The Betrayals(38)
She scampers down the narrow staircase. Down here – where the grey ones work – it is dim, lit only on one side by windows set high up on the wall. These rooms are half underground, and the passage smells of damp stone; but when she pushes open a heavy door and slides through, the harsh scent of soap fills her mouth and nose. Deep in the bottom of her mind – under layers of shadow, almost lost to sight – a child gags, cries, promises never to say the bad word again. But that child was not yet the Rat; and what do rats care for memories, except of food or traps? She pauses, watching, listening. Opposite her is the dim bulk of the great copper; beyond, beside the banked fire, a flock of shirts droops from a washing line. A single drop of water clicks faintly on the floor.
Quick. She darts across the room and yanks a shirt loose. The other shirts sag and bounce as she pulls them closer together, to hide the gap. She unhooks the loose pegs from the line, crouches and slips them neatly under one of the presses, where no one will ever find them. The shirt flicks a damp arm into her face. Then she is still, straining her ears. Nothing.
She slides through the door at the far end of the room, squashing the shirt up inside the one she is already wearing. It forms a moist knot against her chest and makes her shiver. Most of all she would like another blanket, but the blankets are only washed every few weeks. She is careful to make them think the shirt she has taken is lost, not stolen. She is the wind, the scholars’ carelessness, the distracted maid, the accident that leaves the laundry count one short. She must never be a person.
The kitchens are still warm. Her mouth runs with saliva but she hardly takes anything: the stale heel of a loaf, a cupped handful from the pot of cooling stew, an apple, a bit of cheese. She bolts it all on her feet beside the oven, watching the doorway. Sometimes the grey ones steal food too – sometimes, even, the others. She has had to hide, holding her breath, while a dark one helped himself from the pantry, loudly furtive in the way that only humans are. Another night there was a white one, old and portly, who smelt heady and rank and knocked a plate to the floor. She was under the table, huddled as small and shadowy as she could; her heart nearly choked her as she waited for him to crouch and pick up the pieces. But he only swore and staggered out of the room. She wondered then what it would be like, to break something and not be afraid.
The clock strikes. She doesn’t count the strokes, but it reminds her to glance up at the windows. The sky has lost its moonlit sheen. There is no sign yet of morning, but it’s time to go.
It is too cold to cross the courtyard in bare feet, so she takes a longer route, up above the Great Hall, the space between the angle of the roof and the curved vault of the ceiling below, and out by a trapdoor. The sudden light of stars breaks on her face like spray. She doesn’t look down as she crosses a flat ridge, accepting the freezing squeak of snow between her toes, refusing to let the pain throw her off balance. She jumps to a ledge and clings to the wall, face to face with a leering gargoyle. And here there is a narrow window that only a rat could ease through, and a long drop on to a tiled floor, and finally she is back in the others’ world, full of easy paths of corridors and stairs. In spite of the chill she is sweating. But the shirt she stole is safe, tucked into her waistband.
She stops, in the middle of the corridor. Out in the open, where anyone could see her.
Someone is crying.
She is always listening; she is the Rat. But what she is hearing catches her by the throat; she can’t choose to listen, or not to. She cannot hear anything beyond it. A sobbing voice. She is deaf to everything else. It is a man, not a woman – outside her head, not inside – but the Rat is not strong enough to drag herself away from the sound, or even to move out of sight; for once, the child the Rat used to be is in control, and she listens and listens, aching. Not for this one, but for another, a long time ago. A half memory, not even a ghost.
Once there was a room with a crack in the wall. There was a locked door. There was a bucket and a quilt with birds on it. There was a woman who came and went, who brought food and water and songs that ended too soon. And there was the other time, more time, when the ceiling would creep imperceptibly lower unless you watched it, where the only way not to be crushed was to stare without blinking. Or when the floor grew so thin it wasn’t safe to tread on it, when you had to stay still (stay here, stay quiet, whatever you do, darling, you must) and every drip from the roof made you tremble. Sometimes smoke would trickle out of the crack in the wall and if you put your hands to the plaster it would be warm. On stormy days, distant murmurs rose and died, carried on gusts of wind.
The Rat has never been back to that room. She feels it like a numbness deep inside, the one place she will never go. Someone cried in that room – someone lived, waiting, someone waited and slept and tried not to think that anything was wrong, someone stared at the extra food and water that had been left, too much, more than a day’s worth, her panic rising until finally she tried the door and found it, to her confusion, unlocked – but it wasn’t her. She became the Rat the moment she stepped over the threshold.
She stands still. The crying belongs to what she left behind, not to who she is; and every instinct is telling her to run away. It’s dangerous to stay here, in full view. But she can’t. The voice is deep and hoarse, foreign, but the despair is familiar, the choke of suppressed sobs, the fear of being heard. The shame. It’s like a loop of wire, tightening as she pulls against it.