The white one frowns. She tilts her head, as if to see a different angle of light and shadows. In the moonlight her face is a vertical half-mask. Her mouth opens.
The drop of blood falls. There is an instant when the Rat feels its absence, the infinitesimal lightening of her body. Then it ticks on the floor.
‘Who’s there?’
The Rat doesn’t move. If the white one comes closer, she will claw her way upwards, climb frantically until she reaches the narrowing in the chimney where she can brace herself and rest. But every movement will send a rain of old soot and mortar down into the hearth, and then they will know she is here. They will search and peer and drag her out. There will be men with hands, faces with eyes. They will try to make her human, and hate her when they fail. She knows enough about the world to know that.
‘Is someone there?’
Sometimes the grey ones have seen her. A glimpse, a flash, a half-print in the dust. But no one listens to them when they say either there is a girl in the walls or the school is haunted. They would believe this one.
The white one takes another step. The shadows slide over her. She sees the owl in its fractured huddle on the hearthstone. She stops.
The Rat is shaking all over now. Her shoulders burn. Sweat is soaking into her shirt, the hot smell of herself wafting from armpits and scalp. Her hand stings. There is a loose stone beside her head, where a tall man could reach. If she reached for it, she would fall. But she would fall with it in her hand. It is heavy enough, big enough to crack a skull. Her heartbeat accelerates, so loud she is sure the white one will hear. If the white one hears …
The Rat’s fingers curl against the stone. Grit pushes into the tender space under her nails.
The white one turns away. One moment she is there, staring into the Rat’s shadow with a line between her eyebrows: then she is gone, out of the doorway in a whirl of white, moonlit to dark in an instant. Her footsteps fade.
The Rat waits. After a long time she lets herself down. Her bare feet press the floor. She stretches her arms, slowly, knowing better than to relax. Even when one danger is past, there is always another. But at least she can breathe freely. She is glad that she didn’t have to kill the white one. The thought is like a newly missing tooth: she explores the shape of it. Perhaps she isn’t glad. Perhaps she is disappointed.
She shakes herself. Glad, disappointed … She is the Rat. Life is simple for rats. She does what she has to, no more or less. More and less are for humans. More and less are this hall, the empty space, the white one’s gesture-that-was-not-a-gesture. The Rat has no part in that. She will not be human, no matter what happens. Only tonight the moonlight tempted her in.
Her foot brushes the dead owl. A rat would sniff it and leave it: scarce tricky flesh, bony and unappetising. It is easier to steal food from the kitchens, and she has no other use for a bundle of bones and feathers. But she picks it up. She crosses the hall with it swinging from her grasp. She knocked the setting clot off her hand when she lowered her feet to the floor, and now she feels a fresh tickle of blood rolling down between her fingers. The scratch itself is throbbing. She will steal wine and honey from the kitchen, clean it and wrap it in a rag; even a rat would choose not to lose its paw.
The moon has moved. The rectangles of caged light have swept around and up, folding into the right angle of walls and floor. Now the middle of the floor is dark, and the line of silver is hidden. Soon the mountain will swallow the moon completely, and the hall will be dark, the game board extinguished. There will be no grand jeu tonight.
The Rat doesn’t give herself time to think; or perhaps it is the new gap in her head – the thought of a stone in her hand – that nudges her over the invisible boundary without hesitating. She crouches and puts the dead fledgling down in the middle of the space. She spreads the wings into a lopsided fan of feathers. The dark lies on it like dust. Blood drips from her hand onto the floor beside her toes. She looks up, but from here she can’t see the moon, only the bleached blue-black sky and the hump of the mountain.
She gets to her feet and stares into the darkness as if she is meeting someone’s gaze. Another drop of blood falls, but she seems not to notice it. She is listening for something else, something she doesn’t understand. Then she steps backwards out of the space, opening her arms wide, like an invitation.
2: Léo
When Léo wakes there’s a theme running through his head. For a second he can’t place it. It could be a dream: an elusive melody, a shape that broadens into something abstract, a fragment of poetry with the sting of a half-remembered association. He rolls over, squeezing his eyes shut as if he can retreat into sleep, but it’s no good. It echoes in his brain, exasperating, taunting him. Then, abruptly, he recognises it. The bloody Bridges of Königsberg. It mingles with the noise of a door banging and plates clattering in the kitchen below. That must have been what woke him; otherwise he’d have slept late, drowsing uneasily after a night of near-insomnia.
He pulls the bedclothes more tightly round his shoulders, but now he’s awake he’s cold. The blankets are scratchy and thin, and the pillow feels damp to the touch. Last night the proprietor gave him a confidential smile as he said, ‘The Arnauld Suite, sir. I must say, it is an honour,’ and the maid looked at him sideways as she showed him the room, expecting him to be impressed by the draperies and the heavy gilt-framed portraits of grand jeu masters; but there are clusters of dark spots on the headboard where bedbugs are nesting in the cracks, and the mattress sags in the middle like a hammock. Every time he turned over in the night it jangled and creaked, and now there’s a spring digging into his ribs. At this moment, Chryseïs will be spread-eagled under Egyptian cotton sheets, taking up the whole of their bed. She’ll still be asleep, golden hair tangled, an errant smudge of eye-black smeared across her temple, while the curtains billow at the open French window and the scent of hot dust and traffic fumes mingles with the roses on the mantelpiece. Sometimes he feels like summer in the city will choke him, but right now, in this mildewed room, he’d give a year’s salary to be there, back in his old life. He drags his hands over his face, trying to wipe away the sticky feeling of not having slept properly, and sits up. The theme of the Bridges of Königsberg reasserts itself in his head. It’s like a stuck record, the move between the melody and the first development of the Eulerian path, then back to that infuriating tune … Out of all the games to get into his head, it has to be one he can’t stand. He gets out of bed, pulls on his trousers and shirt, and rings for shaving water. ‘And coffee,’ he adds, as the maid bobs a curtsy and turns to leave. She swings back to him, so eager she almost stumbles, and he notices without caring that they’ve sent him the prettiest one. ‘Coffee first. Make sure it’s hot.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Will there be anything else?’
‘No. Thank you.’ He sits down next to the window, his back to her. Churlish, but what does it matter? He’s not a politician any more.
The coffee, when it arrives, is terrible – half chicory, half-burnt – but at least it’s nearly as hot as he likes it, hot enough to warm his hands through the cup. He sips it slowly, watching the sky change colour over the houses opposite. The sun hasn’t come up over the mountains yet, and the street outside is still dim, even though it’s almost eight o’clock. He should be at home, in his study, halfway through his second pot, absorbed in one of Dettler’s reports; it gives him an uneasy, itchy sensation, to be sitting here with nothing to do. He was buggered if he was going to trudge up the mountain at dawn, as if he were a student; yesterday he deliberately ordered the car for after lunch, but already he’s at a loss, shifting in his musty-smelling chair, wondering whether he’s hungry enough to ring for breakfast. How is he going to pass the hours? He winces; the question makes him think of Chryseïs, standing there on the balcony staring at him, the evening after his meeting with the Chancellor. ‘What am I going to do?’ she said, and he almost laughed at her predictability.