The Hour of Rags

The lamp shook. The flame leaned and righted, leaned again, and the shadows of the shelves swung across Corin's face like a slow pendulum.

"Shut the door," Wren said. "Or come in. Don't stand there lit up for the whole corridor."

Tamsin came in. She set the lamp on the steward's desk and pulled the office door closed behind her with two fingers, careful as a thief, which was how Wren had taught her.

"That's mine," Tamsin said, looking at the page.

"It's the steward's."

"It's mine tonight." Her thimble tapped the desk edge, once, twice. "There was a note in the drop at the lamp bell. Today's condemned-linen page, out of the book, by morning. That's all it said. It's never said anything like that before. Ten words, Wren."

Corin had not moved from the press. He was looking at Tamsin's hands: the red knuckles, the split skin at the thumbs that lye made and nothing healed, the ring of keys at her belt. Wren knew those keys. The long one with the filed bit opened the East Wing service stair.

He looked at the keys a moment too long.

"Your hands are a laundress's," he said pleasantly, "and your keys are mine. The service stair to my apartments. I wondered for six years how anyone knew what I burned." He turned his odd eyes, blue and grey, full on her. "Is it you?"

Tamsin's thimble stopped.

"She's Lantern," Wren said. "We grew up two doors apart. She does the steward's wash and he sends her on errands, and somebody's using her for this one because she can get into the office." She lifted her left hand to push the lamp away from the ledger shelf, as if the heat bothered her. "She's not your watcher."

Corin's gaze went to her hand. It stayed there, on her lifted left hand with its ink-stained fingertips. She felt it like a draught.

Then he looked back at Tamsin, and his face did nothing at all.

"I've never seen this woman before tonight," he said. "If anyone asks me, that's what I'll say. I've never met her."

Tamsin understood a beat after Wren did. Her mouth opened and shut. She looked at Corin, then at Wren's hand, slowly lowering, and something in her shoulders gave as if a strap had been cut.

"I'm not doing anything for him," she said to Wren. "Whatever this is."

"Nobody asked you to."

"You're about to." Tamsin picked up the lamp. "I know your face when you're about to."

* * *

The mantel clock in Corin's study said a quarter past two. First light came a little after six this deep into autumn, and the rag fires were lit when the yard bell rang at the first grey.

Four hours, less.

Tamsin refused to come past the connecting door. She sat on the top step of the service stair with the door ajar, her lamp beside her, and said she would hear well enough from there and she wasn't putting her feet on an Ashgrove rug. Wren did not argue. Tamsin had always drawn her lines in odd places and held them.

On the desk Wren laid out what they had stolen. The steward's inkwell, still half full, iron-gall with that faint vinegar tang. The blotter from his desk, which Corin had carried under his arm down two corridors as though he did it every night. And the torn page, smoothed flat beneath a candlestick.

"The blotter?" Corin asked.

"The backing." She turned it over and slid her small knife under the felt. Beneath it was a sheet of ruled ledger stock, the same cream laid paper, the same faint blue lines at the same width. "Stewards never buy blotters. They make them out of spoiled pages. Every office I've ever robbed."

"How many is every?"

"More than you'd like and fewer than I'd like."

She cut the sheet to size against the original's edge. Then she took off her gloves.

She did it without thinking, and then she thought about it, because he was watching. Her hands lay bare on his desk in the candlelight, the stains dark in every crease. Corin was sitting on the arm of the chair across from her with his coat open. Inside it, she knew, the queen's blank disc rested against his ribs.

"You could go to bed," she said.

"I could."

He didn't. He reached for the mantel clock, opened its glass face and began to wind it, a slow quarter-turn at a time, though it did not need winding. The key ticked. He kept his eyes on the hands.

She took up the steward's pen and began.

The steward wrote a cramped, impatient secretary hand, with a hook on his descenders and a habit of lifting the pen mid-word to dip. She had to lift where he lifted. She had to blot where his ink had pooled. Pillowslip, three, scorched. Bolster ticking, one, mildew. Kitchen aprons, six, burnt through. Lawn shirt, gentleman's, one, wax, condemned, tag to office. Her breathing slowed to match the pen. The room went far away.

The clock key ticked. Stopped.

Half past three.

"You've changed something," Corin said quietly.

She did not look up. "How do you know?"

"You stopped breathing on the fourth line from the bottom."

She finished the stroke before she answered. "Bolster ticking. In the original it's dated today. In mine it's dated tomorrow." She set the pen down. "A clerk's slip. Anybody who reads it will think the steward was tired. But if this page ever comes back to me, in anyone's hand, I'll know where it's been. Nobody else in the world made that mistake."

"A trap."

"A signature." She blew gently across the wet ink. "In the Lantern days we all had one. Mine was always a date."

From the stair came Tamsin's voice, dry. "Hers was always a date. Mine was a broken serif. She'll tell you it was her idea."

"It was my idea," Wren said.

Corin's mouth moved at one corner. He set down the clock key, came round the desk and stood beside her chair. He looked at the two pages side by side for a long time.

"I can't tell them apart," he said.

"That's the point."

"No." He crouched so his eyes were level with her hands on the desk. "I mean I've watched forgers' work before. My father kept a seal-man. I've never seen it done like this." He paused. "May I?"

She knew what he meant. She could have said no. She could have pulled the gloves back on and made a joke about charging by the hour.

She turned her right hand over on the desk instead, palm up, then back again, and let it lie.

He lifted it by the wrist, very lightly, and brought it close to the lamp. He tilted it as she had tilted the tag, so the light raked across rather than fell, and the stains showed their layers: the old brown of years, the fresh black of tonight, a red ghost of Kesset wax under one nail. He turned her fingers as though he were reading a seal, as though there were a name in them if he only found the right slant.

The signet, loose on her middle finger, slid and caught on her knuckle.

"Wren," he said. "I started to say something in that press, and I want to finish it, because I don't think I'll get another linen cupboard." The faintest dryness. "I was going to say I'd keep it. Your name. Whatever you do with mine."

The clock ticked into the quiet.

She had been bound once, as a girl, by a man who bought her name for a single command. She remembered how it felt to have her body do a thing she had not chosen. This was the opposite, and it frightened her more.

She took her hand back first. She did it gently, which cost more than doing it quickly. Her fingers felt the cold of the room where his had been.

"You've seen me forge inside the palace now," she said. "Steward's ink, steward's paper. That's a third hanging."

"I know."

"You're collecting them."

He stood. "I'm keeping them," he said. "There's a difference. You taught it to me tonight with your left hand."

On the stair Tamsin's thimble tapped the step, three times, very fast. Then she said, "Quarter to five. If you two are done, I've got a beam to climb."

* * *

The drying loft ran the length of the laundry roof, a long attic of slatted floor and stretched lines, sheets hung in rows like sails in a dead calm. It smelled of starch and warm dust from the furnace flue below.

Wren stayed on the stair, three steps down, her head just above the boards. Corin had gone back to his rooms with the original page folded inside his shirt. A hostage seen in the laundry before dawn would be a story by breakfast. A new wife visiting an old friend was barely gossip.

Tamsin walked down the rows without a lamp. She knew it in the dark. At the fourth beam from the gable end she climbed a stacked basket, reached up and slid her hand into a knot-hole Wren would never have seen. A hollow, dark, worn smooth by six years of a laundress's fingers.

The forged page went in, folded twice.

Tamsin climbed down and stood with her arms crossed under the hanging sheets. Wren waited on the stair. They both listened.

The flue ticked as it warmed. A pigeon shifted on the roof. Far off, a door closed somewhere in the kitchens, and nothing came of it.

No one came.

After a long time Tamsin walked back to the stair and sat on the top step, close enough that their shoulders touched.

"I didn't need saving," she said.

"I know."

"I'd have talked my way out."

"You'd have tried."

Tamsin was quiet. "He saw your hand."

"Yes."

"And he let it go." She turned the thimble on her finger. "I don't know what you've sold him, Wren. Nobody lets a lie go for free."

"I haven't sold him anything."

"Then you owe him." Tamsin stood and brushed starch dust from her skirt. "And that's worse. Come on. They light the rags at the bell."

* * *

The laundry yard was grey at its edges and orange at its heart. The furnace door stood open, and the heat came out in a wall that tightened the skin of Wren's face from six paces off. Smoke and lye, wet ash and scorched cotton. The boy who kept the fire had gone for more coal.

The rag cage was unlocked. Tamsin had the key.

She pulled the lawn shirt from the heap. It was greyed now, wrinkled from the copper, the cuff still marked with that dull red smear like a dried cut. She did not hesitate. She took the small shears from her apron, cut the cuff free along the seam in four quick snips and rolled it tight into her palm.

The rest of the shirt went into the furnace. It caught at the collar first. The lawn went brown, then black, then light as paper, and rose.

Tamsin pushed the rolled cuff into Wren's hand. It was still damp. It smelled faintly of resin under the lye.

"Evidence," Tamsin said. "You're the one who keeps it now."

"You never kept anything in your life."

"That's what you think." Tamsin reached into the bodice of her dress, the way a woman reaches for a letter she has carried a long while, and pulled out a small purse. Grey linen, drawstring, the kind sold by the dozen at any market stall. Worn soft. "Every coin came in one of these. Six years. I've got them all in a crock under the floor. Old habit." Her mouth twisted. "You taught me that too. Never throw away the wrapper."

Wren took it. It was empty and light as the ash drifting off the furnace. Nothing on the outside, no mark, no thread out of place. She almost gave it back.

Then she turned it inside out.

The furnace light fell full across the seams. Down each side ran a line of small paired stitches, slanting, tight, and when Wren bent the cloth she saw what she had seen on the tag by candlelight a few hours ago. Every stitch was crossed twice at the back, the thread doubled over itself so it would hold in the cold.