Keeping Time

An instrument that gives you an answer you do not like is an instrument you check, and Nell spent the morning of the fourth day checking hers, because a preliminary report that rested on a glass she had not proved was not a report, it was an opinion with a licence number on it.

There were two proofs and the guild had taught her both in her first month.

The first was still water. She filled the copper bowl from the jug in her room, set it on the window seat in the morning room, let it stand until the surface was dead flat, and held the glass over it with the stopper drawn. Still water is the nearest thing in the world to nothing at all; it carries no working and it holds no residue, and against it the needle should hang in the middle of the scale and do nothing whatever. It hung. It did nothing whatever. Eleven minutes of nothing, which was tedious and which was the point.

The second was her own wrist.

“That is the part I do not understand,” Héloïse said. She had come in at half past ten with letters she did not open and had been sitting at the writing table with them for three-quarters of an hour, which was as near to loitering as Nell imagined she had ever come. “Water proves it is not lying to you. What does your wrist prove?”

“That it isn’t broken.” Nell turned her cuff back and laid the glass along the inside of her forearm, the base of it against the bone. “Hold on. Watch the needle, not me.”

It took a moment, the way it always did. Then the needle came off the middle of the scale and began to move, over and back, over and back, small and regular and unhurried.

Héloïse got up and came round the table to see it.

“It is keeping time,” she said.

“With me. That’s a living working and I’m the only one in the room, so it’s mine — everyone has a little, most of it doing nothing but running the person. Count it if you like.” Nell had her watch open on her knee. “Seventy-two. That’s what I ought to be at eleven in the morning with nothing to worry about.”

“And a dead one?”

“Doesn’t do that.” Nell stoppered the glass and the needle fell still. “A dead one hums. Low, even, the same note for as long as you sit with it — a drag, like something heavy being pulled over a floor in the next room and never arriving. I’ve heard it forty-one times. It doesn’t keep time with anything, because there’s nothing left in it to keep time with. That’s the whole of the difference, your grace, and there isn’t a third thing. Living keeps time. Dead drags.”

She said it and then she heard herself say it, and she looked up.

The duchess was standing beside her with one hand flat on the table, not looking at the glass any more.

“You should try it,” Nell said. “It’s your house. You’d read seventy-something and be bored by it, and then you’d know what I’m looking at when I tell you what I’ve found.”

She held the glass out, along her palm.

“No,” Héloïse said.

It came out without the courtesy on it. Then the courtesy arrived, a half-second late and very well made. “Forgive me. I have a dislike of instruments that I have never examined and am too old to be reasoned out of. My husband’s physician had a great many of them in the last year and I formed a prejudice.” She took her hand off the table. “Thank you for showing me. I do understand it better.”

“Your grace —“

“Will you dine with us? Sibyl has decided you are being starved in the interest of science.”

Nell should have let it go. Letting it go was correct, and she did let it go, and what she did not do was look away, and neither did Héloïse, and the thing went on three or four seconds past anything that a conversation about salt and needles could account for. Nell had had reason to think about temperature and light and hands every working day for nine years, and she could have said afterwards what the light was doing in that room and where the duchess’s hands were, and could not have said one word about what was in her own face.

She looked down first. She wrote instrument proved against still water and operator’s pulse, day four, 11 a.m. in the ledger in a hand that was not quite her usual hand, and she thought: note that. Note it like you’d note a cold.

Unprofessional, four days in, and observed. She did not write that part.

· · ·Scene break

She took the glass onto the east stairs at one o’clock in the morning.

The house was as quiet as it got. She had given Mrs Pardoe’s kitchen an hour to empty and the servants’ floor another, and she sat down on the half-landing with her back against the wall and the stand set on the flat of the tread below her, and the stopper drawn, and her watch open on her knee with the case turned to catch what light came off the window.

Then she did the one thing the work actually consisted of, which was to wait without deciding anything.

The needle found the working at eighteen minutes past.

It came off the middle of the scale the way it had in the morning room, and it did not hum, and it did not drag. It moved over and back, over and back, small and regular and unhurried, and the shape of it under Nell’s eye was so ordinary, so exactly what she had watched a hundred juniors produce off their own wrists in a cold training hall, that for four or five seconds she sat there waiting to be told what the trick was.

Then she counted it against the watch.

Sixty-one. She counted a second minute: sixty-one. A third: sixty-two, and the sixty-second beat a little late, the way a slow pulse in a resting body is late.

Nell put two fingers to her own throat and counted that, because she was not going to be the kind of operator who read her own fright into a room. Ninety-four. She was at ninety-four and the stairs were at sixty-one, and there was nothing else alive in that stairwell, and every hair on her arms was up.

She sat with it for twenty minutes to be sure, and moved the stand up two treads and got the same rate, and moved it down to the hall floor and got the same rate fainter, and carried the whole apparatus to the fourth step where a man had died eighteen months ago and set it down and waited eleven minutes for any trace at all of the low even drag that would have told her there was residue anywhere in this flight of stairs.

None. Not a tenth of the scale. Not once.

She wrote it in the dark, badly, by feel. No dead signature recovered on the east flight at any point. Signature present is periodic, 61–62, regular, consistent with a living working. No living person on the stairs.

She was still looking at that last sentence when the cold arrived — around her ankles first, the way it had every night since Tuesday, the cold with no address that came where she went — and above her, at the top of the flight, a door opened.

Nell did not move.

Héloïse crossed the landing in a dressing gown with a candle in her hand, on her way from her own room to the corridor that went to the morning room, unhurried, alone, not knowing there was anybody in the stairwell below her at all.

The needle went with her.

It did not jump and it did not break its rhythm; it simply got stronger, rising up the scale as she came along the landing and falling as she went away from it, the way a sound gets louder and then does not, and the rate of it stayed what it had been all night, and then — as she reached the corridor door, and stopped, and stood for a moment with the candle held up, the way a woman stops when she has thought of something — the rate climbed. Sixty-one to something nearer eighty, over four or five beats, and held, and came down again in the space of half a minute as she went on and the sound of her slippers went along the boards and away.

Nell sat on the half-landing of a great house at half past one in the morning with an instrument in her hands that had just kept time with a woman’s heart through two inches of oak and twenty feet of air, and understood that she had been employed for four days to burn her out of her own home.

She did not write it down. She sat still and let herself be exactly as frightened as the situation was, for as long as it took, which was about six minutes.

Then she picked the ledger up off the tread and left the entry exactly as it stood, with the numbers in it and the woman out of it, and told herself that a reading is a reading and a landing is not a stair.

· · ·Scene break

The evening post was on the hall table where Sibyl left things, under a paper-knife, and Nell saw the guild seal on the top letter as she came down with the glass under her arm.

It had been sitting there since seven o’clock while she was upstairs proving her instrument.

To N. Hartigan, licensed operator, at Wexhall in the parish of Ambry. Inspector R. Hale will attend at Wexhall on the eighth day of the current engagement to conduct a routine reading of the operator’s ledger and a walk of the premises. The operator will have her preliminary report drawn and available for his reading on arrival. Classification, method and date of clearance to be stated. By order —

There was more of it, about expenses and the form of the ledger, and Nell read all of it twice standing at the table in the cold with her coat still on, because reading it twice was better than the alternative, which was doing arithmetic.

Day eight. Four days.

Classification, method and date of clearance to be stated.

There was no box on the preliminary for the manifestation is a living working with a pulse of sixty-one at rest, and if there had been, it would not have been a mercy, because the schedule had only one instruction for a living working in a private house and it was the instruction that had been carried out in a farmhouse kitchen at Kettleby by a man who had never once in his life been made to find out whose side he was on.

Nell stood in the hall for a while.

The correct thing, the thing nine years and four hundred pages of standing orders said, was to go up to her room and write the finding in the ledger while it was fresh, seal the preliminary, put it in her case, and say nothing whatever to the client until the inspector had read it, because a client who knows what is in a report interferes with the report. She knew the clause number of that as well. She knew all the clause numbers. They were the only inheritance anybody had ever given her.

There was a light under the morning-room door.

She went down the corridor towards it with the glass still in her hand, still unstoppered, the needle still keeping its slow steady time against her palm — sixty-one, sixty-one, sixty-two — and she thought about the woman who had refused to hold it at eleven o’clock that morning with a lie so polite that it had taken Nell fifteen hours to hear it as one.

Héloïse was at the writing table with the lamp turned low and the letters from the morning still unopened in front of her. She looked up.

“Miss Hartigan. It is nearly two.”

“It is.” Nell came in and shut the door and stood there with the instrument held up between them, where the light would catch the needle and where they could both see what it was doing.

“It’s you,” she said. “It has always been you. Hasn’t it?”