Love Made Me Blind

At two in the morning, the only person who ever speaks to me is a book. This one had been dragged out of a flooded cellar on Fenwick Row and delivered to the Corrow Archive in a bread crate. It lay open on my bench like a patient who had given up arguing. Its pages had fused into a single grey slab, and the smell coming off it was the smell of the harbour in August: salt, rot, and something older underneath. "I know," I told it. "It's rude of the water. But you're not dead yet, so stop being dramatic." I was reaching for the bone folder when somebody knocked on the glass of the street door. Not a polite knock. Three slow raps, spaced like a man who has never once been told to wait. I looked at the clock. 2:07. I looked at the window, where rain was coming down hard enough to blur the lamplight into long gold smears, and I thought about the sensible thing, which was to stay exactly where I was. The knock came again. I'm told I have a problem with curiosity. Tamsin, my best friend, calls it a medical condition. My mother calls it my father's fault. They're both right, and neither has ever stopped me from doing the stupid thing, so I wiped my hands on my apron and went down the stairs. Through the glass, a man stood on the Archive steps with no umbrella. Rain ran off his dark hair and down the collar of a plain grey coat, the sort a person buys when he wants to be invisible and can't quite manage it. He was tall, and he held himself the way people do who have learned to make a room wait for them. But he wasn't looking at the door. He was looking down at something in his hand. I opened it on the chain. "We're closed." "I know." His voice was low and dry, and unhurried even in the rain. "I'm sorry about the hour. Are you Maelis Verrin?" Nobody uses my full name at two in the morning. Nobody uses it at all. "Who's asking?" "Someone who owes you an apology." He lifted his hand and showed me what he was holding. "And a letter." Under the lamp, I saw an envelope, soft with damp, creased at the edges. It was one of the cheap cream ones I buy by the hundred from the stationer on Lantern Street. And the handwriting on the front was mine. To whoever opens this. My stomach dropped through the floor, and then through the cellar beneath it. I have a habit. I've had it since I was fifteen. When a book comes to my bench to be mended, and when I'm finished, and when no one is looking, I write a short note to a stranger and sew it into the spine, where the thread hides it. Nobody was ever supposed to find them. The books go back to their owners, sit on shelves for sixty years, and one day a grandchild cracks the binding open and finds something kind. My father started it. He used to tuck notes into the survey books he carried. He called it leaving a lamp on. I had never, not once, been caught. "Where did you get that?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "May I come in?" "No." "That's fair." He didn't move. Rain was running into his eyes and he let it. "Then I'll say it from here. It was inside a book that came across my desk. I wasn't meant to read it. I read it standing in my office with the door shut, and then I read it again, and then I did something I haven't done in about nine years." He glanced up. "I went looking for the person who wrote it." I should have shut the door. Every instinct I owned was telling me to shut the door. "What does it say?" I asked, which was a ridiculous question, because I knew exactly what it said. I had written it a year ago on a night I couldn't sleep, sitting on the floor of this room with a hymnal in my lap and a cold cup of tea beside me. He didn't take it out. He didn't need to. "Whatever you're carrying," he said quietly, "set it down for a minute. Nobody is grading you tonight." The street was very loud with rain. I couldn't hear anything else. Because that was the line. That was the whole of it, nearly. I had spent forty minutes on those two sentences, crossing out clever versions, until I was left with the plain one. "You wished a stranger well," he said. "I came to find out who does that." I unhooked the chain. I'd like to tell you it was a considered decision. It was not. It was the same part of me that talks to ruined books at two in the morning, and it didn't know yet that it was about to cost me everything. He stepped in out of the rain. The dark wool of his coat steamed faintly in the heat of the foyer. Up close he was younger than I'd thought, maybe thirty, with a face built from angles that someone had tried to soften with good manners and only partly succeeded. His eyes were grey and tired and sharply attentive, the kind that catalogue everything in a room and then pretend they haven't. He took in the foyer. The worn stairs. The coat hooks. The water dripping from his own sleeves onto the tile. "I'm sorry about your floor." "It's seen worse. Last week it was a fish." His mouth moved. It wasn't quite a smile, more the rumour of one. "A fish." "It was in a book. Don't ask." I folded my arms. It was the only thing I could think of to hide my shaking hands. "You've got about thirty seconds before I call the night guard, who is, I should warn you, seventy-three and extremely suspicious of tall men." "Understood." He held out the envelope. "It's yours. I only wanted to return it in person." I stared at it. I hadn't expected that. I had expected a demand, or a threat, or money. I had expected someone who wanted something from me. Instead he stood there with the letter held out in two careful fingers, the way you hold something that might still be alive. I took it. The paper was warm from his hand. "You could have posted it," I said. "I could have." He seemed to think about that. "I didn't want anyone else to handle it." There was something in how he said it, a care that did not match the stranger-in-the-rain script, and it snagged in me like a thread on a nail. "Why?" "Because someone who writes that," he said, "probably isn't expecting anyone to be careful with her." Silence. The old radiator ticked. I became aware, in a series of small humiliations, that my hair was falling out of its knot, that I had paste on my cheekbone, that I was wearing an apron with a hole in it, and that this soaked, infuriating man was looking at me as though I were the first interesting thing he had seen in a month. "Right," I said. "Well. Thank you. You've returned it. Goodnight." "There's one more thing." Of course there was. He reached inside his coat, and for one wild second I thought of knives, and then he drew out a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, bound with twine, and heavy with water. A tag hung from the knot in a clerk's handwriting. Lot 41. He set it on the bottom stair between us as though laying down an offering. "I'd like you to save something for me," he said. I looked at the bundle. A thin line of harbour water crept out from under it across the tile. I knew that smell. Salt and rot and something older underneath. Every professional instinct I have turned toward it like a plant to a window. Don't do it, said the sensible part of me. You don't know him. He's wet and he's handsome and he's lying about something. A man doesn't cross a city in the rain at two in the morning to return a stranger's note. "What is it?" I heard myself ask. "An account book. It was in the water for three weeks before anyone fished it out. The ink is nearly gone." For the first time his voice thinned, a hairline c***k in the polish. "I need every line of it back. And I need it in seven days." "Seven days is not enough time to dry it, never mind read it." "I know." "Nobody in this city could do it in seven days." "I know that too." He looked at me steadily, rain still shining on his jaw. "That's why I came to you." Something cold touched the back of my neck. Not fear exactly. The feeling of standing at the edge of a platform when the train is still a long way off, and feeling the rails begin to hum. "Who are you?" I asked. He didn't answer. He looked, instead, past me, up the dim stairwell toward the light spilling from my workshop, where a ruined book from Fenwick Row waited on my bench beside a lamp I had left burning. "Do you always work this late?" "Do you always answer a question with a question?" "Only when I'm afraid of the answer." It was the first honest thing he had said, and I think we both heard it. The air between us changed. It didn't soften. It tightened, like a thread pulled just before it breaks. Above us, in the Archive, the old clock struck the quarter hour. Seven days, I thought. One stranger. One impossible book. And a letter in my pocket that I had never meant anyone to read, written to a man I had never met, who had somehow walked through the rain to find me. I knew, standing there with the harbour dripping across my floor, that if I said no, nothing would happen. That was exactly the problem. I'd never wanted anything to happen so badly in my life. "Bring it up," I said. "Mind the third step. It's loose."