Chapter 16: A Good Girl

The meeting had gone on past dark and left him worse than it found him — the device laid out and talked over in that flat careful way they had, how it would be carried and where and when and what it did, and the benefactor’s clever quiet voice making it all sound like a piece of engineering and not the thing it was — and Merko came home through the cold streets with it sitting in him and wanting, more than he had ever wanted anything, the ordinary warmth of his own house. The lamp. The food. The fire built up. The girl moving about it all, keeping it, the one place the floor did not move. He let himself in thinking of that, the dinner waiting and the evening’s shape to lie down in.

There was no dinner. There was no fire built up, no lamp lit but the one guttering low he’d left that morning, and the house was cold and dark and wrong, and he stood in it with the first crawl of anger coming up — and then he heard her.

She was in the kitchen, on the floor, and at first he thought she’d fallen, and then he saw she had not fallen, she was down in the middle of the floor away from everything, her knees up and her arms wrapped round them and her back held off from any wall or thing behind her, and she was breathing wrong — fast and shallow and tearing, a sound that was trying to be breath and not managing it, her whole body going with it, her eyes open and seeing nothing in the room. He had seen it elsewhere now. He had seen it on a young man the night after his first death, sitting just so, breathing just so, the body gone on without him into some loop it couldn’t break. And down the back of the shift she still wore the cloth had soaked through and dried and soaked again, two long stains gone brown and stiff and one of them still wet at the edge, and he understood, standing there, that she had been like this — or near it — for some good part of the day, alone, on the floor of his cold kitchen, while he was out being a hero.

Something turned over in him that was not like the morning. The morning had been all heat and fear with a body under it to land on. This was cold and it was shame, and the shape the shame took — because shame needs a shape a man can use — was this: that he had handled it wrong. Like a brute and not a man. Vinda came into his head with her clear amused voice, Vinda who had run this girl and this house like a clock and never once raised a hand, who’d have looked at him over the wreck of his evening with that particular tilt of her eyebrow — and how did that serve you, you great fool? Did the shouting cook your dinner? You don’t break a good tool to teach it. Honestly, Merko. Honestly. He had not managed it like a man who knew how to run a house. He had managed it like a frightened soldier with a whip, and his house had stopped, and here was the proof of it breathing wrong on the floor.

“All right,” he said. “All right, girl. Up. Come on.” And when she didn’t move, couldn’t, he bent and got an arm under her and lifted her — she weighed nothing, she always had weighed nothing — and carried her up the stairs and laid her face-down on his own bed, and lit the lamps, and went to the trunk.

He had a field kit in it, an old soldier’s roll, lint and salve and a flask of the spirit they cleaned wounds with, and he knew how to use it; he had used it on better men than her and on himself. He took the ruined shift off her back — peeled it where it had stuck, slow, the way you do, wetting it first so it came without taking the scab — and he did not tear it this time; he set it aside. And he looked at what he’d done, properly, for the first time, with a soldier’s eye instead of a frightened man’s arm.

It was not as bad as the blood had made it look. That was the first thing, and it loosened something in his chest: the skin was cut, two lines of it, crossed, and they had bled and bled again through the day for want of tending, but they were shallow — the whip had bitten the skin and no more, no deep tissue, nothing that would scar her crippled or take a fever if it was cleaned. He had seen men flogged to the bone. This was not that. He had, he realised, pulled the second stroke without knowing he did — some old soldier’s measure in the arm that knew the difference between marking a man and ruining him. He cleaned the cuts with the spirit and she flinched and made a small sound but the awful breathing had begun, somewhere in the lifting and the carrying and the being-tended, to come back toward something like breath; and he laid the lint on and bound it round her properly, firm and clean, the way it should have been bound twelve hours ago, and by the time he tied it off she was breathing like a person again, shallow and tired but her own.

“There,” he said. “That’s better. That should have been done this morning. That was — “ he stopped, and did not finish it, because the word that came was one he didn’t use.

He left her lying as she was, face-down, because to sit her up would be to put her back to the wall or the pillows and he understood now what that would cost her; he set a cup of water from the pipes on the floor by her head where she could reach it. And the ordinary management of his own evening was nowhere, no dinner, the house cold, and he found he wanted to understand the thing, the way you want to understand a horse that’s thrown you. “Why’s there no dinner?” he said. Not harsh. Genuinely asking. “You’ve had the whole day. Hurt or not, you’ve done a day’s work hurt before. What happened to my dinner?”