The Note

By three o'clock Isa had copied out the whole of the first chapter of the wrong half, for the sake of the exercise.

It was a good hand. She knew it was. She had a clear, small, upright, fast hand, learned at the kitchen table at Vellamara from her grandfather, who had held that a gentleman might be known by his figures and a lady by her capitals; and she had put down the Flood's first leaf in it, column by column, the numbers going up, the strange tall Marian names of the harbours written out in a careful phonetic of her own, Ess-ka-ra, Vell-an-dor, the Three Quays, in a neat narrow script with ink so black that it shone. It was no use to anyone. It was a fair copy of the wrong book. It would not buy her bed, or her bun, or the lady's patience. But it was something to do with the hand; and a girl who has been told to wait for three hours in a very large and very quiet room has either to do something with her hand or to let it do something on its own.

It did the second thing at ten past three.

She looked down, and found that she had drawn, in the margin of the page, with the point of her pencil, a small neat square house with a pitched roof and a chimney. There was a window in it. There was a door. Over the roof, quite lightly, in a few quick marks, she had drawn three drops.

She stared at it. Then she rubbed it out with the heel of her hand, a little too hard, so that the paper pilled, and put both hands in her lap.

I shall be extremely civil.

The rain went on. It ran down the tall windows in long slow ropes, and the light that came through them was the colour of dishwater; it fell across the floor of the hall in broad pale panes, and by three it had begun to fade. The hall had its own sounds. A page turned, a long way off, with a dry whisper. A stool creaked. In the second row from the door a young man with a ledger was copying figures with a small contented noise like a mouse; at the next table an old scholar with a white beard on his chest had been asleep since before she came, and breathed, at the third beat, with a soft regular whistle that she had begun to count. Mr. Wren ran past her table, twice, with a lamp in his hand and a look of purpose, and ran back again with the look of a man who has just remembered what he was looking for and forgotten where. He went past her the third time muttering. The Ebb. The Ebb. In the, no, that was the, it was in the cloth.

At a quarter to four, her candle began to gutter.

She watched it go. It burned down to the width of her thumb-nail, and the flame leaned over, and righted itself, and leaned again, and a little thread of black smoke went up from it, straight as a pin; and she thought, with perfect clearness, that it was a very small thing to be afraid of, a candle, and that she had been afraid of rather larger. And then, with a last small spit and flicker, it went out.

The hall did not seem to notice.

She sat in the grey dusk with her hands folded and her pencil behind her ear, and the whole of the great high room went on, around her, quietly, with its business. She had two coppers. She could have bought a lamp. She could have gone up to the little bald porter with his tray and put down one of them and had an hour's light for it, and thought no more; and she did not. It was not the money. She had worked it out already, on the walk, as she worked out everything: the lamp was one copper, and the second copper was the end of the month, and between the end of the month and a landlady who read other people's letters upside down there was a very thin line of coppers and a very large quantity of Isa Bartoli's pride. She could sit in the dark. She had sat in the dark before. At Vellamara, in winter, one learned to read by the window, and to find the line by touch, and to say the lesson to oneself on the stair.

She took the bun out of her satchel.

She looked at it. It was a Watertide bun, round, glazed, split at the top and filled with cream. It had been squashed a little against her notebook, and the cream had come through the split in a small pale tongue. Do not eat it until after you have been given the book. She weighed it in her hand. It was the third thing that she had been told that day not to do, and she found, with a faint inward shock, that she was going to obey.

She put it back in the satchel.

That is the whole of my character, thought Isa, a woman who will starve rather than disobey a bookseller. And she laughed, once, without any sound at all, in the dark, with her hand over her mouth, until the old scholar at the next table stirred in his sleep and said something about the Third Reading, and she stopped.

Evie did not notice.

She was at the window, in the last of the light, with her lamp burning steadily at her elbow, and she had finished the first line of the table of the salt-works and begun the second. It was going very well. It was one of those afternoons on which the glyphs slid out of the pen like water and settled on the paper in order, one under another, without any trouble, and she did not think. She sat inside the line, in a long warm quiet. She had been there, she supposed, for about an hour. She would have been there for another, if it had not been for the interruptions, which were all of them, as she told herself afterward, entirely trivial.

The first was Mr. Wren.

He came past her table at about twenty past four, at a trot, with a lamp in his hand and the most unhappy face that she had ever seen on a person, and went by in a rush of damp wool and anxiety and the fragments of a sentence, in a very low voice, to himself. The Ebb. The Ebb. It must be, it was in the grey cloth. It was in the same cloth as the, the Flood. He did not look at her. He went off down the lane towards the stacks and turned the corner under the gallery stair; and she heard the faint sound of a ladder being dragged, and a muffled exclamation, and silence.

The Ebb. She knew it, in a vague way. It was a tide-table, a Marian one, the second half of a pair; she had seen the Flood on the shelf. It was a good book. It was nothing to do with her. She dipped her pen.

The second interruption was the bell.

She did not at first know that it was the bell. She had been writing; the line was long, with a difficult run of signs in the middle, a sort of stuttering of the little hooked glyph that meant flood and the smaller one that meant ebb; and she had paused over it, with her pen lifted, and without any reason at all she had turned her head to the left.

Ting.

It was a very small sound. It came from a long way off, or from very near; she could not tell. It was one note, high and clear and quite unlike the ticking of a hazelnut-sized bell against a collarbone, a pure thin silver sound like a spoon touched lightly against a glass; and it hung for a moment in the air of the great room, and went out.

She sat quite still.

She put her hand to her throat. The ribbon was where it always was, and the little bell lay in the hollow of her collarbone, cool, round, quiet. She touched it with one finger. It did not move. She had not moved. She had turned her head a few degrees, to the left, in the direction of the stacks, as one turns at the sound of a name; and as she sat there, with her hand at her throat and her pen in the air, she realised that she had been holding her breath.

It was nothing, she told herself. It was the ribbon.

She turned her head the other way. Nothing. She turned it back, slowly, to the left, to the long dim corner of the hall under the gallery where the shelves began, and the bell spoke again, a very little louder than before: ting.

She felt the hair stand up along her arms.

It was not fear. She knew fear; she had had it in her stomach on the coach from Pucket and in her chest at night in the first year, in the room over the cobbler's, and it was cold and plain. This was something else. This was the feeling that she had had as a child on the harbour wall, with a wet cloth in her hand and her palm flat on a stone, when she had found, quite suddenly, under her fingers, the place where the old writing began. It was the feeling of being, very gently, asked.

She did not think about it. That was what she said to herself later, and it was true. She did not think. She put down her pen. She stoppered the ink, and covered the half-codex with its cloth, and laid the sheet she had been copying under a blotter, and rose, quietly, and went away down the lane between the tables with her hands at her sides, in the manner of a person going to fetch a pencil.

The stacks were at the back of the hall.

They were not locked. A reader could go in, if she was known to the desk; and Evie was known. They were a warren of high dim narrow aisles of dark oak shelves, rising to a gallery, with ladders on brass rails and small round windows set in the walls, and a smell of old paper and beeswax and dust that went into her head like wine. There was no light but what came in through the windows. She walked down the first aisle with her fingers trailing along the spines of the books. Poets. Historians. A long run of dark blue volumes with the single word Customs in faded gilt.

Ting.

It was louder. It was just at her ear, as if someone had flicked the little bell with a nail, and she had turned, without knowing, to the left again, into the second aisle.

She went on. She did not pass anyone. At the end of the second aisle a tall ladder stood against a shelf with a lamp on its top step, and under the lamp, in a puddle of yellow light, Mr. Wren sat on the floor in his green and gold with his back to the oak and his spectacles in his hand and his head on his knees. He did not hear her. She went by on tiptoe.

The third recess was at the very end of the stack, under the gallery stair, in a corner so deep and shadowed that a person would have had to know it was there. It was a short row of shelves in the angle of two walls, narrow and close, with a small brass plate on the end that said, in the library's gilt copperplate, MARIAN: VERSE. It held, so far as she could see in the dusk, the odes. They were thick fat volumes, bound alike in dull red cloth, standing in a long row from the bottom shelf to the top. She had never wanted them.

The bell rang.

It rang twice, one note on the heel of the other, high and clear and bright; and it did not stop. It went on, a very little, in the air, like a bell that has been struck and not yet let go; and she stood in the dusk with her hand at her collarbone and listened, with the whole of her skin, to a thing that she had worn for two years and not once heard.

It is for the shelf, she thought. It is for the bottom shelf.

She knelt.

It was a thing one did not do, in the Library, in a good dress; she was in her grey wool, which had been kneeled in before. She put her hand flat on the cold floor and bent her head, and looked along the bottom of the shelf, between the dust and the red cloth, and saw that the line of the odes was not even. It had a small, a very small, irregularity at one end, as if a book had been pushed in too far. She put her hand into the gap. It was a narrow gap. It went back a long way. She felt, at the end of her fingers, something soft and rough, like linen, and then, behind it, something hard.

She drew it out.

It was wrapped in a grey linen cloth, the same grey, as it happened, as her own dress, and it was larger than she had expected and much heavier. It had been lying for a long time. The dust of it came off on her fingers in a fine soft powder. She laid it on her knee and turned back a corner of the cloth, and there, under her hand, was a board of dark oak covered with grey leather, and on the cover, in faded gilt, a single line in Marian glyphs, such as she had been reading for four years.

She read it. She could not help it.

The Hours of the Harbour. The Ebb.

The bell had stopped. It had stopped at the moment that she read the word, as quietly as a held breath let go, and the stacks were once more silent, except for a drip of rain and the faint sound of Mr. Wren, a long way off, blowing his nose.

Evie sat on the floor of the Great Library in the dust with the second half of a book across her knees.

She did not feel clever. She did not feel anything, except a small clear dazzled blankness, such as comes in the moment after a very good sneeze. It was not her book. It was nothing to do with her. She had not been looking for it. She had come in for a pencil. She thought, quite calmly and distinctly, someone is going to have to be given this; and then she thought of a voice that she had heard, a quarter of an hour since, going by in the aisle. The Ebb. The Ebb.

He didn't say for whom.

She wrapped the cloth round it. She got up, and brushed the worst of the dust from her skirt, and walked back down the long aisle with the book in her arms, past Mr. Wren who did not look up, and out through the arch into the hall.

It was nearly dark.

The lamps were lit down the whole length of the room, one to every two tables, a long double row of small steady gold flames in the dusk like a street at evening; and between them, in the long lane, in her damp blue dress and her hat, a very small girl sat at table thirty-one under the gallery with her hands folded in her lap, in the dark, looking at nothing.

She did not look like a person who was waiting. She looked like a person who had been told to wait by someone she respected, and who intended to do it to the end if it killed her, and who would be extremely civil about it. She had a pencil in her hair. She had a notebook open before her, a small square of white in the dusk; and she had, Evie saw, as she came down the lane, no candle at all.

It was a very small observation. It was a thing she would not have been able to say how she knew. She did not look at the girl's face. She did not look at anything; she kept her eyes on the cloth in her arms, in the way that one keeps one's eyes on a full cup. She walked down the long lane between the lamps, past her own table and her own lamp and her own pen, and came to the corner under the gallery, and stopped.

She laid the book on the table. She laid it down, in its grey cloth, gently, and with the flat of one finger, as one slides a letter under a door, she pushed it across the oak, through the dusk, until it stopped against the girl's folded hands.

"I think that's yours," said Evie, to the table.

There was a silence.

It lasted perhaps four seconds. In the hall, a page turned. The old man at twenty-three drew his whistling breath, and let it out. At the table, a small cold hand slowly unfolded itself and touched the grey cloth, as one touches something that may prove to be hot, and turned back its corner; and Evie, who had not meant to look up, looked up.

It was a thin, pale, fine-drawn face, with a straight small nose, a decided mouth, and fair hair coiled and pinned with a pencil. Its eyes were dark. They were enormous in the dusk. They had in them, steady and bright, the whole of three hours of civility, and under it, quite unbidden, as a spring comes up through a flagstone, something so astonished, and so near to tears, and so entirely unwilling to be seen to be near them, that she felt the breath go out of her body as if she had been struck.

"That," said Isa Bartoli, in a small clear voice, "is the Ebb."

"I believe so."

"It is in the right cloth. The numbers come down." She turned back another corner, and looked, with an expression of the most intense and awful concentration, at the page. Her hand shook. She laid it flat on the paper to still it. "I have been looking for it for three hours."

"It was in the wrong place."

"Yes. I imagine that it was." Her eyes came up. "Where?"

"Behind the odes," said Evie. "At the bottom. Pushed in."

"How did you know?"

It was the one question that she had not prepared for. She stood there in the dusk with her hands empty and her heart doing something quick and foolish, and felt the little bell lie quiet and cool against her collarbone, as if it had never in its life done anything but hang; and she said, with great presence of mind, which was the habit of a lifetime, "I heard a librarian say it was missing."

It was perfectly true.

"Oh," said the girl. Something in her face went, a very little, in the direction of a smile. "Yes. That would be Mr. Wren."

"I think so."

"He was extremely sorry."

"He is, I believe, still sorry. He is in the stacks. He is sitting on the floor."

"Oh, dear," said Isa, with such sudden and heartfelt dismay that Evie heard herself, to her complete astonishment, laugh. It was a very small laugh. It came up out of her like a bubble from the bottom of a well, quite uninvited, and broke in the dusk, and was gone; and the small dark-eyed girl looked up at her with her mouth open and her hands flat on the Ebb, and, after a moment, laughed too.

It was the first sound of the kind that the table had ever made.

At twenty-three the old man woke up. He said, "The Third Reading is on Treesong," in a loud clear voice; and, perceiving that he was among strangers, went to sleep again.

And Evie, who had been standing, found that she had sat down. She did not know how. It was the bench across the table from the girl, in the dusk, in the corner under the gallery; and her own lamp was two tables off, behind her, a small bright distant island, and it did not seem to matter in the least.

She looked at the girl across the table. She thought, with a slow, curious, entirely unreasonable certainty, oh. There you are.

She did not say it. She was twenty-one. She had never in her life said such a thing, and she would not for years. But she sat in the dark, on the bench, with her hands in her lap, and for the first time in the whole of that long wet afternoon she did not count her breath.