← Lantern's Glow

Daylight Through the Willows

Daylight Through the Willows

It was a pan that woke her, landing on a stove with a clang Caitlin would have known anywhere. Ms. Hawthorne had owned that pan longer than Caitlin had been alive, and every morning after the party she brought it out to punish the eggs and anybody still asleep upstairs. A cupboard shut. Water ran.

I know that pan too. It was a wedding present, and not from me; mine was a great deal better and she lost it in nineteen eighty-one.

Caitlin opened her eyes on rose wallpaper. The bookshelf stood open past the foot of the bed, showing her a slice of the sitting room. The settee still had its dreadful flowers, and the shepherdess Liam had turned to the wall was still facing it. Past her she could see the hall door, exactly where a door belonged.

She was the little spoon. She had not been anybody's little spoon in so long she'd forgotten it was a position you could be in. Liam was asleep behind her with his arm heavy over her waist, and her head was on his other arm, which must have gone completely dead hours ago, and he had never moved it. His breath was warm on the back of her neck. She lay there and let him be heavy, and felt something in her chest go soft and wide and a little frightened, like a window thrown open on a cold morning.

The vanity was bare except for her one hairpin. She looked at it for longer than a bare vanity deserved. Last night there had been something else on it, lit gold, and now there was a hairpin. She decided, for the present, to be a person who had seen a hairpin.

His bag sat beside the vanity. He'd brought it back last night and left it closed. He'd told her there was a ticket in there. Friday. Her mouth went dry at the thought of asking what he meant to do about Friday, which seemed deeply unfair when she had survived a corridor that refused to lead to a party full of people.

Liam stirred when she tried to lift her head off his arm and reach for the pin. She missed it by a ridiculous margin and got the edge of the sheet instead.

"What are you doing?" he asked, without opening his eyes.

"An ambitious rescue mission. My hair has annexed your face."

He lifted his head. A length of red hair slid out from under his cheek. "There."

"Thank you. The negotiations were getting ugly."

He tried to flex the fingers of the arm under her head and made a face. "I can't feel this."

"You could have moved it."

"You were on it."

She rolled over to face him. He opened his eyes then, and the smile came slowly, and for a moment she forgot the bag entirely. She put her palm flat on his chest and felt him breathe. Last night was right there, in his warm skin and the marks they'd left on each other. A cupboard banged downstairs, and her stomach answered it.

"Coffee," she said. "The inn has coffee. I can smell it from here. If we stay up here, Ms. Hawthorne will give all of it to people with better manners."

"She likes you."

"She loves me. She still hides the good coffee."

He sat up. The sheet fell to his waist. She made herself look at his face, then failed for a moment. He caught her failing and reached for her hand.

"You okay?"

"Yes." She squeezed his fingers. "I'm thinking about breakfast. Some of it."

He waited. He'd waited all night, through things far more frightening than this room in daylight. If she asked him now, she might turn the bed into a place where an answer was owed for what they'd done in it. She didn't want that. She wanted to get dressed and walk downstairs and prove she could stand beside the front door with him while he told her the truth, whatever it was.

"Come on," she said. "You should see how much smaller this place gets when people are looking for toast."

They dressed out of the mess they'd made. Her velvet had wrinkled past saving. She fished one skull sock out from under the bed and found the other still on her foot. Liam found his shirt by the bed, his tailcoat on the settee, and his cravat on the sitting-room floor, which he stuffed in a pocket without comment. He pulled a pair of jeans out of his bag. She turned to the mirror to fix her hair and caught him behind her in the glass, closing the bag, and her heart gave a small hard knock she didn't like.

She put the pin in crooked. It stayed. She'd take it.

He picked up the bag by its handle. She carried her shoes, because the rug was warm and she wasn't ready to balance on heels. They went through the bookshelf into the sitting room, and Liam glanced back once at the bedchamber. She didn't ask what the look meant. It took everything she had.

The hall door opened on the short west passage: the little table, the portrait, her paper bat with its bent wing. She touched the wing as they passed, and the cheap paper folded down again the way it always did. At the corner she could see all the way down the stair. The rope below had been unhooked. A woman from Ms. Hawthorne's cleaning crew brought a hamper of used linens through the public hall and stood aside to let them down.

"Morning," she said.

"Morning." For once in her life, Caitlin didn't explain her dress or the man beside her.

At the bottom the parlor doors stood open. A broom leaned against the fireplace. Last night's paper decorations hung limp over stacks of empty plates, and a carved pumpkin had caved in on itself by the hearth. The lantern sat on the mantel. Its glass was gray in the morning light. Caitlin went close enough to see inside it, and stopped.

There was a cold wick in it. And there was soot on the inside of the glass, fresh and dark.

"It's out," Liam said, beside her.

"It's never lit." She heard her own voice, very level. "It's never been lit, not in my whole life. She cleaned that glass on Tuesday. I watched her do it. She was complaining about her wrists."

He looked at the soot for a long moment. So did she. Neither of them reached for it. Caitlin gripped her shoes so hard a buckle bit into her palm, and she found that she was not frightened, exactly, and not sure what to call what she was instead.

They followed the smell of coffee.

The kitchen door was propped open with a crate, and the black paper cat had come loose at one corner. Inside, Ms. Hawthorne was moving between the stove and a tray of mugs in her apron, her hair already coming down, humming something that wasn't anything. She took them in: their clothes, Caitlin's bare feet, Liam's bag. Her face did a great many things very quickly, and what it settled on was delight, which she then tried to hide behind a spatula and failed.

"Oh, good morning, you two. Cups are there, the coffee's hot, mind the floor, I've mopped it once already and I'm not doing it again before noon."

"Ms. Hawthorne." Caitlin set down her shoes. "The Rose Room door disappeared last night. The west stair took us into a room I've never seen. And there was a woman by the lantern humming my grandmother's tune, gray hair, a cameo. Has anybody ever told you anything like that? Anybody? Ever?"

Ms. Hawthorne put down the spatula. She looked at Caitlin for a long moment, and her eyes went soft and bright, and for a second her mouth moved as though there was something she might say. Instead she reached out and cupped Caitlin's cheek in one warm floury hand.

"Bread's warm, sweetheart," she said. "Sit down before you fall down."

She's been answering questions with bread for as long as I knew her. I never did get a straight answer out of her either. I had my suspicions. She had her bread.

Caitlin stood there with that hand on her face. She thought about pressing. She thought about the cameo and the soot and the brass plate with the scratch through the E, and about her grandmother telling that story at the kitchen table, two endings, never the same one twice. Ms. Hawthorne took her hand away and went back to the eggs. Liam took the mugs off the tray and handed them to Caitlin, and she poured. There was butter and a half-cut loaf on the table. She cut them thick slices; Liam took the plates. He didn't say anything when she gave him the bigger one.

They ate in the side parlor. The window looked out on the willows and the gravel drive. Caitlin had sat here before after parties, with Maggie complaining about her shoes and Ms. Hawthorne demanding that she choose which decorations could be thrown out and which had to be kept forever. This morning the chairs were heaped with folded tablecloths, and Liam had to move a box of paper hats before he could sit down. He set his bag against his chair leg, within reach.

"Does it pass?" she asked, nodding at his mug. "By Boston standards."

He took another sip and considered it. "It's hot, and I didn't make it. That's pretty much my whole standard."

"Wow. Boston's really let itself go."

They talked about the party, and about the drawings he owed the magazine. Every time the bag shifted against his ankle, she heard its buckle scrape the floor, and every time, something in her stomach scraped with it.

When he'd finished his toast, he picked up the bag. "I should take this to my room before it gets in the way."

"You can." She stood too fast and nearly kicked her shoes under the chair. "I mean, of course you can. It's your room. There aren't any rules about where you put a bag. Except Ms. Hawthorne's rule about not leaving anything on the dining table, she still tells people about the guest who did that with a suitcase and a leaking bottle of shampoo, it was nineteen ninety-something, she has never recovered."

He let her run down. She put her shoes on. The heels felt absurd after the bare boards upstairs. They went out into the foyer, where the front door stood propped open for a woman carrying the last of the party trash out to the cans. Beyond her the drive curved down between the wet willows toward town. She came back in, nodded at them, and left the door wide while she went for another load. Caitlin could walk through it now. So could Liam. Nothing was going to stop either of them.

She looked at the bag, then at him. He caught her looking. She could have asked about the magazine, or whether he'd slept. He'd give her a true answer, and she'd have found a nice way to go on not knowing.

"Are you going back to Boston?" she asked.

He set the bag down on the foyer floor.

The bag tipped against his shoe, and Liam set it upright. Caitlin watched his hands, then his face. The open door behind her let in cold air and the sound of somebody dragging a trash can across gravel. A guest walked around them carrying a folded coat and last night's paper crown.

He'd known she'd ask. He'd seen her look at the bag in the bedroom. He had meant to have an answer ready by coffee. Instead he'd watched her break the crust off her toast and put it on his plate because she'd noticed he was still hungry, and the ticket had stayed in the pocket, and he'd realized he already had the answer and was only afraid of saying it out loud.

"I came up here expecting to go back," he said.

She nodded, and her shoulders came up. He hated that he'd made her wait through a whole breakfast for it.

"I bought a return ticket when I took the job." He moved the bag clear of the path to the door. "I don't want to use it."

Her eyes came up to his. "Liam."

"I can work here. The magazine doesn't care where I draw, as long as they get the pages. I need a table and decent light. I can find those here." He glanced at the limp paper ghosts still hanging over the parlor doors. "I might rent somewhere without a secret bookshelf."

The corner of her mouth moved, but she kept looking at him, waiting, and he could see her pulse going in her throat. The deadline was still real. The work still paid the rent. He'd gone back to Boston after every other job because his apartment was there, and his mail, and the two blocks he walked around. He didn't have to go back this time. The thought was so large and so simple that for a second it took his breath.

"How long?" she asked.

"I don't know yet."

She looked past him at the drive. Her hair had worked loose around the pin; she pushed it behind her ear. She waited. He didn't want to pretend he could give her a limit.

"I want to stay in Glensford," he said. "Find a place to work. Finish the assignment here. See you after work, if you want that."

She turned back to him. "In Glensford. On purpose. People don't usually do that on purpose."

"Yeah."

"Because you want to? Or because that hall was terrifying and I happen to know the way to the kitchen?"

"Both of those are true." He shook his head. "I liked it here the minute I got off the train. The work gave me an excuse to stay a few days. Then you dropped a ghost on me."

She was standing so still he could hear Ms. Hawthorne's spoon hit the rim of a pan behind them. He wanted to look at the floor for the next part. He looked at her.

"You kept telling people where to put things last night, even while you were arguing with them. You went off to help a kid with a pumpkin when we weren't done talking. You were scared out of your mind upstairs, and you still stopped to make sure I could see the stairs behind us. I want to know what an ordinary Tuesday with you is like."

"Library returns," she said. Her voice had gone rough. "People insisting they've never seen a book I watched them carry out the door. I eat lunch standing over the sink a lot."

"Okay."

"And I don't expect you to live in a guest room so we can conduct an extended study of my weekdays. I mean, there are places to rent. I could help you look. If you want. I know people who know people, which is the town's main industry after telling you what they think of your parking." She took a breath, and it shook. "I want to see you too."

He took her hand. Her fingers closed around his at once, then loosened so he could hold them properly.

"I'll look for a room today," he said. "I'll call about the ticket. After that, maybe you can show me the part of town I missed yesterday."

"You missed a lot of town."

"I got distracted."

"By your assignment."

"At first."

She laughed, and the sound made him look past her at the open door. The woman with the trash sacks came back through, picked up the doorstop, and started to swing the door partway shut, then saw them standing there.

"Going out?" she asked.

"Yes," Caitlin said. "We're going out."

The woman held it for them. Liam picked up his bag. Caitlin noticed and glanced down at it.

"Your room?"

"Later. I'll put it somewhere out of the way down here."

She took the bag from him, set it beside the foyer bench, and turned back. "There. Solved, and I haven't even finished digesting my toast."

He left it there. They went out onto the porch together. Last night's damp was still in the boards. Caitlin pulled the door shut behind them, and the latch caught with a plain, ordinary click.

From the porch he could see the rooftops of Glensford through the willows. Somebody was walking a dog along the road below. A delivery truck idled at the turn while the dog made up its mind about crossing. Caitlin came to stand beside him at the rail and pointed out the direction of the town library; he could make out a red brick corner through the branches. She told him where to get breakfast when Ms. Hawthorne had had enough of them, and which landlord to avoid at all costs. He told her he'd come back for his sketchbook later.

"Of course you will," she said. "If you don't draw the town right this minute, it might be gone by lunch."

"I was going to draw you."

She looked at him. "You've done that."

"You keep moving."

She reached for his hand. Four notes came across the porch, hummed or whistled, uneven, and the delivery truck's gears ground through the middle of them. The last one hung a little longer than it should. Liam turned toward the door. Nobody stood at the front windows, and the road was empty except for the dog and its owner. The sound was gone before he could tell which way it had come from.

Don't look at me.

Caitlin's fingers tightened around his. She looked toward the road, and her eyes were wet, and she was smiling when she gave his hand a tug.

He went with her down the porch steps and toward town.

Down the hill they went, the pair of them, arms empty for once, holding hands. For years I'd hoped somebody would come down those steps and take half. I suppose that counts.