Page 30

I have nothing for that, and it takes me a moment.

“Then come with me when you can. Next week.”

“I cannot say when.”

“You can’t say when, or you won’t?”

He does not answer. He does not look up either.

My face goes hot. I am standing in his hall with a rag in one hand and a bottle of vinegar in the other, and I have just been handed half of something, and I can hear the other half not being said. I lose my temper.

“Fine.” It comes out at the volume that gets me thrown out of chapter houses. “I believe you about the fen. Now tell me the rest, because there is a rest, I can hear it sitting in your mouth. The registrar said leaving to visit somebody doesn’t end it. She said it to both of us, at that table. You stood there and heard her, and now I ask for three days and I get a reason with a wall behind it.”

“You may leave whenever you like.” He says it low, to the page.

“For good.”

“Yes.”

“But not for three days.”

“That is correct.”

His hand is flat on the ledger. He has not turned a page since I came in.

“He’s dying.” My voice cracks. “I’m frightened he’ll die while I’m hanging cloth in your hall, and the one thing you won’t give me is the part you’re not saying. Whatever it is, it wouldn’t survive being said out loud, or you’d have said it.”

He does not answer.

I go out and put my whole weight into a door that weighs as much as I do. It thuds instead of slamming, and I do not even get that.

Malo is in the scullery with his sleeves rolled, scrubbing this morning’s pan. I burned the eggs again.

“I said I’d do the pan.”

“You say so every morning, madam.”

He is going to lose that wager.

I sit on the step with the vinegar bottle still in my hand.

“He won’t let me go and see him. My master. He’s dying, Malo. He’s dying in a chair in a cold shop and I can’t get three days out of a man who owns everything I can see from his gate.”

“He does not own the fen, madam.”

“You know what I mean.” My voice goes. “I want to see him before he dies. That’s all I want, and I can’t have it.”

Malo dries the pan. He hangs it up. He turns round and folds the cloth over the rail, and then he says, “All the years I have been in this house, he has never once refused a person a thing he could give them. Not once, madam. Not to anybody.”

He means it kindly. It makes me angrier. Everybody else gets yes, and I get no.

“He can give me this,” I say. “Corentin still needs me. Having been good to everybody else doesn’t get him out of being wrong to me.”

Malo looks down at the folded cloth. “No, madam.” He takes a clean one off the rail and puts it on the step beside me, and does not look at my face while he does it.

Then he goes off to do the fires.

I cry into Malo’s clean cloth until it is not clean. Then I sit on that step for a long time with my ears going, homesick for a cold shop and a man in a chair.