The Latch

On the third day of the storm the latch on the ice-house door was frozen.

She worked at it with both gloved hands, and then with one glove off, and then with a stick of kindling from the passage, and it did not move at all. The iron had furred over with rime. Her bare fingers stuck to it for a second and came away stinging.

“It sticks when the wind’s in the north,” said Casimir behind her. “You have to lift before you push.”

She hadn’t heard him come into the passage. She should have. The cold always came into a room a moment before he did.

“I’m aware there’s a technique.”

“I’m sure you are.” He came to stand beside her, and put his hand over hers on the latch, and lifted, and pushed.

Neither of them moved for a second after the door gave.

His hand was over hers. His glove was off. It was the left hand, the bad one, and it was so cold she could feel the chill of it through her own skin like water through cloth, and she thought, very clearly and in words, I should take my hand back, and did not.

It was Casimir who stepped away. He did it carefully, the way you step back from a sleeping animal, and put the hand in his coat.

“Careful,” he said, quietly.

“Yes.”

“I only meant the latch.”

“I know what you meant,” Ilse said, and went into the ice-house before she could say anything else.

The storm had come down on the seventh day and shut the keep like a book.

It was not the kind of storm Ilse knew from Brennock, which arrived with thunder and left with a mess. This one had arrived without a sound. In the morning the valley had been there; by noon it wasn’t, and the windows showed nothing but a white so total it looked solid, and the wind moved round the tower with a long, patient pressure that made the shutters creak like a ship. Nobody went out. Nobody could. The fire in the kitchen was fed every hour by a rota, and the rota was posted on the pantry door in Wenna’s handwriting, ruled into columns.

Ilse had spent the first day on the cipher and got nowhere.

She had spent the second day on the cipher and got a little further than nowhere, which was worse, because it meant she could now see how far she had to go. The groups of four were not letters. The numbers between them were not page references. On the third page a group repeated eleven times in a column, like a list, and she had sat looking at it until her eyes watered and then gone down to the ice-house to count something she could actually count.

The ice-house was a round stone building across a short covered passage from the kitchen yard, and in a winter this long it had stopped being a place for keeping food. She knew that. Tove had told her. She had meant to go anyway, because an inquiry should look at the thing it was inquiring into, and because she had been in a warm kitchen for two days with a cipher and was beginning to feel like a coward.

· · ·Scene break

There were eleven of them.

They lay on the stone shelves along the curved wall under canvas, each with a wooden tag tied at the foot, and the light from the passage door made the frost on the canvas glitter. Ilse had counted debts owed by the dead before, in the Registry, a hundred times. She had never counted the dead.

She read the tags because that was what she knew how to do. J. Aldous, Lowcross, 63. That would be Jory. A child, Lowcross, 4. She stopped reading after that one.

Casimir stood in the doorway and didn’t come in.

“I come down every week,” he said. “I don’t know why. They’re not going anywhere. Maud thinks it’s morbid.”

“It isn’t morbid.”

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a count.” She turned round. “You come and check the count. So nobody can tell you later it was smaller.”

He looked at her for a long moment with an expression she couldn’t read, and then he said, “Yes,” as if she’d put her finger on a number in his own handwriting.

“When the ground thaws,” Ilse said, “they’ll be buried.”

“When the ground thaws, Oster walks down that valley.” He said it without any heat at all. “So every week I come and look at eleven people who can’t be buried because I’m keeping the whole march alive, and I tell myself that’s the right arithmetic, and then I go back up and have my porridge.” A breath. “I’ve never shown anyone in there. Rurik knows. Maud knows. I didn’t want you to find it on your own.”

“Why?”

“Because you’d have written it down,” he said, “and I’d rather you wrote it down with me standing here.”

· · ·Scene break

They didn’t talk about the latch.

They didn’t talk about it for the rest of that day, or at supper, where the whole household ate in the kitchen shoulder to shoulder and the wind moved round the tower and Wenna read the fuel rota aloud to general applause. Ilse sat at one end of the table and Casimir at the other. She could feel exactly where he was in the room the whole time, the way you can feel a draught from a window you can’t see.

After supper she went up to the tower room, sat on the bed with her private ledger open on her knee, and after a long time wrote on a fresh page:

Record of a matter which may later be disputed.

Day 8 of the inquiry. Ice-house latch. His hand over mine, approximately four seconds. I did not withdraw mine. I wanted not to. This is recorded so that I cannot later persuade myself it was the cold.

She read it back. It was accurate. It was also the most ridiculous thing she had ever written in a ledger, and she had once recorded a bishop’s debt in hens.

There was a knock at the door.

She knew who it was before she said come in, because the room got colder, and she did not close the ledger in time.

Casimir looked at it. He was too well-mannered to read upside down and too honest to pretend he hadn’t seen that there was writing there.

“I came to apologise,” he said. “For the latch.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I think I do.” He stayed in the doorway. “I’m not in a position to — Ilse, you hold a page with my name on it. Everything I do near you has that page in the room. I’d rather not ever make you wonder whether a thing was meant or was a man trying to be rid of his winter.”

“I don’t wonder that.”

“You don’t know that you don’t.”

“I know exactly what I know.” She held up the ledger. “I wrote it down.”

He blinked.

“It’s a record of a matter which may later be disputed,” Ilse said, with enormous dignity, because it was either that or put her face in the pillow. “In the guild we write things down at the time so that nobody can argue about them afterwards. Including ourselves. I’ve recorded that I didn’t take my hand back. I’ve recorded that I didn’t want to. I’ve recorded that it wasn’t the cold.” She shut the ledger. “So you don’t need to apologise. You’d be apologising for something I’ve entered as my own.”

Casimir stood in the doorway for what felt like a long time.

Then he laughed. It was not the dry breath he used in public. It came up out of him as though it had been stored somewhere a long while, and he put his good hand over his eyes and laughed until he had to lean on the doorframe, and Ilse, who had never once in her life made anyone laugh on purpose, found that she was laughing too.

“You kept minutes,” he said, when he could.

“I keep minutes on everything.”

“You kept minutes on me.” He took his hand from his eyes. The laughter went out of his face slowly, and what was underneath it was plain, and tired, and not at all careful. “All right. Then enter this, since we’re keeping the record. I’ve wanted to stand closer to you than a grille for three years. I’ve never said so because I paid a levy at your counter and that’s not a thing a man says to someone who can’t refuse to serve him. I’m saying it now because you’ve been honest and I’d be ashamed not to be.”

The wind leaned on the tower.

“And I’m not going to do anything about it,” he said. “Not because of the page. Or not only. Because I’ve never in my life known how to take something I haven’t paid for, and I don’t want to learn on you by getting it wrong.”

Ilse looked down at the ledger in her lap, and then up at him.

“I’m not going to do anything about it either,” she said. “Not because of the page. Because I’ve never in my life wanted something I couldn’t put a number on, and I don’t trust it, and I won’t make you the place where I find out whether I’m right.” She swallowed. “That’s also for the record.”

“Duly noted,” said Casimir.

“Duly noted,” said Ilse.

He went. He closed the door very quietly.

She opened the ledger and wrote it all down, every word, and it took her until past midnight, and it was the most accurate thing she had ever recorded.

· · ·Scene break

On the ninth morning the storm lifted. The valley came back out of the white piece by piece: the ridge, the treeline, the road to Lowcross cut clean through the drifts by men with shovels who had started at dawn.

At noon somebody rang the gate bell.

It was Tove, on two sticks, with snow to her knees and a basket over one arm, twenty days before she was due. She did not come in. She handed the basket to the gate guard and said something short, and turned round, and went back down the road the way she had come.

The guard brought the basket to the kitchen. It held a mutton pie, still faintly warm under three layers of cloth, and a note on a strip of brown paper in a large, angry hand.

For the Warden. And for the Reader, who looked.

Rurik read it over Ilse’s shoulder and said nothing at all, and went out into the yard, and was gone for some time.