape with an iron crown. The Cathedral's lantern. And inside the glass, where the flame should be, an eye. Open. Six tiny stitches for the lashes.

The same eye that looked out from her hut wall in chalk.

Behind her the lantern swung, and the light lurched across the shroud and back.

Tobit had set it down on the table, hard enough to rattle the glass. He came round beside her and looked at the hem. He did not touch it. His fingers had closed so tight on the chalk that it snapped in his fist.

Then he reached up with his other hand and laid it flat over Ilse's eyes, gently, and held it there, as if there were something in the room that must not see her looking back.