On Sunday morning Alan began to build a road.

He did it because he knew how. It was the only thing he had left that he was certain of, and he went at it with the cold absorbed energy of a man who has been told that his house is on fire and has decided to alphabetize the papers. He had not slept. He had sat on the edge of his bed until the window went gray, in his coat, with a green scarf round his neck, and watched the north lawn come up out of the dark: a long white blank under a pale sky, with one thin line of small tracks running across it from the arcades to the boundary stones, and no light on it anywhere. He had looked at that line of tracks for a long time. Then he had got up, and washed, and made his bed with its sharp corners, and gone to the Annex at seven, where it was cold and quiet and the lamps had not yet been lit, and sat down at the long table and uncapped his grandfather's pen.

PETITION FOR LEAVE TO BE HEARD, he wrote, at the head of a fresh sheet, in capitals. Under Section Twelve of the Charter of the Council.

He wrote it as he wrote everything that mattered, in his small upright hand, with no ornament. It had a caption and a recital and a prayer. It set out, in numbered paragraphs, the facts as they were known and the grounds on which a hearing was sought, and it did so without a single adjective. It said that the compound retained from the east greenhouse had been examined in the presence of an independent observer. It said that a second sealed sample existed, deposited under the Rule of Deposit, with a record of custody. It said that a document of historical interest, of which the Archivist had custody, bore upon the nature of the mark observed on the person of Mr. K. Pell. It did not say what the document was. It did not need to. It asked, in the correct form, humbly and with every proper courtesy, to be heard.

It came to a page and a half. It was perfect. When he had finished, he read it through, and went back to the head, where a line had been ruled for the names of the petitioners, and wrote on the first of them, A. Valemont, Treasurer. And beneath it, on the second, he wrote the name, and stopped.

E. Joy, Applicant.

He looked at it. It was a short name. It was in his hand, small and upright, and it sat on the ruled line waiting for a signature beside it, and the space beside it was white.

She would have to sign it. He had known that. It was a petition of two. And there was no way on earth to put the paper into her hand without walking up a stair and saying a sentence, and he had not got a sentence.

He put down the pen. He sat with his hands flat on the table, and did what he had been doing, in one form or another, all night. He thought of a girl on the arm of a cracked leather chair saying, in a very small clear voice, A cost is a thing you wish you hadn't had to pay. And then he took up another sheet, and began to write to the Bar.

There were four letters.

The Bar of the Council was a small and ancient body, in the way of such things: eleven advocates, of whom perhaps six were living and three active, who held among them the sole right to speak for a private party before the Council's sessions. Their names were in the Calendar. He copied them out. He wrote to Master Ignatius Crowe, and to Mr. Septimus Loake, and to Lady Marchbanks, and to Dame Ottoline Fenn, in four forms of address, four times, in four careful and entirely courteous letters, setting out the case in a hundred and fifty words and asking if the recipient could see her way, or his, to acting. He sealed them with green wax. He put them into the pigeonhole of the outgoing post at eight o'clock, on a Sunday, with both hands, and watched a paper swallow drop from the arch and take the first of them in its beak.

"You didn't have breakfast," said Pip.

He had come up silently, as he did these days, round and rumpled and pale, in his waistcoat with the gold bees, and he laid a bun in a twist of paper on the sill beside Alan's elbow. It was still warm. He did not say anything else. He stood a moment with his hands in his pockets and his round freckled face quite grave, looking at the swallow as it went up through the arch into the gray, and then he went away down the cloister, and did not ask.

Alan ate the bun. He ate every crumb, standing at the pigeonholes, because it would have been wasteful not to, and because it was apple, and had cinnamon in it. He did not think about whose recipe it was.

The answers came on Wednesday.

They came in the afternoon post, in a small white flock, and three of them were for him. He opened them in the library, at the end of the long table, in order. The first was from Master Crowe, in a thin spidery copperplate on cream paper. He regretted extremely. He was, as it happened, under a prior engagement to a party whose interests might, in a certain light, be thought to touch upon the matter. He wished the young gentleman every success.

The second was from Mr. Loake, and was four lines long. It said that Mr. Loake had retired to the coast in the autumn of last year, on grounds of health. It said that the sea was very good for him. It enclosed a pressed sea-pink.

The third came on heavy lavender paper, in a firm round hand, and he read it twice.

Dear Mr. Valemont, wrote Lady Marchbanks. You write a very clear letter. I wish that I could say that it was a surprise to me to receive it. I must tell you, in kindness, and because you are young, that in the whole of my forty-six years at the Bar I have never known any advocate to accept a brief against the Chair of the Standards Committee. It is not that it is forbidden. It is that it is not done. We are a small body, and a cautious one, and we have all of us, I regret to say, grown old in the habit of a certain prudence. I am sorry. I should like to be braver than I am. I find, at seventy-one, that I am not.

She had signed it, and under the signature, in a smaller hand, as if added after the rest, she had written: Try Fenn. She is the only one of us who was ever any good.

He folded the letter. He put it into the folder with the others, and laid his hand on it.

There was no letter from Dame Ottoline Fenn.

He went to Professor Hale on Thursday morning.

The study was in the west tower, at the top of forty-three steps, among the ungraded papers that leaned against each other like drunken colleagues, and the old man was in his shirtsleeves at his desk with chalk on his nose. He took the Petition. He read it, standing, with his spectacles pushed up on his forehead, from the caption to the prayer, and when he came to the line with the two names he stopped, and looked at the second one for a rather long time.

"It is very well drawn," said Professor Hale.

"Thank you, sir."

"It is the best thing of its kind that I have seen in thirty years. I want you to hear that." He laid it down. "I will countersign it. It requires a member of the faculty. There is, I regret to say, only one other member of the faculty who would have signed it with a better heart, and he is in a room at the top of the Fellows' Stair." He took up the pen. He signed, with a long careless flourish, and blew on it. "It will be filed."

"Sir."

"It will be forwarded, through the Warden, in proper form, to the Clerk of the Council. It will be received. It will be numbered." He looked up. His eyes behind the spectacles were clear and tired and entirely without illusion. "And it will be delayed."

Alan said nothing.

"You know that, of course. You have a mind like a rule. You knew it when you drew it up." The old man put the cap on the pen. "I tell you only because I find that it is a good thing, now and then, to have it said aloud by somebody who is not trying to sell you something. You have built a very fine road, Mr. Valemont. There is a gate at each end of it."

"I am aware of it, sir."

"I thought that you might be. It does you no discredit." He held out the paper. "Take it. Send it. And then, my boy, if I may offer a piece of advice from a man who has spent his life teaching intention and consequence to the young, I should go and look for the thing that is not on the road."

"What thing?"

"I have no idea," said Professor Hale. "If I did, I should be a good deal more use."

He could not sleep on Thursday night.

It was not new. He had not slept properly since Saturday, and he had come to know the sounds of the dormitory at night as one knows the stanzas of a very long and tedious poem: the tick of the pipes, the whistle of Pip's nose, the long exhalation of the old building settling into its frame. He lay on his back with his hands folded and his blanket squared and looked at the ceiling, which had a crack in it like the delta of a river, and thought about gates.

There was a gate at each end of the road. Professor Hale had said so, and he was right. It was a clean, wide, well-lit road, and there was nothing wrong with it. Every step of it was correct. And it ended in a Tuesday in May.

He had been over it a hundred times. He turned it round, and round, as he had turned a great many documents, hunting for the flaw. And somewhere around two in the morning, quite without his meaning it to, his mind slid sideways and fell into a different groove entirely, and he heard in it, quite distinctly, a high clear voice, a boy's voice, a round and freckled one, saying in a cold courtyard: It'll be the wrong time. And it'll be in a footnote.

He lay quite still.

It was not the road. It was the margin. It was a thin brown line in a dead woman's hand, crowded up the edge of a page in a hurry, in an attic, by lamplight. He had read it aloud in a warm room with a pair of brass lamps burning and a girl crying at his shoulder, and he had written down every word. He had thought it was about a spell. It had said a number of things, and he had taken them in order, and he had filed them. The Threadmending was of the Second Order. The names of the six. The mark is not the harm. The mark is only the signature. And a sentence at the very end, quite short, quite dry, like a clause in a charter that no one reads.

It fades in nine nights, unless it is renewed by the hand that made it.

He sat up.

He did it very slowly. The dormitory was dark. Pip's breathing went on, whistling gently, from the next bed, and the pipes ticked, and a bar of pale light lay across the floorboards from the gap in the curtain. He put his feet on the cold boards. He did not light the lamp. He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and did a sum.

The boy had fallen on the nineteenth. It had been a Friday, at about nine in the evening. He had not been able to forget the hour. He had been standing on a frozen lake, with a girl's forehead against his, and a shout had come across the ice. Nineteen. And the mark had been on his wrist within the hour, a band of silver, wound three times.

Nine nights.

He counted them off on his fingers, in the dark, like a child. The twentieth, the first. The twenty-first. The twenty-second. The twenty-third, the hearing. He did not skip one. The twenty-fourth. The twenty-fifth, and a can of oil. The twenty-sixth. The twenty-seventh, a stair. The twenty-eighth.

The twenty-eighth. It had been last Sunday. It had been the night she went into the forest.

It had been the ninth night.

He sat there in the dark with his fingers curled in the air. He did not know what he felt. He knew only that there was a number in front of him, a plain one, an ordinary date, and that if the old woman who wrote that margin had known what she was talking about, then on the night of the twenty-seventh, somewhere in the small hours, a man had had to walk into a whitewashed ward in the east wing of the Academy and put his hand on a boy's wrist.

And there had been guards. There had been two of them, on the step. The Council's men.

They would have kept a book.

He was on his feet. He was dressed before he knew that he had moved, in the dark, with his coat on over his shirt and his boots in his hand, and he went out of the dormitory in his stockinged feet, down the cold stair, and sat on the bottom step to lace them. It was ten to three. He thought, quite calmly: I cannot ask for it. It is the Council's. It is not mine to see. There is no form that will give it to me, and there is no one to whom I can apply.

And he thought of a narrow gray woman at a little table, with a pen in her fist, saying, in a voice like a ruler laid on a desk: I have lost a document.

He waited until eight.

There is a limit to what a person may do at three in the morning. He sat in the Annex until the windows paled. He shaved. He ate a bun that Pip had put by his bed, and which he had not noticed, and at five minutes to eight on Thursday evening, which was no longer Thursday morning, which was the evening of the following day, a fact he checked three times, he knocked at the door of the Warden's office.

She was at her desk.

It was a plain square room at the foot of the north stair, with a high window onto the south arcade and a rug the color of porridge, and she sat in it in her gray gown with a lamp at her elbow and a ledger open in front of her and a pen in her fist, looking exactly as she had looked at nine o'clock that morning, at midday, and at every hour since the year of the flood. She did not lift her head.

"Mr. Valemont."

"Warden."

"Shut the door."

He shut it.

"I have a problem," said the Warden, to her ledger, in a flat dry voice. "I have been looking at it all day. It is a document on my desk." She lifted her left hand, without raising her eyes, and laid it, quite precisely, on a thick bound book at the corner of the blotter, a large flat one in black cloth with a red spine. It lay open. "It is the Academy's copy of a certain register. The Council's men keep the original. I am sent a transcript, weekly, for my signature. I have signed this one. It is entirely in order. But I have the impression that I have mislaid something within it, and I shall have to go and find out what."

She set down her pen.

"I must see the Archivist," said the Warden, "on a matter of shelving. It is a thing that cannot wait. I expect to be eleven minutes." She rose. She tucked her list under her arm. She walked to the door, narrow and upright, and with her hand on the knob she said, to the wood, quite without expression: "I shall not look back."

She went out. The door closed. The sound of her heels went away down the passage, brisk and unhurried, and was gone.

He stood in the room.

He stood a long moment with his hands at his sides, looking at the black book on the blotter. It lay open in the lamplight, and the right-hand page was ruled in faint blue, with columns. It was a plain book. It had been kept in a plain hand, a soldier's hand, upright and square, with an occasional smudge. And it was entirely, he understood, a thing that he was not permitted to touch.

He sat down in the chair.

He did not take it up. He bent over it, as one bends over a pool, with his hands on his knees and his eyes moving slowly down the margin, and read.

WATCH BOOK OF THE EAST INFIRMARY, said the heading. Posts: the east door; the ward. By order of the Standards Committee. The columns were Date, Hour, Officer, and Remarks. The entries were made every half-hour, in the same square hand, in the same black ink, hour upon hour, down page after page. Twenty-two hundred. All quiet. Twenty-two thirty. All quiet. Patient asleep. He turned back. He turned back to the nineteenth, and the twentieth, and read the first night with a slow cold interest, as one reads the opening pages of a story whose end one has been told.

19 Jan. 22.00. Dr. Lunt and Mr. Pym arrive, with order. Healer relieved of findings. 22.30. Patient examined. 23.00. All quiet.

And then, in the margin, in the same hand, a little smaller:

20 Jan. 05.10. Chair attended. Sat one hour. Left 06.12. Patient peaceful.

He read it again. It was written in full. There was nothing hidden. A tall man had gone into the ward at ten past five in the morning and sat for an hour at a boy's bedside, and had said so to four hundred people in a cold courtyard. It was in the book. It was perfectly proper.

He turned forward.

He turned the leaves quite slowly, one at a time, through the twenty-first and the twenty-second, through the long dull columns of a week. All quiet. All quiet. Patient asleep. Healer in ward. The twenty-fourth, which was the hearing. The twenty-fifth. The twenty-sixth. He turned to the twenty-seventh and then, because it was the right page, he put down his finger on the margin of it, and did not move.

27 Jan. 23.30. All quiet. Healer in ward.

28 Jan. 00.00. All quiet.

28 Jan. 00.30. All quiet. Healer in ward.

And then there was nothing.

It was a clean white space. It was an inch and a half of blank ruled paper. The columns went on down the page, blue and faint, with their little printed headings, quite empty, quite orderly, three lines of them, each with its hour pencilled very faintly in the margin as the sergeant had always done: one o'clock, half past one, two. And beside the blank, in the margin, in the same square hand, not smudged, quite firmly, as one writes a thing that one has been told to write, he read:

Chair's visit: not to be entered. By order. Sgt. R.

Then, on the next line:

28 Jan. 02.30. All quiet. Healer in ward. Patient settled.

He sat there.

He sat for the best part of a minute with his finger on the page, in the circle of lamplight, in a room that smelled of ink and porridge and a faint dry dust, and the clock on the wall ticked, and he did not feel anything. It was the strangest thing. He had expected, if he had expected anything, a kind of leaping triumph. It did not come. What came instead was a cold, small, hollow clarity, as of a man who has gone down a staircase in the dark and set his foot, at last, on the floor.

Three entries. A full hour and a half. No other night in the whole of the month had a hole in it. He turned back to make sure. He turned through all of January, line by line, and there was not a gap. Every half hour, every night, a plain square entry. All quiet. All quiet. A man who writes All quiet fifteen hundred times does not leave out three by accident.

It was a deliberate omission. It had been ordered. And the sergeant who had made it had been so honest a man, or so poor a conspirator, that he had written down, in the margin, the fact that he had been told to leave it out.

He took his notebook from his breast pocket. He opened it at a clean page. It was a very small action, and he did it with a hand that shook very slightly, and he uncapped his pen and ruled the page into its columns, and wrote at the head, in capitals, RECORD OF OBSERVATION.

Date: 1 Feb. Hour: 8.03 in the evening, by the clock in the Warden's office. Place: the Warden's office, north stair. What was observed: the Academy's transcript of the Watch Book of the East Infirmary, lying open on the Warden's desk, left open by the Warden without comment. I read it in her absence. I did not touch it.

He went on. He set down the entries as he had seen them: the nineteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-seventh. He set down the three blank lines, and the note in the margin, word for word, and the initial. He did it with perfect precision, in the small upright hand with which he had written ten thousand things, and at the foot of the page, where there was a line for the witnesses, he stopped, with the pen lifted, and looked at it.

Witness: none.

He wrote it. He had to. It was the truth. He wrote it down, and looked at it, and a most peculiar thing happened. It came back to him in a rush, as one remembers the sound of a voice in a dark room. A cold stone passage, and a lantern, and a girl with her arms wrapped round herself, white and small against the wall, saying in a low shaking voice: I know I can't witness. It's against the rule. But I'd like it written down that I was here.

He put down the pen.

He sat there for some time with his hand pressed against his mouth.

When the Warden returned, at eleven minutes past the hour by her own watch, which he had been consulting without knowing, she did not look at him. She came in with her list under her arm, and sat down at her desk, and took up her pen, and bent over the ledger. She had, he saw, shut the black book. It lay on the corner of the blotter, squared to the edge, with the red spine neatly to the front. She did not remark on it.

"Thank you, Warden," said Alan.

"I have no idea what you mean," said the Warden. She turned a page. "The Archivist sends her regards. The shelving was in perfect order."

The Council sat on the second of February.

It was the Feast of the Candlemas, the middle of the winter, a bitter bright blue day with a hard sun on the snow, and the whole Academy had been given a half holiday for no better reason than that nobody could have been got to work. The Council had come the evening before. Four black carriages had gone up the drive in a line, without lamps, and the school had watched them from the windows in a long shuddering silence, like a village watching a funeral. They met in the Warded Chamber at ten, behind the oak door with no handle, and no one was admitted.

He sat in the library.

He had not meant to. He had gone there at nine, to read, and had sat for three hours at the end of the long table with a book open in front of him and his hands flat on the cover, and the sound of the great clock in the west tower striking the quarters came down through the stone like a slow bell tolling in the bottom of a well. At eleven the first-years began to cluster in the cloister. At half past they were thick as starlings. They stood in knots and rows along the arcades, in the hard glitter of the snow, whispering, and the whole place had the dreadful hush of a thing waiting to be said.

The bell tolled at noon.

It was not the hour. It was the other bell, the little one over the north gate, which was rung only for proclamations, and he heard it come across the courtyard, high and cracked and thin as a spoon on a cup. He went to the window. The whole of the Academy was gathering in the great yard below. Four hundred people, in a long dark crescent, in their coats and mufflers, with their breath going up in clouds. And on the steps of the Great Hall, alone, small and upright and gray, with her list in one hand, stood the Warden.

She read it in her ruler voice.

She did it without any expression at all, as she had read out the names of every first-year at the beginning of every term for thirty years, and the thin clear sound carried across the snow like the notes of a plain bell. The Council had sat. It had considered the matter of the Potions Club of Levis Morny Academy and its Responsible Officer. It had adopted, without division, the Resolution laid before it by the Standards Committee. That the said Club be dissolved. That Ambrose Marlow, Assayer of the Third Class, be reduced to the Fifth. That he be dismissed from his post, with effect from the close of the present term, which was the twenty-first day of June. That the compound retained be destroyed upon the conclusion of its analysis.

She paused. She turned a page.

"A petition," read the Warden, "for leave to be heard, under Section Twelve, having been duly lodged on the first of February by two students of this Academy, countersigned by Professor Hale, has been received." Her voice did not alter in the slightest. "It has been numbered. It will be considered at the Lady Day Session of the Council, on the twenty-fifth of March."

There was a ripple through the crowd.

He stood at the library window with his hands at his sides.

The twenty-fifth of March. It was a clean, sensible, proper date. It was seven weeks away. It was a Monday. It was precisely what a person of reason and good manners and a very beautiful voice would have said, with perfect sincerity, in the expectation of nothing at all, and Alan heard it, and heard under it, in a small cracked clear voice, in a tower full of brass: It'll be a Tuesday in May.

She had been out by a month and a day.

He looked down into the courtyard.

They stood, as they had stood on the morning of the accusation, in a small stiff group by the fountain: Mira, rigid, with her hands folded; Dara, thin and gray; Theo, who had gone entirely white; Wren, arms folded, braid wound round her head. And at the end of the line, a little apart, in a patched brown coat, with her hands thrust deep into her pockets and her face turned up toward the Warden on the steps, stood Elen.

She did not look round. She stood quite straight and quite still while the cold clear words went across the snow, and he saw her hand come out of the coat pocket, once, and go, very lightly, to the left side of her chest, where there was a card.

He thought: she knew.

He thought: she knew, on the Saturday, in a tower, with a paper in her hand. She had read it. She had said it'll be a Tuesday in May, and she had said it in a small hard laugh, and he had put it down to temper. He had said, with perfect gentleness, that it was the only way that could not be refused.

He had been right. It could not be refused. It could only be waited out.

He turned from the window.

He went and sat at the long table with his back against a bookcase, and for a time he did not do anything at all.

It was the word that he could not get past.

He had been turning it over for six days. He had turned it in the dark, in a bed, with a crack in the ceiling, and in a library, with a Petition, and in a long pale room with a book of dry blue columns. He had said it, in all honesty, in a tower full of wheels, with a warm lamp on the crate, and a frog in a green cloak on the arm of a chair. He had said it twice. You are worth the cost.

Cost.

It was a plain word. He had never examined it. It was the most ordinary word in the law. It was what a thing came to, when you added it up: the price of a deed, the weight of a mistake, the sum that must be paid. He had used it all his life in the sense that a clerk uses it, as a measurement. A cost was proportional. It was a thing one bore. It was, in his father's house, a very nearly holy word, because it meant that nothing in the universe was free, and that a man who paid his debts was a man who might be trusted.

He thought of the girl who had said, quite gently, and in tears: A cost is a thing you wish you hadn't had to pay.

He had heard it as a quarrel. It was not a quarrel. It was a definition.

He sat at the long table with his hands pressed flat on the wood, and saw it, suddenly, as one sees a figure in a puzzle, all at once, entire, with the whole of its outline standing out in clear black lines. A cost was a thing that one would not have chosen. It was a thing that came to one, from outside, and was borne. And he had said, in the kindest voice he possessed, to a girl who had stood in a hall with her chin up and said it wasn't poison, that she was a thing to be borne.

He had not meant it. He had meant the other thing. He had meant: I would pay anything. I would pay all that I have. I would pay the cadetship, and the house, and the name. I would stand in front of the Council in a ring of silver and be asked a plain question, and I would answer it with my whole life. He had meant that he would not refuse her. That there was nothing in the world that he would not give.

And he had called it by the name of the thing that people wish to avoid.

"She isn't the cost," said Alan.

He said it aloud, to the empty library, in a voice so low that the dust did not stir. He heard how it sounded. It sounded like a sentence from a language he had never learned, and had always known.

"She is the reason."

He was holding the edge of the table. His knuckles were white. He had not got it all. He knew that. He felt it, like a stair in the dark, very near, not yet under his foot. There was more. There was a thing about the way that he had said it, and the way he had heard it, and the exact grain of a voice that was kind and level and so correct that a lavender cardigan in a city school could have had it by heart. He did not yet understand that. But he understood this. He had said the wrong word, and he had been saying it for a year and a half, in every key, to the one person in the world who could hear it. And he had never once thought to look it up.

He drew a sheet of paper toward him.

It was a plain sheet, from the Annex's rough gray stock. He did not rule it. He did not put a heading on it. He took up his grandfather's pen, and dipped it, and sat for a long minute with the nib held above the page, and then he wrote, quite slowly, in a hand that was not at all upright, a line at a time.

Dear Elen.

I do not know what I said. I know what you heard. I should like to find out.

He looked at it.

It was four lines long. It was a very bad letter. It had no order in it, and no argument, and no clause. It did not explain a single thing. It did not say it was sorry, because he was not yet certain what for, and it had not occurred to him to lie. It simply stood on the paper in a boy's unsteady hand, quite bare, quite true, like a small thing set down on a step.

It was the tenth.

He did not seal it. He folded it in four, along the soft creases of the other nine, and put it into the back of the notebook, behind a row of postcards and a strip of paper with a star. He did not know when. He only knew that it was the first of them that he could have given to her, and that it would not be given with a form.

He sat a while longer. Then he rose, and put on his coat.

The can stood on the Annex step.

It was a quarter to five, and the light had begun to go out of the sky, and the whole of the south arcade lay in a long blue dusk with the forty iron brackets of the lamps standing along it dark and cold. The snow had been swept. A thin wind came down the passage from the north. And on the top step, by the door, beside the lamp that hung at the arch, stood a small tin can with a long thin spout, and a folded gray rag laid across it, and, tucked under its handle, a slip of paper.

He knew it before he read it. It was in a quick loose uphill hand, with a brush.

Back at nine. (Water.)

She was not there. He looked down the arcade, and up it, and at the stairs. There was no one. She had set down her work, as one sets down a thing that one is going to take up again, and gone elsewhere, to the infirmary corridor or the clock tower or wherever it was that a person went who had once said that she would be good at being lost, and she had left her card.

He stood a moment with his hands at his sides.

Then he bent, and took up the can.

It was heavier than he had expected. It was half full. It smelled of paraffin and cold iron and a very faint sweetness underneath, like the smell of an old shop. He took the rag. He turned to the first lamp, the one at the Annex arch, and looked at it, and saw, for the first time, that it had a tag.

It was a small one, a tin disc the size of a florin, tied to the bracket with a loop of green twine, and on it, in thin fine copperplate, scratched with a pin, was a single word. Doris.

He read it twice.

Then he looked along the arcade. He saw them, now that he knew to look. They hung from every bracket, a long double row of little tin discs in the dusk, turning very slightly in the wind, and each had a name. Philippa. Old Bertram. Mrs. Abernathy. The Colonel. A very small one, at the far end of the passage, which said, in letters scarcely bigger than a grain of rice, Gerald, and which had a second tag beneath it, tied on with a bit of red wool, that said, in a different and much cruder hand, Not that Gerald.

He stood in the empty arcade, in the blue cold, with a can of oil in his hand and something very strange happening at the back of his eyes.

He reached up.

It was a thing he had watched done a hundred times. He knew it as one knows a proof. You trimmed the wick. You filled the font, to the line, and no farther. You struck the match, and held it to the wick, and drew it away, and the flame came up round and yellow and steady, and you said the name. He took the little scissors from the pocket of the rag, where they had been tucked. He stood on tiptoe. He did it, with great care, as he did everything, and his fingers were not at all steady, and he spilled a quarter-cup of paraffin on the step.

"Good evening, Doris," said Alan.

He said it very formally. It came out of him low and rather stiff, in the voice that he used for the Warden, and it hung in the cold air in front of the lamp. The wick caught. A small yellow flame stood up in the glass, wavered, and burned. And it was only a lamp, an ordinary brass lamp with a green chimney, on an ordinary iron bracket, in a public passage. It did not do anything. It simply shone.

He went on to the next.

It took him forty minutes. He had expected it to take twenty. He did them in order, one by one, down the long south arcade, and round the corner into the cloister, and he read each tag as he came to it, and said the name. He said it to Philippa. He said it, rather more gravely, to Old Bertram, who was very large and burned with a slow smoky flame and had to be coaxed. He said it to the Colonel, and to Mrs. Abernathy, and to a very small bent lamp near the library door that had no name at all, only a tag with a question mark, and to which, after a pause, he said, "Good evening. I regret that I do not know what to call you."

The lamp burned. It did not seem to mind.

He burned his finger on the twenty-third.

It was the Vickery brass, the heavy one, with the green glass chimney. He had been warned. A tall loose cheerful voice, in a library annex, a hundred years ago, had said, They get frightfully hot, mind. You've got to watch your sleeve. He had not thought of his finger. He drew the chimney off, a little too quickly, and the hot brass took him across the first two fingers of his right hand with a hard dry sting, and he made a small involuntary sound and dropped the can.

It rang on the flags. Oil ran across the stone.

"Oh," said a high small voice behind him. "You've done it wrong."

He turned.

It was a first-year. He was perhaps eleven, a small, serious, round-faced boy in a coat too large for him, with a satchel and a muffler and a runny nose, who had stopped in the middle of the arcade and was regarding Alan with the grave interest of a naturalist observing an unusual bird. He was holding his own books in both arms. He did not seem at all afraid.

"You've got to turn the key first," said the boy. "Then take the chimney off. Kieran always turned the key. It stops the flame jumping."

"I see," said Alan. He was holding his hand against his coat. It throbbed. "Thank you. I was not informed."

"Kieran told me. When I was lost." The boy edged closer, with a sort of dignified curiosity. "He showed me where the Alchemy room was. He said if I couldn't find it, I was to look for the lamp with the dent, and it was always the one by the door." He considered Alan. "Who are you?"

It was a plain question. It was asked with no malice at all, in the clear flat treble of a boy who wishes to be told the answer, and Alan, with his burned fingers and his can on its side and a long dark flagged arcade full of small lit flames around him, stood quite still, and could not think of anything to say that was true.

"I am," said Alan, slowly, "the lamp monitor."

The boy examined this.

"You're not a very good one," he observed.

"No."

"But you did say good evening." The round face was entirely serious. "Kieran said that matters. He said they like it." He shifted his books. "You'd better do the next one properly. It's Philippa. She sulks."

"I did Philippa."

"Then you've done her twice," said the boy, "and she'll be insufferable," and went on down the arcade with his muffler trailing, and did not look back.

Alan stood a long moment with his burned hand held to his chest.

Then he picked up the can. He mopped the oil from the flags with the rag, quite thoroughly, and turned the key, and took off the chimney, in that order, and lit the lamp.

"Good evening," said Alan, to the flame. His voice shook very slightly. "Right then."

It was Kieran's phrase. It came out of him by itself, without any permission, and lay on the cold air in the empty arcade between a lamp and a boy, and he heard it, and stood still.

He did the last of them at ten to six.

It was Doris again. She was the last as well as the first, the one at the Annex arch, with her small tin tag turning in the wind, and he came back to her along the dusk of the arcade with the empty can in his hand and a smell of paraffin and scorched skin about him, and stood in front of her. She was burning steadily. She had burned the whole time. He had not noticed her go out, and she had not.

"Doris," said Alan. "I do not suppose that you can tell me what she meant."

The flame stood in its green glass, quite still, and did not answer.

He set down the can on the step. He laid the rag across it, folded, as it had been. He took the slip of paper, which he had put in his pocket when he lifted the can, and slid it back under the handle, exactly where it had been, so that it should be there when she came at nine. He did not write anything on it. He thought of it. He stood for a long moment with the pencil in his hand. Then he put the pencil away.

It would be enough, he thought, for her to see that the lamps were lit.

He looked up.

There was a window across the passage, a tall one on the ground floor, with a lamp burning behind it. It was the Warden's. She was standing at it, in her gray gown, quite still, with one hand on the curtain, looking out. She had been there, he understood, for some time. Her narrow face in the light was entirely unreadable. She did not nod. She did not move. She looked at him for as long as it takes to read a line, across the dusk, with her gray eyes. Then she let the curtain fall.

He went to the library.

He sat at the end of the long table for two hours, with his burned fingers wrapped in a handkerchief and a book in front of him that he did not read. He was aware of the pain, in a dull and not unwelcome way, like a hand held on a shoulder. He was aware of a smell of oil. The lamps burned along the arcade outside, a long gold string in the dark, forty and a little tin disc on each, and not one of them flickered. He found, a little to his surprise, that he was not unhappy. He was something he had no word for. He was a person who had been very far from home and had, quite by accident, in the dark, put his hand on a wall.

"Mr. Valemont."

He looked up.

It was a quarter to nine. She stood at the end of the table, short and square in her gray shawl, with her iron hair standing on end and her broad face quite closed, and her hands, which were like two loaves, were folded in front of her. She looked at his handkerchief. She looked at it, for rather a long moment, with her pale shrewd eyes, and something moved in the heavy jaw.

"Lamp," said Healer-Mistress Brandt.

"Madam."

"Vickery brass. They always do the first two fingers." She did not smile. "Cold water. Not butter. Come with me."

He went.

She took him to the dispensary, at the far end of the infirmary corridor, a long narrow room with a stone sink and rows of brown bottles, where a single lamp burned over a scrubbed deal table, and she ran cold water over his fingers for ten minutes, in silence, with a large rough hand round his wrist. She dressed them with something green and cool. She wound a strip of linen round them with the neat quick unsentimental movements of a woman who has dressed some thousands of hands. And all the time, from the end of the corridor, behind the closed door of the ward, there came a thin faint steady glow, which he did not look at, and which lit the bottom of the door like a line of gold.

When she had done, she wiped her hands.

"A word," said the Healer-Mistress. "About a night."

He waited.

"The twenty-seventh. The Saturday." She said it to the sink, flatly, in the voice of a woman who has been told that her findings are reserved and has never been told what she is permitted to say about her own arms. "I was in my ward. I'd been there since six. I had my day-book. I'd entered the hour, the pulse, the temperature, as I do. At ten to one, the sergeant came in."

"Sergeant R."

"Rackham. A decent enough man. He'd been looking at his boots for a week." She dried her hands, finger by finger. "He said the Chair wished to sit with the patient alone. He said, it was by order. He said, if I'd be so kind." Her jaw moved. "I said, it was my ward. He said he knew. He said, he was very sorry. He said, it would only be an hour."

"And you went."

"I went. I came in here." She nodded at the dispensary. "I sat at that table. I didn't read. I looked at the door." She hung up the towel. "I'd been a Healer forty years. I'd never been put out of a sickroom. I stood there, an hour and twenty minutes, by the clock, and I did not hear a thing through that door. Not a sound." She turned. Her pale eyes held his. "But I smelled it."

He did not breathe.

"Lavender water," said Brandt. "And cold iron. Coming under the door like a draft. I've never smelled that mixture in my life. I'd know it in my grave."

There was a silence in the dispensary. The lamp ticked. Somewhere in the long dark building behind them, a door shut.

"I went back in at seven minutes past two," said Healer-Mistress Brandt. "The sergeant opened it. The Chair had gone. The boy was lying as I'd left him. And his wrist." She drew a long slow breath. "The thread. It was brighter. It was gold. It was pulsing, like a hearth. And in about ten minutes it settled, and went down to where it had been, but warmer. It was a good deal warmer than it had been in nine days."

"You noted it."

"I noted it." She put her hand into the pocket of her gray shawl, and drew out a small thick book bound in black oilcloth, worn gray at the corners, with a stub of pencil on a string. "I enter everything. It's how I was made. And nobody's asked me what I enter, because they've told me I have no findings."

She laid it on the deal table.

She laid it quite deliberately, face up, open, under the lamp, at a page with a column of small cramped figures, and she stepped back from it, two paces, with her hands folded over her stomach.

"A day-book," said Healer-Mistress Brandt, in a voice like a drawn bolt, "is a day-book. It is not a finding. It is not a report. It is a record of what a woman did in a day. It is kept on a table. I have a pipette to look for in the other room, and I shall be some minutes." She turned. "I do not expect that a student in my dispensary, with a bandaged hand, would take the liberty of reading what lay open before him."

She went out. The door closed behind her.

He sat down.

He read it by the single lamp, in her blunt square pencil, with the figures running down the margin in neat small columns. 27 Jan. 18.00, pulse 52. 21.00, 51. 23.00, 51. 00.30, 52. And then, in a different hand, a little more cramped, as of a person writing very fast with her jaw set: 00.50. Sent from ward by Sgt. Rackham, by order of the Chair. Went to dispensary. 02.07. Re-entered. Thread bright gold. Pulse 60, rising. 02.20. Thread settling. Warmer. And, underneath, quite plain, entered like a temperature: Smell in dispensary 01.10 to 02.00: lavender water. Cold iron. Not from any medicine of mine.

He sat looking at it a long time.

It was a plain, honest, unremarkable page. It would have convinced no one. It was the entry of a Healer-Mistress with forty years' service, whose findings were reserved, and whose book, if produced before the Council, would be called a private memorandum by a gentleman with a very kind voice. It had a smell in it. It had a sergeant, and a clock. And it fitted, to the minute, into a white space in another book, on the corner of a desk, in a room at the foot of the north stair.

He had a gap. He had the other side of it. He had a woman who had been put out of her own ward, and a man who had written, in a margin, that he had been told to say nothing. He had a date that came out of a dead woman's pen, and the hour that came out of a clock. It was nearly a proof.

It was only half.

He saw it quite clearly, as he sat there with the bandage stiff on his hand and the cold green smell of the ointment in his nose. It was a book and a book. It was two documents, from two people, each of whom had been told to be silent, and any gentleman on a platform with a kind voice could say that two honest persons may be mistaken about the same hour. It wanted a third thing. It wanted someone who had been standing outside, in the dark, on the lawn, with an eye on the door, who had seen a man go in and come out, who had no reason to be there, and no way to be silenced.

It wanted a witness who was not on anyone's payroll.

The next time would be the sixth.

He had done that sum too. It was a very simple one, a fortnight's addition. Twenty-eight and nine. He sat in the dispensary with the lamp ticking and the thin line of gold under the door, and thought: Tuesday. In the small hours. And there was no one to stand in the dark.

He thought of her.

He thought of a girl with a can of oil going along an arcade at nine at night, with a card in her pocket, saying good evening to a lamp. He thought of a hand laid flat on a pane. It came to him so suddenly, and so completely, that for a moment he could not breathe. And he put it away, as he had been trained to put away anything that he could not file, with great care, in a drawer at the back of his mind, and shut it.

He did not know that there was a card.

He closed the Healer's book, gently, and laid it on the table, squared to the edge. He sat looking at his bandaged hand. Down the long dark corridor, behind a door, a thread of gold light pulsed once, warm and slow and patient, like the beating of a very small heart, and was still.