Page 10 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"The paper is accurate."

"That is what a good clerk would say." She drank, once, the only time. "I am not here to catch you. I am here so that the central office overseeing stations like Ashgrave does not have to send the person who would come after me. You may take that as a courtesy. It is the only one in my case."

She asked after term dates, dining arrangements, and the health of the chapel organ, three questions a Visiting Fellow would ask, each one flat and correct, and then she stood. The tea in her cup was two-thirds full. From the pour to the door, the meeting ran four minutes. I know because I counted, and I counted because a woman who allots four minutes to a closure mandate is telling you what your remaining hours are worth, and it is a denomination I had not been paid in before.

At the door she stopped, without turning fully.

"Who is new this term?"

"Seven new faculty appointments. Their personnel files are at the registry, at your disposal."

"They were at my disposal before I came," she said, and went up to the rooms where the case sat level on the sideboard, and I stayed seated at my own desk for some minutes, on the reasoning that a man who has just heard his term's sentence read should at minimum remain seated for it.

There was one further piece of administration that afternoon, and I performed it in pencil, in the margin of a schedule no one else consults. Thursday's four o'clock was moved to the Thursday following. The appointment had held since March; it would hold one week more; and a college being read cover to cover was no college in which to keep it. I weighed the cost of a week against the cost of the walking hours of a woman whose habits I did not yet know, and I chose the week, and I record that the choosing took longer than the tea had.

* * *

Wednesday I passed him in the north corridor.

I had known I would; his teaching schedule crosses my path to the common room twice a week, and I had, in August, when the schedules were drafted, declined to notice that fact in a way that required active declining. He came out of the stairwell door with a stack of essays against his chest and ink on the hand that held them, and there was a beat, the beat every corridor imposes, in which two men decide the size of the encounter.

"Headmaster," he said.

"Dr. Mercer."

"Your east range is still off true." Cheerful. Around the essays, over his shoulder, not stopping, a man skimming a stone across the whole width of a lake as he walks past it.

That was the entire event. Three sentences, distributed two to one, of which mine was his surname. But between the second sentence and the third he looked at me, and did not disguise that he was looking, and the look asked nothing and reported nothing; it was simply attention, entire, undisguised, spent on me as if attention cost him nothing and there were more where that came from. I am not spoken to in that dialect. I administer a college where every glance is denominated, weighed, and rendered; I have not been looked at carelessly in this building in nine years, and carelessly is inaccurate, and I will leave it standing anyway, because the accurate word is a payment I decline to make even here.

I held the look one second past its budget. I know the figure exactly. A man in my position budgets his seconds the way a bursar budgets a deficit, and I ran one second over, and then I inclined my head and continued to the common room and chaired forty minutes on the library's acquisitions dispute, and if any colleague present found the Headmaster's summary of the serials question more clipped than usual, no one had the standing to say so.

One second. I put it in no report. It is the most expensive thing this office has spent all term.

On Wednesday night I walked the quad at eleven, as I walk it, and the fog stood on the lawns at its level, and I stood at the edge of it and made my weekly note of the height in the pocket-book. I did not make a note of the fact that the light in the guest suite burned until one, or that its curtain was drawn back at one corner, squarely, held rather than hanging. I came in by the west door. I hold keys to every door in this college, and on Wednesday night, for the first time in nine years, I chose my door according to what could see me.

* * *

By Thursday the college knew a stranger was in it. She had been in residence two days. No announcement beyond my drafted paragraph was made, and none was needed; a college is a house, and a house knows. The porters' lodge grew formal. Two of my senior colleagues developed sudden business with their own filing. Doors that stand propped on their wedges all term were found shut, and shut doors make a corridor into a different instrument; sound carries down it further, and arrives stranger.

She dined in hall Thursday night, at the high table, two seats down from me, and was charming in the way of a woman who has decided that charm is the correct tool for the evening and has the tool oiled and ready. She asked the Provost about endowment history. She asked the chaplain about the organ, again, which told me the organ question was not about the organ, and I have since had the organ loft locked. And once, over the fish, she looked down the length of the hall, along the student tables, with an expression I recognized from no social repertoire: the expression of a person reading a stock list, row by row, and I looked where she looked, and made myself stop, and did not identify for her, by so much as a turned head, which people at those tables had been assigned mustard, gray, or red Curacy folders.

* * *

Croft was at my office door at seven on Friday morning with the gatehouse book under his arm.

"Sir."

"Last night?"

"Corbett," he said. "Third floor called it in."

He laid the book open on my desk to Thursday's page. The watch entry was in Dell's square hand: the hour, the lamp, the walk-through, floors searched, nothing found, and, in the field Dell's training requires him to fill, the reporting party's name. MERCER, T., CORBETT HO. I read the page once. Then I nodded, and Croft attended it with the straightedge, there on the blotter, per the standing order, as that book has been attended for longer than I have held this office, and carried the book and the page away in separate pockets. The book is bound because bound paper shows its absences honestly, to anyone who knows to look, and no one in the daylight college knows to look.

Eleanor Wren found me in the gallery at noon. She does not loiter; she intercepts, and makes it look like coincidence.

"There was a lamp seen in your east range last night," she said. "Seen, and reported, and walked after. I had it before breakfast. Tell me once, here, and it will not appear in my first return."

"A sitting ran past its hour," I said. "The scheduling was mine. It has been corrected, and it will not recur."