Emily had told him in Stormwind that a girl had been found dead. He had, by then, finished a painting: a young woman in a blue dress, hands composed, eyes closed. He had painted it as a man notes down a name he expects to forget. He slept badly and dreamed better, which was the wrong order for a man trying to live.
No one had asked him to go to Westfall. The wish arranged itself without announcing its reasons. He packed a small bag and took a mail-coach west. It made its customary quarrels with the road and at last chose to lose one outside a holding called Garner’s Fold. The driver, cheerful despite the road, declared a halt. “There’s a smithy down the road,” he said, pointing with the whip. “Tell him the axle’s sulking.” Basil had the sense to lift his bag from the coach before he left it, and the driver, relieved of responsibility, promised him a seat back to Stormwind in the morning, if not the morning after.
Garner’s Fold consisted of a yard, a forge, and the minimum of houses necessary to prevent the forge from wandering away. The smith was of that type who never looks surprised to be needed. He said he would come. Given both the hour and the circumstance, Basil thought it best to retire. One of the houses served as an inn, as such houses often do—beds honest, beer correct, and conversation kept to the small change of weather and cattle. He ate, as one does in such places, what was brought, and went up when the hearth below had decided to go out. He lay down and expected not to sleep. He slept.
At some dark hour, he woke. The house had that particular stillness of buildings you do not know well: all the noises are correct and therefore suspicious. He lay listening for the sound that had woken him up and could not isolate it. He was not alarmed, for it was not his habit, but he experienced the peculiar embarrassment of a man who has been watched making a small mistake and cannot tell who has watched him.
The inclination presented itself then—polite, persistent. He dressed without striking a light. The corridor had been scrubbed recently and held the thin, soapy smell of diligence. On the stair he paused, not to listen, but to become the sort of man who goes out of doors at night without an errand. It seemed he was already that man.
Outside the yard, the land went spare in every direction. The moon could not be bothered; what light there was came from the general agreement of the stars that it would be a waste to withhold it entirely.
He did not choose paths so much as accept them, as paths in that sort of country did not so much lead as decline to hinder. He went on with the air of a man who has been given proper directions and trusts them because he cannot remember having asked.
Presently he found that he had come to a place he could not have named if asked. A house stood a little off from the faint track. The door gave when he tried it, not in welcome, but because it seemed staying shut had ceased to be worth the effort.
The rooms on the lower floor conducted themselves as deserted rooms do—without imagination.
At the top, three doors. He opened the first and was shown the customary scene: a bed-shape printed in boards by years of weight, a rectangle on the wall where a picture had protected the wallpaper from the sun. The second door stuck. The third knew him.
Behind it was a small room that had been emptied of furniture and of the signs furniture leaves behind. The boards bore the discreet shine of oil. There was a smell he recognized and disliked recognizing: a clean, tight smell of ship-stores.
The window was the window he had painted: old, its glass wavering, bellied in one corner in a way which turned a moonlit strip of road into a slow river. He knew where the light would touch when the day leaned; he could have set his palm on the wall and found the cool place that had been her shadow. He didn’t. His hands felt suddenly awkward in front of him. He slid them into his pockets because there was nowhere else decent to put them.
He wanted, very much, to ask: Who cleaned this? Who took away the dust and left the quiet? He imagined a woman with her scarf tight against scents she would rather not carry home. He imagined a priest finding something respectable to do with his hands. He imagined a guard with a bucket. He experienced—coolly—the unpleasant justice of having been anticipated. The dream had not borrowed this place. This place had been pleased to use his dream.
He told himself he had not been here. He said it aloud to the floor: “I have not been here.”
He returned to the inn by a way that would not let him remember the way back.
In the morning he paid what was asked and thanked the smith by name though he had not been given it. The coach took him up just as promised. Stormwind received him with its usual lack of interest, which was a comfort. In his studio the painting waited, as paintings do, with the patience of things that do not know what they resemble. The blue was blue. The hands were as he had made them. The light lay obediently where it had been told.
He set his bag down in its place. He washed his hands longer than was needed. He told himself, carefully and without heat, that the matter was concluded: he had gone, as far as was reasonable, to satisfy a curiosity no one had demanded of him. He was content to allow that something had placed him where it preferred, and that he had stood there as long as was polite.
He did not propose to ask what else might be required.
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