Chapter 27
Everett Strand
The wire was thin as a hair, and it ran across the top step at the height of a man's ankle.
He saw it at the last moment, by the light of a lantern burning in a bracket on the wall. He had been climbing fast, two steps at a time, with his hand on the rope rail, and the stone landing at the top of the spiral had risen out of the dark before him: a narrow platform, six feet square, with a low door of black oak at the far end, studded with iron. A line of gold lay under it. The ticking was deafening. Behind the oak, quite plainly, he could hear them all, fifteen clocks, fifteen pendulums, a hundred small bright mechanical hearts, running out of step with one another in an endless dry chatter, like a field of crickets.
His boot stopped an inch short of the wire.
He stood without breathing.
It was a fishing line. Clear, nearly invisible, stretched taut from a nail in the left wall to a small gray object on the right, which had been taped neatly to the base of the door frame. A flat gray block, the size of a paperback, wrapped in plastic. Two wires ran out of it. One was white. One was red. A small black box, about the size of a matchbook, sat on top, with a green LED that glowed steadily.
Semtex, thought Damen. A pound and a half. Maybe two.
And a tripwire. And a timer.
He lied about the timer.
He crouched.
His hands were quite steady. That was the curious thing. He knelt on the cold stone landing with the sweat running down his back and the blood drying in his throat, and the gun battle roaring below him like a distant sea, and his hands were as still and sure as a surgeon's. He took the knife from his boot. He laid the point against the fishing line, very softly, a hair's breadth from the nail. He drew a long breath.
The line is the switch, said the voice. Cut it, and the circuit stays open. Pull it, and it closes.
Unless he's wired it the other way.
Then you will not hear the answer.
He cut the line.
It parted with a tiny dry tick, almost lost in the clocks. Nothing happened. The green light burned. The block sat on the flagstone, smug and gray, looking like a book.
He let out his breath.
He took the black box between finger and thumb, and slid his knife under its edge, and lifted. The wire at the back came away with a faint click, white, then red. The light went out. He held the dead box in the palm of his hand for a moment, staring at it. Then he turned, and flung it from the landing, out through the window, and heard it fall, a long way, in the dark.
"All right," he said, aloud, to the door.
He put his hand on the iron ring.
It was a round room.
He had not expected that. In his mind it had always been square, a paneled office with a window, a mahogany desk, a fire. It was a circle, forty feet across, at the top of a stone tower, with a domed ceiling lost in shadow, and eight tall arched windows set into the wall like the windows of a church. Through them he could see the night: the fog, the flares, the red sparks of the battle on the quay, the black sweep of the sea. The floor was bare boards, dark and polished and worn smooth in a circle. There was a stove. There was a bed in an alcove, narrow and neat, with a gray blanket. There was a table with a lamp, and a pile of books.
And from the walls, from the ceiling, from every shelf, bracket and niche and beam, in a dim gold swarm, hung the clocks.
They were beyond counting. There were great mahogany longcases with brass faces and swinging pendulums, tall as a man. There were bracket clocks, and carriage clocks, and cuckoo clocks; there were skeleton clocks under glass domes, their wheels turning like the works of a mill; there was a clock with a painted ship that rolled on a painted sea, and one with a mechanical bird, and one with a tiny orrery of planets that ticked round a brass sun. They all said different times. They struck the quarter-hours in a dozen voices, a cascade of silver chimes and wooden knocks and deep metallic bongs, overlapping, interrupting one another, like a congregation praying out of order. And at the center of it all, in the middle of the floor, on an iron frame as high as a house, bolted down with brass, stood the great movement of the tower clock itself: a huge, slow, glittering engine of wheels and levers, turning in the gloom, with a pendulum the length of a boat swinging beneath it, to and fro, with a sound like the breath of a giant.
Tock.
Tock.
Tock.
And at a desk beside it, in a high-backed leather chair, with his hands folded on the blotter, sat a very old man in a camel cardigan.
"You have cut my wire," said Everett Strand.
He did not look round. His voice was thin and dry and a little breathless. He sat very upright with a rug across his knees and a lamp at his elbow, and in its light the long fine head, the white hair, the stooped shoulders seemed carved from some pale soft stone. Beside him, at his shoulder, in her gray uniform, with her black bag in her lap and her face as blank as a plate, stood Mrs. Aldous.
"Yes," said Damen.
"That was clever."
"It was a pound and a half of plastic explosive."
"Two," said the old man. "Mr. Mercer is nothing if not generous." He turned his head, slowly, with an effort that made the muscles in his neck stand out. "Forgive me if I don't rise. I find that my knees have given up. Do come in. Shut the door. It's draughty."
Damen shut it.
He walked into the room. The boards were warm under his boots. He passed the longcases, and the bracket clocks, and the orrery, and a small silver clock that began, as he went by, to play a thin, bright, tinkling tune; and he stopped ten feet from the desk, with his hands open at his sides. He had the rifle slung. The Colt was at his back. He did not touch either.
"Where's Vance?" he said.
"On the stair, I imagine. He went down when the shooting began." Strand gave a little dry laugh. "He is a loyal boy, in his way. He left me his regards. He said Sorry about this, Mr. Strand, and set the charge himself. He was very apologetic." The pale eyes glittered. "I told him not to worry. I have known for four months that Cassian was going to murder me. I should have been quite hurt if he hadn't tried."
"You knew."
"Of course I knew." The old man smiled. "Do sit down. You look dreadful."
"I'll stand."
"As you like." He folded his hands. "You've come for the girl, I take it. And the child. And the wife. Mrs. Whitlock is an extraordinary woman, by the way. I have never met a person who could look at me so steadily without moving a muscle. I should have liked to have her on my staff."
"And your elder. I watched her lead four boats through Black Maid Deep with their lights out. I did not think anyone living could do it. She has your hands, Mr. Knox, and her mother's nerve, and I am very sorry that I was the one to teach her that she needed both." A cough shook him. He wiped his lips with a handkerchief and looked at it, and put it away. "I gather she's put Mr. Mercer to sleep."
"How?"
"Mrs. Aldous told me." He glanced up. "She has been very naughty. She left her bag where it could be found. I find that I am not in the least angry."
"Mr. Strand," said the gray woman, in an unmoved voice, "you should not be talking."
"I'm dying, Mrs. Aldous. I'd like to be allowed to enjoy it."
"You will be sick."
"I am always sick. It's one of my chief diversions." He turned back. The mild eyes rested on Damen's face. "Well, my dear boy. Here we are. You've walked up a hundred and ninety stairs through my men, and cut my wire, and stood before me, and not drawn a gun. I find that remarkable. I should like to know why."
"Because you haven't."
The old man stopped.
He sat motionless, with his thin hands on the blotter. Then, very slowly, he looked down at the desk. Between the lamp and the inkwell, half hidden by a ledger, there lay a small blued automatic pistol with a worn ivory grip. It had been there all the time. He picked it up, with a trembling forefinger, and turned it over, and set it down again, a few inches nearer the edge.
"So I haven't," he said softly.
"You could have shot me when I opened the door."
"I could."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because I've been thinking." Strand glanced at the great pendulum. It swung slowly through the gloom, silent and enormous, and the old man's eyes followed it. "I do a great deal of thinking, now. It's all I have left. I sit here at night, among the clocks, and I go over my life, as one goes over a set of books. Item by item. What was owed, and what was paid." The thin voice dropped. "And I find that it does not come out right."
"No."
"It never does. That's the trouble with accounts. One thinks, if one keeps them tidily enough, they'll balance." A bleak smile. "They don't. There's always a remainder."
"Give me the book," said the old man.
Damen took it from under his coat.
He had carried it in the lining, at his back, under the black overcoat, ever since the hall. It was heavy and squared and cold. He drew it out, the false one, Marta's, with its red cord and its worn black cloth, and carried it across the floor, and laid it on the desk in the lamplight, between the inkwell and the gun.
Strand looked at it for a long time.
He did not touch it. He sat very still. Mrs. Aldous, behind him, had stiffened. In the stillness the clocks went on, and the great pendulum swung, and from somewhere far below came a long dull concussion, and the windows shuddered.
"Yes," said the old man. "That's the one."
He laid his hand on the cover.
He opened it. He turned the pages slowly, one at a time, with a tremor in his fingers. He read a name. He read a second, and a third, and smiled faintly, as at old friends; he paused at one, and his lips moved. A page. Ten. Twenty. He licked his thumb and went on. He turned forty pages, fifty, a hundred. And then, quite quietly, without any change of expression, he stopped.
He turned a few leaves back.
He turned them forward.
He put his thumb in the gutter and ran it along the stitching, from the head to the tail. He held the book up to the lamp, and tilted it, and looked at the spine; he sniffed at the paper; he scratched the red cord with a thumbnail. He sat for some seconds quite motionless. And then, with a sound that began as a sigh and ended as something very like a laugh, he closed it and laid it down.
"Marta Szabo," he said.
Damen said nothing.
"The cord is wrong. She's used mercerized cotton. In 2016, Martin used silk." The old man shook his head, almost admiringly. "And the paper is a hundred years too old. Nobody has made that rag stock since the war. She's got it from a Victorian burial register, I should think. The binding is superb." He tapped it. "I knew her father. A fine man. He could do a death certificate with his left hand that would pass a coroner."
"She said you'd see."
"Eventually. Mercer would have taken an hour." The pale eyes lifted. "And the real one?"
"In Washington."
"I beg your pardon?"
"A woman named Ruiz. Federal. She's had every page since nine this morning." He kept his voice flat. "Two hundred and thirteen names. With the sums, and the leverage, and the dates. There's a copy in a vault. There's a copy on four telephones. By dawn, a great many people will wake up to find the door of their house is open."
Strand sat for a moment quite without moving.
Then he put his head back against the leather chair, and shut his eyes, and a smile, slow and wide and utterly unfeigned, spread over his thin yellow face.
"Oh, good," he said.
"What?"
"Oh, good." His voice cracked. "Oh, that is very, very good. I had hoped. I had hardly dared. I thought, he is a fool, he is a loyal, sentimental fool, he will bring me the thing and sit there and let me have it. And I should have had to keep it." His breath caught. "I did not want to keep it, Damen. I did not want the Registry. I have not wanted it for years."
Damen stared at him.
"I wanted it destroyed," said Everett Strand. "I wanted it read."
"You'd better sit down," said the old man. "This will take some time."
He sat.
He did it without knowing, on a hard wooden stool by the stove, with his hands hanging between his knees. The clocks ticked. Overhead, in the lantern, the bell for the half hour struck, deep and slow and four minutes late. And Everett Strand, in his chair, among his pendulums, in the sallow lamplight, with a ruined hand on a counterfeit book, began to speak.
"I have not told this to anyone," he said.
"I met Martin Calder at the age of nineteen. In the seminary. We were both going to be priests. He was brilliant, and gentle, and he could add up a column of figures in his head faster than a calculator. I was the sort who talked." A small smile. "He was the best man I ever knew. He kept my books for thirty years. He was my friend. I attended his wedding. I stood godfather to his child."
Damen did not move.
"Yes," said Strand. "Wren Calder is my goddaughter."
"You—"
"I held her at the font. She screamed the roof off." The old eyes were fixed on the pendulum. "Evelyn bought the christening gown. She was so happy. It was the only time in our marriage she was ever really happy. We had no children, you see. She had wanted them. I said, there's time, and there was not." A long breath. "She is the only child I have ever held."
"Then why did you send me?"
"Because I was ordered to."
"By whom?"
The old man turned his head.
For a time he said nothing. The clocks ticked. Mrs. Aldous, behind him, had bowed her head and closed her eyes. Outside, a long way off, a loud hollow concussion shook the walls, and the flames in the windows flared and died.
"I've never seen their face," said Everett Strand.
"Whose?"
"The Chair's."
"They send a letter," he said.
"On Thursdays. For twenty-nine years. A plain white envelope, no stamp, no postmark. It comes to the table in the hall, with the other post. It contains a card, and on the card, in a hand I would know in my sleep, there is a sentence. Collect from Harlan. Remove the Costa brothers. See that the Commissioner's son is looked after." The thin voice was almost dreamy. "I have obeyed every one. I have never asked why. It was understood, from the beginning, that I was the hand and they the head."
"The Table."
"Is a fiction. The Table is seven men who think they are ruling. They are my creatures. The Chair is their chair, and mine, and I have sat beneath it for twenty-nine years." He moved a finger on the blotter. "I thought, at first, that it was a man. A banker. A senator. I tried to follow the envelopes. I tried to find out. I failed. In 1998, after Evelyn died, I stopped trying. I thought: it doesn't matter. Someone must keep the clock."
"And in 2016?"
"In 2016 the card said Remove Calder."
The word fell like a stone.
"I read it four times," said Strand. "It was the only card in twenty-nine years that I did not at once obey. I went to the window. I stood there for an hour. I thought: they have made a mistake. They do not know who he is. I wrote back, and I said so. I sent it by the usual route, the box in the hall. On the Thursday following, the answer came." A cough. "They know."
"They knew about the Registry."
"Of course they knew. They had known for years. They had let him copy it. They had wanted it copied." The old man's mouth twisted. "Do you not see? It was a test. The Chair wished to know if I could be trusted to kill my oldest friend. And if I could not, I should be removed also. I had a week."
"So you sent me."
"I sent the one man I knew would not harm his child."
Damen sat motionless.
"I had read the files," said Everett Strand. "As Martin had. I had seen the same pattern. Thirty-one men and not a single woman, not a single child. I thought: it is an accident. It is a coincidence. And then I thought, it is a rule." He lifted his eyes. "I knew that if I sent you to that house, and the child was there, you would not be able to do it. And I knew she was there. I had telephoned Martin that afternoon. He said: she's sleeping at home tonight. He did not say it to warn me. He said it because he wanted me to understand."
"You knew."
"I knew everything, Damen." The old voice shook. "I sent you to murder my friend. I sent you, so that she would live. It was the only mercy I could think of. And I told you the house would be empty, because I could not say it in so many words. I told you the girl was away. And I sat in this room while you drove north through the rain, and I prayed. I, who have not prayed since 1963."
The sea thudded far below.
Damen heard the clocks. He heard the pendulum. He heard, inside him, a voice he had not listened to in nine years, saying: you thought it was yours. You thought it was a mercy you chose.
It was a mercy you were chosen for.
By two men who loved her.
"I told you she had burned," said Strand, "because it was the only thing I could say. I had to believe it. I had to be able to say to the Chair: the child is dead. And I needed you to believe it, so that you could say it too, in your sleep, to anyone who asked." He closed his eyes. "I have never been so afraid in my life. I thought, the girl will be found. She will be found by a man like Mercer, and the book will come out, and they will know. I thought of her for nine years. I had her watched. I never told you. Marta Szabo's yard has been under my eye since 2016."
"You watched her."
"Every Sunday. Dinner at the funeral home. A girl with a cake." A faint wondering smile touched his mouth. "I would sit in a car on Cooper Street and watch her walk in with it. I thought: I did that. I made that possible. She's alive. It is the only good thing I have done."
Mrs. Aldous had begun, silently, to cry.
"And then Teddy came," said Damen.
"Teddy Calloway. A weak man." Strand sighed. "He came, not to me, but to Mercer. I did not know. He told Mercer about the girl. Mercer took it to the Chair. And in March, the card came again. Collect the Calder girl. Retrieve the Registry copy. Remove Knox." He opened his eyes. "I disobeyed. For the first time in twenty-nine years, I did nothing. I told Mercer to wait. I said: I will deal with it myself. And I thought, I will deal with it. I will bring him here, and I will put him in a room, and I will make him choose."
"Choose what?"
"Whether to run."
Damen stared.
"I never meant to kill you," said Everett Strand. "I meant to frighten you. I meant to bring your wife and child to me, so that I could keep them from Mercer. I thought: if they are in my house, under my roof, no one dares touch them. And I would give you a day, and a car, and a map. And you would take the girl, and the book, and go." The voice cracked. "I did not know that Mercer was already moving. I did not know about the boy at the marina. I did not know about the hearse, and the, and the warehouse. I have been a sick man in a tower. I have lost control of my own house."
"You told me you wanted the girl."
"I told you what I had to tell the telephone." The old eyes met his, and they were naked, and old, and wet. "Do you think they don't listen? Do you think this room is not wired? There is a microphone in the third clock from the left. I have known it for years. I speak to it, when I need to. Mercer's boys have heard every word I said to you, on every call. Bring me the girl. Seventy-two hours. I said it for them. I said it for the Chair."
"But you let them hold my child."
"I let Mercer believe he was holding her. I held her, Damen. I held her in my house, in my tower, under my eye, and I fed her cake." A long shuddering breath. "It was the best I could do."
There was a silence.
It lasted a long time. The pendulum swung through it. A cuckoo, somewhere in the dimness, put out its head and called the hour wrongly, and withdrew. Damen sat with his hands on his knees. He felt, beneath his ribs, a slow cold wrenching, like a lock being forced; and he did not know whether it was rage, or grief, or something else entirely.
"You killed Cody Bell," he said.
"No."
"He was seventeen."
"I didn't. I have said it. It is the one thing I shall never forgive." The thin hands closed on the blotter. "I will tell you what I did. I did not stop it. I did not stop it, because I did not know, and I did not know because I had made myself blind. That is a sin, Damen. I have been a sinner for sixty-eight years, and I have confessed to a good many. But I find that I cannot confess to that one."
"And Teddy."
"I am sorry about Teddy."
"And Wren."
"She is alive. She is in the next room. Mrs. Aldous has kept her sedated; she has a thigh wound, and no more." The old man's head dropped. "Cassian wished to have her questioned. I did not allow it. It is the last order I was able to give."
Damen stood.
He walked to the desk. He put both hands on the blotter and leaned over the old man, so close that he could smell the sickness on him, sweet and sour, and see the yellow in the eyes. His voice, when it came, was very low.
"Tell me who the Chair is."
"I don't know."
"You've served them for twenty-nine years."
"I have served a hand." Strand did not flinch. "I have never seen it. I do not know the name. I have only the cards." The old face worked. "If Martin found it, if he found where it was written, then it is in the other thing. The sealed thing. In the box. I do not know. I have never opened it."
"I've seen the envelope."
"Then you know more than I."
"It says it's for Wren."
"Then let her open it." The old man lifted his head. "And tell me, Damen. One last thing. Is it true that she answered the child?"
"What?"
"With the light. On the cliff." The voice dropped to a whisper. "Eli told me. The boy. He came to me this afternoon, and told me everything. I've never been so moved. A girl on a cliff with a pair of binoculars, and a child at a window with a compass." A smile crossed his face, wide and boyish and full of wonder. "Evelyn would have been so pleased. She loved a signal. She used to flash the porch light at the ferry."
The door opened.
It opened without a sound. A draft stirred the clocks, and a hundred chimes quivered; and in the doorway, small and stern in a pink sweater, with her braids undone and her boots covered with soot, stood a girl of twelve, holding her mother's hand.
"Is it safe?" she said.
"Ivy—"
"I counted. I counted to a hundred and ninety." She came in. She came across the floor with her chin up, past the longcases, the orreries, the little silver clock that played its tune, with her eyes going left and right, taking everything in, and her mother a pace behind her, white and straight in her torn cardigan, with a boy in a black jacket at her shoulder, whose gun hung forgotten at his side. "There was a man at the bottom with a rifle. He said stop. Eli said he'd shoot him if he didn't. And then he cried."
"You shouldn't have come up."
"I wanted to see." She stopped in front of the desk.
She looked at Everett Strand.
He looked at her. They regarded one another across the green blotter, the very old man and the very small girl, with the lamplight gold on both their faces, and for a long moment neither spoke. Then the old man did something Damen had never seen him do. He put out his two trembling hands, palms up, flat on the desk, like a person offering something.
"Hello, my dear," he said.
"Hello, Mr. Strand."
"You came."
"I wanted to see the clock."
"Which?"
"The big one." She pointed past him, at the immense slow engine on its iron frame, with its gleaming wheels and the long pendulum swinging to and fro. "It's the one that's wrong. Mama said you'd never fix it." A pause. "Why not?"
"I told you."
"You said it was because she'd be gone."
"Yes."
"I've been thinking about that." The child folded her hands. She spoke with the grave deliberate courtesy of a small judge. "I don't think she's in the clock, Mr. Strand. I think she's in you. And the clock is just a clock." She cocked her head. "If you fix it, you'll still have her. And everyone will know what time it is."
Nobody breathed.
The old man sat looking at her. His mouth had opened a little. The color had gone out of his face, leaving it the shade of candle wax; and the lamplight shone in his eyes, which were full and brimming and perfectly still.
"Would you do it?" he said, in a whisper.
"Me?"
"I can no longer climb the ladder. My hands are too weak." He lifted them, shaking. "It's four minutes. The minute hand. You push it forward, with your finger. You will find a little brass lever. I have never been able to bring myself to touch it."
Ivy looked at her mother.
Naomi's face was wet. She nodded, once.
The child walked to the great clock. She stood at the foot of the iron frame, small, pink, upright, in the glow of the lantern, and looked up at the tall white dial above her, with its black hands at twelve-forty-two. She took hold of a ladder, and climbed. Eight rungs. Nine. She stretched out her arm. And with one finger, with immense care, as she had touched a ladybug, she pressed a little brass lever and pushed.
The minute hand stirred.
It moved forward, slowly, with a faint creaking, through four tiny notches, and stopped.
"There," said Ivy.
Overhead, in the lantern, the great bell began to strike.
It was a deep sound. It rolled out of the tower and across the quay and the burning boats and the black cold sea, deep and slow and golden, true to the second. It struck once. It struck twice. It struck the whole of the hour, and the stone shook with it, and the windows hummed; and every clock in the room, the longcases and the carriage clocks and the cuckoos and the orrery, seemed to hold its breath and then, with one accord, with a great soft chiming, to agree.
Everett Strand sat with his hands over his face.
His shoulders were shaking. No sound came. The gray woman behind him laid a hand on his back, and then, after a moment, her whole arm, and bent, and rested her cheek against the white head; and Damen, standing alone beside the desk with a counterfeit book at his elbow and a purple elastic on his wrist, looked at his wife and saw that she was weeping too, silently, steadily, with her hand pressed to her mouth.
When it was over, the old man lowered his hands.
His face was calm. It was drawn and gray and very old, and quite without fear. He looked at Ivy, down on the floor, with her sooty boots and her serious eyes, and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome."
"It's twelve forty-six."
"I know."
"It's the right time." He turned his head. "Mrs. Whitlock."
"Yes," said Naomi.
"I believe you have something in your waistband."
She did not move.
"A vial," said Everett Strand, gently. "Of the clear. Mrs. Aldous will not allow me to increase the dose." His eyes met hers, steady and grave. "I should be very much obliged. I find I have rather a lot of pain. And it is, as I think you will agree, a very good time."
She stood very still.
Behind her Damen heard the clocks, and the slow tock of the pendulum, and the boy Eli breathing through his mouth. He saw her hand go to her waist. He saw her take out a small clear glass bottle with a rubber cap, and a single sealed syringe, and hold them in her palm, looking down at them as one looks at a flower.
"It's not what I came for," she said.
"No."
"I came to take my husband home."
"And you shall." The old man smiled. "This will not take long. I shall be asleep before you reach the bottom of the stair." The thin voice dropped. "You have been kind to me. In a room that was not kind. I should like to be allowed to repay it."
She looked at Mrs. Aldous.
The gray woman raised her head. She was wet-eyed and white. She said nothing. But she gave a single small nod, so slight that it might have been a trick of the light; and Naomi, who had sat at the foot of six hundred beds, drew a long breath, and walked forward.
"Take the child out," she said.
"Mama—"
"Ivy. Out. With your father."
"I want to stay."
"I know." She knelt, and took the child's face in her hands. "I know you do. But this is a nurse's business. You can be a nurse later. When you're old enough." She kissed her forehead, hard. "Go and see how the boats are doing. Count the flares. Tell me how many."
"All right."
"And, Ivy."
"Yes?"
"You were the bravest person here."
Ivy looked at her. Her gray eyes were enormous. Then, with a gesture of such grave and simple tenderness that Damen felt his heart turn over in his chest, she took off the brass compass from round her neck, and laid it in the old man's hand.
"For the time," she said. "In case you need to know which way."
He closed his fingers on it.
"Go with God, little one," whispered Everett Strand.
They went out.
They stood on the landing, the two of them, a tall man and a small girl, in the lantern light on the cold stone, with the oak door shut behind them. They did not speak. Below them the tower fell away in its long black spiral, and from the foot of it, faint with distance, came the sound of the battle dying: a few sharp shots, a shout, a long rolling cheer. The flares had gone. There was a pale gray light in the narrow window.
Dawn, he thought.
Ivy slipped her hand into his.
"Dad."
"Yes."
"What's she doing?"
"Helping him."
"Is it like when Mrs. Peck died? The old lady at the hospice?"
"A little."
"Does it hurt?"
"No." He drew her against his leg. "That's what the nurse is for."
They stood. The clocks ticked. Behind the door, very faintly, there was a murmur of voices, the old man's, and hers, and a pause. Once he heard Strand laugh. Once, quite clearly, he heard him say, in a voice weak and warm and strangely young: Tell Rosa the clock's right now. Tell her it's finished. She'll know what I mean.
And Naomi's voice, low, puzzled: Rosa?
Then the silence.
It lasted a long time. It lasted until the light in the window had gone from gray to pearl. At the end of it the door opened, and his wife stood in the gap, with the empty syringe in her hand and her face wet and calm. Behind her, in the high-backed leather chair, in a pool of gold light, an old man sat with his head tipped back, as if listening. His hands lay open in his lap. In one of them, tarnished and small, a brass compass shone.
"He's gone," said Naomi.
"Did he say anything?"
"Yes." She frowned. "He said a name. He said, tell Rosa. I don't know why." She looked at him, bewildered. "My mother's name is Rosa."
He looked at her.
"It's a common name," said Damen.
"Yes."
"It's nothing."
"No," said Naomi slowly. "I suppose not."
And behind her, in the gold and silver room, among fifteen clocks, all ticking, all different, all at last in agreement, the great bell in the lantern of the tower struck the quarter.