Love Made Me Blind

Chapter 7: Footsteps Before Midnight

Bram Hollis arrived at eleven with two men in grey suits, and I knew, from the creak of the front door, that Soren had called them the moment my back was turned.

"I said no," I told him on the landing.

"You said no to the stairs."

"That is a very narrow reading."

"I'm a very narrow man." He did not smile, but there was something at the corner of his eyes that suggested he wanted to. "I've called one person. He's a friend. He won't come up. He'll sit in the car and wait for me to tell him whether to go home."

I would have argued. I'd have thrown the handkerchief at him. But the man coming up the stairs behind him was already taking off his hat.

He was a broad, rumpled, kindly looking man of about thirty-five, with a crooked nose and the face of a person who has been up all night more often than he'd like. He carried a thermos. His suit had been slept in. He stopped on the third stair, the loose one, and stepped over it with a flawless little hop that told me Soren had warned him.

"Miss Verrin," he said. "Bram Hollis. I run what Soren calls an office, which mostly means I remember where he's put things." He offered a hand. "I'm told you're a terror."

"I'm told you're a friend."

"Also true." His grip was warm and brief. "I'm sorry about the door."

"It's not your fault."

"No. But I'd like to make it somebody's." He turned to Soren, and his voice dropped, something shared and unsaid passing between them. "Two men downstairs. Say the word."

I watched Soren think.

I'd learned something about him in three nights. He doesn't answer quickly when it matters. He takes a breath, and the whole room waits, and when the answer comes it is always shorter than you expect.

"Send them home," he said.

Bram's eyebrows rose. "Both?"

"Both. Too many strangers near the book. It's what they'd expect." He glanced at me. "Miss Verrin's rules."

"Are they?"

"They are now," I said.

Bram looked from me to Soren, and the crooked nose twitched, and something in his face eased like a man putting down a heavy bag. "Right. I'll be in the car, then." He handed Soren the thermos. "Tea. It's disgusting. Drink it anyway."

He went down. I heard him murmur to the two men, a brief, warm, humorous exchange, and the door shut behind them, and then the street was quiet.

"He seems nice," I said.

"He's the best man I know."

"He's afraid of you."

"No." Soren turned the thermos over in his hands. "He's afraid for me. It's different, and a good deal more tiring."

I didn't ask what he meant. I went back into the workshop and picked up my loupe and tried to remember how to be a professional.

For two hours, we worked. I rehung the lamp. I changed the wedge under the humidity chamber door. I photographed each leaf again, from three angles, as though cameras could make up for the ones I'd lost. When midnight began to creep up the corridor, I found myself listening.

I couldn't help it. A building makes a sound at night, a living, creaking, breathing sound, and I'd lived in this one nine years. I knew the knock of the pipes. The sigh of the old beams. The loose tile in the stairwell that sounded like a cough.

I heard the sixth stair creak.

I put down the loupe.

"What?" said Soren, very quietly.

"Someone's on the stairs."

"Dunmore?"

"Dunmore doesn't use the stairs. He thinks they're beneath him." I lifted my eyes to the doorway. "That's not his tread."

He rose, soundlessly. It was the kind of silence I had only seen in animals, a smooth, controlled uncoiling. He picked up the heaviest thing in reach, which happened to be a brass paperweight shaped like a fish, and moved to stand beside the door with his back to the wall.

I should have been frightened. I was, a little. But under the fear, absurdly, there was a spurt of laughter, because the most powerful man in the city was about to ambush an intruder with a fish.

Footsteps. Slow. Close.

A shadow slid across the strip of light under the door.

The handle turned.

Soren lifted the paperweight.

"Maelis?" said a voice. "Are you still here?"

The door opened.

Hesper Quill stood in the doorway in her heavy grey coat, her bag over one arm, her silver hair coming loose from its knot. She looked as though she hadn't slept. She looked, in the strong light, ten years older than she had that morning.

Her eyes went to Soren, and the brass fish, and back to me.

"Good evening," she said faintly.

"Good God," I said, laughing in sheer relief. "Hesper, you nearly got a fish to the head."

"I can see that."

"What are you doing here? It's midnight."

"I couldn't sleep." She walked in slowly, setting her bag on the bench, avoiding Soren's eyes. "I thought I would check the press room. The humidity this week—" She trailed off. "Is everything in order?"

It was a perfectly ordinary question. Any director might have asked it.

But I'd known her nine years, and I knew the sound of her ordinary questions. And I heard the faint edge underneath this one, thin as a wire.

I hadn't told her about the leaves.

I'd meant to. I'd had my mouth open on the stairs. But then Bram had come, and the guards, and the hour had run on, and I hadn't rung her. Nobody had. And Hesper Quill, who had never in nine years come to the Archive after ten at night, who had once told me if you want to be a conservator, learn to love your bed, had arrived at midnight to check on the humidity in a room I'd have told her was fine.

"Everything's in order," I said slowly.

"Good." Her smile was brittle. "Good. Then I won't disturb you."

"Hesper."

"Yes, dear?"

"Did you come to check on the press room?"

"I did say that."

"Do you want to look?"

A pause so slight I might have imagined it. "That won't be necessary."

I looked at her, at her hands, tight on the strap of her bag, and I felt something cold and quiet settle in my stomach like a stone dropped in a well.

"Of course," I said. "Goodnight, then."

"Goodnight." She turned to the door. At the threshold she paused, and her eyes, just once, lifted to Soren, who had lowered the fish and stood very still beside the shelves. A look passed between them that I could not read. It was not hostile. It was not friendly. It was something older than both, wary and weary and strangely tender, like two people who have long ago agreed not to mention a thing.

"Mr. Aldane."

"Miss Quill."

And she went out.

I stood listening to her footsteps fade down the stairs, careful and slow, and when the front door closed, the silence in the workshop felt different. Thicker.

"She didn't ask about the leaves," I said.

"No."

"She didn't even ask who you were. Who was with me."

"She knew."

"She knew about the leaves too." My voice shook. "Didn't she?"

Soren set the paperweight gently on the bench. "I don't know."

"Don't you?"

"No." He looked at me directly. "I don't. And I'm not going to guess aloud about a woman who has been good to you."

It was the right thing to say. It was exactly the right thing, and I hated how steadily he said it.

I turned away and stood at the dark window, arms wrapped around myself. The street below was a wet black mirror. A lamp burned at the corner, pooling gold on the cobbles. I could see my own face in the glass, pale and drawn. Behind it, the reflection of the room.

And in the reflection, a man.

He had settled onto the paint-stained stool by the door. He had taken off his shoes. He sat with his elbows on his knees, a mug of Bram's terrible tea cooling in his hands, and he was watching the door with the quiet, patient attention of a man who had decided to guard something and would not be talked out of it.

I watched him for a long time in the glass.

He didn't know I could see. He sat there, the heir to half the harbour, a man whose name was written on cranes, in his socks on a stool that had been splashed with vermilion by an apprentice in 2019. He drank cold tea without complaint. His shoulders were tired. His face, in repose, was gentler than I had ever seen it, and strangely young.

He sat like a man keeping a vigil.

And something small and quiet and very dangerous moved in my chest. Not a flutter. Not a leap. Something slower than either, like the first loose stitch in a long seam.

I thought: oh, no.

I thought: I'm in trouble.

And in the reflection, as though he had heard it, Soren Aldane lifted his head, found my eyes in the glass, and held them.

Neither of us looked away.