‘Yes, I know,’ he said. There was a pause, and he added, with a dry edge, ‘And not just occasionally.’ Then suddenly I wasn’t exactly angry any more.
He turned and went into his cell, kicking a path through the matches. He shook them off his blankets on to the floor, sat down at the foot of his bed and bowed his head.
I cleared my throat. ‘Do you think the Danse Macabre is shit?’
Another long pause. I could feel my heart beating in my jawbone, and between my teeth. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘No, that’s different.’
‘Because of you? You’re my saviour, are you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why.’
‘And of course,’ I said, ‘your games are a model of self-revelation.’
His shoulders jerked with a single, ironic cough of laughter, as if I’d made a bad joke. After a moment he reached out and brushed the matches off the nightstand. They pattered on to the floor. There was one left on his pillow and he rolled it between his finger and thumb. Then, very deliberately, he leant over and struck it against the wall.
I grabbed it from him. I don’t remember moving but I was there, in front of him. It felt like blowing the flame out took all the breath I had. ‘For pity’s sake, Carfax!’
‘What?’
‘What do you mean, what? You drop a naked flame in here, it’ll go up like—’
‘Like the London Library?’
I checked that the match was properly out, and dropped it into the ewer on the nightstand. When I turned back to Carfax he had a curious little smile on his face. Something about it made my spine tingle. I took hold of him and dragged him to his feet. ‘Come on,’ I said, and manhandled him to the door.
‘What’re you – let go of me—’
I got him into the corridor. ‘Stop arsing around.’
He pulled away and stared into my face, frowning. Then he rolled his eyes. ‘I’m touched,’ he said. ‘Honestly, Martin. You really think self-immolation is my style? I’m not going to burn myself to death. I wouldn’t give you all the satisfaction.’
‘Then what was that?’
He sat down on the windowsill, folding his arms.
‘I’ll get a servant to clear it up,’ I said. ‘Go back to the library.’
He tipped his head back, examining the ceiling. I waited, but he didn’t give any sign of having heard what I’d said.
‘Look …’ I could have slapped him, one cheek and then the other. I could actually see the marks my hand would leave, two vivid red prints across his face. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Carfax. I couldn’t care less if you burn to death.’ He looked at me then. ‘Stay alive until we’ve finished the joint game. That’s all I ask.’
Silence. I felt sick and off balance, like my heart had dropped into my stomach. I walked away. I didn’t think he was going to answer, so it took me by surprise when he said, quietly, ‘Thank you.’
‘You wanted honesty, didn’t you?’ But I didn’t turn round. I didn’t care if he heard.
I’m not a thug. I’m not a bully. Am I? Who does he think he is, to say that?
It wasn’t even me. It wasn’t even me.
Later
I went to find Felix. He wasn’t in his room. When I finally tracked him down he was in one of the music rooms, bashing out scales. He didn’t notice that I was there until I closed the piano lid and he barely got his fingers out of the way. ‘Hey! What the—’
‘Leave Carfax alone,’ I said.
‘What? It took me ages to get all those matches, even with my cousin sending me two packs a week.’
‘It wasn’t funny.’
He rocked back on the piano stool, screwing up his face. ‘Yes, it was. What’s up with you? I thought you’d—’
‘Leave him alone, all right? I’ve had enough. It’s boring.’
He stared at me. Then he reached for some sheet music and flicked through. Without looking up, he said, ‘You’re going soft. Or are you scared he’ll go running to Magister Holt?’
‘No! I don’t want him to crack up before the end of term, that’s all. Come on, Felix. We’re doing a joint game together, I need him compos mentis.’
‘You said you still hated him. You said—’
‘That’s not the point!’ I pulled the music away from him and slapped it down on the piano. (Am I a thug and a bully?) ‘Once our game’s handed in, you can make his life a misery. Until then, hands off. All right?’
He muttered, ‘All right.’ There was nothing else to say, so I left him to it.
Once, when I was small and Dad took me to the scrapyard, I found a watch on the floor of the office. It turned out it had been dropped by one of his clients. Dad asked me if I’d picked it up. It was beautiful, with a rotating dial for the phases of the moon, and I wanted to keep it more than anything in the world. So I shook my head. Dad got down on his knees and said, ‘Léo, if you tell me the truth you won’t be punished. Did you take the gentleman’s watch?’
I started to cry, I think. I nodded, and got the watch out of my pocket, and held it out to him.
He hissed through his teeth like he was disgusted with me. Then he smacked me across the face, hard.
Why on earth am I thinking about that now?
Chapter 10
11: the Rat
It has begun to snow. For a long time – for days – the clouds empty themselves like old sacks; and then the last rags blow away and the sky clears. The moon slides from one window to the next, and the next, without curiosity. The snow reflects so much light you could almost read by it: if you can read at all, that is, and if you were awake to read. Almost everyone under this roof is asleep. If the Rat were to pause, she could hear the long murmur of their breaths, the tiny thrum of their collective unconsciousness. Someone else might imagine the school as a boat, drifting on that sea-sound; but the Rat has never heard the sea, or of it. And she doesn’t pause, creeping on numbed feet along corridor after corridor. As long as she is invisible, she is safe.
It is cold: a deeper cold than ever, now. There are fires in the scholars’ hearths. Soon the days will be as brief as a blink and she will hardly move from her knot of blankets beside the blank bulk of a chimney, close under the roof, huddling against the stone for the faintest warmth. She will starve a little, and freeze a little, and slowly slip into an aching half-sleep that will linger till the first thaws. She can feel it coming. But she isn’t afraid. Hunger is hunger, and cold is cold, but she is a rat. Rats survive the winter.
She scampers down the narrow staircase. Down here – where the grey ones work – it is dim, lit only on one side by windows set high up on the wall. These rooms are half underground, and the passage smells of damp stone; but when she pushes open a heavy door and slides through, the harsh scent of soap fills her mouth and nose. Deep in the bottom of her mind – under layers of shadow, almost lost to sight – a child gags, cries, promises never to say the bad word again. But that child was not yet the Rat; and what do rats care for memories, except of food or traps? She pauses, watching, listening. Opposite her is the dim bulk of the great copper; beyond, beside the banked fire, a flock of shirts droops from a washing line. A single drop of water clicks faintly on the floor.
Quick. She darts across the room and yanks a shirt loose. The other shirts sag and bounce as she pulls them closer together, to hide the gap. She unhooks the loose pegs from the line, crouches and slips them neatly under one of the presses, where no one will ever find them. The shirt flicks a damp arm into her face. Then she is still, straining her ears. Nothing.
She slides through the door at the far end of the room, squashing the shirt up inside the one she is already wearing. It forms a moist knot against her chest and makes her shiver. Most of all she would like another blanket, but the blankets are only washed every few weeks. She is careful to make them think the shirt she has taken is lost, not stolen. She is the wind, the scholars’ carelessness, the distracted maid, the accident that leaves the laundry count one short. She must never
be a person.
The kitchens are still warm. Her mouth runs with saliva but she hardly takes anything: the stale heel of a loaf, a cupped handful from the pot of cooling stew, an apple, a bit of cheese. She bolts it all on her feet beside the oven, watching the doorway. Sometimes the grey ones steal food too – sometimes, even, the others. She has had to hide, holding her breath, while a dark one helped himself from the pantry, loudly furtive in the way that only humans are. Another night there was a white one, old and portly, who smelt heady and rank and knocked a plate to the floor. She was under the table, huddled as small and shadowy as she could; her heart nearly choked her as she waited for him to crouch and pick up the pieces. But he only swore and staggered out of the room. She wondered then what it would be like, to break something and not be afraid.
The clock strikes. She doesn’t count the strokes, but it reminds her to glance up at the windows. The sky has lost its moonlit sheen. There is no sign yet of morning, but it’s time to go.
It is too cold to cross the courtyard in bare feet, so she takes a longer route, up above the Great Hall, the space between the angle of the roof and the curved vault of the ceiling below, and out by a trapdoor. The sudden light of stars breaks on her face like spray. She doesn’t look down as she crosses a flat ridge, accepting the freezing squeak of snow between her toes, refusing to let the pain throw her off balance. She jumps to a ledge and clings to the wall, face to face with a leering gargoyle. And here there is a narrow window that only a rat could ease through, and a long drop on to a tiled floor, and finally she is back in the others’ world, full of easy paths of corridors and stairs. In spite of the chill she is sweating. But the shirt she stole is safe, tucked into her waistband.
She stops, in the middle of the corridor. Out in the open, where anyone could see her.
Someone is crying.
She is always listening; she is the Rat. But what she is hearing catches her by the throat; she can’t choose to listen, or not to. She cannot hear anything beyond it. A sobbing voice. She is deaf to everything else. It is a man, not a woman – outside her head, not inside – but the Rat is not strong enough to drag herself away from the sound, or even to move out of sight; for once, the child the Rat used to be is in control, and she listens and listens, aching. Not for this one, but for another, a long time ago. A half memory, not even a ghost.
Once there was a room with a crack in the wall. There was a locked door. There was a bucket and a quilt with birds on it. There was a woman who came and went, who brought food and water and songs that ended too soon. And there was the other time, more time, when the ceiling would creep imperceptibly lower unless you watched it, where the only way not to be crushed was to stare without blinking. Or when the floor grew so thin it wasn’t safe to tread on it, when you had to stay still (stay here, stay quiet, whatever you do, darling, you must) and every drip from the roof made you tremble. Sometimes smoke would trickle out of the crack in the wall and if you put your hands to the plaster it would be warm. On stormy days, distant murmurs rose and died, carried on gusts of wind.
The Rat has never been back to that room. She feels it like a numbness deep inside, the one place she will never go. Someone cried in that room – someone lived, waiting, someone waited and slept and tried not to think that anything was wrong, someone stared at the extra food and water that had been left, too much, more than a day’s worth, her panic rising until finally she tried the door and found it, to her confusion, unlocked – but it wasn’t her. She became the Rat the moment she stepped over the threshold.
She stands still. The crying belongs to what she left behind, not to who she is; and every instinct is telling her to run away. It’s dangerous to stay here, in full view. But she can’t. The voice is deep and hoarse, foreign, but the despair is familiar, the choke of suppressed sobs, the fear of being heard. The shame. It’s like a loop of wire, tightening as she pulls against it.
The sobs die away, quieter, into gasps. Gradually the sound loosens its grip on the Rat. She takes a breath. But the heaviness is still in her feet, pinning her to the floor: she isn’t ready to move yet.
There’s a faint rustle, a wet sniff, and the scrape of shoes on stone. A door opening at the far end of the corridor.
Now. Now a rat would run. But it’s too late.
For a long time they stare at each other, the Rat and the man at the far end of the corridor. She should go, right now, disappear into a crevice before he’s sure he’s seen her. But his stance mirrors hers: abruptly she doesn’t know which of them is prey. He wipes his face on his sleeve. He is one of the black-robed ones, the young ones; he has a cross on his collar, standing out stark against the fabric. He sees her notice it and squeezes it in his fist.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I was – I – I wanted somewhere where no one could hear … the cells are so close together, I was afraid they’d – but I wasn’t doing anything wrong … please don’t …’
What does he want of her? She waits, her nerves singing with the danger. When was the last time she deliberately let someone see her? It makes her feel raw, prickling all over.
‘Are you a servant? I mean – not that it matters, I don’t … It’s stupid, I’m fine really, it’s only … the others are – they don’t … And the Magisters, too. I didn’t realise it would be so hard …’ He tugs at his collar as if there are teeth on the inside. ‘You must think I’m pathetic. Well, the others do. I wish …’ He stops, starts again, with a jerk like being sick. ‘And I’m scared for my family. They keep saying things about Christians being attacked. But we’re not allowed newspapers, and I don’t know if they’re lying, or if … Do you know?’
Silence. She stares at him.
‘Um,’ he says. ‘Sorry. I’m Simon. Are you, I mean …?’
He is asking her name. As if she has one.
She can’t move. She can’t remember the last time someone spoke to her. Asked her a question and expected an answer.
He steps forward.
Whatever there is between them, his movement snaps it. She swings around, hears him call after her, runs. Perhaps there are footsteps, but they falter and anyway she leaves them behind. She keeps going, surefooted in the dark, until her breath comes ragged and a patch of sweat spreads across her back. The shirt she stole is coming loose from its bundle against her stomach. She clambers on to a pipe to reach a window, drags herself upwards, lets herself down again into a storeroom, follows the familiar path through the buckets and brooms to the half-hidden door at the far end. No one is following her now. The door leads to another set of steps; at the top of it is her tiny nook, her nest, where the slates rattle next to her ears at night and the draughts whirl. She drags her stolen shirt out from under her clothes and clutches it to her face, breathing hard. Whose was it, before she plucked it off the washing line? She imagines a young man – the young man she just saw – and wonders if she can smell his body under the lingering scent of soap. Abruptly she throws it into a corner. She has never thought this way before. What does she care? What she takes is hers. She drops into the knot of blankets and curls up. She is shaking as well as sweating.
He saw her. He thought she was human.
Simon, she thinks. His name was Simon. Since when did she care about names? She is the Rat. She is not one of them. She survives; she does not remember, she does not feel. This is wrong. This is dangerous. A rat would smell poison. Simon.
She waits until she has stopped shuddering. Then she lies down and closes her eyes. She is the Rat: she always sleeps dreamlessly, lightly, her mind blank. But tonight she does not. Tonight she stays awake, wrapped in her private dark, listening to the silence in the walls.
12: the Magister Ludi
The snow below the window of the Biblioteca Ludi is less like a blank page than a primed canvas that has been carried carelessly, buckled and spotted with marks. Any artist would grimace at it and refuse to pay the bill. It’s unusable. Unless, the Magister supposes, staring out through the leaded panes until h
er eyes begin to blur, unless he were one of these modern iconoclasts – the kind of enfant terrible she is old enough now to despise – who might simply exhibit it as it is. She saw a show like that in England once, a childish mess of solid colours, and it made her sick that someone should be allowed to get away with it. That a privileged, pretentious young man should be admired for mere audacity. At her side, Aunt Frances was bewildered, wandering from blue to green and finally coming to a halt in front of a panel of yellow. ‘Oh my,’ she murmured, ‘yes, it is … um …’ The Magister (although she wasn’t yet Magister Ludi, she was only Claire, halfway between lives, adrift in a foreign country) said nothing. All the energy she had was concentrated on not looking sideways to where the largest picture hung like a square of new-cut meat, with a thick bloody sheen. Red. If she never saw red again she would be happy.
Now she blinks away the pink shadows her brain has superimposed on the snow, and tries to see what’s there. A wide slope, criss-crossed by bird-prints and flecked with blown fragments of bark. Today is Sunday, and no one has come up the road; it’s a seam, a mere ripple under the white. Granite boulders hunch under their caps and burrow into the drifts. The sky is heavy, layered with grey strata. Another snowfall is coming.
There’s nothing unusual about snow. She draws back from the window, rubbing her eyes. Every year it falls, and stays, and melts. It’s hardly an omen, even less a surprise. She’s being fanciful. Allowing the weather to play on her nerves – is this how the madness begins? One day she feels this vague dread, as if pressure is building on the mountain behind Montverre, waiting for a yell, a dropped plate, a single gunshot … and the next she will be creeping to the library, secreting barrels of oil. She laughs. She is so afraid of madness she will drive herself mad, thinking about it. She’s being self-indulgent. Hysterical. Deliberately she uses the word she hates the most. A womanly state, of no importance. Like the nightmares, or the times when she can’t sleep, the surges of grief that catch her off guard, the new agony of a wound she thought had healed. Neurosis. A feminine lack of detachment. She turns her attention back to her desk, and the real blank page. Maybe, after all, this is why she can’t look at the snow without a prickling sense of malaise.
The Betrayals Page 12