Page 9 of The Headmaster’s Binding

"Along a straightedge?"

She said she could get me an incident number Monday. It never came.

Back at my desk I laid my first teaching week out side by side: the rubbing with its ghost letters, the notebook, Leah Brandt's email. Somebody had cut a name out of a table, a night out of a bound book, and the reasons out of a crying second-year, and I sat there a long time because the same verb kept fitting.

Item nineteen: this college has an editor.

I underlined it twice. And then, because writing a thing down is how I make myself stop pretending I haven't thought it, I wrote the question underneath, the one that mattered more than who was holding the razor.

Item twenty: editors work for somebody. Every cut copy goes up to a desk for approval. Whose?

Chapter 4

Adrian

For nine years I have filed my reports to an office that has never once written back except to acknowledge. On Monday the office wrote back. It sent a person.

Her card came ahead of her by a day: heavy stock, deckle-edged, a name and nothing else. ELEANOR WREN. The deckle edge is not a vanity. Paper of that make is torn, not cut, against a rule that is kept in one room, and a card made of it says, to anyone who knows the paper: this comes from the room. I held the card by its edges the way one holds a photographic plate, and I stood it against the pen tray, square to the blotter, and I conducted the Monday of our second week in its presence, which I believe was the intention.

Rosalind found it there at five. She read it without touching it, which is her training, and looked at me.

"The guest suite, then."

"The guest suite."

"I'll have the chimney looked at," she said, which meant: the rooms have stood empty since March, I know who this is because you have gone still around the mouth, and nothing in this house will be seen to have been moved. She had the chimney looked at. Nothing in the house was moved. I record, for accuracy, that I spent an hour that evening confirming this, drawer by drawer, and that the confirmation was for my own benefit, and that I found everything where it belonged and slept as if I had found otherwise.

* * *

She arrived Tuesday at ten, in a gray car that did not stay, with two suitcases, an assistant, and a rigid brass-cornered case built to be leveled rather than packed.

Eleanor Wren is a small woman of about my age who dresses like the second-most-senior person at a funeral and stands like the first. The college had been told, by then, what I had drafted for it to be told: a Visiting Fellow in the History of Institutions, attached to no department, reporting to no one on the premises. Every word of that is true. I had drafted the truest lie available, which is the only kind worth signing.

The assistant was introduced as Neave. No surname was offered. She is young, and she carried both suitcases and would not surrender them to Croft, and she did not speak on Tuesday, or on Wednesday, or at any hour since that I can attest to. Croft, who says two words where other men say forty, met her silence with his own, and the two of them went up the visitors' stair like a procession with the sound turned off.

The third case Neave carried alone, level, in front of her, the way you carry a full tray or a sleeping child. In the guest suite she put it on the sideboard, took a brass spirit level out of her coat, and adjusted the case's feet, each in turn, until the bubble sat centered from every approach. Wren did not watch her do it. Wren watched me not watching it.

I know the make of that case. I saw one opened once, at twenty-four, in a room I signed a document in, and I have arranged my whole career, without ever once saying so, around the ambition of never seeing one opened again. I filed the knowledge where I file everything I cannot afford to be seen to possess, and I asked whether the rooms would suit.

"They will," Wren said. "You keep a level house, Headmaster. I am told the whole seaboard says so."

The second clause is where she keeps the blade. I would spend the term learning the sheath, and I began learning it there, in a doorway, before her coat was off.

* * *

She took tea in my office at four. Rosalind brought the good pot and was gone before it had finished settling, and I poured, and Wren let me, and I will record the meeting in sequence and at the pace it occurred, because it occurred at a pace I have thought about since.

She did not touch the tea for the first minute. She spent it on the room: the blotter, the pen tray, the window and its view of the east range, the shelf of college histories with their unbroken spines. Not a search. An audit reads differently from a search; a search hopes, and an audit confirms.

"I will not waste your hour," she said. "You know what happened to Micah Vane last spring. I know what happened. We will not be describing it to each other, now or later, and that economy is the last one I have come to offer you."

"I understand."

"Keeping the spring incident quiet cost the office a great deal." She turned her cup a quarter turn, and I thought, unwillingly, of my own hand on a glass at the mantel, and put the thought where it goes. "There will not be another. If there is, the station closes, and the college is made tidy."

Tidy is a housekeeping word. In the vocabulary I read sideways it is also a housekeeping word. That is the whole of what is wrong with it. A house is made tidy by removing from it everything that does not belong and straightening what remains, and I sat with my hands at rest on my own blotter and did not ask her to define her terms, because I have signed the definitions.

"The office is aware," she said, "that your station has run the cleanest paper on the seaboard for nine years. I have read all of it. Clean paper is one of two things, Headmaster. It is a clean station, or it is a good clerk."