Einherjar

01

The house was on the third street east of St. Stephen’s. The lane was narrow and the upper floors leaned toward each other. Two doors down, a red cross had been painted on a door. Rain had pulled the paint down into the wood. Below it, in a hand that sloped badly, someone had written Lord have mercy upon us.

The watchman sat on the step with bread on his knee. His hat was over his eyes. He was not asleep. He was not eating.

At the end of the lane, a fire-pot burned. The smoke smelled of pitch and sulphur. It stayed under the upper windows. The gutter ran dark between the houses. Above a doorway, a rag caught on a nail lifted once, then dropped.

You had been inside since morning.

The man on the bed had stopped breathing while you were downstairs washing rags. When you came back up, his jaw was slack and his eyes were half open. A fly was on his lower lip. You brushed it away. His skin shifted under your thumb. Nothing answered the touch. His fingers were still warm at the knuckles when you folded them over the cloth. That would not last.

You leaned close. The Latin came out low. The words had been in your mouth for years. The t and the s caught against your teeth. The vowels opened at the back of your throat. You did not hold the last sound the way the sisters had taught you to do across the courtyard. The room was too small for that. The bed had no breathing left in it. The hallway below was quiet. You let one line end and began the next.

Below, in the back of the house, his wife was alive. Through the floorboards she might hear the prayer without hearing the words.

You finished. Pulled the sheet to his chin, then over his face.

The room smelled of vinegar from the table and rosemary from the bowl by the window. Under that was the first sweet hour of the body. It would be worse by tomorrow if he stayed. Rue and dried lavender were tied in linen against your wrists. When you lifted your arm, the leaves moved against your skin and gave off one sharp green breath, then nothing. The apothecary on Fenchurch Street still had rue. The rosemary was running low. Last time, the man behind the counter charged three times the old price and watched your hands while you counted the coins.

The window was already open. August light came in flat and yellow and did nothing.

The body needed to go downstairs. The cart would come at dusk. Last night, two streets over, wooden wheels had knocked over broken stone, slow and uneven, with the hand-bell before them. The cart had been built for barrels. The boards were dark. The driver looked for the red marks on the walls. If no one brought the body out, he waited. If no one came after that, he went on and came back the next night. The lane was too narrow for turning, so the cart entered at one end and left by the other. The same grey horse came with it, dull-coated, careful around the gutter.

His wife had not come upstairs since yesterday. The neighbours on the left were dead, both of them, within three days of each other. On the right, behind a sealed door, a woman knocked on the inside of her window every morning at the same hour. You did not know if she wanted out, or if she wanted someone to know she was still there.

You had dragged a body downstairs alone before. Canvas under the shoulders, grip the corners, use the stairs. But this man had been tall, and the staircase turned twice, and the last time you did it alone the canvas tore at the first turn and the body slid and you sat on the landing for a while with your hands on your knees before you started again.

You went to the top of the stairs and looked down.

There was a man in the hallway.

The door had been open. Most doors on this street were open, the ones without the red cross, because the air was supposed to move and because it was August and because the people still inside had stopped caring who came through.

From the second floor, when he came in, a voice. Words he could not place. Not English. The sound came through the boards and into the stairwell. One phrase came clearer than the rest. A few syllables, slow, one after another. A pause. Then the phrase again. A third time. Then it stopped.

You appeared at the top of the stairs. You looked down at him and did not step back. Your sleeves were pushed past your elbows. Your forearms had the scrubbed raw colour of someone who washed with lye more than once a day. You stood with your weight on both feet. A dead man behind you, the plague on every side of the street, and you in the doorway.

"I need to bring a man down," you said. "He's dead. I can't manage the stairs alone."

Your voice carried down the stairwell. Each word reached the bottom. He looked at the staircase. Then he went up.

The room was small. The dead man was on the bed with the sheet over his face. The bowl of vinegar water. The folded rags. The shoes placed against the wall with the heels together. The window open, letting in air that carried the pitch smoke from the fire-pot and underneath it the gutter and underneath that the faint sweet thing from the bed.

You had already pulled the sheet back and were spreading canvas on the floor.

"His feet or his shoulders," you said.

"Shoulders."

You took the feet. He placed his hands flat on the dead man's back and used his weight to turn the body. The dead man's head went with the rest of him, loose on the neck. His arm slid off the edge of the bed. You caught it. The skin under your palm gave nothing back, no answering pressure, no small correction of muscle. Before you had folded the arm fully across the chest, his hand had moved from the back to one shoulder. He braced the body there and took the weight out of your hands.

The canvas took the weight. You lifted together. Your end was heavier because the legs were longer than the torso, and you adjusted your grip once, shifted your feet, started down backwards. The staircase was narrow enough that your shoulders nearly touched the walls on both sides. At the first turn you said "left" because his shoulder was about to catch the doorframe, and he corrected without answering. At the second turn the canvas bunched and you stopped, pulled the slack through with one hand while holding the weight with the other, and continued. The canvas had cut red lines across both your palms by the time you reached the bottom.

You set your end down. Lowered it until the weight was off your arms, then let go and straightened and pushed your hair off your forehead with the back of your wrist.

He picked up the body and carried it through the front door. Canvas and all, the whole weight, in one motion. He set it against the wall where the cart would stop. When the dead man's weight shifted against his chest, his feet did not move. His breathing was the same as before.

*

The dead man's wife was in the hallway. She had come from the back of the house in clothes that had not been changed in days, the fabric at her cuffs stiff with something dried. She was standing where her husband had been on the canvas two minutes ago. She was looking at the floor.

You told her where to go if she began to feel ill. Which parish clerk would record the death, and which door to use because the front entrance had been closed since May. Where food could be bought if the Cheapside market was still open, and where to try if it was not, and how to tell from a distance, because walking close enough to read the sign and then turning back was the kind of movement that made watchmen remember your face. You said it in order. The order worked. The woman stood and listened and looked past you at the front door and nodded at the end.

You would come back tomorrow and say it again if she had not heard it.

Outside, the light had shifted lower. The lane was the same. The watchman two doors down had not moved. His bread was still on his knee. Behind the sealed door, someone was coughing, a sound that came in long wet bursts and carried from one end of the lane to the other because there was nothing else on the street to absorb it, no cart wheels, no voices, no footsteps. In the gaps between each burst you could hear the person inside trying to breathe.

The tall man was in the street. He had not left. He was standing with his back near a wall, angled toward the south end of the lane, his weight forward on the balls of his feet. Half his face was covered, a strip of cloth dark with something, vinegar or sweat, tied behind his head, the edge sitting just below his eyes. On this street, in August, in the middle of the plague, that was not unusual. Everyone covered their faces. But his was more stable than most, the position fixed, the fabric pulled tight and flat, nothing loose, nothing that would slip.

"I'm here most days," you said. "This parish. Sometimes St. Stephen's, sometimes St. Margaret's. If you need to know when the carts come through, or which streets are closed."

He looked at you. His eyes went to your face, then your hands, then back. It lasted less than two seconds.

"Ghost," he said.

The coughing down the street had stopped. The fire-pot crackled at the corner. A pigeon somewhere above on a roof, its feet scraping on the tile.

"It's what I'm called."

The lane was empty. Red crosses on two doors, sealed shut. Smoke from the fire-pot hung at second-floor height and did not move. He was standing against the wall with the cloth over half his face.

"Yes," you looked at him. "I can see how you'd arrive at that."

His eyes changed. It was a small movement, there and then gone. You could not tell, because the cloth covered the rest.

You told him your name. The one name, the name the sisters had given you when you were small enough that you did not remember being given it. There was nothing else to offer. He did not ask for a family name. You did not explain why there was none.

He left south, toward the river, on the shadowed side of the buildings. He turned the corner and was gone.

You stood in the street for a few seconds after the corner was empty. Then you went back inside, because the wife was still in the hallway, and there was water to boil, and rags to wash again, and the cart would come in an hour, and before that there were two more houses on this street where the doors were not yet marked.

02

The plague did not end. It thickened through August and into September, the Bills of Mortality climbing week by week, the numbers passed around at market stalls and read aloud at doors, smudged by the fingers of everyone who had held them. The streets did not empty all at once. They thinned. A baker on Fenchurch Street closed, then the one on Lombard Street, then the one after that. The fire-pots burned at every corner now. Parish clerks ran out of space in their ledgers and started new ones.

You kept working.

The city had shrunk to a few streets and the people still on them. You saw the same faces at the same hours. The woman who sold herbs near Cheapside, her stock halving every week. The sexton at St. Stephen's, who had stopped wearing gloves because he could not dig fast enough with them on. The watchmen rotating between sealed houses, some of them coughing now themselves.

Ghost was one of the faces.

By August there were whole streets where no one lived. Families dead or fled, doors unlocked or broken, furniture still inside, beds still made. The houses stood open and dark and the only things moving through them were rats and wind and, at night, Ghost. He did not stay in the same one more than a few nights. He kept nothing in them that could not be carried out in the time between hearing a footstep on the stairs and reaching the back door.

He had come south from Manchester in July, on foot, on roads where the traffic was moving the other direction. Families with carts piled high, merchants closing their London houses, a magistrate's coach with the curtains drawn. They were leaving. He was walking in. The cloth over his face was the same as everyone else's, vinegar-soaked, tied behind the head. If his sat tighter and did not slip, no one on these streets was paying enough attention to notice.

He walked south in the mornings as far as Thames Street and turned east or west. He did not continue past Thames Street. He did not go near the Inns of Court. Each day, at Thames Street, he turned back. This was the line he did not cross.

*

You did not arrange to see him. The streets were too few and the living were too few, and if you walked east from St. Margaret's in the afternoon and he was walking west from wherever he slept, the lane was narrow enough that passing without acknowledgment would have required effort. Sometimes you spoke. Practical things. Which streets were closed this week. Where the carts had changed their route. Where clean water could still be had. Sometimes you said nothing, and he said nothing, and you walked past each other and that was the full transaction.

He was there the morning you wrapped a girl from the next street. He carried the vinegar water out without being asked. He was there the week after, at the end of a street you had not expected him on, standing against a wall with his arms at his sides, facing the south end of the lane. He was there when the parish clerk at St. Stephen's asked you to help count the week's dead for the Bill, and you sat in the vestry with the ledger open and your hands smelling of ink, and when you came out he was across the street, and neither of you explained why.

The city was small now and God, if He was paying attention, would not have had to work very hard to put two people on the same street. You began to know his hours. He moved south in the mornings, north in the evenings, and during the middle of the day he was not on any street you walked. You did not know where he went. You did not ask.

He began to know yours. You were certain of this because twice he appeared at a house you were working in before you had told anyone which house it was. He said nothing about it. You said nothing about it.

Your hours had a gap in them. He would have noticed.

Every day, at the same time, you were gone. Mid-afternoon, sometimes earlier. Whatever was in your hands was set down, and you left by a door or a lane he could not use. The direction changed. The length of time did not. When you came back, your face was the same. Your hands went back to the work.

He did not ask.

It was October, or late September. The light had changed. You were in a house on the south side of St. Stephen’s parish. A man had died there two days ago and his wife the day after. The bodies were gone. The smell was not. Their bedding was still on the bed, and you were folding it because the neighbours would not come in.

Ghost was in the doorway. The frame came up to his shoulders. He stood with one side forward, his left hand on the doorpost, the other at his side. His coat pulled at the shoulder seams. The right heel of his boot had begun to come away from the sole. The cloth over his face was dark with vinegar and use. He did not come further in.

You were kneeling beside the bed. The linen was better than most in this parish. Small flowers had been worked along the edge of the pillowcase in blue thread. You folded it. Set it on top of the rest.

Your hand moved. Forehead, chest, left shoulder, right shoulder. Fast, the fingers together, the motion compact, a thing your muscles had done so many times it no longer required thought. You did it before you remembered where you were, and who was in the doorway.

Rue still clung to your clothes. Your fingertips brushed the fabric and found what they knew. Ten years of it. More than ten. The cloth, the order of the movement, the place where the hand stopped. None of that was strange. The strange part was doing it under another person’s eyes.

You looked up. He was looking at you. His eyes were on your hand, which was still at your right shoulder, the last point of the cross. The pressure went out of your fingers. The old touch came back.

The room was quiet. The smell of the dead was in the walls. Outside, a cart went past, wheels on stone, and a dog barked once from somewhere below the lane.

You lowered your hand.

He did not speak. He did not look away. He did not step back or step forward. He stood in the doorway with the same posture he had come in with, and you understood that he had seen it, and that he knew what it was, and that he was not going to do anything about it.

You went back to folding the linen.

After a while he left. His footsteps went south, the same pace as always, and then the street was quiet.

The next time you saw him, three days later, nothing had changed.

He brought you a blue glass bottle. Whatever was inside sat too deep for the coloured glass to give it up. At home, you tipped it into your hand. The beads of a rosary slipped through the narrow mouth, one after another. Wood, or bone, struck your palm. More familiar than cloth under your fingertips.

Fifty-nine beads and a small cross. You counted them with your fingers. A long time passed before you put them back into the bottle.

You were not sure if that made you safer or less safe. You did not stop seeing him.

03

The parish clerk’s office at St. Stephen’s was above the vestry. Low ceiling. One window. Tallow, old paper, damp wool when it rained. The ledgers were on shelves along the back wall, stacked by year. The newest one lay open on the desk. It had been open since June. The pages were full, the last names written so small the letters touched.

The ledger from the year before was on the top shelf. The clerk had asked you to check whether a woman who had died last week had any recorded kin. The ladder was old. The rungs bowed in the middle. You were near the top when the door opened below.

You did not need to look. His left foot always came down heavier than the right. He came through doors shoulder first.

"Come down from there," he said.

"Catch me."

You jumped before he answered. Your skirt caught air. Your stomach went with it. Then his hands were on you, one at your ribs and one under your arm, and your weight hit him without moving his feet. His fingers tightened once. Then you were standing. He let go.

You brushed dust from your palms onto your apron and picked up the ledger that had come down with you.

"The ladder was right there," he said.

"The ladder was behind me. You were in front of me. You're closer than a ladder and more reliable."

He did not answer. You set the ledger on the desk and turned back to him.

The seam on his left shoulder had torn open. Three inches, perhaps. The shirt showed through, grey under the dark wool. The edge of the coat had begun to fray.

"How long has that been like that," you said.

He looked down at his shoulder.

"I can fix it," you said. "I have thread."

"You don't need to."

"I've seen you eat. I know what you own. You have one coat. If you wait for it to fix itself, you'll be wearing two pieces of clothing by Christmas."

The sewing kit was already in your hands, the one you carried for the houses, for shrouds and bedding that needed mending before it could be used again. The needle was thick, meant for canvas, not wool, but it would hold.

"Sit down," you said.

He sat on the edge of the desk. The torn wool was coarse under your fingers when you pulled it together. Smoke first, then vinegar, then sweat and old wool. The stitches went in uneven. You had never been good at this. The sisters had said so often enough. Time had not improved it.

"This is ugly," you said, looking at your own work.

He did not look at it. He looked at the window across the room. His shoulder did not move under your hand.

"I once mended a curtain at the convent and the Mother Superior asked if a dog had done it," you said. "She meant it as a genuine question."

His shoulder moved. One small shift. You finished the seam, bit the thread, tucked the end under.

"Done. Don't pull it. Don't reach for anything above your head. Don't do anything sudden."

"That limits my options."

"Your options were already limited. Now at least your coat is in one piece."

The needle and thread went back in the bag. Out came the food. Bread, hard but not stale. A piece of cheese wrapped in cloth. Two apples from the market on Cheapside, which had reopened last week for the first time since August. The apples were small, bruised on one side, the kind that would not have been sold six months ago. There was enough for two. You often carried extra for the people you visited, the ones behind sealed doors who lowered baskets from their windows.

The yard behind the vestry was thick with graves. The newer ones were easy to spot, the earth darker, not yet settled, some without markers. The sexton had stopped carving names into the wooden crosses in September. There were too many. The crosses were blank now, or marked with a date and nothing else.

The step by the vestry door was wide enough for two. He followed you out and sat beside you. His knee was near yours, with a little space left between. The food went between you. You tore the bread and held your half in both hands.

The words passed silently. Your lips did not move. The bread was in your hands. The graves were in front of you. Sparrows moved in the eaves of the church. For one second the words were there, and then they were finished, and you ate.

His eyes were on your hands when you looked up. He had not started eating. He was looking at the place where your hands had been still. You tore off another piece of bread. He began eating after you.

The cheese was sharp and dry. The apples tasted like October, thin-skinned, the flesh soft near the core. You ate yours down to the seeds. He ate his the same way, nothing wasted. For a while there was only chewing, sparrows, and a cart on the main road, wheels loud in the empty streets.

A bell sounded from somewhere east. The flat dull ring of the death cart's hand-bell, two or three streets over. You both heard it. Neither of you turned. The sound moved south, faded, was gone.

"You do that every day," you said. "Walk to Thames Street and turn around. You never go past it."

You said it with your mouth half full, because you had noticed weeks ago and it had never seemed worth a separate conversation.

He chewed. Swallowed. Looked at the unmarked crosses in the yard.

"There's someone I used to work for," he said. "He lives past Thames Street."

"And you can't see him."

"If I go near him, someone might know I'm here. He may have given them my name. I don't know. I don't know if anyone is looking."

It was the most words he had said at once since you had met him. His voice did not change while he said them.

"So you walk to the same street every morning and turn around," you said.

"Yes."

"That sounds like a terrible way to live."

"It's not the worst one."

The ledger was on the step beside the food, brought out with the bread and cheese, the clerk's question still unanswered. The most recent pages were open, the names packed tight in compressed handwriting. Each entry had the same format: family name, given name, parish, date. The family names were written first, larger, and the given names after, smaller, sometimes abbreviated. Whole families on the same page. A man, then his wife two lines below, then a child below that, all with the same word in the first column, connecting them line to line.

Your finger ran down the column of family names.

"I don't have one of these," you said.

He looked at the ledger. At the column your finger was on.

"The sisters gave me a name when I was small. Just the one. I don't know whose I was before that." You turned a page. More names, more families. "You give yourself to God, you don't need the rest. That's what they told me. And I believe it. Most of the time."

The sparrows had moved from the eaves to the yard wall. The light was pale gold now, late autumn, coming in low enough to put the newer graves in shadow and the older ones in sun.

"But sometimes I think it must be a strange thing, to have a word that someone else also has. That connects you to people you've never met."

He was sitting beside you. He did not say anything. The crumbs and the cloth and the apple cores were on the step between you. The cloth over his face shifted. A small thing, a fraction of an inch to the left. If you had not been sitting this close you would not have seen it.

You closed the ledger.

He picked up the apple cores and the cloth and put them in his pocket. You sat in the yard for a while longer. The cart bell sounded again from further south. The sparrows came back to the eaves. The light moved across the graves, and the blank crosses threw short shadows on the dark earth, and neither of you said anything else, and neither of you left.

04

The first frost came in late November. It settled on the rooftops and the sills and the red crosses on the doors. In the morning the gutters that had run all summer with dark water were still, the surface frozen into a thin dirty skin. The fire-pots at the corners burned smaller. Pitch was running low. The cold air carried less smell, and what had been unbearable in August sat faintly under the frost by December.

The Bills of Mortality dropped. Not suddenly. No one trusted the first week, or the second. The numbers fell from thousands to hundreds, and people read the sheets and folded them and put them away. Then hundreds became dozens. The sheets moved more slowly from hand to hand. By January the numbers were low enough to look like ordinary death again. A city could produce those numbers without carts.

In December you saw him near the river. In January, outside a church while the sexton worked at frozen ground. Once in February he was at the end of a lane with the wind coming straight through it and nobody else there. The coat was the same. The seam had held. Rain had darkened the wool at the shoulders and dried there more than once.

Through the winter, the living opened their sealed doors one by one. Most doors stayed shut. Neighbours waited a week, then two. Someone went in. After that the house either filled again or stayed open with the furniture inside. Rain and frost took the red crosses down by degrees. No one painted new ones. The houses he used were filling too. Families came back. New tenants shut doors that had stood open all autumn. You did not ask where he slept after that.

Coal was by your door one morning, in a bag you did not know, tied with a knot you did. Three tallow candles were on a table in a house where you were working. Thick ones. They had not been there the night before. A wool blanket was folded on the vestry step, rough, with the smell of another house in it. No note. You did not look.

By spring the city was filling. Cheapside had carts again, and voices, and shutters being raised in the morning. The bakers opened. The coffee houses. The tailors. Families came back from the country with furniture in wagons. New tenants scrubbed walls, replaced bedding, opened windows. The air that came in was cold and clean and carried the river and cooking smoke. By summer there were enough people on the streets that you could walk from St. Stephen’s to the river without counting everyone you passed.

The watchers came back too. Doors that had been open all summer were closed now. Parish constables stood longer at corners. Men who had not cared where anyone went in August had begun to look twice. Ghost's routes shifted. He no longer walked the same streets at the same hours. A week would pass. Then he would be at the end of a lane you were crossing, and you would walk together for a while, and then he would turn south or east and be gone. The gaps grew longer. There were more streets now, more people on them.

The afternoon you found him was a Thursday in June. The air was warm. A west wind brought the river smell through Cheapside, and under it the smell of green things from yards that had been shut up all year. You were not working. The clerk had not called you. There were no houses to visit, no bodies to wrap, no baskets to fill. You stood in the street with nothing in your hands.

You walked east. Toward the river, toward the streets where he had been last week. There was no reason for it.

He was on a bench outside a church you did not know, in a small yard with an old garden. The bench was low. His knees sat too high, his legs spread to make room for the rest of him. His forearms rested on his knees. His hands hung between them. He was looking at the weeds in the paving cracks.

The garden had gone wild over the plague year. Rows had broken. Herbs had spread into the stones. Flowers had come up where no one had put them.

He saw you before you reached the gate. His head turned. He watched you cross the yard.

You sat down beside him.

Neither of you explained.

The garden was in front of you. It was not beautiful. The lavender had gone leggy and was falling sideways into something yellow. The yellow had grown through the base of a rose that had not been cut back in over a year. The rose was blooming anyway, small tight flowers, dark pink.

"Apothecary's rose," you said. "Rosa gallica. The petals go into rosewater. Conserves too. The sisters used to dry them and put them in sachets for headaches. That yellow one is woad. Isatis tinctoria. It makes blue dye, but you have to ferment the leaves first, and the smell is terrible. We had a vat of it at the convent one summer and the Mother Superior made us move it outside the walls."

He looked at the garden while you spoke. His eyes moved when your hand moved.

"That one," you pointed at a low plant with grey-green leaves near the wall, "is southernwood. Keeps moths out of wool. That is comfrey, good for bones. The tall one at the back with the purple flowers is foxglove. It will stop your heart if you eat it, so don't."

"I wasn't going to," he said.

"I'm being thorough."

The wind moved through the yard. Lavender brushed against the yellow flowers and left its smell on the air. A bee worked the rose, going from one tight flower to the next, its legs yellow.

You leaned back on the bench. The wood was warm from the sun. Your shoulders touched the back. Above the church wall the sky was pale blue, late June, with the light still high.

"There's a plant I've only seen in drawings," you said. "In a book at the convent. Jasminum. The flowers are white and the smell is supposed to carry across an entire garden at night. It comes from Persia, or India, or somewhere that isn't here."

He was quiet for a moment.

"There are ships from the East Indies," he said. "They bring seeds back. Plants."

You turned your head to look at him.

"Some of them survive," he said. "There's a man in Fulham growing things in a walled garden that have no business being in England."

"How do you know about a man in Fulham."

"I used to read other people's letters."

"And the seeds survive."

"Some." He looked at the garden. "Ten years from now there will be plants in London that nobody here has seen before."

Ten years from now the gardens would be different, and he had said this to you, sitting beside you.

You looked at the foxglove at the back of the garden, purple, tall, poisonous, blooming anyway.

"Other people's letters," you looked at him and said. "That's a crime."

"It was my job."

"You know trade routes. You know about ships and seeds and a man in Fulham with a walled garden. You know which streets in London are safe and which are not and you know it before the parish constables do. You sleep in empty houses and you don't go past Thames Street and your name is Ghost." You ticked these off on your fingers. "You are the most suspicious person I have ever met, and I work for an illegal church."

His eyes were on you. The cloth covered everything from the bridge of his nose down, so what you could see was his eyes and the skin above them. He did not look away. He did not look at the garden or the gate or the street beyond. He looked at you, and you looked back at him.

A cart went past on the road outside the yard. A woman called something to someone in a voice that was annoyed and ordinary. Sparrows fought briefly in the eaves of the church, a burst of wings and small angry sounds, and then settled.

Your shoulder was not touching his. Between you, a strip of bare wood sat cold under the open air. It had been cold since winter. Your body would warm it if you moved over. Summer would warm it if you waited long enough. The board would end in the same condition.

Neither of you moved.

The sparrows came back to the lavender. The bee was still on the rose. The shadows in the yard had moved a full inch since you sat down and you had not noticed.

He reached into his pocket and took out a flask. Water, or something close to it. He pulled the cloth down to drink. The motion was quick, and you had been sitting close enough and looking in the right direction and so you saw his face.

The cloth came down. The lower half of his face was pale where the fabric had covered it. He drank. The water moved in his throat. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and pulled the cloth up again.

You did not say anything. You looked back at the garden. The shadows in the yard were longer now. The light had gone gold at the edges.

After a while you both stood and left the yard. You walked west together until the street forked. There was no need for either of you to go that way. At the fork you went north, and he went south. The sun was still above the rooftops. It would be light for another hour.

05

The morning of September the first was a Saturday. The sky was clear. The wind came from the east, warm for September, strong enough to turn the church weathervanes the same way. You met him at the corner of Cheapside where the road turned south. The market was not open yet. Your footsteps sounded ahead of you on the street.

It was not every day. Not every week. Still, there had been enough mornings like this that neither of you said anything when he was there. You walked past houses with new tenants, houses still empty, shops with their shutters raised. Someone had swept broken plaster from a doorway and left the pile in the gutter. A woman was washing a window with grey water. Two men carried a bench into a coffee house that had been shut since last summer.

Near the bridge, a baker had set out bread. Better bread than anything sold in July or August of the year before. You bought two pieces and gave him one. He ate his standing up. You ate yours as you walked, tearing off pieces and losing crumbs behind you. It was faster to keep moving. The morning was too warm for standing still.

"Are you going to leave London," you said.

He looked at you. Then at the street.

"Not yet," he said.

"Not yet meaning not this week, or not yet meaning you haven't decided."

"Not yet meaning not yet."

You kicked your heels against the wall. The bread was warm. The sun was on the back of your neck.

"Good," you said.

You did not say why it was good. He did not ask. The baker set out more loaves on the counter. A woman with a basket crossed the street toward him. A shutter went up somewhere behind you. Someone called for change.

For another hour, there were streets to walk. He spoke of ships from the East Indies, delayed somewhere beyond England because Dutch merchants were disputing a port you had never seen. You told him the comfrey in the St. Stephen’s yard had flowered again. He did not answer. At the next turning he went left. Left was St. Stephen’s.

In the early afternoon you parted at the same corner where you had met. You went north, toward the room where you kept your things. He went south, toward whatever empty house he was sleeping in that week. The sun was still high. The wind was still from the east.

You held your skirt down with one hand. Your hair came loose and blew across your eyes. Through it, with your eyes narrowed, you watched his back disappear down the lane, until the wind stopped.

*

September. The heat stayed into the nights, and the timber-frames along the lanes near the river had dried to the colour of old bone. The gutters were low. The wells were slow.

You were mending a sleeve by the window of your room. The needle was the same one, the thick one meant for canvas, and the thread was running low. Outside it was dark, or nearly dark. Somewhere east, past the bridge, past the wharves, a glow. Low and orange, sitting on the roofline.

You watched it for a moment. The needle went through the fabric. You pulled the thread tight.

Orange light from outside caught on the silver. You set it down and shook out your wrist. Your eyes had begun to ache. The rest could wait until morning.

*

He smelled it before he saw it. Smoke, but not the thin smoke of a hearth or a candle left burning. Thicker. The kind that comes from structures, from beams and floors and walls catching at once. He was in a house near Aldersgate, in a room on the second floor, and when he went to the window the eastern sky was orange from the ground to a height that was not right, not the height of a chimney fire or a single building. The orange was wide and it was moving.

He was on the street within a minute. The wind hit his face, warm, carrying ash, small flakes of it, grey and black, landing on his sleeves and the stone of the road. People were already outside. Some of them in night clothes, standing in doorways, looking east. A man ran past carrying a clock under his arm. A woman was shouting a name from an upstairs window.

He went east.

The streets toward the bridge were filling with people going the other direction. Families with bundles, servants with armloads of plate and linen, a boy pulling a handcart stacked with books. The street was packed and moving west. He pushed east through it. The closer he got to the river, the brighter the sky was, the thicker the smoke, the louder the cracking. Not one fire. Hundreds. Timber frames catching one after another.

He got as far as Thames Street. The warehouses on the south side were burning. Oil. Tallow. Pitch. Spirits. The heat from them pushed him back thirty yards. The road surface was hot through his boots. Sparks flew west on the wind and landed on roofs ahead of the fire. The sky was deep red now. The red was moving.

The streets lay east of this. St. Stephen’s. St. Margaret’s. The room with the few things left in it. The house on the third street. The yard with the garden.

He tried to go north, to loop around. Fenchurch Street was burning. Lombard Street was burning. He went further north, to Cornhill. People were carrying things through the street. The buildings at the eastern end were on fire. The smoke cut the distance down to twenty feet. He pulled the cloth tighter over his face. His eyes burned. He kept going east until the heat stopped him. He stood there. People pushed past him on both sides. He could not get through.

Women. Men. Children. Servants. Some carrying bundles, some carrying nothing. All moving west. He looked at every face going past. He looked at the height of every woman. None of them was right.

He stayed on Cornhill until the buildings on the north side began to catch. Then he moved west with everyone else. There was no other direction left.

The second day. He tried from the north, through Moorgate, east along the city wall. The fire had spread overnight. Streets that had stood at midnight were gone by dawn. Smoke rose over the wall and leaned west. He got as far as Bishopsgate before the heat turned him back. The crowd here was thinner. People sat in the fields outside the wall with what they had carried out.

He walked the line of them. He looked at each face.

The third day. Old St. Paul’s caught fire. The scaffolding went first. Then the lead roof. Melted lead ran down the walls and into the street. The booksellers’ stock in the crypt burned with it, books carried there for safekeeping and left to burn for hours. He saw the cathedral from Moorfields. At night the sky behind it was brighter than the day sky. The heat reached him there.

He did not sleep. He walked the perimeter of the fire, east along the wall, south to the river, looking for a way in, a gap, a street the fire had passed and left standing. There were none. The fire moved through everything between the stone walls of the city and the river. Block by block. Parish by parish. What it left was a landscape he did not recognise.

On the fourth day the wind dropped. The fire lines the soldiers had blown with gunpowder on the eastern edge held. It rained in the afternoon, lightly. The fires still burned in cellars and foundations. The smoke lowered. Ash turned to grey paste underfoot.

He crossed the line.

 *

East of Fish Street, stone foundations stood in rows where streets had been. Chimneys stood without walls. The ground was hot. Steam came up where rain met ash. His boots left prints. He counted by foundations. First street. Second street. Third.

The house on the third street east of St. Stephen’s was a foundation and two partial walls. The timber frame had burned out. What remained was the stone base and the layout of rooms without rooms. The doorway was an opening in a waist-high wall. He stepped through it. The floor was ash, fallen stone, charred beam ends. The staircase was gone. The second floor was gone. The room where he had first heard the words over the dead man was open air above rubble. He had not understood them. He had known what they were for.

He stood in the doorway for a long time. The mortar in the remaining wall had turned to powder. He noticed this. When he touched it, the powder fell from the stone in a line and collected on top of the wall. He watched it collect. The wind moved it. He watched that too.

St. Stephen’s was a shell. The walls stood to different heights, the tallest on the north side, eleven feet perhaps, twelve. The roof had collapsed inward. Beams lay across one another in the nave. The yard behind the vestry was ash. That step was buried under a section of wall that had fallen outward. The stone had cracked in the heat. One side of the crack sat higher than the other, about the width of a finger. He noticed this too, the width of the crack.

The garden was gone. Every plant burned down to the ground. The roots had baked in the soil.

He sat on a stone that had been part of the wall. The stone was warm.

Around him people were beginning to come back. They walked through the ruins slowly, looking at the ground. A woman stood in a doorway that opened onto nothing. A man dug in the ash with his hands. A child carried a pot with both arms and set it down beside a chimney.

He sat on the stone and watched the people go past. He watched them all day. Women, men, children, some of them carrying things. Some of them crying. Some of them already clearing, already beginning. The light moved from east to west across the ash. He looked at every face that passed. He looked at the height of every woman. He had looked at faces on Cornhill during the fire. Now he looked again. The face was not there. He kept looking.

None of them were you. He had already established this. He established it again.

In the late afternoon he stood up and walked west. On Cheapside, where the fire line had held, a minister was standing on a crate. Protestant. A Bible in one hand. His voice was strong and it carried over the ruins.

Ghost walked past. The minister's voice followed him for half a street, then the sound of hammers and carts covered it, and then it was gone.

*

He stayed for weeks. He did not leave.

The rubble was cleared. The streets were surveyed and marked with stakes. Wren came with drawings. Parliament passed a rebuilding act. Brick, not timber. Wider streets. New foundations.

He walked the streets he had always walked. South to Thames Street, east or west. The line he used to stop at was gone. What had been on the other side was gone. He crossed it now without registering the crossing, and it meant nothing, and he kept walking.

Then one morning he walked south to Thames Street and turned west, and kept walking, past Blackfriars, past the Temple, out through Ludgate and along the road that led away from the city. He did not carry much. He never had.

Behind him the city was already filling with carts and stone and the sound of building. Ahead the road was open and the air was clean and the fields on either side were green because the fire had not touched anything outside the walls.

He had said he would stay. Not yet, he had said. Not yet.

06

The church was new. Portland stone, pale, the mortar between the blocks still white. Christopher Wren had drawn it on paper and the masons had put it up on the site where the old one had stood. The walls were clean. The floor was clean. The windows let in light that had nothing to fall on yet. No wear. No smoke stain.

He came in through the south door. The nave was empty. His footsteps sounded on the stone floor and came back off the walls. There was no other sound.

The memorial was set into the wall on the north side, near the east end, low enough that a person would have to know it was there to find it. A rectangle of pale stone, smaller than the ones around it. The stones near it had family names, dates, scripture. Hers was plain.

The name the sisters had given her. Below it, Riley.

No date of birth. No one had known when she was born. The year of death was there, 1666. Nothing else. No epitaph. No verse. No mention of God, heaven, or rest.

Below the name and the year, one line of Latin, cut into the stone in letters smaller than the rest.

Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo.

He had told the mason what to carve. He had said the words from memory, slowly, one syllable at a time. He did not know what they meant. The mason had looked at him and then at the paper where he had written them out, and asked if he was sure of the spelling. He had said he was not. The mason corrected two letters. That was all.

The stone was smooth under his hand when he touched it. Cool. The cuts where the letters were carved had sharp edges. Years would take the edges down. Then the letters. Grain by grain, until the words sat shallow in the stone.

The light from the nearest window fell across the lower half of the memorial. The upper half was in shadow. Her name was in the light. Riley was in the light. The Latin sat where the light ended.

He stood in front of it for a while. He did not kneel. He did not speak. His hands were at his sides. The church was quiet and new and empty and smelled of cut stone and fresh mortar.

Then he left.

The south door closed behind him. Outside, the street was wider than before. The buildings on both sides were brick. The sky above them was the pale grey of a London winter. Hammers. Saws. Carts. Voices.

He walked south. Toward the river. The same direction he had always walked.

À quoi ça rime. Ça rime avec Riley.

PREVIOUS / MASTERLIST

Chapter 3: Le lieu intact

The light at the end of the lane does not move closer. It sits at the distance where the hedgerow meets the road and stays there, a pale disc against the dark, and you watch it without stopping, without looking directly, counting your own steps to keep from turning around. Twelve. Fifteen. Twenty.

He is beside you. He has not said anything since Kopf runter. His hand is at his side, the fingers loose but the wrist turned inward, the arm ready. His eyes have already been to the hedge, the wall, the ditch, the open field and back. You do not need to look at him to know this. You learned it through his forearm over the last hour.

Your arm is still linked through his. There is no one on the lane to perform for, but you have not let go and he has not shaken you off and so you walk like this, your body pressed to the side of his arm. The arm is thick enough that your fingers do not meet around it. Your shoulder fits into the hollow below his, your hip against the outside of his thigh, and the contact is warm through the fabric and solid, and the solidity is mass, plain and simple. You have never had a husband. You do not know what a husband's arm feels like. But you think it might feel like something you could lean your weight into and the weight would be taken without the arm adjusting. You do not lean. You hold on, because holding on is what you have been doing since the filing room, and letting go requires a decision you have not yet made.

The light does not follow. After thirty steps you allow yourself to look back and it is gone, switched off or turned away or never what you thought it was. The lane is dark. The insects are loud. Your own breathing sits above them, closer, more ragged than you want it to be. You let go of his arm. The air fills the space where his body was. You keep walking.

The mill is ahead, a shape against the sky where the lane turns and the trees begin. The wheel is gone, sold or stolen in some year you will never know, and the race that fed it has silted to a brown trickle you can hear but not see. Nettles grow out of the bank where the sluice was, thick, waist-high, pale in the thin light. The door is off its hinges and leaned against the outside wall with a plank braced under it to keep it from sliding. Inside, the mill is one room, stone floor, the remains of the hopper still bolted to a timber frame that has rotted at the base and sags left. A leather strap hangs from a nail above the hopper, cracked, dry, the kind of strap used to hold a grain sack open at the mouth. The roof is intact. The window on the south side has been boarded from the outside with planks that do not quite match the building, newer wood against old stone.

You step inside. Your shoe finds a piece of broken tile and the sound it makes on the stone floor is sharp and loud in the enclosed space and your body flinches at it and the flinching annoys you because you have been walking for an hour without flinching and a piece of tile should not be the thing that undoes it. He comes in behind you and stands near the door, not inside and not outside, his weight on the frame, his eyes adjusting. The scarf is still on his face. The cut above his eye has crusted dark.

You lean against the wall opposite the door. The stone is cold through the back of your blouse. Your legs have not stopped shaking. Your knees, your thighs, the muscles in your calves. You press your shoulders into the wall and let the stone take the weight and stand there and breathe and your breathing is loud to you and loud to the room and you would like to stop it being loud but your lungs are doing what they want and have stopped consulting you.

He watches from the doorway. He does not come closer. Between you the stone floor is bare, swept clean by whoever used this building last, or by wind, or by rats. A rusted bolt sits against the base of the wall near your right foot. A length of rope, grey with age, coiled under the hopper. The room smells of damp stone and old grain and something animal that has been here recently, a fox or a cat, something that uses the dark.

Outside, the trickle of the race. The insects. The breeze coming down the lane from the direction of the town, carrying warmth and the faint petrol smell of the vehicles that have been running in the streets all evening. A bat crosses the open doorway low and fast, close enough that you feel the air from it. His head does not turn. The bat does not concern him.

"You can go from here," you say.

He does not move.

You wait. The breeze comes through the doorway and touches your neck where the sweat has cooled and you shiver once, a short involuntary thing, and press harder into the wall. Your blouse has stuck to your back. You can feel the damp of it between your shoulder blades, the cotton pulling at the skin when you shift.

"Why," he says, the word coming out flat through the wool.

"Because you did not kill me."

He is quiet.

"Because if they found you there, they would not only kill you."

He is still quiet. You can hear his breathing now, or you think you can. You are beginning to resent the evenness.

"Because I did not want to hear it," you say.

"Hear what."

"What they would do to you."

The words come out before you have finished choosing them. They sit in the air between you and the air does nothing to soften them.

He steps into the mill. One step, then another. The stone floor gives a different sound under his weight, deeper, the grit shifting. He stops four paces from you.

"Who do you work for," he says.

"You know enough."

Something outside, distant, a vehicle on the Poitiers road, the engine note rising and falling as it passes behind the trees. It moves through the space and then it is gone and the insects fill back in. A dog barks somewhere, a single sound, then silence.

"What are you," you say.

He looks at you.

"Not a soldier. Or not only."

"Enough of one," he says.

"Enough of one." You look at the dark square of the doorway behind him. "For what?"

"For leaving."

You have heard him do this before. Wrong room.

The shaking in your legs has slowed. Your shoulders have stopped pressing into the wall. You are standing now the way you stand at your desk, upright, the weight on both feet, the body returned to a posture it knows.

"Do not come back," you say. "If I see you again, I will call."

He says nothing for a long time. Long enough that the bat comes back through the doorway, or another bat, low and angular, and he does not look at it. Long enough that you hear the trickle of the race change pitch as something passes through it, a leaf or a branch, and then it settles again.

"Then call sooner," he says.

The words land. You feel them in your sternum, a small flat impact.

You did not call.

You could have. In the filing room, before you touched his collar, before you pushed his hair back, before you said the word husband. You could have opened your mouth and said a name, any name, Drechsler, Pfeiffer, Wache, and the building would have done the rest. You did not.

"You should not have done that," he says.

"I know."

He turns toward the door. He stops at the frame and puts his hand on the wood and looks out at the lane and the dark and the hedgerow.

"Your collar," you say.

He looks back at you. The scarf is still on his face. The eyes above it find you across the four paces of stone floor and stay. Whatever he is looking at, it is not the wall behind you and it is not the doorway behind him. It is you, specifically, the shape of you against the stone in the dark, and the look lasts one second longer than any look he has given you tonight. Then it ends.

"I fixed it. Don't unfold it before you are clear."

The wool moves over his mouth. Not enough for a smile. Just a brief pull in the fabric, there and gone. He reaches up and touches the collar, two fingers on the fold, confirming. Then his hand drops.

He looks at you once more from the doorway. Then he steps through and into the lane and you hear his boots on the packed earth, three steps, five, seven, and then you do not hear them anymore because he has moved off the path and into the grass or the hedge or wherever men like him go when they stop being visible.

The mill is empty. You are in it.

You stand against the wall. Your arms are still folded. Your legs have stopped shaking. The square of moonlight on the floor has moved since you arrived, crawling toward the hopper, and in its edge you can see a smear of something dark on the stone that was not there when you came in. You look at it. Blood, probably. His. From the cut, or from the side of his jacket, the stain you covered with his collar. He stood here and bled onto the floor and neither of you noticed. The blood is already drying. By morning it will look like a watermark, like something the building has always had.

You uncross your arms. You button your coat. You run your hands through your hair and find it damp at the temples and push it back. You step outside. The lane is empty in both directions. The moon gives enough light to find the ruts and follow them back.

The walk takes forty minutes.

At the checkpoint, the new man looks at your Kennkarte, then at your face, then back at the card. His torch is dim. He waves you through.

No questions.

The town is quiet. The shops are shuttered. The tabac is dark, the poster still curling in the window. Your shoes sound too loud on the cobbles.

In your room, the water in the jug is warm and tastes of clay. You drink it anyway. The bed is where you left it. The clean paper is still stacked on the table. Your right shoe has a scrape across the toe.

The office will be there in the morning. The top drawer of your desk has your brother's letter in it. He is somewhere near Bonneuil-Matours. He asks again if you have been taking care of yourself, as though you were the one who had left home for the army and never looked back.

Nobody knows about tonight.

You are sitting on your bed on the Rue de la Gare with your shoes off and your feet sore. There is a scrape across the toe of your right shoe. The man is gone. The grip on your wrist is gone. The pulse under your thumb is gone.

You lie down. The ceiling is above you. The tracks are outside the window. No trains tonight. The yard is closed. The memorandum said so. You typed the translation yourself.

In the morning there will be the office. Filing. Typing. Drechsler’s coffee at four. The carbons. The third column.

*

The filing room is different in the morning. The blackout curtain has been pulled back and pinned, and the light comes through the south window at a low angle, catching the dust in the air and laying a warm stripe across the shelves where the June fuel allocation files are stacked. The room is narrow and clean and smells of paper and old wood and nothing else.

You stand where he stood. Left side, between the window and the door. The shelves are at your back. The distance to the door is four steps. The distance to the window is two. You can see the corridor through the doorframe, and the corridor is lit and empty and ordinary, and from here you can see both directions, which is why he chose this spot, or you think it is.

The files on the shelf behind you are in order. You check them because checking them is your job. Transport schedules, fuel allocation, bridge reports. Nothing is missing. Nothing has been moved. Nothing has been taken. The stack is as you left it, the edges aligned, the rubber band still perished on the June reports, the brown mark still on the cover sheet.

You look at the floor where he stood. The morning light shows the stone clearly, the cracks, the old mortar, the grain of it. There is no blood. If there was blood last night it has been scuffed away or was never enough to mark the stone. The floor looks the way it has always looked. Clean, grey, used.

You stand there a moment longer.

PREVIOUS

Chapter 2: Le mari sans papiers

The soldier in the doorway is young. That is the first thing you register, before the uniform, before the rifle slung across his chest, before the torch in his left hand that throws a disc of yellow light across the floor and catches the edge of your shoe. He is young and tired, his collar dark with sweat. He has been checking rooms too long. Doorway, floor, shelf at eye level, then on to the next. He misses corners. Men like him always miss corners when the day has gone on this long, so you do not look at yours.

He sees you first. Then his torch moves and finds the man beside you.

"Wer ist das?"

Your hand is on the man's arm. You put it there in the second before the door opened, when the handle turned and you moved without deciding, your fingers closing around his forearm above the wrist. The muscle under the sleeve is rigid, the entire length of the forearm locked. His wrist bones press into your palm, knuckles too large, the joint rough against the inside of your fingers. If you let go his hand will go back inside the jacket and the thing that is no longer in his hand will be back in it.

"Mein Mann," you say. "Er wartet auf mich."

The soldier looks at the man beside you. The torch moves up from the chest to the face and stops at the wool scarf covering the lower half. The sudden light catches his eyes and the pupils pull tight. He does not blink. He sits in the torchlight and gives nothing back.

"Warum trägt er das?" The soldier gestures at the scarf.

"Verletzung," you say. "Kiefer. Er kann nicht sprechen."

The soldier shifts his weight. He lowers the torch from the man’s face. The beam drops to the floor between you and slides toward the door he still has to check. He is a young man with a torch and a list of rooms to check and a uniform that fits him the way uniforms fit men who have not yet grown into the war, slightly too large at the collar. He looks at you. He looks at the man. He looks at your hand on the arm. He does not know your palm is wet against the sleeve.

"Papiere?"

You reach into your coat pocket with your free hand and produce your Kennkarte. The photograph is two years old. Your hair was different. The card identifies you by name, by nationality, by occupation: Dolmetscherin, Eisenbahnverwaltung, Châtellerault. Translator, railway administration. The soldier reads it, turns it over, reads the back. He holds it up and moves the torch between the photograph and your face. You let him look. The bulb is too bright and too close and you can feel the heat of it near your chin.

He hands it back.

"Und seiner?"

"In unserer Unterkunft. Er ist erst heute angekommen. Vom Zug."

"Von wo?"

"Poitiers."

The soldier considers this. Behind him, in the corridor, you can hear the second soldier opening the supply closet at the far end, the one that has not been used since the previous administration left a set of broken chairs inside. A chair leg drags across stone. Torchlight moves across the corridor wall and settles.

The young soldier looks at the man beside you once more. His torch goes to the scarf, to the jacket collar turned over on itself, to the boots. His gaze stays at the boots.

French work boots have hobnails set in a particular pattern. German military boots have a tread that any soldier would recognise from his own feet. The boots beside you are neither. Leather, re-soled, caked at the seams with something the torchlight turns to brown.

Your pulse sits in your fingertips where they press into the forearm.

"Er soll sich das nächste Mal ausweisen können," the soldier says. He steps back from the doorway.

You nod. You do not say thank you. You walk the man past the soldier and into the corridor, your hand on his arm, and you can feel the soldier watching from behind as you move toward the side door at the end of the hall. Your eye line reaches his shoulder and no higher. His chest is thicker than yours by several turns of the ribcage, and walking beside him the corridor draft does not reach you. His body is between you and everything else. Your heartbeat slows by degrees. You work to match his pace. His boots put weight into the floor at regular intervals, heavier than yours, easier to follow. The corridor is long and lit only by what comes through the glass panel above the front entrance, a grey square of evening light that falls on the stone floor ten metres ahead.

His stride is wrong. You feel it before you see it. He walks the way he stood in the filing room: weight forward, balanced, each step carrying through the shoulder before the next one lands. A husband would not walk like that.

You slow your own pace. You press your fingers into his forearm once, a quick compression, and lean toward his shoulder.

"Slower," you say. English, barely a sound.

He adjusts. His stride shortens. His weight settles back.

You push the bar on the side door and the evening air comes in warm, carrying the smell of engine oil from the vehicles parked along the courtyard wall, and beneath it the green smell of the plane trees on the road past the gate. The two soldiers who were leaning against the back gate earlier are gone. The gate stands closed. A single lamp burns on the wall above the courtyard entrance, throwing an orange circle on the stone below it. A fermented stink lifts out of the gutter. Your eyes go to it before you can stop them. The stones along the foot of the wall are bleached and worn. A moth works the edge of the light in tight circuits.

The courtyard is not what you expected. You have always used the front entrance. The front is swept, the steps washed, the brass plate polished by someone whose name you do not know. Back here the flower beds have gone to seed. Crates have been pushed over them. A wheelbarrow sits on a flat tyre beside the wall, and under a tarpaulin something gives off the old-metal smell of engine parts. The path to the gate has been squeezed to a single body's width between the debris. It looks less like an office and more like the aftermath of a move that was never finished. Your step catches on a loose stone and you pause. He does not pause. He is already through the gap between the wheelbarrow and the wall, one shoulder turned, no adjustment, no slowing.

You step out and he comes with you. Your hand on his arm, his body beside yours, the warmth of the evening settling on the back of your neck. You turn left toward the street. The street leads to the bridge and the bridge leads to the south bank and the south bank is where the town thins out. You do not know where you are taking him. You know it is not here.

The street is narrow. Stone facades on both sides, shuttered windows, iron balconies with paint cracking in long vertical strips. The cobbles are uneven underfoot and you match your feet to the ruts without thinking, the same ruts you have walked for five months, the same uneven stone at the corner where the drain cover sits crooked and has sat crooked since before you arrived. There is a paper straw on it now, one end bitten flat and darkened. The tabac door is still shut. The poster in the window, an advertisement for cigarettes that have not been available since February, has curled at the top corners from the heat.

You walk. He walks beside you. Your hand on his arm, his arm against your side. To anyone watching from a shuttered window, a wife walking her husband home in the long June evening, leaning into him because the cobbles are bad and because that is what wives do.

"Do not look at the door," you say, because his head has turned slightly toward the tabac.

His head comes back.

"Your hands."

He opens them. You feel the motion through his arm, the tendons releasing.

"You are not guarding me," you say. "You are walking with me."

He says nothing. But the fists stay open.

The street takes longer with him beside you. Your pace stays almost normal. His stride keeps changing the measure of it, pulling you half a step too fast before you can correct it.

A vehicle turns into the street ahead. Headlamps. The light sweeps across the building fronts and catches you both and you do not flinch. You tighten your grip on his arm and tilt your head toward his shoulder and keep walking. The vehicle passes. A Kübelwagen, two men in the front seat, the engine rattling on the cobbles. It does not slow. The lamplight runs across his jacket and across your face and is gone and the street is dark again and you keep walking.

At the corner of the Rue de la Poste, a checkpoint. You see it twenty metres before you reach it: the wooden barrier across the road, sandbags stacked on either side, the lamp on a pole that turns the checkpoint into a bright island in the darkening street. Two soldiers and an Unteroffizier. One of the soldiers is smoking. The smoke rises in a thin line and disperses at head height. The other is leaning against the sandbag wall with his hands in his pockets and his cap pushed back. The Unteroffizier is standing at the barrier with a clipboard. His pen is clipped to the board and the board is angled toward the lamp and he is writing something, the pen moving in short strokes.

You keep walking. Your pace does not change. Your hand on his arm does not tighten. A wife would not prepare herself to pass a checkpoint she had passed every day for five months.

The Unteroffizier looks up. He sees you. The clipboard comes down to his side.

"Papiere, bitte."

You produce the Kennkarte. He takes it, reads it, looks at you. His name is Brandt. He has a wife in Düsseldorf whose photograph he keeps inside his cap, pressed flat against the crown. You know this because Pfeiffer told you, and Pfeiffer tells you things because Pfeiffer has decided that telling you things is a form of friendship. The next day, you bought Pfeiffer a beer.

"Und der Herr?"

"Mein Mann. Er spricht nicht."

Brandt looks at the man beside you. He looks at the scarf. He looks at the shoulders under the jacket.

"Warum nicht?"

"Er kann nicht. Kieferverletzung."

"Kann er hören?"

"Wenn er will."

This comes out flat. Not entirely performance. Brandt's mouth moves once at the corner. The soldier leaning against the sandbags glances over. You have said the thing a wife says about a husband who has been difficult on the journey and who will be difficult when they get home and who is standing beside her like furniture she did not choose and cannot return.

Brandt hands the Kennkarte back. He does not move the barrier.

"Er muss sich das nächste Mal selbst ausweisen," he says. "Oder er bleibt hier, bis wir jemanden zum Überprüfen schicken."

The man beside you does not move. You can feel the stillness. It is not waiting. He has calculated the distance between his right hand and the Unteroffizier's sidearm. He has set the number aside. He has not discarded it.

"Herr Brandt," you say. "Ich bin seit fünf Monaten in diesem Büro. Sie sehen mich jeden Tag. Wenn Sie meinen Mann morgen mit Papieren sehen wollen, muss ich ihn erst ins Quartier bringen. Und dafür muss er durch Ihre Schranke."

Brandt looks at you. He looks at the man. The man beside you is looking at the barrier, not at Brandt. This is correct. A sullen husband with a jaw injury does not make eye contact with the man deciding whether to let him through. He endures. He waits for his wife to do the work.

Brandt lifts the barrier.

You walk through. You do not say thank you. You are a German woman with a German husband walking through a German checkpoint. The walking through is not a favour.

Fifteen metres past the barrier. Twenty. The lamp behind you puts your shadows ahead of you on the cobbles, long and joined at the feet.

The soldier who was leaning against the sandbags calls something. His voice carries in the warm evening air. The words are rough, idiomatic, barracks German, not addressed to you but to the man beside you, or to the air between you. Something about a wife who does all the talking. Something about what a man does at night if his mouth does not work. The other soldier laughs. A short sound, cut off. Brandt says nothing.

The arm under your hand turns to iron.

You feel the sequence: forearm rigid, shoulder locked, weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet.

You move your hand from his forearm to his wrist. Your thumb closes around the inside of his wrist. You press down, firm enough to hold him there. For a moment there is only the pressure of your hand on his skin. Then a beat comes up under your thumb, small and regular, and you realise you have his pulse.

You lean into him. Your mouth close to the side of his neck, above the collar. Anyone watching sees a wife steadying her husband, calming him, managing him. Your lips do not touch his skin.

"Do not," you say.

The arm does not relax. But the motion stops.

His pulse under your thumb, fast and hard and even. The street ahead is darker now, the lamps fewer, buildings giving way to lower walls and then to the edge of town where the houses stop and the road becomes a lane between hedgerows. The checkpoint lamp shrinks behind you. The soldier's laughter has stopped. The evening insects have started in the hedgerow to your left, a continuous sound that fills the space the town has left behind.

"If you look at another man like that," you say, "he will remember your face."

He says nothing for five steps. Six. Seven. The lane is unpaved here, packed earth, and your shoes find the ruts left by cart wheels.

"He already looked," he says. Low. The scarf dulls the consonants.

"Then make him forget."

He turns his head toward you. In the failing light you cannot read what is above the scarf, only the line of the brow and the cut that has stopped bleeding and the eyes. They are on you, and there is no gratitude in them and no trust. At least they have stopped looking for the way out.

You let go of his wrist.

The town is behind you. The lane runs between hedgerows into open ground where the fields begin, flat and dark, the last strip of light sitting along the western horizon. The air smells of cut grass and warm stone. Underneath it, the sour chemical trace of scorched rail.

Your legs are shaking. Your knees. Your thighs. The muscles along your calves. You keep walking because stopping would mean acknowledging the shaking and acknowledging the shaking would mean sitting down and sitting down on a dirt lane at the edge of Châtellerault with an Englishman who cannot speak and a pulse still beating fast under the skin of your wrist where his blood was a minute ago is not something you are prepared to do.

The hedgerow gives way to a stone wall, low, capped with moss. Beyond it the field stretches south toward a line of trees that mark the river. A barn sits at the edge of the field, its roof partly gone, the timbers visible against the sky. An owl calls from somewhere inside it, or near it, a single note that carries across the open ground and stops.

He walks beside you. His stride has settled into something closer to yours, to the husband's, though there is no one left to perform for. His hands are at his sides, open. His breathing has not changed since the filing room. Yours has.

The lane forks. Left toward the river crossing, right toward the mill that has not operated since the owner's sons went to the front in 1940 and did not come back. You go right. The mill has been empty for years. The miller left last year. Since then, animals have had the place more or less to themselves, and people keep away.

You are almost there when he says, behind you:

"Kopf runter."

German. Your German. Two words spoken with an English mouth that turns the vowels wrong and the consonants too hard, and for a moment your feet stop because no one has spoken German to you in that accent before and the sound of it, your language in his voice, lands somewhere you were not expecting.

You turn. He is looking past you, over your shoulder, toward the road you came from. His chin is lowered. His eyes are on a point of light that has appeared at the far end of the lane, a torch or a headlamp, moving slowly.

"Keep walking," you say.

Chapter 1: L'homme mal classé

The office closes at six but the war does not. A wire can come in at any hour. You stay until someone tells you to leave, and then you stay after that, because the filing does not stop when the Feldwebel locks the front door, and the carbons do not collate themselves, and the transport requisition from this morning still has a wrong depot code in the third column that no one has corrected because no one reads the third column except you.

Châtellerault's railway administration occupies the south wing of what used to be a postal sorting office. The ceilings are high enough that the heat collects above head height and does nothing useful there. The walls are pale green, institutional, with a strip of darker green at waist level where the old wainscoting begins. Someone has hung a calendar from Poitiers on the wall behind the main desk. It is two months behind. No one has turned it. The typewriter is a Torpedo 18, manufactured in Frankfurt, requisitioned from a stationery supplier in Châtellerault whose name is still on the service tag bolted to the underside of the carriage. You found it there in your second week, when the ribbon jammed and you turned the machine over to clear it. The name was Garnier. You did not look for it. You have not forgotten it.

The files lean against the far wall in stacks, oldest at the bottom, held upright by the weight of everything that has come after. Transport schedules, fuel allocation, troop movement carbon copies, bridge inspection reports, requisition forms for rolling stock that has already moved south or been reassigned or no longer exists. Your job is to translate what needs translating, French municipal documents into German, German operational summaries into a format the local Kommandantur can file, and to type what needs typing, and to not ask what the typed things are for, because the typed things move down a corridor and into another office and after that they are not yours.

You are good at this. You are good at this because you are accurate and because you do not make mistakes in the third column and because you have learned the particular rhythm of this office: which signatures are needed before a fuel requisition can leave the building, which forms can be stamped by the duty clerk and which require Drechsler's hand, which documents go upstairs to the Kommandantur liaison and which go into the metal cabinet by the window where the lock has not worked since March and where the key sits on top of the cabinet itself, visible to anyone who cares to look. You know that Feldwebel Drechsler drinks his coffee at four and does not want to be spoken to until the cup is back on the saucer. You know that the duty clerk on the night rotation enters through the side door and leaves his bicycle in the courtyard against the wall where the drainpipe leaks, and that his name is Pfeiffer, and that he once brought you a bread roll from the canteen without being asked and never did it again. These things are like the e on the typewriter, the letter that sticks more often than the others. Only a dry ribbon. Nothing worth looking at too closely.

The air in the office is bad. By noon, the smell of railway oil has thickened in it, sharp and black and impossible to keep out of your throat. The food is not good either. You cannot remember what the potato cake at noon tasted like. French documents lie scattered across the desk, pages out of order, half-sentences caught between carbon copies and official stamps. After long enough, even the broken-off ends of French become part of the room.

Your brother writes that the mud is worse than last month. He does not say where. His letters arrive through the military postal system, stamped and refolded, sometimes with a line blacked out by a censor whose hand you have come to recognise by the thickness of the ink. In the last letter he complained about his boots, said the leather had split at the toe, said the quartermaster had promised replacements twice and delivered neither. He asked whether your mother had received the money he sent in April. He asked about the roses. He signs his name, then draws a careful line beneath it, then the unit number you read each time and each time move past without stopping. He does not ask where you are. He only says he is somewhere near Bonneuil-Matours, that the billets are close and stale, the weather damp, and the French countryside has very little to say for itself.

The envelope is in the top drawer of your desk at the office. You keep it there because the room you sleep in has no lock, and because letters from home are personal and this office, despite everything, has a door that closes.

Outside, the day's last light has gone flat. June evenings in the Vienne stretch past nine, the sky holding a thin brightness that makes the buildings look cut from paper against it. The air coming through the window above the filing cabinet carries the heat of a day that should be ending but is not. The station is two streets south. You can hear the shunting from here on windless nights, the couplings knocking against each other as they are pushed together or pulled apart, metal on metal in the yard. Tonight there is no shunting. The yard has been closed since midday. The reason arrived as a typed memorandum on Drechsler's desk at eleven: an incident on the line south, unspecified damage, area sealed, all civilian and non-essential military movement suspended until further notice. The memorandum was on standard Kommandantur paper, countersigned by an office you have not seen correspondence from before. You noted the signature block. You did not ask about it.

You typed the French translation of the suspension notice yourself, for the mairie. You checked the spelling twice. You put the carbon in the outgoing tray.

After the memorandum came the patrols. By early afternoon the street outside the office had emptied of everything except uniforms and vehicles. A motorcycle courier passed three times in one hour, the same machine, the same rider, the engine note the same each time, turning south toward the railway sidings and returning north and turning south again. You watched from the window above the filing cabinet while you replaced the fuel allocation files for the third week of June. The second time the motorcycle passed, two soldiers came up the street on foot and stopped outside the tabac across the road, which has been closed since the owner left in April. They tried the door. They looked through the glass. They moved on. A woman had been watching from the upper window of the house beside the tabac, and when the soldiers stopped she moved back from the glass, and when they left she did not return to it.

You were watching too. From a window, with the fuel allocation files open under your hands. You stayed where you were.

The lamp outside the station has lost its glass shade. Through the window you can see the bare bulb, unlit now in the long evening, mounted on its iron arm above the street. The glass must have broken recently. Last week it was there, or you think it was. The pieces would have fallen onto the pavement below, but there are no pieces. Someone has swept them. The bulb hangs exposed, waiting for dark to arrive and make it useful.

The office was closed at five. Drechsler left through the front. You stayed, because the transport requisition was still wrong in the third column and because there was nowhere to go that was better than here and because the sound of your own typing is a sound you understand.

The filing room is at the back of the building, past the corridor with the water-stained ceiling and the toilet that runs continuously, a thin sound inside the wall that you heard every day for three weeks before you stopped hearing it and that you hear again now as you pass because the building is empty and the building being empty makes everything in it louder. You go there to return the bridge inspection reports to the correct stack, because someone, the duty clerk probably, or Pfeiffer, has filed them with the fuel allocation records, and the fuel allocation records have a different numbering system, and it matters, or it does not, but you do it anyway because the doing it is what your hands know and your hands need to know what comes next.

The door is half-open. You push it with your shoulder because your hands are full, then lean back until it closes behind you. The room is narrow, shelved on both sides, one window at the far end that looks onto the courtyard. The blackout curtain has been pulled across but not pinned at the bottom corner, and a strip of grey evening light comes in at a low angle across the floor and climbs the base of the opposite shelf. Your eyes follow the light across the floor, past a broken tile near the wall.

He is standing against the shelves on the left side, between the window and the door.

Your feet stop. The bridge reports shift in your arms, the top one sliding forward, and you catch it against your chest with your chin and hold it and stand in the doorway with the documents pressed to your body and look at what is in the room with you.

He is tall. That is the first registration. Tall and wide enough across the shoulders that the shelving behind him, built for file boxes, frames him wrong. He is wearing civilian clothes, a dark jacket, a shirt that might have been white before today, but they fit him differently from the men in this town. The jacket is tight across the upper arms. The trousers are cuffed in a way that is not French. He is standing with his back to the shelves but not leaning. His weight is forward on both feet, distributed evenly, and his right hand is inside the jacket at the left side, and his left hand is flat against the shelf behind his hip where he can push off it to move. He is not looking at the window. He is not looking at the door. He is looking at you.

The wool scarf covers the lower half of his face. Only his eyes show. The light through the gap in the curtains is not enough to give you his expression. There is a cut above his left eye, shallow, several hours old, the blood dried to a dark line that follows the crease of the brow. His hair has been pushed back and is darker than it should be. Wet, or dirty, or both. Below the cut, he keeps his eyes on your face. They have not blinked since you came in.

His stare makes the back of your neck go cold. Dark eyes, no fact in them, no angle, nothing you can use. The look stays fixed on you, too close to the skin at your neck. The tendons in his left hand are standing. His breathing is even. You have seen fear in this building. The French clerk who delivers the water reports on Thursdays, his fingers pressing the paper hard enough to crease it as he hands it across Drechsler's desk. The families at the checkpoint on the Poitiers road.

You open your mouth and what comes out is French, because French is what you use in this building when you are not typing German, and because this is a French town and a person in it is assumed to be French until proven otherwise.

"Qui êtes-vous?"

He does not answer.

His thumb presses once against the inside of his jacket, then stops. The leather creaks under his hand and goes quiet. He is deciding something. You can see the decision being made in the small adjustments of his weight. His right hand stays where it is, inside the jacket. His left hand lifts a centimetre off the shelf and returns.

You lower the bridge reports. You set them on the nearest shelf with both hands, slowly, placing them flat, and you do this because your hands need a task that is not shaking. The paper makes a small sound against the wood. Outside the window, a vehicle passes in the street, headlamp light sweeping across the top of the blackout curtain and vanishing. The engine is heavy. A truck, not a car.

"Who are you," you say again. English this time. Because something in the cut above his eye and the way his hand rests inside his jacket is not French and is not German and the shoulders are wrong for this town and the silence is wrong for a man who has been caught somewhere he should not be.

His eyes change.

"Wrong room," he says.

The scarf dulls the words. The vowels sit flat and the consonants carry, and the rhythm is unmistakable. The accent comes from somewhere in the middle of the country, maybe the north. You cannot place it exactly. English, though.

Your hand is on the shelf. You can feel the grain under your fingertips, the rough edge where the wood has splintered at the corner. Your body has already done something without your instruction—shoulders drawn up, weight shifted onto the back foot, left heel finding the doorframe.

The corridor behind you is eight steps. The side door is at the end of the corridor. Drechsler is gone. Pfeiffer will not arrive until nine.

The man has not moved. He is watching you calculate.

"Don't speak," you say.

He looks at you. The cut above his eye has opened slightly at the outer edge. A thread of fresh blood sits in the crease of his brow.

"Not with that accent."

The sound from the front of the building reaches you through two closed doors and a corridor, and even so you can identify it: the main entrance, tried from outside. A hand on the latch, then a knock, then a voice in German. The voice is not shouting. It is asking a question in the tone of someone who expects the door to open and is mildly inconvenienced that it has not. A second voice answers from further back, and there is the scrape of something heavy being moved, the iron bolt, the one Drechsler slides into place when he leaves because the lock alone is not enough for him, and then the bolt gives and the door opens and the voices come inside the building.

Your fingers dig into the shelf. A splinter presses into the pad of your index finger.

"You're German," he says. The cadence of a grid reference.

"And you are very bad at being lost."

The voices in the front hall are speaking to each other. You can hear the words now: checking the building, orders, someone saw a light on the upper floor, standard sweep of the block. Two men, possibly three. Their boots on the stone floor of the entrance hall have the cadence of soldiers who are walking a route they have been told to walk and will walk it thoroughly.

Footsteps come closer. Your fingers stay dug into the shelf, caught there between holding on and letting go.

He stops looking at you. His eyes move to the window. The drop to the courtyard. The height of the wall. The distance across the yard to the back gate. Each part of it passes through his face in order, quick and practical, and then the answer is there.

"No," you say. "There are men in the yard."

You know this because you saw them from the corridor window twenty minutes ago. Two of them, leaning against the gate that leads to the lane behind the building, smoking, their rifles slung. You did not think about why they were there. Now you know.

His eyes come back to you. They stay.

"If they find you here," you say, "I was never alone. Do you understand?"

He understands. You see it in the way his right hand comes out of his jacket. It comes out slowly, the fingers opening, and it settles at his side. The hand is empty. Whatever it was holding is now somewhere inside the jacket where it cannot be seen, and the transfer happened in the space between one of your sentences and the next, and you did not see it move.

In the corridor, closer now: a door handle tried, a drawer opened and shut, the scrape of a filing cabinet pulled and pushed back on its rail.

You step fully into the filing room. You set the bridge reports on the shelf where they belong, fuel allocation on the left, bridge inspection on the right, and you straighten the stack because straightening stacks is what you do and because if you do not do it now your hands will do something worse. The paper is cool against your palms. The rubber band around the June reports has perished and left a brown mark on the cover sheet.

You look at him. The jacket, the stain below the left pocket that is not mud and not rain and not anything you want to name. The boots, which are leather but not the right leather, not French work boots and not German military issue, something else, something that has walked a long way and been re-soled. The hands at his sides, empty now, the knuckles scraped on the right, a small cut across the base of the left thumb. The face, with its dried blood and the eyes that have not looked away from you once.

You are a person who files bridge inspection reports in the correct order and types the third column without errors and translates suspension notices for the mairie and keeps your brother's letters in the top drawer because the top drawer is yours and the things in it are yours and nothing else in this office belongs to you and nothing else in this town belongs to you. Caution is how you survive here. You have to know what is yours to touch.

The man in the filing room is not yours.

A second door opens in the corridor. Closer. The toilet, from the sound of it, and closes again.

He did not hurt you. He is standing in the room with his hands empty and his back to the shelves and he has not moved toward you and he has not moved toward the door and the cut above his eye is bleeding again, a single line into the crease.

You cross the room. Three steps. You have translated field interrogation summaries. Verhör. Verschärftes Verhör. There is blood on the files that came in three months ago. You do your job. Old blood darkens with time until it looks like ink. You have typed the dates and the locations and the outcomes and filed the carbons. Your job is the third column. Your job is the depot codes. Your hands go first to the scarf, to straighten the edge of it over his mouth, then to his collar to fold it over the stain. His hand catches your wrist. The grip closes around the bone below your palm, fast, exact, the fingers finding the joint and locking. The speed of it goes through your arm and into your shoulder.

You do not pull back.

"Your collar," you say. "There is blood."

He looks down. His eyes go to the stain. He lets go of your wrist. The place where his fingers were keeps its shape for a moment, a band of pressure fading on your skin. You fold the collar of the jacket over the stain. You reach up and push his hair forward over the cut above his eye, and your fingertips touch his forehead, and the skin is colder than you expected, and the edge of the cut is rough under your thumb, and he does not move. He lets you do it. He stands with his hands at his sides and the blood on his brow hidden now under the hair you have moved, and he lets you arrange him.

"You are my husband," you say.

He stares at you.

"You cannot speak."

The door handle turns. The metal-on-metal sound takes every other sound out of the room. You hear quiet.

"Not if you want to live."