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Chapter 499
The house on the north side of the city was not the house Raymond had been picturing.He had been picturing the room with the boxes in it — the narrow stairs, the corridors, the green lamp and the ledgers going up the wall to a ceiling he could not see, the whole of it smelling of dust and old paper and the faint dry sweetness of the sealing wax — and he had built the rest of the house around that room in his mind as a house is built around a heart, room after room of the same dark and the same dust. What he found instead, driving in through the gates at half past nine on the fourteenth with the rain beginning again, was a large square Georgian house standing at the end of a gravel sweep with a portico and lamps on either side of the door and every window lit, and the gravel had been raked that afternoon, and there were no cars in the sweep at all."No cars," Melissa said."No cars," Raymond said. "Which means she was right and the old families have stayed away, and it also means the
Chapter 498
The old man looked into the fire and did not immediately answer."I am not going to be comfortable with an apology from you," he said at last. "I have had eleven years in this mill to work out the reasons you did not come, and they are all good reasons, and none of them make me less of an old man alone in a valley with a blade under his floor. So keep the apology and come back in the spring and we will drink tea and not talk about it." He stood up. "But I am going to say one thing to you now, and then you are going to go up that track and I am going to go to bed, and we are neither of us going to mention it again. I have read the first page. I have read the line about the return, and the line about the name that is freely given, and the line about the wound, and the line that comes after the wound, and the line that comes after that, and I have never once told you about the line after that." He looked at Raymond. "The line after that says that a page returned to the one who filled it
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
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