The night had a temper.
It came striding over the town with a wild skirt of rain, and laid its cold hands upon every chimney and slate and sleeping window. The wind worried the eaves like a thing with teeth; it drove handfuls of gravel along the street; it made the lamp-flames in their glass cages shudder and bow, as if even fire were capable of fear. Thunder went to and fro among the clouds with a slow, resentful tread. A muttering that endured, like an old grievance spoken under the breath.
Within St. Bartholomew's, where the town's prayers lay stacked in the silence of pews, the sound of that weather came softened and made solemn. It was there, behind walls thick as penance, that the storm seemed not to lessen but to change its nature and becoming, through the organ-loft and the stone arches, a kind of hymn without words.
A single lamp burned in the vestry. Its light was poor, confined and yellow, and it set all the rest of the church in a deeper obscurity by contrast. The pews were not so much seen as guessed at: long shapes sleeping in rows; the pulpit, a darker shadow; the font, faintly pale as a skull. The stained glass, when lightning flared, showed itself for an instant in rigid colour, the saints' faces startled into existence and then swallowed again.
Mr. Harrowby, the curate, sat with his coat still on, though he had removed his hat and laid it upon his knee as if he could not quite bring himself to be at ease while the storm prowled so near. He had been writing; the pages before him were smudged where his hand had paused and pressed too long. From time to time he lifted his eyes, to listen, in that way a lonely man listens when he tells himself he is not lonely. He was not old, yet the set of his mouth hinted at years spent in restraint; the lines beside his eyes suggested a habit of gentle concern turned daily into practice. His was an unyielding countenance that might inspire confidence in the penitent and vexation in the irreverent.
When the great door of the church shuddered in its frame, he started so sharply that his pen scratched a crooked black scar across the paper.
A second sound followed: not wind, but the unmistakable violence of human hands fumbling, striking, pushing at iron and oak in the dark. The latch clanking. The bolt grating. Then the door bursting inward with a report like a gunshot, as the storm flung itself, for a heartbeat, into the church. It came in as rain and cold and the smell of wet earth. It came in with a gust that snapped the lamp-flame sideways and made the shadows leap like frightened things.
It came in with a figure stumbling over the threshold.
Mr. Harrowby was on his feet at once.
The man who had entered—if man he could be called, being still young—had no hat. His hair lay drenched and dark against his forehead; water ran from his coat in steady drops and pooled upon the flagstones. His hands, bare and reddened, were held out before him as if he could not quite bear to touch anything. He did not look at the curate, nor at the church; his eyes were fixed instead upon the aisle, upon the darkness between pew and pew, as though he expected something to rise from it.
"Sir," said Mr. Harrowby, and his voice was low, more careful than commanding. "You must not—" He checked himself, for the young man's expression made rules seem suddenly small. "Come here. You are soaked through. Sit."
The stranger took one step, then another, each as uncertain as if the floor were a bog. He seemed at any moment ready to turn and flee, though to where—into that night? back into that wind?—was beyond sense. His breath came in sharp pulls; his shoulders were hunched as if expecting a blow.
"I—" He tried to speak and failed. He swallowed, and the motion made his throat work like that of a child forcing down tears. "Father—"
"I am not a priest of Rome," Mr. Harrowby said gently. "But I am a minister, and I am here."
The young man's gaze snapped to him at that, startled, almost angry. Then softened into something worse: relief, the kind that humiliates.
"You are alone?" he demanded, though his eyes had already swept the church again. "No one else is—no one came in after me?"
"The church has been empty since Evensong," Mr. Harrowby answered. "No one followed. Come, sit by the fire."
There was a small grate in the vestry, and a reluctant flame within it. Mr. Harrowby drew the young man nearer with a hand not quite touching his shoulder—an instinctive deference to panic, which often hates being handled. The young man allowed himself to be guided, though he kept twisting his neck to look behind him, as if expecting footsteps to sound in the nave.
When he reached the chair, he did not sit at once. He stood over it, trembling; not from cold alone, for there are shiverings of the spirit which do not cease even when warmed.
"I have done something," he said at last.
The words fell into the vestry like a stone into a well. The storm outside answered with a long groan.
Mr. Harrowby waited. If he had learned anything in his brief years with human misery, it was that the first statement is seldom the truest; it is only the first gate, and the mind, having found itself at the gate, must decide whether to enter.
"I have done—" The young man pressed his wet hands together till the knuckles whitened. "I must tell it. I cannot keep it any longer. It is—" He broke off and looked toward the closed door again. His lips shaped a name and did not speak it.
"Tell me," the curate said.
"She will find me." It was spoken with utmost certainty—as though remarking that dawn follows night. "She will, she will. She always—" He shook his head violently, as if to dislodge the thought. "You do not know her."
Mr. Harrowby's eyes did not harden; but they did sharpen, as a man's will sharpens when he understands that he has been entrusted not with ordinary sorrow but with something that might cut.
"Who is she?"
The young man gave a short, broken laugh that held no mirth. "Who is she? She is—" He faltered. "She is a lady. A gentlewoman. She is everything the world loves. She is sunshine." His voice thickened on the last word, as if he had bitten into something bitter. "And I am—" He glanced down at his soaked coat, his hands, his boots that had tracked mud across the church stones. "I am nothing."
"Nonsense," said Mr. Harrowby, too quickly; then, catching himself, he amended, "You are frightened. You are ill at ease. You are no less than any other creature. Sit, I beg you."
The young man obeyed at last, sinking into the chair as if his knees had ceased to bear him. For a moment he bowed his head and stared at his own hands, watching the water drip from his fingertips to the floor. It was the most dreadful occupation—like watching time itself leak away.
"She said," he murmured, "that if ever I spoke—if ever I confessed—then I would hang. Not her. Me."
Mr. Harrowby felt, in spite of himself, a quick flare of indignation. "No one may compel—"
"You do not understand." The young man looked up, and now in his eyes there was an expression of fear that made the curate's indignation falter. "She need not compel. The world compels. They will look at me—and they will see what they want to see. They will see a poor boy grown into a poor man, with no mother to vouch and no father to defend. They will see hands that have done labour, and they will imagine those hands capable of anything. And she—she will weep. She will faint. She will pray. She will have lilies at the funeral. She will be called an angel."
Mr. Harrowby's throat tightened, and he was silent for a beat. The storm made a sound like distant applause, mocking.
"Is there a crime?" the curate asked carefully. "A crime in which you have had part?"
The young man's mouth twisted, as if the word itself pained him. "There are crimes," he whispered. "So many that I cannot count them without… without—" He pressed the heel of his hand to his forehead. "I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. I cannot walk down a street without imagining—" He stopped again, and his eyes flicked to the window, where lightning was staining the glass.
Mr. Harrowby drew his chair nearer, and sat opposite, so that the young man would not feel alone with the dark behind him. "Start at the beginning," he said. "However it began."
The young man gave a small, helpless shake of the head. "The beginning is innocent," he said, as if that were the most terrible thing of all. "That is how she makes it. That is how she… how she—" He swallowed. "I thought I had found a miracle. I thought God had sent me—"
"To befriend her?" the curate suggested, softening the sentence into a question.
The young man's eyes flashed. "To be saved," he said, fiercely, and then the fierceness collapsed into something like shame. "Forgive me. Forgive me. I do not mean—" He dragged in air like a drowning man. "I came tonight because I cannot… I cannot bear the sound of her voice in my head any longer. It tells me what I am."
Mr. Harrowby leaned forward. "What does it tell you?"
"That I am hers," the young man said, and the words were so quiet they might have been lost—except that the storm hushed at that instant, as if even the weather had paused to listen.
A chill went through the curate that had nothing to do with wet clothes or open doors. "And why do you believe it?"
The young man's gaze slid away. His fingers twisted together till the skin looked raw. "Because," he said, "I have done what she asked."
Mr. Harrowby exhaled slowly. "Then tell me what she asked."
The young man's jaw clenched. His eyes shut. When he spoke again his voice sounded older, scraped, as if it had passed over rough stone. "She asked me to carry things," he said. "To stand watch. To take messages. To… to fetch the shovel." He opened his eyes and looked at the curate as if daring him to recoil. "And I did it."
The curate held his gaze. "You did it out of fear."
"At first." The young man's smile was a bare, bleak thing. "At first."
Mr. Harrowby's hands tightened on the arms of his chair. He felt—against his will—a dawning comprehension, not of the particulars, but of the shape of the thing: a snare made not of rope but of circumstances; a trap that needed no lock because the victim's own mind served as the latch.
"Do you believe she is dead?" the curate asked, and heard, even as he asked it, how strange the question sounded.
The young man's breath caught. His eyes widened. He stared at the curate as if the words had been struck from him.
Then, very slowly, he nodded.
"I buried her," he said.
The vestry seemed to contract.
The flame in the grate made a small sound and sank lower, as if it too had been weighed down.
"You—" Mr. Harrowby began, and stopped. The human mind reaches, in moments, for the simplest conclusion, as a hand reaches in the dark for a familiar railing. Yet nothing in the young man's face permitted simplicity.
"I buried her," he repeated, and now his voice had changed. It held bewilderment—almost resentment—like a man who has performed a desperate act and was astonished to find that desperation is not, in itself, a cure. "And still—still I am here. Still she is—" He gestured sharply to his own skull, as though she inhabited it. "Still she will find me."
Mr. Harrowby forced himself to speak with steadiness. "Tell me what you mean. Was she injured? Was she—did you—"
The young man shook his head violently. "No. No! Not like that." He pressed his hands over his eyes, and when he drew them away they were shaking. "I cannot tell you yet. If I tell you that—if I tell you the end—then I will not be able to tell you how it began. And how it began is—" He struggled. "How it began is the sin. Because I let it begin. I walked into it smiling."
Outside, the storm flung another lash of rain against the windows. The sound was like fingers tapping to be let in.
Mr. Harrowby rose and went to the door to press the bolt more firmly, as if he could bar out not just weather but fate. When he returned, he brought a blanket from a cupboard and placed it around the young man's shoulders. The young man did not thank him; he barely seemed to notice. His gaze had turned inward, and his pupils were large as if he were looking upon something vast.
"Listen to me," the curate said. "Whatever has happened, you have done a brave thing in coming here. There is mercy for they who confess."
"There is no mercy," the young man whispered, with such certainty that Mr. Harrowby felt the words strike him as if they were physically thrown. "Not for people like me. Not in courts. Not in newspapers. Not in rooms full of men with clean hands and clean wives. Mercy is for the ones who can afford it."
Mr. Harrowby felt himself colour, though no accusation had been spoken aloud. He had, after all, never gone hungry. He had never been forced to make a choice between bread and dignity. In that instant he understood what it is to be helpless before another's lived knowledge.
"Tell me her name," he said, softly. "If you cannot speak of the act, speak of her. Speak of what she is."
The young man's lips parted, then closed again. His whole body seemed to resist, treating the name as if it were a hook that would draw something through the door.
"I cannot," he breathed. "If I say it aloud—" He shook his head. "No. No, it is better to begin where I can still breathe."
He stared at the fire. In its wavering light his face looked hollowed. "It began," he said, "with a loaf of bread."
"A loaf?" Mr. Harrowby repeated, absurdly. The simplicity seemed almost cruel.
"Yes." The young man's eyes did not leave the flame. "A loaf, and a ribbon, and a laugh. It was spring. It was… I was younger. I still believed the world was—" He faltered, searching for the word as if it had been stolen. "Fair."
Mr. Harrowby did not move. He scarcely breathed. He felt the air in the vestry thicken with the gravity of what was about to be told.
The young man's voice grew quieter, and with its quietness came a strange steadiness—as if, having at last chosen a path through the thicket, he could walk it even while knowing every branch would strike him.
"I was twelve," he began, "and I had not eaten in two days."
And with that sentence, the church fell away.
Not by any magical trick of the senses, but by the more ruthless power of memory—memory that does not request permission, but takes it. The vestry, the lamp, the curate's concerned face: all of it receded until it was as distant as a childhood dream. The sound of the storm became, gradually, the sound of another weather: not thunder, but the brisk wind of March; the thin, sharp brightness of a day that pretends to be gentle while still keeping winter's knife hidden in its sleeve.
The young man's eyes—now those of a boy—blinked against light.
He stood on a street that was not yet blackened by soot in his remembrance. He stood with cold in his bones and hunger gnawing like an animal. Around him the town moved with the indifferent energy of people who had enough: carts creaked, women walked with baskets, a butcher's boy shouted, and somewhere a dog barked at nothing. The smell of bread—warm, yeasted—rose from a shop he could not afford to enter.
He was staring at that shop window when the carriage rolled up.
It was fine: clean wheels, polished lamp-casings, a driver whose posture suggested training. Its horses were glossy and impatient and made their displeasure known with snorts that steamed the air.
The boy stepped back at once, instinctively—because the poor learn early not to be in the path of wealth.
The carriage stopped anyway.
A footman descended, opened the door, and held out his hand—to someone inside. There was a flutter of pale skirts, the bright flash of a ribbon, and then she emerged.
She was little older than he was: perhaps thirteen or fourteen. She wore a bonnet tied with an absurdly cheerful bow, and her coat was the colour of new butter. Her cheeks were pink with health; her eyes were bright as if the world had been made to amuse her. She looked—at a glance—like every painting of innocence that ever hung in a drawing-room.
And then she turned, and looked directly at him.
"Good morning!" she said, with a warmth that startled him more than the carriage. It was not the warm smile of charity, bestowed downward, but the warm smile of a child who thinks she has discovered something delightful. "Are you hungry?"
The boy did not answer at first, because in his experience questions like that were snares. If he said yes, it was shameful; if no, it was a lie.
However, she did not wait.
She clapped her hands once. "Oh, we shall fix that directly," she declared, and before he could retreat she was already moving toward the bakery door, ribbons bobbing, the very picture of purpose.
The boy watched her go, frozen between hunger and suspicion, while behind him the town continued its indifferent business. If any passersby saw him, they saw only a street-rat lingering too close to fine things. If any saw her, they saw a little lady playing at kindness.
Only the boy—thin, wary, starved—felt the true strangeness of it: that she had looked at him as if she meant it.
A gust of wind lifted the edge of her coat. For a second the inside lining showed—a flash of red silk, the colour of a cut.
He did not know then what that colour would come to mean.
He only knew that the smell of bread had grown stronger, and that the girl in butter-yellow had turned in the doorway and beckoned him, smiling as if she were inviting him into a game.
And, against every lesson hunger had taught him, he took a step toward her.