Page 15

“Thirty clear days. Until midnight at the end of the fourteenth of September, either of you may say the marriage is ended. Say it to the other before a witness and send word to this office. No cause needed. The bride keeps her share. After that, the house pays out, and Morlac requires both signatures.” She looks up over her spectacles. “Do you understand the term?”

“Yes.”

The registrar slides the paper across. “Leaving to visit somebody does not end it. If either of you means to end it, you say so, to the other, in front of a witness, and you send word here.”

Enora takes the pen. She does not sign.

“Not yet,” I say.

The registrar looks at my collar instead of my face, as they all do, and then finds something to do at the far end of the room with a folio.

Enora puts the pen down and folds her arms.

“Go on then,” she says.

I am going to lose her now. I have known that since the hammer came down, and I have decided to tell her what I am anyway.

“You know what I am.”

“I know what people say. They say it about weather, mostly.”

“Then ask me. Whatever you want to know before you sign.”

She does not have to think about it.

“What do you do?”

“When a soul comes loose, I carry it over. I have done it for four hundred years. That is all my work is. I do not choose the hour, I do not cause it, and I cannot refuse it.”

“And the coins.”

“The fen towns pay me in the coin they put in the mouths of their dead for the crossing. I take it when I take them. That is what you smelled.”

“Right,” she says. “What else?”

“I am called out at every hour, and at night more than in daylight. When I am called I go, and I come back cold. You will be alone in a house four miles into the fen, with Malo, who keeps it, and with the thing everyone in Morlac just stepped away from.”

The registrar’s pen has stopped scratching at the far end of the room.

Enora stands there, and I wait for what I have watched before: she will count the cost, she will be polite about it, and she will go.

“Enora,” I say.

“I’m going to sign it,” she says. “I’d have signed it before you started talking. You’ve no idea how little of that was new.”

She signs. Her hand shakes and the letters come out fine anyway.

She said the quiet one in front of two hundred people, and it hurt under my sternum, where nothing has hurt in four hundred years.

When she puts the pen down I see what something did to her palms yesterday, two red weals across both, one of them broken open and cleaned badly, and I did not see them last night, because I was not looking at her hands.

I take her wrist and turn her hand over, and she lets me, and neither of us says anything about it.

I fold my handkerchief into the worse one and close her fingers on it. It is linen and it is cold from my pocket, and she makes a small sound at the cold and does not give it back.

I take the pen from her and write my name under hers, and the registrar seals it with wax and hands us each a copy, and it is done in the time it takes to boil an egg.

Then Enora says, “Was that you last night?”