Page 33 of The Headmaster’s Binding

Item two: the interval, carried forward at the standing rate, reaches the bottom of its page in the last week of term. My arithmetic has not moved in a month. The last week of term is forty days away, and the college will spend that week hanging greenery and rehearsing carols for the one evening it is all in one room.

Item three: there is an annex I have not read, and it is in my locked drawer, unread, the way his notebook rode against my chest, unread, and I notice that I have begun to measure my whole term in documents I will not open, and that a man who will not open his mail is not master of his correspondence. He is only ahead of it.

Item four: the inspector's name is under mine on a form that is either a shield or an exhibit. I will learn which from the direction of the next envelope.

Item five: her pencil moved twice over the quad a week ago Monday, and I have accounted for one of the entries, and the second is loose in the college somewhere with my name on it.

Item six: the light in Corbett is still on at twenty minutes to one, and the man under it called this college's walls thin, once, in my own office, as a warning I chose to hear as a joke, and I have stood at a cold window in a stone room for forty minutes, in the dark, doing nothing, which is the most dangerous thing I have done all week, and I include the form.

His lamp went out at ten to one. I stayed at the window while the glass gave back my own faint outline instead, and then I locked the small room behind me and crossed the lane, and I will close this page with the only finding the week supports, entered in the officer's own hand.

The office has amended who may be asked. I have declined to ask. And forty yards from my station's most defended room, unregistered, unread, and unaware, sleeps the one person on this ground the annex would price above every head it newly encloses, and the only thing standing between that page and that window tonight is a form with two names on it, and I do not know what the second name means.

Chapter 15

Thomas

At four o'clock on Wednesday morning I wrote down the date and hour of a thing that hadn't happened yet, sealed it in an envelope, signed my name across the flap like a crank with a patent, and put it behind the clock over my office door. Thirty-six hours later the thing happened. I want that first in the record, before the rest of this night, because everything I did afterward I did knowing I wasn't guessing anymore. I can tell you when this college is going to do it again. I have the envelope.

Here's how the grid closed.

Tuesday night, kitchen table, graph paper, three rulers, and every scrap of paper I've collected since September laid out in a horseshoe around a pot of tea that went cold on principle. Stream one: the attendance registers, two academic years of them. Quiet Fridays: the sudden absences, the present, no contribution notations, clustering the day after certain Thursdays, with the spacing between those Thursdays closing all term like contractions. Five weeks apart two years ago. Four and a half last autumn. Four in the spring, then under. This term the gap runs three, and the last quiet Friday was three weeks ago this Friday.

Stream two: Leah Brandt, who cried in my office for four timed minutes in week two and couldn't say why, and whose email said everything's been sideways since last Thursday. Thursday. Not Wednesday, not the weekend. The college's business gets done on Thursdays, and the day after, somebody sits in a seminar with their name present and the rest of them somewhere else.

Stream three is Micah Vane, and I laid his out with clean hands, because his scraps are relics now. The spring reading list, week by week, Thursdays. His mother's testimony, relayed through a tired man in a diner: tired in March, polite in April, gone by May. And the one behavior left on his chart, the thing the staff at Greenbank set their clocks by. Ten to four. Ten to four is when you arrive for a four o'clock, a few minutes early, out of respect.

Thursdays. Four p.m. Every third week, and shortening. I sat back and looked at three separate kinds of paper agreeing with each other, and I did what any responsible academic does with a hypothesis: I bet against myself. If I was pattern-matching my way into a breakdown, nothing would happen, and in June I'd open the envelope and laugh at the state of me. I wrote: Thursday. Four o'clock in the afternoon. Somewhere on this ground, someone keeps an appointment. By Friday they'll be lighter. Sealed it. Signed the flap. Four a.m. exactly, which the record will show is becoming my hour.

Then I slept badly, taught Wednesday like a man renting his own body, and waited for Thursday to grade my work.

* * *

At eighteen minutes to four on Thursday I left my office and took the long route toward the library, the one that passes the mouth of the chapel walk. Casual. I had a folder under my arm as a prop and a heart rate I declined to take.

Croft was standing at the mouth of the walk, the way a bollard stands, in the middle of the flagstones, hands folded in front of him, facing out. Twenty yards behind him, down the walk, there was a recessed door in the range wall, two steps down, and a kid in a green anorak was standing at it. Not knocking. Not pacing. Standing, hands at his sides, a little early, the way you stand outside the office of someone who's been kind to you. He checked his watch once while I was watching and then made himself stop checking it. Ten to four.

"Afternoon," I said to Croft. "Short cut through?"

"Closed, sir."

"The walk's closed. Since when does a walk close?"

"Works," Croft said, and didn't gesture at anything, because there wasn't anything to gesture at. No barrier, no tools, no works. Just a man with his back to the only thing on that walk worth guarding, positioned so precisely that he couldn't have seen the door behind him if he'd wanted to.

"Right," I said. "Works." And I walked on, because he was looking at me with the patience of masonry, and because the kid at the door had gone still in a way that made my chest hurt, and because there is no version of me barging down that walk that ends with anyone safer.

I was back in my rooms by two minutes to four. My window faces east, over the service lane, at the backs of the chapel range, and I stood at it with the lights off like the amateur I am, watch in hand. At four o'clock, within fifteen seconds of four o'clock, a candle came on behind a small deep window across the lane.

Came on. I'm keeping that phrasing. Not was lit. Nothing crossed the room behind it, no shadow of a hand. There was a dark window with a stone sill, and then there was a candle flame standing in it, upright and calm, like it had been doing this for a hundred years.

I stood at my own dark window and watched a candle burn in a room I'd never once noticed, forty feet from where I sleep, and at three minutes past five it went out, and the window was just a window again.

Then I did the paper thing. The county antiquarian society's Transactions for 1902 has the surveyor's elevations of the chapel and the east range; Ballard flagged the volume for me weeks ago, and it's been on my desk under a mug. Sheet eleven, south elevation. The small deep window belongs to a room off the chapel walk, marked in the surveyor's tidy italic: vestry. One room, nine feet by eleven. A room the size of Kit's room, where nineteen of us drank wine and voted on the fog.

Item forty-three: the envelope behind the clock is now evidence. I predicted this college's appetite to the hour, thirty-six hours out, on the strength of attendance registers and a grieving mother's clock. Being right was the worst thing that has happened to me since the photograph. A puzzle you can predict isn't a puzzle. It's a timetable.

I made it to the sink and stood over it a while, and in the end didn't need it, and I count that as Thursday's one victory.