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Chapter 497
Raymond said, "Sayle came to you in the spring?""He came in the spring," the old man said. "He sat in that chair where your coat is and he told me what he was, and he told me what he had been since he was nine, and he told me that a woman in a house on the mere had begun to dream of a girl, and then he said the thing that no man in that business had ever said to me before, which was that he was not asking me to do anything and that he had come to the mill because he had nobody to tell and he had been carrying it a long time." The old man looked at Raymond. "I have been in this business longer than you have been alive and I have met very few men I would take a risk for. That was one of them. I gave him tea and I said no and I sent him away, and then I sat at this window for three months thinking that if I was ever going to be worth anything to anybody it would be in a room on the fourteenth of a month with two blades and a page and a name that would stand up and speak itself." He got
Chapter 496
The car took him back to the valley in the dark.It was the same driver and the same long dark car and the same silence, and Raymond sat in the back of it and did not look out of the window and did not sleep and did not think about the condition he had set, because a condition once set is a condition that has been decided, and a man who goes back over a decision he has already made is a man who is going to talk himself out of it before the morning. What he thought about instead was the second blade, and the fact that the miller had had it under his floor for eleven years, and the fact that a man who keeps a blade under his floor for eleven years has a reason for it, and the reason is not always a good one.The car stopped at the gate with the high wall and Raymond got out and did not thank the driver and the driver did not expect it, and the car turned around in the lane and went away, and Hester was at the door with a lamp in her hand and a face that said she had been expecting him a
Chapter 495
"The four will not—""The four will do exactly what I say on that night or the four will be the reason the arrangement ends," Raymond said. "You are not the only one in this room who has been in a business with dangerous men, and I am not going to be told what the four will and will not do by a woman who has been letting them do it for forty years."Leonie Vasan looked at him and did not smile and did not frown."Second," she said."Second. When the page is finished, and my name is in it, and the substitution is complete and the girl is free, I cut your name out and I take it with me. The arrangement keeps running under your successor. The room keeps its head. The four keep their hall. But you go out, and you go out that night, and you go out whether it costs a girl or a page or the whole of the ledger, because that is what you have been asking for for three months and I am not going to walk into that house and come out of it with you still in it."The woman's face did not change."An
Chapter 494
Raymond said, "The four.""The four are the problem," Leonie Vasan said. "The arrangement is not the problem and the page is not the problem and the thing at the head of the table is not the problem. The four are the problem, and they are the problem because they are not going to allow a substitution. They are not going to allow anything at all that has not happened before, and they have the emblem and they have the hall and they have enough of the old families behind them that on the fourteenth, at that table, in that room, if they say the girl sits down in a white dress and the dinner goes ahead as it always has, then the dinner goes ahead as it always has, and I cannot stop it with a seat at the head of the table and a family name." She paused. "I can stop it with a blade and a page and a man who is willing to speak his own name. But even then I cannot do it in a room that is full of them and expect anybody in it to leave.""Sayle told me you had four of your own.""Sayle told you
Chapter 493
The car came on the second day, in the afternoon, when the light in the valley had gone flat and yellow and the dog was asleep in the last of the sun on the step, and it came up the lane without slowing and turned in at the gate of the house with the high wall as though it had been there before, which it had, though not in Raymond's time. It was a long dark car, the same long dark car, and it stopped in the yard and the engine stayed running and the driver did not get out and did not turn around to look at the door.Hester came into the front room and said, "There's a car," and Raymond said, "I know," and put on his coat.Melissa stood up."You're not going alone.""I'm going alone.""Raymond—""He'll be back tonight," Hester said, from the doorway, in her flat Yorkshire voice, and she said it as though it were a fact and not a hope and not a comfort, and Raymond was grateful to her for it and did not say so. "And you'll be here when he is, and you'll eat something before he goes, bec
Chapter 492
Raymond told her.He told her about the vellum and the blade and the name that had to be spoken, and about the substitution, and the page, and the ledger, and the room, and the nineteen houses and the forty-one names in her grandfather's drawer, and he told her about the woman who had been paid sixty-two years ago and had not aged, and about the four men in red emblems who wanted a dinner and a girl in a white dress and no question about what the page did with a wound.And then he told her the last part, and he watched her face while he said it, and it was the hardest thing he had done in eleven years."Your grandfather's list," he said. "The fourteenth name on it. That's Sayle's mother. He was seven years old when his house failed its promise, and he has been in that room ever since, and he is the one who has been taking the blade out of the box and putting it back and learning how it works, and he is the one who has been leaving doors open for somebody to walk through." He paused. "
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