Chương 182: CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-TWO: MARTA

He went to Marta. Not to the market — to the house, in the evening, which he had done perhaps a dozen times in nine years and never without a reason. It was a market family's house on the second street off the square: two rooms below, two above, well-kept, warm. Marta had lived in it for thirty-eight years. She had raised two children in it. She had, in the past four years, refused three separate offers of better accommodation from an organization that had wanted to acknowledge what she was to it.

She let him in and put water on without asking whether he wanted any.

"It's about Calla," she said, with her back to him.

"How do you know?"

"Because you came at night and you didn't send Perrin ahead," Marta said.

"Sit down." He sat. She put a cup in front of him and one in front of herself and sat down across the table.

"I know," she said.

"I've known for five weeks."

"Tell me what you see," Marcus said. Marta wrapped her hands around the cup.

"She sleeps here now," she said.

"Since she came back. She has that room in the east wing and she has slept in this house every night for six weeks." She paused.

"She hasn't said why. I haven't asked."

"Is she all right?"

"No," Marta said.

"But she isn't in danger, if that's the question. She's eating. She's working. She goes to the records room at dawn and she comes home at dark." She paused.

"She's careful. That's the word. She has become careful in a way she never was." The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"Careful how?" Marta thought about it.

"She was always sure," she said.

"Since she was small. Not arrogant — sure. She'd look at a thing and work it out and then she'd say what she'd worked out and if you disagreed she'd want to know why, because maybe you'd seen something she hadn't, and that was interesting to her." She paused.

"Now she works it out and then she checks it and then she checks it again and then she doesn't say it."

"Has she told you anything about Vellenmoor?"

"She told me the facts," Marta said.

"The room. The magistrate. The prior. What she said and what he said." She paused.

"She told me all of it in one sitting, the second night she was back, like a report. Beginning to end, nothing left out, no colour on any of it." She looked at Marcus.

"And when she got to the end she said: and then he said my argument was unnecessary. And then she stopped."

"What did you say?"

"I said: he meant you'd got it right." Marta's mouth tightened.

"And she said: yes, I know. And she got up and went to bed." Marcus turned the cup on the table.

"What does she need?" he said.

"That's the wrong question and you know it's the wrong question," Marta said.

"You've been doing this nine years."

"Then what's the right one?"

"What does she need to do," Marta said.

"Not what does she need to be given. She's twenty years old and she has just found out that she can be the person the room depends on, and she has also found out what that feels like from the inside, and nobody can give her a way through that. She has to walk through it." She paused.

"The only question is whether there's something on the other side worth walking toward."

"Is there?" Marta was quiet for a long moment.

"The northeastern case," she said.

"The one Vance offered her." Marcus looked up.

"She told me about that too," Marta said.

"Not that she'd refused it. That it had been offered." She paused.

"She told me about it the way people tell you about a thing they're going to think about for a long time. She said: there's a man in the northeast who's going to be hanged next spring and Holloway asked for a second and Vance offered it to me." She paused.

"And then she said: I said no."

"And?"

"And she has said the words I said no to me four times in five weeks," Marta said.

"Unprompted. Four times. About a thing that is finished and decided." She looked at Marcus steadily.

"My daughter is not finished with that decision. She is arguing with it every night in this house without saying so."