Description: female, tall, dark, forty years or thereabout, brown hair worn back, marked upon the left arm and about the throat. Circulated at Halverside
They should have gone on the Friday and it was her that kept them.
She wanted to be clear about that afterward, in her own head, at the times when she was going over it, which was often. It was not him. He said, on the Friday morning, in the flat voice, that there were four roads out of Halverside and that by Monday there would be two, and that a firm of attorneys would post a letter to any address in the province and that they could give Ferris a name at Cauldry and be sixty miles off.
And she said no.
She said no because Ferris was going to have the name of whoever instructed that third renewal, and because she had spent twenty-one years not knowing a great many things and had decided somewhere on the church steps in the dark that she was finished with it.
That is not a reason, said Azaelis. That is an appetite.
“Yes,” said Su’inn. “It is my first one in twenty-one years and I am going to have it.”
Very well.
“That is all? Very well?”
You have refused me twice on the road and been right both times, he said, and I have been keeping a private account of it, and by my reckoning you are owed one.
She spent Saturday and Sunday in a lodging above a wheelwright’s on the far side of the water where the woman took a week in advance and asked nothing, and she did not go out, and she did the thing she had been putting off since Cauldry, which was to sit down with her own hands and find out what was left in them.
She ran the stay on nothing, four times, and it came clean.
She ran the close on a fold of her own skin at the wrist, twice, and it came clean.
She ran the slow over the burn on the left forearm, which she had not done in eleven years and which was pointless, and it went in like weather and did nothing at all, exactly as it had every time she had done it between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-two, and she stopped doing it again for the same reason she had stopped the first time.
Why do you do that.
“To check.”
It is a shut window. It has been shut for twenty-one years.
“I know it is a shut window,” said Su’inn. “I run it about once a decade so that I can go on knowing it is a shut window, because there is a version of me that stops running it and starts thinking about all the reasons it might not be, and that woman is insufferable and I have met her.” She wiped her hand. “Everything works. Whatever you have been doing to this body, none of it has come out of my hands yet.”
Yet, said Azaelis.
“Yes,” she said. “Yet. I heard it.”
Ferris’s letter came to the wheelwright’s at the eighth hour on Monday morning and it was three lines long and one of them mattered.
Sir. The renewals at seven and fourteen years were instructed by the late Mrs Ellis Kell in person at this office. The renewal at twenty-one years was instructed in writing by a party for whom this firm acts in another matter, and I am not at liberty to name that party to you, and I am aware of what I have just told you by declining. F.
Su’inn read it four times.
“He is not at liberty.”
He is not at liberty, and he has written it down and put his hand to it and sent it to me, which he was also not at liberty to do. Something in it had gone very quiet. Su’inn. Read the second half again.
“A party for whom this firm acts in another matter.”
Yes.
“That is you.”
That is a class of about four hundred people and I am one of them, said Azaelis, and I want you to hold on to the four hundred for a day or two, because you are about to spend the whole of this morning being certain and there is no ground under it yet. A pause. And also, yes. It could be me. I have thought of nothing else since the second line.
She folded the letter.
“You did not instruct a renewal on a standing inquiry against a woman you had never heard of.”
I did not, he said. And I have signed a very great many instruments in eleven years that were put in front of me by a firm I trusted, on matters I did not read, because I have four hundred years of judgement and I use most of it on the things I have decided are interesting. Level. I do not know what is in my own file. That is not a confession. It is a description of every wealthy man who has ever lived.
They came at noon.
She was at the window because she had been at the window for an hour, and she saw the first of them come over the bridge on foot, and she did not need to see the second.
Down the back. Now.
The wheelwright’s yard had a gate onto the lane and the lane ran down to the water and there was a footbridge at the bottom, and she went down the stairs and across the yard and through the gate at a walk that took everything she had.
There was a man at the bottom of the lane.
Not looking at her. Looking up it, at the top, where she had come from, in the way that men are posted.
She turned back.
There was a man at the top of the lane.
Wall on your left. The long one. That is the mill leat and it is walled both sides and there is a gap at the wheelhouse and the wheelhouse has a door on the far side.
“You have not been in this town.”
I have been in eleven towns with mills in them and they are all the same town.
She went over the wall.
It was not a good wall either and the left hand did not help, and she came down badly on the far side into six inches of black water and gravel and came up soaked to the knee, and started down the leat toward the wheelhouse with the stone going past her shoulder on both sides.
Behind her, up on the lane, somebody said something short.
The wheelhouse was locked.
She stood in front of it in the water with her hand flat on the wood and heard boots up on the wall.
Su’inn.
“It is locked.”
I know it is locked.
She turned around.
The leat ran straight for forty yards behind her and there was a woman standing in it at the far end with her coat off, not hurrying, coming down the middle of the channel through the water with the unhurried economy of somebody who has done this a great many times and is not going to be out of breath at the end of it.
Su’inn put her back against the wheelhouse door.
How much.
“I do not know.”
Azaelis. How much.
I do not know, he said, and it was the first time in eleven weeks she had heard him say a number was beyond him at a moment when she needed one. I do not know what this costs because I do not know what I am about to do, and I am not going to know until I am doing it, and if I give you a figure now it will be a comfort and not a number.
The woman was thirty yards away.
“Then guess.”
A day. Perhaps two. And Su’inn, I am going to say the other thing, and I am going to say it now because in about ten seconds you will not be able to hear anything.
“Say it.”
I am going to get us out of this leat, said Azaelis, and you are not going to like how.
Twenty yards.
She thought about a peat cutter’s leg and a boy who would be tired at thirty. She thought about an old priest with a book inside his coat. She thought about a notice of need lying dormant in a drawer at the provincial office with her description in the margin.
She thought: I know exactly who I am handing this to.
That was the part she came back to, afterward, more than any of the rest of it. Not that she had not known. That she had.
“Take it,” said Su’inn, and let go.