Page 29 of The Headmaster’s Binding

* * *

I walked him out. There is no institutional gloss for it; the Headmaster does not walk junior faculty across the quad at half past six; I did it because the alternative was watching him go from the window, and I have done enough of that this term to know which of the two costs more.

We fell into step by the chapel walk. I noticed, at ten yards, that I had shortened my stride and he had lengthened his, and that the compromise had been reached without negotiation, below the level at which either of us was consulted. The fog stood off the lawns at its usual height and held still while we went through it, and he talked about his seminar, of all things, the essay Toby Renner had written and half-ruined with a borrowed thesis, and I said the things a headmaster says, and the whole quiet length of the quad was a conversation about nothing conducted at exactly the pitch of the other conversation, the one we were not having, the one with ten inches in it.

The gallery window was lit.

She stood in it with her book. Neave was a shadow behind her shoulder. She did not step back from the glass when I looked up, and she did not pretend to be studying the weather; she watched the two of us cross her sightline in step, from the chapel walk to the Letters door, the full length of the quad, and at the end of it, with the economy of a woman totting a column, her pencil moved twice.

Two entries. I have begun to keep books on what she keeps books in, and I know this much: she does not write down what she has merely seen. She writes down what she intends to use.

* * *

The frost had cleared from the office window by ten. All but the one corner.

I sat with the face-down folder at my left hand and the candle burning at its allowance, and I entered the day's true account, since this page answers to no one. I summoned a man in order to frighten him off the worst ground on this campus, and I held better cards than I have ever held against anyone: his trespass, his lost hour, his notebook, his review, his need of this post, the whole apparatus of a college that has ended careers for a tenth of what he has done. I laid down exactly one of them. Then I returned his property with the seal of his privacy unbroken, and converted my order into a request, and walked him back across open ground in front of the inspector as though the quad were a page and I wanted the entry made.

There is a sentence that ends men like him. I have used it four times in nine years; it costs nothing to say and it has never once failed me; I had it loaded all afternoon. It requires only a flat voice and a reference to the terms of a probationary appointment.

I could not make my mouth perform it. I record the fact without decoration, as an officer should: the station's best instrument for the removal of a hazard was tested tonight against a literature professor with a wet shoe and a night he cannot account for, and the instrument failed, and the failure was not in the sentence.

Above the quad, the pencil moved twice. I do not know yet what the second entry was. I know what the first one was. It crossed forty yards of fog in step, and it did not have the sense to walk apart.

Chapter 13

Thomas

Micah Vane is alive. I've started this entry four times, and that's the sentence that has to go first, because every other sentence in it is about what alive turns out to mean, and I want the record to hold the fact for a second before the meaning gets to it.

The law firm's number has been in my notebook since September, filed flat against a pencil rubbing of his name. I called it Monday night, from the pay phone outside the village store because I didn't trust my cell on college ground and I'm past pretending that's paranoia, one hour after the Headmaster of this college stood ten inches from me and asked me, personally, not as my employer, to stop looking. I want the timeline in the record, plain: one hour.

A woman at an answering service took my name. Tuesday, a voicemail: Mr. Gault will meet you Saturday, eleven a.m., somewhere off campus, your choosing. I picked a diner in Denbridge, forty minutes out, because forty minutes felt like the minimum safe distance and because I've never once seen anyone from Ashgrave eat anywhere with laminated menus.

Tuesday I also sat through the review, four to five, and said nothing about anything, which is a skill I have now, and that's all I'm writing about Tuesday.

* * *

Thursday morning I went to the record room, because Ballard had said come, and because after the stair I've made a decision I might as well commit to paper: I'm not going down into this college again. I'm going down through paper. Paper doesn't take your hour. Paper is where this place keeps its editor, and the editor makes mistakes.

The record room is everything he promised. Good chairs, a kettle older than some of the holdings, and Ken Ballard in his shirtsleeves among four hundred years of the college writing itself down. He'd already pulled the 1840s accession registers for me, had them waiting on a foam cradle like patients. He worked me through the handwriting, the abbreviations, the marginal codes the Victorian librarians used, and twice he took a volume away from me because I was turning pages at what he called reading speed instead of archive speed. When I got lost he didn't take over; he leaned back with his coffee and let me be lost until I wasn't, which is rarer than it sounds and is, for the record, how you teach.

For the printed books, he sent me to the issue desk. Requests at this library are yellow slips in duplicate: top copy travels with the book, and the flimsy goes onto a brass spike on Marion Hale's desk, where the whole term's curiosity sits in a spindled stack, mine now included. I put in three slips: the 1911 college history, the county antiquarian society's Transactions for 1902, which Ballard says has the surveyor's elevations of the chapel and the east range, and a Victorian guidebook with floor plans. Marion took the slips without a word, speared the flimsies, and said, "Returns close at nine, Dr. Mercer." Six words. Somehow both a rule and a welcome.

On the way out I mentioned to Ballard, casual as I could make it, that I needed to be off campus Saturday, personal errand, and did the local taxi firm actually exist or was it another of the college's decorative facts. He didn't ask where I was going. He took a ring of keys out of his coat, worked one off, and held it out.

"Green Rover, north lot. She pulls left after forty miles an hour. Think of it as her opinion."

I could have hugged him. I didn't, because he's a Reader in ecclesiastical history, but the impulse goes in the log.

* * *

The fog gave out at the second cattle grid past the gates, all at once, the way a dog stops at the edge of what it knows is its yard.

I'm writing that down because I watched for it. I had the window cracked and my eyes on the verges, and one moment the hedges were coming at me out of the gray, and the next the road was just a road, wet and ordinary under a sky doing normal things. Forty minutes of normal. Gas stations. A man walking a spaniel. A world that has no idea.

The diner had a horseshoe counter and a sundae on the menu called the Kitchen Sink, and there's a version of me from September who would have ordered it for the bit. I noticed him not being there. I got coffee. It came in a thick white mug, burnt from sitting since morning, and I drank it anyway, and it tasted like being forty minutes from that fog, which is to say wonderful. The booth's vinyl was split at the seam and mended with tape, and it sighed when I sat.

Gault was in the last booth. Sixties, heavy, gray suit gone soft at the elbows, a cardigan under the jacket, and a manila folder on the table with an elastic band around it, sitting in front of him the way you'd sit in front of a thing you'd stopped being able to feel. No first name offered. Six months of this had worn him down to a surname.