The brass lock surrendered with a sound like a small bone cracking. Bartholomew Wren turned the key twice more out of habit, then shouldered the cabinet door wider until the hinges offered their familiar complaint, thin and reedy in the stillness of the archive room.
Morning had not yet reached the upper windows. The gas lamps along the back wall burned low, their mantles turned down to a blue whisper that barely dented the shadows pooling in the corners. Dust moved through the slanted dark in slow columns, each mote a traveller with nowhere urgent to be. The smell of the room was old paper and camphor and the faint metallic tang of the cabinet's iron fittings, a scent Bartholomew had learned to read the way a doctor reads a pulse. Today the room smelled wrong. Not rotten, not quite. Disturbed. As though something had been moved that ought to have stayed put.
He set his satchel on the reading stand and drew out the ledger first. His hands, still steady at seventy-three, opened it to a fresh page and uncapped his pen with the efficiency of long practice. The nib touched paper. He wrote the date, the cabinet number, and a line of identification in his careful copperplate: Portrait Studies, Women in Victorian Dress. Unlocked Series. To be catalogued.
Then he lifted the first frame from its velvet slot.
The woman in the plate stared out at him with the composed patience of the long dead. Her collar rose to her jaw, her hair drawn back in a style Bartholomew's mother would have recognised: the severe fashion of the 1860s, before softness returned to women's dress. He turned the frame over. A slip of paper had been glued to the backing board, yellowed at the edges but legible.
Miss E. Thorne. 1861.
He set it aside and reached for the next.
Mrs. Adelaide Finch. 1863.
The next.
Miss Cordelia Calloway. 1865.
Bartholomew's pen stopped moving. He looked again at the third frame, then at the slip of paper, then back at the face in the plate. He knew that name. Every soul in Ashford-under-Wold knew that name, or claimed to. The Calloways had been the spine of the village for three generations; their folios filled three shelves in the parish records, and their photographs, the ones the family had permitted to be copied, hung in the corridor of the public library above a brass plaque that named the donor. This face, though, he did not know. The features were sharp where the living matriarch was round, the mouth set where the other smiled, the eyes level where the other warmed. A younger woman, certainly. A relation, almost certainly. But the woman he took his tea with on alternate Thursdays, the one whose gate creaked and whose garden gnome had a chip out of its ear, was not this woman.
He set the frame carefully on the desk, away from the others, and made a small note in the margin of his ledger: Variant likeness. Investigate provenance.
The catalogue could wait. He drew the second frame toward him and turned it over.
Miss E. Thorne. 1864.
The same woman as the first, then, or near enough. The dress had changed: darker, heavier, the collar lower, the sleeves narrower. A woman growing older inside a fashion that had begun to move on without her. He made a note: Repeat sitter, three-year interval. Compare facial topography in later entries.
The third frame. Mrs. Adelaide Finch. 1865. He paused. He had not yet seen a Miss Finch. He set this one beside the second Mrs. Finch and reached deeper into the cabinet.
The cabinet had been locked when he arrived. The key had been in his pocket since Monday, when the curator at the Hartwell Museum had pressed it into his palm with a small bow of the head that older men reserve for one another when neither can quite bring himself to say what he means. The lock was an old Chubb, the kind that required not only the key but a particular twist of the wrist that Bartholomew had learned decades ago and had not used in fifteen years. He had performed the motion this morning, and the lock had given way, but he had been unable to convince himself that no one had been there before him. The dust on the cabinet's upper surface had been disturbed in a pattern that suggested a cloth drawn across it, then a hand laid flat to test for further residue. A careful hand. An educated hand.
He set the thought aside, as he set aside most thoughts that did not serve the work, and reached for the fourth frame.
Miss Cordelia Calloway. 1867.
Again. A second portrait, two years later. The same face, if not quite. Something in the jaw had hardened. Something behind the eyes had retreated. Bartholomew turned the frame over twice, searching the back for any further marking, and found only the slip of paper and a faint impression in the board, as though someone had pressed hard against it once and then thought better of the impulse.
He laid the four frames side by side on the reading stand and studied them. Four women, the catalogue suggested, but he was not yet certain they were four. The first Miss Thorne and the second Miss Thorne might have been sisters. The two Miss Calloways might have been cousins. The Mrs. Finches might have been mother and daughter. The dates did not argue against it: a family would commission a portrait and then, twenty years later, another, and the two sitters would share a surname and not much else.
He wrote: Identity uncertain in three of four plates. Cross-reference with parish register and Calloway family papers, if accessible. C.F.M.
The initials he used for his private shorthand. They stood for compare with mother , a small joke that only he understood and that his late wife had once, in a rare moment of levity, pronounced clear as mud .
He drew the next frame from the cabinet. The velvet gave up its charge with a soft hiss, and he felt the small familiar thrill of the work, the sense that the next plate might be the one to make sense of all the others. It was the thrill that had kept him at the Hartwell for thirty years, that had carried him through cabinets of moth-eaten folios and crates of unsorted glass negatives, through the smell of silver nitrate and the patient boredom of restoration. It was a small thrill, and he did not trust it, but he let it carry him.
The fifth frame was larger than the others. The plate inside was not a portrait at all, but a landscape: a stretch of river, a low bridge, a stand of trees on the far bank that Bartholomew recognised after a moment as the willows above the old mill. There was no notation on the back, and the velvet slot from which he had drawn it had been labelled, in a careful hand he did not recognise, Sitter 4, contextual .
He set the frame down with the others and made another note. Fifth plate: not a portrait. Possible companion piece. Note format anomaly.
He reached into the cabinet again. His fingers found only velvet. He leaned forward and peered inside. The cabinet had held more than he had been told, or so he now suspected. There were twelve velvet slots, each labelled in the same unrecognised hand. He had pulled from the first five. The sixth was empty. The seventh was empty. He pulled the velvet tray forward on its runners and found, beneath it, a shallow drawer that had not been in the original catalogue.
The drawer contained a single object: a small leather notebook, its spine cracked, its pages warped by damp. He lifted it out and laid it on the desk beside the ledger. The cover bore no title. The first page, when he opened it, bore a date and a name: 14 September 1869. Miss E. T.
Bartholomew sat very still. The gas lamp beside him gave a small pop, and the flame steadied, and the shadows in the corners rearranged themselves as though listening.
He did not open the notebook further. Not yet. He had learned, over thirty years, that the first page of an unknown ledger was a threshold, and that a man who crossed it without preparation often wished he had not. He closed the notebook and set it in the centre of the desk, equidistant from the four portrait frames, and he wrote in his own ledger, in the careful hand that had outlasted two employers and a wife:
14 09 1869. Notebook recovered from unlocked series. Author identified only by initials. Possible connection to Miss Thorne of Plates 1 and 2. Do not proceed without reference to parish register. B.W.
He uncapped his pen, recapped it, and slid it into his breast pocket. He placed his hand flat on the notebook's cover and felt, through the leather, the faint impression of the words inside, as though they had been written so hard they had nearly come through.
In the corridor outside, the floorboard at the top of the stairs gave its usual creak, the one he had heard a thousand times and would have sworn no one else knew how to provoke.
He lifted his hand from the notebook. He did not turn his head.
"Mrs. Calloway," he said, to the empty room. "I had not thought to see you before Thursday."
The floorboard gave its creak again, and then there was the small dry sound of a hand settling on the doorframe, and then the voice he knew, warm but crisp, with the soft West Country vowels that had not quite left her in seventy years of living inland.
"I had not thought to find you with my mother's face under your hand, Mr. Wren."
She stepped into the lamplight. Her coat was buttoned wrong, the top button caught in the second hole, the way she always buttoned it when she had dressed in haste. Her eyes went to the four frames on the desk, and then to the notebook, and then to him.
"You have been busy," she said.
She came further into the room without waiting to be asked. That was Mrs. Calloway's way. She had the manner of a woman who had never in her life required an invitation to enter her own family's history, and so she treated every room as a continuation of her own parlour. She smelled, as she always did, of peppermints and the lavender she kept in her coat pockets, and beneath that, faintly, of the liniment she rubbed into her left shoulder on cold mornings.
"The photograph," she said, nodding toward the topmost frame. "You have taken it from the series."
"I have."
"And the others you have brought down as well. The three plates. Mr. Wren, I did not give you leave to dismantle the display. I gave you leave to consult it."
"You gave me leave," Wren said, "to determine whether the series was genuine. The only way to determine that was to lift the plates from their backing and examine them in raking light. I could hardly have done that through the glass."
She looked at him. He met her gaze. There was a silence in which the lamp made its small adjustments and somewhere below, on the street, a delivery cart passed over a loose cobble and made the particular clatter he had been hearing since 1958.
"Sit down, Mrs. Calloway," he said. "You will tire yourself standing."
"I am not tired."
"You are buttoned wrong."
Her hand went to her collar. She looked down at the misbuttoned coat, and something crossed her face that was not quite a smile and not quite irritation, but the particular compound of both that he had learned to associate with her. She sat down in the chair opposite the desk. She did not remove her coat.
"Now then," she said. "Tell me what you have found."
Wren drew the four frames toward him and arranged them in a line, top edges aligned, the way he had once arranged a thousand series on the long table in the Hartwell basement. Plate 1, the boy with the lamb. Plate 2, the girl in the bonnet. Plate 3, the young man at the door. Plate 4, the woman at the window.
"The plates themselves are consistent," he said. "Albumen prints, mounted on card of a stock that was in use between roughly 1855 and 1885. The card has yellowed in the same pattern across all four, which suggests they have been stored together for at least a century. The developer chemistry is consistent. The plate edges, where the photographer's hand rested, show the same faint thumbprint on all four, though I would need a better lens to be certain it is the same thumb. I have made a note to that effect."
Mrs. Calloway was watching his hands as he spoke. He noticed, and slowed them.
"The subjects," he said, "are posed in a consistent manner. Three-quarter length, slightly off-centre, looking past the lens rather than into it. That is a convention of the period, but it is also a signature, if you will pardon the word. Whoever made these plates made them in a particular way, and made all four of them in that way. They are, in my professional judgement, a genuine series. They were taken by one photographer, of four related subjects, over a period I cannot yet determine but which I would guess to be no more than two or three years."
"Then they are what I said they were."
"They are what you believe them to be. That is not the same thing, Mrs. Calloway, and you know it."
She said nothing. The lamp ticked faintly in its mantle.
"The question of identity," Wren went on, "is a different matter. I can date a plate. I can describe a plate. I cannot tell you with certainty, looking at a face, whether that face is your mother, or your aunt, or your grandmother, or a stranger who happened to stand where your mother stood sixty years later. I would not presume to make that identification from a photograph alone. I would not make it for any family. I would not make it for you."
"You have already made it," she said. "You wrote it in your notebook."
"I wrote that I had made a provisional identification, subject to confirmation. I wrote that Miss Margery Thorne of the parish register appeared to be the most likely candidate. I did not write that she was your mother. I do not know that she was your mother. I know only that the face in the window is the face of a young woman who, according to the parish register, lived in this house, in this street, in the year 1869. That is all I know."
"It is enough."
"It is not enough for me."
She turned in her chair and looked at the photograph of the boy with the lamb. Her hand came up, and she rested the tips of her fingers on the edge of the frame, not touching the glass.
"He was four when that was taken," she said. "Or thereabouts. I have heard my mother say so. He had a way of standing with the lamb. He stood so the lamb's head was turned toward the camera. He thought it was funny. He thought everything was funny, until he didn't."
Wren said nothing. He had learned, over thirty years of handling other people's dead, that the moment a voice changes in that particular way is not the moment to put a question.
"She kept the plates in the album," Mrs. Calloway said, "until she married. Then she put them in the portfolio. Then, when my father began his work on the local histories, she gave them to him, because she thought they would be useful to him. They were not useful to him. He had no interest in photographs. He had interest only in documents. He kept them in the portfolio because she asked him to. After he died, I found the portfolio in the back of the wardrobe in the room that had been hers, and I put the plates in the portfolio in the way she had put them there, and I have kept them so."
She withdrew her hand from the frame.
"I did not damage them, Mr. Wren."
"I did not suppose you had."
"Then why have you written in your notebook, in a hand I can read from this chair, that the face has been scratched?"
Wren did not answer immediately. He reached, instead, for the topmost frame, and turned it so the lamp fell upon the face of the woman at the window. He angled it, slightly, so that the light caught the surface of the print at a raking angle, and then he held it so she could see.
"There," he said.
She leaned forward. The scratches were visible only when the light fell across them at that particular angle. They ran across the woman's face in a series of fine, deliberate lines, as though someone had taken a pin, or a hatpin, or the point of a small pair of scissors, and had drawn it, again and again, across the brow, the eyes, the mouth. The lines were not the marks of accident. They were too parallel for that. They were too even. They had been made with the slow, careful pressure of a hand that knew what it was doing.
Mrs. Calloway sat back.
"Who," she said, "would do such a thing."
"I do not know."
"It was not my mother. She would not have done it. She kept the plates. She put them in the portfolio. She gave them to my father. She asked him to keep them."
"I understand."
"She did not scratch her own face."
"No."
"Then who."
Wren set the frame down. He placed it carefully, with the bottom edge aligned to the desk, as he had been taught to do in 1931 by a man whose name he could no longer remember but whose hands he could still see.
"There are three possibilities," he said. "The first is that the damage was done before the plates came into your mother's keeping. The second is that it was done after, by someone other than your mother. The third is that it was done by your mother, in a frame of mind I am not equipped to judge. I do not propose to choose between them. I propose only to note the fact, and to ask you, as the present custodian of the plates, what you wish to be done about it."
"I wish," she said, "for it not to be there."
"That is not in my power."
"Then I wish for you to say who did it."
"That is not in my power either. I am an archivist, Mrs. Calloway. I am not a detective. I cannot read a face that has been crossed out and tell you what was crossing the mind of the person who crossed it. I can only tell you that the crossing happened. I can tell you, from the pattern of the scratches, that it was done with a single, fine point, applied with some force, by a right-handed person, and that the scratches are consistent with having been made by a hatpin. That is all I can tell you."
She was quiet. The lamp ticked.
"Will you be able to tell me anything else," she said, "from the notebook."
"The notebook is yours. I will return it to you on Thursday, with the plates. I will not read it further without your permission."
"You have read enough of it already."
"I have read the cover and the first page. I read those because they lay open when I unwrapped the portfolio. I did not turn past the first page. I will not turn past the first page."
She looked at him. There was a long silence.
"You are a careful man, Mr. Wren."
"I have been a careful man for a long time."
"My mother," she said, "was not a careful woman."
She stood up. The chair made its small complaint against the floor. She reached up and unbuttoned her coat and began to rebutton it correctly, starting from the bottom this time, the way she always did when she had decided to be methodical about something.
"I will come on Thursday," she said. "At four. I will bring the portfolio. I will bring the parish register, if I can lay hands on it. I will bring the letters that came with the notebook. I will bring nothing else. I will expect you to have nothing else. I will expect the room to be as I left it. I will expect the plates to be in their frames and the frames to be in their order. Do you understand."
"I understand."
"Good day, Mr. Wren."
"Good day, Mrs. Calloway."
She went out. The floorboard at the top of the stairs gave its creak, and then there was the slow sound of her on the stairs, one at a time, the way she always came down, her hand on the rail.
Wren sat for a long time after she had gone. The lamp burned. The plates lay in their line. He did not touch them. He did not touch the notebook. He sat with his hands flat on the desk, and he looked at the scratched face of the woman at the window, and he thought, as he had not thought to think that afternoon, that he was very tired, and that the room was very quiet, and that he would, when he had sat a little longer, go down to the kitchen and put the kettle on, and that he would, when the kettle had boiled, sit at his own table with his own cup, and that there would be no one there, and that there had been no one there for five years, and that this was, on the whole, the shape of his life.
He sat there a long time. Then he stood, and he went down to the kitchen, and he put the kettle on, and he sat at the table with his cup, and the house was very quiet, and he let it be quiet, because that was, on the whole, the shape of his life.
He did not sleep well that night. He lay in the dark and listened to the radiator tick and to the distant sounds of the street, a fox, a cat, a bin lid in a wind that was not strong enough to wake anyone else. He thought about Thursday. He thought about the notebook. He thought about the way Mrs. Calloway had stood at the desk and the way the lamplight had fallen on her hair and on her hand where it rested on the wood, and he thought that she was a proud woman, and that she was right to be proud, and that he had no right, really, to the curiosity that had made him open it at all, and yet he could not stop himself, and he would not, if he were honest, have stopped himself if he could.
He slept, toward morning, a thin and broken sleep, and he dreamed of nothing he could remember when he woke.
The next three days passed in their ordinary way. He catalogued a small donation of postcards that had come in from a vicar's widow in Frome. He answered two letters from researchers who wanted to look at the Hartwell collection, and he told them, in his careful way, that the collection was closed until further notice and that he would let them know. He ate his meals at his own table. He spoke to no one of consequence. He thought, often, of the notebook, and he did not open the desk drawer again.
On Wednesday evening he went down to the shop and stood for a time behind the counter, and young Pell came in for his tea, and Wren gave him a cup, and they talked, in their desultory way, about the weather, about the state of the pavement on the high street, about a dog that had been seen several mornings in a row on the corner of Castle Street and that no one seemed to own. Pell asked him if he was well, and Wren said he was, and Pell looked at him a moment longer than was necessary and then said nothing, and Wren was grateful for that.
On Thursday morning he rose early. He made his bed. He washed and shaved with particular care, because he had the sense, without quite knowing why, that the day required it. He put on a clean shirt, and a waistcoat that his wife had liked, and his good trousers, and he went down to the kitchen and made himself a proper breakfast of egg and toast and tea, and he ate it at the table without reading, which was a thing he had not done for a long time.
He went up to the darkroom at half past three. He unlocked it. He let himself in. He closed the door behind him and stood a moment in the dim red light, and he breathed in the familiar smell of stop bath and fixer and the faint, papery smell of the plates themselves, and he thought that this was, whatever else, the room he had chosen, and that he would not, on this of all afternoons, fail it.
The plates lay in their line on the drying rack. The notebook lay in its place on the desk. He did not touch either. He pulled the second chair around to the side of the desk opposite his own, and he set it at the right height, and he adjusted the lamp so that its light fell evenly across the surface, and he set out two cups, though he knew Mrs. Calloway would not stay for tea, and a small glass of water for himself, because he had learned, over the years, that his throat closed on these occasions and that a mouthful of water helped.
He sat down at his own chair. He folded his hands on the desk. He waited.
At four o'clock, precisely, he heard her on the stairs.
She came up slowly, one step at a time, her hand on the rail. He listened to the rhythm of it, the way he had learned to listen over the years, the way he had listened to a great many people come up those stairs to look at the things they had brought him or the things they had been told to bring. She came up the way she always did: deliberate, unhurried, certain of her right to be there.
She came through the door without knocking. She was wearing a dark blue coat and a hat she had not worn the last time, a small felt hat with a narrow brim that sat square on her head. She was carrying, under one arm, a large envelope, flat and heavy, and under the other a smaller folder, and in her left hand, balanced against her hip, a leather portfolio, brown and worn at the corners.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Wren," she said, and her voice was steady.
"Good afternoon, Mrs. Calloway," he said, and he stood, because it seemed the right thing to do, and he indicated the second chair.
She did not sit. She set the portfolio on the desk, and the envelope, and the folder, and she stood with her hands resting on them, and she looked at him, and he looked at her, and for a moment neither of them spoke.
"I have brought what I said I would bring," she said. "The portfolio is the original. The envelope contains the letters that came with the notebook. The folder contains the parish register of Long Compton for the year in question and the two years on either side of it. I have nothing else with me. You have nothing else before me. Is that correct."
"That is correct."
"Then I will sit down," she said, and she sat, and she folded her hands on the desk, and she looked at the plates in their line on the rack, and she did not look at the notebook.
He sat down opposite her. He did not touch the portfolio. He did not touch the envelope. He did not touch the folder.
"Where would you like to begin," he said.
She did not answer at once. She looked at the plates. There were seven of them, all but one face-up on the rack. The scratched one was at the far end, and it lay where he had laid it on Monday, with its face toward the wall, and he had thought, when he put it there, that she would want it that way, and he had been right.
"I would like to begin," she said, and her voice was very even, very measured, very much under control, "by looking at the plates in order. You may take them down yourself. You may hold them by the edges. You may tell me what you see in them, or you may say nothing, whichever you prefer. I will ask questions when I have questions to ask. I will tell you when I have had enough. Do you understand."
"I understand."
"Good," she said.
He stood and went to the rack. He took down the first plate, the one of the harbour at twilight, the one that was quite unremarkable, and he brought it to the desk and laid it, face-up, between them. She did not touch it. She looked at it for a long time. Then she nodded, almost imperceptibly, and he took it back and set it on the table behind him, face-down, and he took down the second, the street scene, and laid it in the same place, and she looked at it, and she nodded again, and he took it away, and so on, one by one, the harbour, the street, the churchyard, the river, the parlour with the empty chair, and each time she looked for a long time and said nothing, and each time he took the plate away and set it down, face-down, on the table behind him, and each time he came back to the rack, and each time there was one fewer plate on the rack, and each time the scratched one drew nearer to the end of the line.
When there were two left, he paused.
He stood at the rack with his hands at his sides. The plate of the parlour with the empty chair lay face-down on the table behind him. The plate of the woman at the window lay face-up on the rack, and beside it, at the far end, the scratched plate lay face-down against the wall, exactly as he had placed it on Monday.
Mrs. Calloway was looking at her own hands. Her hands were folded on the desk, and the knuckles were very white, and the small gold ring she wore on her left hand caught the lamplight and threw a tiny moving spot on the wood.
"Mr. Wren," she said, and her voice was not quite as steady as it had been.
"Mrs. Calloway."
"I would like you to take down the next plate."
"Yes," he said. "The plate of the woman at the window."
"Yes," she said.
He took it down. He held it by the edges. He brought it to the desk and laid it, face-up, between them.
She looked at it for a long time. The lamplight fell on the plate, and the woman at the window looked out from the plate with her soft, blurred face, and the curtain stirred behind her as it always stirred, and the glass of the window caught the lamp and held it in a small, bright disc.
"This is my mother," Mrs. Calloway said, at last. Her voice was low, and very even, and very tired. "This was taken in the spring of nineteen fourteen. She was thirty one years old. She did not know she was being photographed. My father took it from the lane with a long lens. He gave it to me, much later, and I brought it to you, and you have kept it well."
"I have kept it as well as I could," he said.
"Yes," she said. "I know."
She was still looking at the plate. Her hands had not moved. The ring still threw its small spot on the wood.
"The next one," she said.
"Mrs. Calloway."
"The next one, Mr. Wren."
He stood. He went to the rack. He took down the scratched plate, carefully, by the edges, the way he had taken down the others. He brought it to the desk and laid it, face-up, between them.
The red light of the darkroom fell across the plate. The scratches ran in their long, deliberate strokes across the face of the woman at the window. The silver beneath had been laid bare, and it shone in the red light like a row of thin, bright wounds.
Mrs. Calloway looked at it.
She did not speak. She did not move. She looked at the scratched plate, and the plate looked back at her with its long, bright wounds, and the red light held them both, and the darkroom was very still.
Then she said, very quietly:
"I see."
That was all she said. She said it once, and she did not say it again.
He waited. He did not speak. He did not move. He stood at the desk with his hands at his sides and watched her, and she watched the plate, and the red light fell between them, and the radiator ticked faintly behind the wall.
After a long time, she lifted her hand from the desk and laid it, very gently, on the edge of the plate, not on the face, not on the scratches, but on the wooden edge, where her fingers could rest without touching the silver. She held it there, and she looked at it, and the ring on her finger caught the red light and held it.
"My mother," she said, and her voice was very small, and very tired, and very certain. "My mother was a kind woman, and a quiet woman, and she kept her own counsel, and she died when I was nine years old, and I have spoken of her to very few people, and I will speak of her to very few people again. Someone has done this to her plate, and I do not know who, and I do not know why, and I would like to know, and I would like, very much, for you to help me to know, and I would like, if it is possible, for the plate to be mended, or at least for it to be kept safe, and I would like, when we have finished here, to go home, and to put the kettle on, and to sit at my own table, and to be quiet for a long time."
He stood there for a long moment. Then he said:
"Yes, Mrs. Calloway."
She lifted her hand from the plate. She folded her hands on the desk again. She looked at him, and he looked at her, and the lamplight held them both.
"I will do what I can," he said.
"I know you will, Mr. Wren," she said. "That is why I came."
She stood. He stood. She gathered up the envelope and the folder and the portfolio, and she held them against her, and she went to the door, and she went through it, and he heard her on the stairs, one step at a time, the way she always went down, her hand on the rail.
He stood in the darkroom and listened to her go. He heard the shop door open and close. He heard the street door open and close. He heard her slow, deliberate footsteps on the pavement, fading into the sound of the town.
He went back to the desk. The scratched plate lay face-up in the lamplight, and the scratches ran across the face of the woman at the window, and the silver shone in the red light like a row of thin, bright wounds.
He looked at it for a long time. Then he took it, carefully, by the edges, and he carried it to the rack, and he set it, face-down, at the end of the line, and he stood back, and he looked at the seven plates, all face-down now, in their careful order, and he thought that this was, whatever else, a thing that had to be answered, and that he would, on the whole, be the one to answer it, and that he did not, as yet, know how, and that this was, on the whole, the shape of the work that remained.