The Fourth Postcard
Dunmarrow — Day Thirty-Three
The fourth postcard came on a Tuesday, in the same hand as the first three, tucked into the mail slot between a bill from the coal merchant and a letter from Marta’s sister, and Cormac Delaine knew, before he had even turned it over, that this one would not go into the cookery book.
The garden cannot wait past the frost.
Come home, or we will send someone to bring the garden to you.
He stood in the front hall with the postcard in his hand for a long time, long enough that Marta called from the kitchen to ask if the post had brought anything interesting, and he said, in the light, easy voice of a man called Corin Dell, that it was only the coal bill, and put the postcard in his breast pocket, and went in to dinner.
He did not sleep that night.
He lay beside his wife — his cover wife, he made himself think, deliberately, the way he had been trained to think six years ago and had stopped, somewhere in the last two, quite managing to and listened to her breathing, slow and even, and turned the sentence over in the dark until it had worn a groove in him.
We will send someone to bring the garden to you.
It was not a threat against him.
He understood the code well enough to know that.
It was a threat against the network; against the fiction of Corin Dell, against the careful architecture of six years, against a woman asleep beside him who believed, with her whole unguarded heart, that she had married a records clerk who hummed off-key and remembered anniversaries and had never once, in eleven years of marriage, been anyone else at all. Read the latest chapters at novelping.com.
If they sent someone, it would not be gentle.
He had trained the people who did that kind of sending, in the early years, before he had gone under.
He knew exactly what bring the garden to you meant when the garden declined to walk on its own.
He went to work the next morning as Corin Dell, because there was nothing else to be, and sat at the third desk from the door in the Fourth Section, and filed papers with hands that did not shake, and at half past ten the young aide came down the stairs again, the one who had turned a page the wrong way up eighteen days ago and said nothing about it since, and Delaine understood, watching him cross the room, that the two of them had reached an arrangement neither had spoken aloud: the aide had seen something, had chosen not to act on it, and both men now carried the weight of that choice in a silence that could break at any moment either of them decided it should.
“Mr. Dell.” The aide set a folder on the desk.
“Filing, when you have a moment.”
“Of course.”
The aide did not leave immediately.
He stood a moment, looking not at Delaine but at the green cabinets behind him, at cabinet 3381 specifically, and Delaine felt something in his chest go very still and very cold.
“You have a good memory for numbers, I think,” the aide said, conversationally, as though remarking on the weather.
“Three-three-eight-one. I noticed you didn’t need to check the card index, the night I came down for the roster.”
“Six years.” The aide nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something he had already suspected.
“That’s a long time to remember one number.” He looked up, finally, and his eyes, behind the crooked glasses, held an expression Delaine could not fully read — not accusation, not yet, but something adjacent to it, a question being asked without being spoken, held open in case the other man wanted to answer it.
“A long time to do anything, really, without it becoming part of who you are.”
He picked up his own folder and left, and Delaine sat at his desk with his hands folded on the blotter, perfectly still, and understood that the young man had just told him, as plainly as either of them could afford to say it in a room with other clerks in it, that he knew, or suspected enough to be as good as knowing, and had chosen for now, for reasons Delaine could not guess at and did not dare ask — to say nothing further.
He thought of the postcard in his breast pocket.
He thought of Marta’s sister’s letter, still unopened on the kitchen table, full of ordinary news from a sister-in-law who thought he was exactly who he said he was.
He thought of six years of humming off-key on purpose, of birthdays remembered, of a woman who would wake up tomorrow morning to a husband who might already, by then, have made a decision that would end her marriage without her ever being told the real reason why.
He did not photograph anything that day.
He filed papers, and went home at the ordinary hour, and made Marta’s tea before his own, and said nothing about the fourth postcard, and lay awake again that night with the sentence still turning, unresolved, in the dark: we will send someone to bring the garden to you, set now against a young aide’s careful, deliberate silence, and understood that he had perhaps a matter of days, and no clean way, left to him, of choosing which of the two men he had been for six years he was finally going to have to become.
Marta stirred beside him, half-asleep, and murmured something he didn’t catch, and reached for his hand in the dark the way she had every night for six years, without needing to be fully awake to find it, and he held it, and did not sleep, and thought, for the first time since the training house eleven years ago, that he no longer knew with any certainty which of his two names the hand in his belonged to.