Page 34 of The Headmaster’s Binding

* * *

I took everything to Ballard the same evening.

I want to log the reasoning, because the not-telling has had a logic all term, and I've been proud of it: everyone who brushes this pays a toll, and the toll is taken out of them, not me. But the grid changed the shape of the problem. A mystery you sit on is a private madness. A timetable you sit on is a list of people you let it happen to. Somewhere on this campus is a kid in a green anorak who is going to spend tomorrow lighter, and three weeks from now there'll be another one, and I am done being the only person who knows and can't prove he knows it sanely. I needed a grown-up: the one person above the salt in this whole gothic filing cabinet who's talked to me like a colleague since October, who lends a man his car and doesn't ask where it's going.

The record room light was on at eight. Ballard was at the long table in his shirtsleeves with the 1840s accession registers, glasses pushed up into his hair, and when he saw my face he put down his pencil and said, "Sit down before you fall down. Whatever it is, the kettle's older than it."

It took me an hour. I gave him the whole record in order, and when I ran out of words I unfolded the grid across his registers. He weighted the corners with two paperweights and a tin of pencils, careful as a sexton.

And the photograph. I laid it down last, right way up, turned toward him, the way Gault turned it toward me.

Ballard looked at it for a long time. His thumb came up like he was going to touch the boy's folded hands and then didn't. When he spoke, his voice had gone somewhere I hadn't heard it go, all thirty-four years of counter and cradle out of it.

"He sat at my counter once a week, two years," he said. "Wanted the works ledgers. The old fabric accounts. Brightest reader I've had at that desk in a decade, and I include the faculty." He folded his glasses onto their case and looked at me. "Tell me the part with the envelope again. Slowly."

So I told the grid twice, which is what it deserves, and he asked the questions an archivist asks — which registers, which years, could the quiet Fridays be flu, could the intervals be term rhythm, and to each one I had an answer, because I'd asked them all of myself first, and he nodded like a man checking sums that keep coming out the same.

Then he was quiet for a moment, and he said, "First things first, Thomas." First name. First time. "You are not mad, and I am not humoring you. A man who shows me a sealed prediction and a candle that kept its appointment is not a man I intend to lose to the word overwrought." He picked the photograph up in both hands, the way the lawyer had taken the reading list, and gave it back to me. "Second: who else has this? All of it, I mean. The whole architecture."

"Nobody. Elena thinks I'm sleeping badly. The lawyer got the parts a court could hear."

"Keep it that way. Two people is a confidence. Three is a committee, and committees leak." He got up and filled the kettle and stood with his back to me while it worked, thinking in the set of his shoulders. "Here is what I'd ask of you. Do nothing for a few days. Teach. Eat your dinners in hall. Be boringly visible. A pattern like yours cuts both ways, you understand. A man who can predict Thursdays is a man whose own Tuesdays can be read off a wall." He said it lightly, a big man making tea. "And let me ask some careful questions of old friends. Registry men. An archdeacon. Men my age, in rooms like this one, at other foundations. Old men trade in quiet, Thomas; nobody audits the furniture. If a trust with no people in it has cousins, one of us will have shelved the cousin."

"Discretion," I said, like a man testing the floor.

"Discretion is the whole of my faith," Ballard said. "I've kept other people's records for thirty-four years and told no one anything, including, mostly, myself." He warmed the pot; he actually warmed the pot, while the college sat over its own cellar all around us. "You've carried this since September alone. That was wrong of the term, to make you. It stops tonight."

I don't cry in front of Readers in ecclesiastical history. I came close enough to log it.

He walked me to the court door at half nine and stood in it, backlit and enormous, and said, "Straight home now. And you did right, Thomas, bringing this to me." I went out across the court, and the fog was down and level, and here's the strange bookkeeping of it: I felt lighter than I had since October. Turns out that's what telling somebody does. Files you thinner by exactly the weight of what you hand across the table.

* * *

Adrian was in the cloister.

Ten o'clock, four lamps, the fountain running its one dark thread of water, and the Headmaster of this college standing at the far end with his coat on and his hands behind his back, not obviously waiting for anything, which by October I have learned is what it looks like when he is waiting for something.

"Dr. Mercer. You are out late."

"It's a nice night for weather." I should have kept walking. The record will show that I have never once kept walking. "Auditing the moonlight?"

"The college keeps hours. I keep some of them." He looked at the folder still under my arm, and then at my face, longer, and whatever he read there moved him off the pleasantries. "You have the look of a man who has been spending."

"Funny thing about that. I came into some money." And then, because it was ten o'clock, and because I'd watched a candle keep an appointment, and because the kid in the green anorak was somewhere on this campus tonight being lighter, the nice-night register fell out of my voice entirely. "Forty letters came to this faculty in September. Cream paper, upstate postmark, one to a pigeonhole. How many answers do you suppose went back?"

He said nothing, which is a thing he does with more precision than most men speak.

"One," I said. "The answer is one. Micah Vane."

The name went down the cloister the way sound goes down that cloister, doubling on itself, and Adrian went still. Not the stillness he issues. A stillness that happened to him. Twenty feet of flagstone between us and I watched a name land on the Headmaster of Ashgrave College like a cold front he'd walked into without a coat.

"You were asked," he said, "to stop."

"Asked. There's the word." I came down the cloister toward him because my feet had opinions. "Asked by whom, though. That's what keeps me up. Because there's a Headmaster who asks me things in his office with the minutes running, and there's a man who stood in the rain at two in the morning with blood on his lip and asked me like it was personal. I keep trying to work out which one of you wants me stopped, and for whose sake, and the arithmetic never comes out."

"The distinction you are drawing does not exist."

"It existed for eleven seconds once."