Chapter 3: Two Notes, Going Up

The bed was narrow, and Ada’s back was a warm wall in it. Mira put her arm around her sister’s waist and pulled herself in until her chin was near Ada’s shoulder, and she said it quietly, into the dark, at her ear.

“I followed you. When you went out. I saw.”

Ada stopped. Not the way a person stops when sleep takes them — the other way, the hare’s way, everything in her gathered and still.

Then she rolled over. She got a hand into the quilt between them and pushed herself up on an elbow, and her voice came out low and fast.

“There’s nothing to it. Miri, listen to me. It was cold, that’s all it was, and I went down to the end of the garden to send him off so he wouldn’t stand in the frost the whole night for nothing. Nothing happened. Nothing has ever—“

Mira put her hand flat over her sister’s mouth. “The maid,” she said.

Ada’s eyes went past her, toward the maid’s room. Beyond the wall something turned over and sighed, and then came a slow grating, which was the maid, working her teeth in her sleep.

Mira took her hand away. She sat up and put her back against the headboard and drew one curtain aside the width of two fingers and let the frost light in. It was enough to see by. It lay along the quilt and along Ada’s arm. Ada’s hair had come down loose and lay black on the linen, and her hands were knotted in the quilt where it crossed her waist. Her eyelids were a soft new pink, the pink that comes after crying, and there was one wet place at her temple that she had missed.

“You saw him,” Ada said.

“I saw him. I won’t tell anyone. Not a soul in this house.” Mira waited. “You love him.”

Ada looked at her for a long while. Then her chin moved — a nod, and barely that — and the breath she had been holding since the garden came out of her, and her shoulders came down with it.

“He’s nobody,” she said. “You know what he is. He’s got the one name, and it came off the straw in the stable, and there’s no family standing behind him, and a green eye in his head. Half the yard crosses itself when he walks past. But he’s good, Miri. He is good.”

Mira had known it since the garden, before Ada said a word. What she had not expected was the comfort of it — one thing in front of her that she had not seen before it happened.

“Good how?”

And Ada told her.

“Three years ago the boy I was promised to died. His house had gone down first, and there was nothing left of it but the promise, and then he died and there was nothing at all. My mother took me to the abbey to pray for him. The fourth week of the fast, and so cold in that church that my feet ached to the bone, and I knelt on a cushion and thought about a boy I’d never met, in the ground, and how little there was to say about him.”

She turned her hand over in the quilt.

“We were coming back in the afternoon. Something got up out of the ditch behind us — a dog, my mother said, or a snake, no one ever knew — and the near horse shied into the other, and the driver went over the side, and then the pair had their heads down and they were running and the coach was coming on behind them. My mother put both hands over her mouth. I could hear the wheels finding the edge of the road, that gritty noise, and past the ford the road drops away, and I kept thinking, we are going over it, we are going over it.”

“Then there was a whistle. Two notes, going up.” Ada’s hand closed again. “And someone came past the window at a run. Faster than the coach. I know how that sounds. He came past the window at a run, and then there was a hand on the near horse’s bridle.”

“When we stopped, he had his arms around the horse’s head and his mouth at its ear and he was talking to it. I don’t know what he said. It wasn’t our language, or it wasn’t words at all. The ears came forward. The horse stood and blew and stood.”

“Then the steward came up.”

She said the next part flatly.

“He came up white, and he had the whip off his belt and he swung for the horse’s flank, and Bram caught it. Caught it on his forearm. The leather went around it twice, and the arm came up, and the veins stood out under the skin as thick as my little finger. He didn’t let go. He didn’t say anything either. He just stood there with the steward’s whip wound around his arm.”

“And then he turned his head and looked at me.”

“That’s the thing, Miri. Not that he ran, not that he stopped the horses — I’ve told that part a dozen times and it’s a fine story, and everyone says so, and that isn’t it. He was standing there with a whip in his arm, and he turned and looked at me, and it wasn’t a servant looking at his lord’s daughter. It was a man asking me for something.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“The sun was out,” she said. “It was on the horse’s back, and on his face. That eye of his was green like a bottle held up to a candle. And then everyone was there and it was over.”

Mira lay still and listened, and noticed that her sister had told the whole of it and had not once said what the man looked like, except for the eye.

“For two years before that,” Ada said, “he was a place to put my foot. Every time I came down out of the coach, my foot went on his shoulder, and he went down on one knee, and he didn’t move. That was all he was to me. My mother’s maid used to say he was better than a step, and she was right — he never shifted once, it was like stepping out onto stone. Every day for two years. And I never once looked at his face.”

“He came over the wall tonight to take you away,” Mira said.

Ada’s eyes came up. “I know what he came for. I told him no. I told him twice, and the second time I made him hear it.”

“Why.”

“Because I’m a Vale daughter.” She said it simply, without heat. “Whatever this house wants a daughter for, I’m the daughter that’s here. The messenger is on the road with my name in his mouth. If I go over the wall behind the stable, what does my father send him instead? An apology? An apology won’t stand in the ford at the Sarrow.” She looked down at her hands. “And I won’t be the one who was somewhere else when she was needed. I told him I’d not see him again. I meant it.”

“He was still on his knees in the gravel when I left him,” Mira said.

Ada’s jaw worked.

“Let him take you,” Mira said. “Don’t stay here.”

What she had seen did not come to her as a picture anymore. It came as a pressure, the way weather comes before it. A northern room. A woman in a bed with her back to a man who never once put a hand on her, through all the years of it. And at the end of it her own hand pressed flat over her own mouth, and gold going down under it, and nothing after.

Mira did not know whether any of that had to happen. She had never known that about any of it. But she knew she wanted her sister over that wall, and she knew, too, that if Ada went there would be no daughter left in this house for anyone to put on the road, and her father would have something else to say to the Duke in the morning. Both of those were true at once, and she did not examine which of them was speaking.

Ada laughed. One note, and no pleasure in it at all.

“You think I’ve had him,” she said. “That’s what this is. You followed me out and you stood in the cold, and now you want me over the wall before the wedding night — before anyone in that house can find me ruined.”

“Ada—“

“I’ll say it as many times as you want it said.” She sat up straight and the quilt came off her shoulders. “He put his arms around me for the space of a breath. I put my hands on his arms and I pushed him off. That’s the whole of it. I’m as I was this morning, and no one in Vauntholm is going to find anything to shame my father with.”

“It isn’t that,” Mira said.

“Then what?”

Mira leaned in and put her mouth to her sister’s ear and told her.