Four letters crowd the plank above the door, stacked in pairs and packed so tight that the bar of the E shares a stroke with the R. Jasper reads the sign twice before it settles into WREN. The paint has gone matte and grey at the corners. Someone has touched it up over the years with a brush a size too wide.
He stands on the step with the notebook in his left hand and the pen in his right. Biscuit sits against his calf, a warm weight, his inside-out ear pressed to Jasper's trouser leg. Next door, the bakery breathes through its open doors. Yeast and woodsmoke roll across the gap between the buildings, and a laugh follows, huge and wheezing, that rattles a tin tray somewhere inside.
Delphine's pencil has dented the page. Wren. Press. Under it, in his own crooked script: Knock.
He knocks. The door is thick, and the sound that comes out of his knuckle is smaller than he meant.
Nothing answers.
In the city, a door announces its occupant before he reaches it. Marlow would have pinged the room, read the occupant's calendar, and told him she was free for eleven minutes, then offered an opening line pulled from her last three public posts. Jasper stands on a plank step with his pen over a page and has no idea whether a woman waits behind this wood.
A rhythm leaks through the grain. Tick. Tick. Tick. Metal on metal, light as a fingernail on a coin. It stops.
"It's open." The voice is low and does not rise to carry. "Push slow. The floor sticks."
He pushes slowly. The door drags across a swollen board with a sound like a drawn breath, and he steps through into a smell that stops him on the threshold.
Linseed oil and hot metal. Damp paper, and under it something sharp and clean as a cut pear, a solvent that stings the back of his nose. His eyes water. He blinks them clear.
The room runs long and narrow, lit from the north by a row of tall windows with the glass gone wavy in the panes. Light falls across the floorboards in grey bars. The planks are black, soaked through, as if decades of ink had dripped and boots had trodden it in until the grain gave up its color. A wall of shallow wooden drawers climbs behind the door, hundreds of them, each with a brass pull and a paper label in faded capitals. Strings cross the ceiling beams, and sheets hang from them, each pinned with a wooden clothespin and printed on one side. The ones nearest the stove curl at the corners. The ones farthest away hang flat and wet.
A proof table stands by the stove, its top scarred with ink rings. A glass plate sits on it, smeared with black paste, and beside the plate a rubber roller rests in a wooden cradle. A jar of pencils leans on a stack of paper offcuts. Someone has pushed a coffee tin to the corner, and a dozen worn brushes bristle out of it.
The press stands in the middle of the floor. It is bigger than he imagined from the window: a bed of black iron as long as a door, a cylinder over it as thick as a barrel, and a bar that rises from one end at the angle of a railway signal. Brass has worn bright where hands grip it. Rust blooms on the flywheel, and Wren scrubs it away, and it blooms again.
Wren stands at the far wall with her back to him.
She wears a canvas apron stiff with ink, the front of it so dark that the straps look pale. Her sleeves are rolled above the elbow. Her forearms are corded, and the muscle shifts under the skin as her right hand moves. Dark curls have worked loose from a knot at the nape of her neck and drift against her jaw. She does not turn.
In her left hand she holds a steel tray the length of a ruler. In front of her a slanted wooden case holds a hundred small compartments, each filled with lead letters. Her right hand drops into one compartment, rises with a tiny slug of metal pinched between finger and thumb, and flicks it into the tray. Tick. Her eyes touch the letter for a quarter of a second as it passes. Her hand drops again. Tick. She does not look at the case. She looks at a sheet of paper pinned at eye level, and her hand finds the next compartment on its own, the way a tongue finds a tooth.
He counts. Nine letters. Ten. Eleven. A short pause while she slides a thin strip of lead along the row. Then she snaps the tray against her palm, turns, and looks at him.
Her eyes are brown, and the lids come down a fraction as she takes him in, from the wrinkled jacket to the dog.
"You're the one from the road," she says.
"Jasper Cole." He lifts his hand, and she lifts hers, palm out, in a gesture a traffic officer might use. Her fingers are black to the second knuckle. The cuticles have gone dark. A thumbprint of ink has dried on the inside of her wrist, whorled and perfect.
"I'd leave a print on you," she says.
He lowers his hand. "I'll risk it."
"I won't." She wipes her palm down a rag that hangs from her apron string, which changes nothing. "Delphine has sent four people to tell me about you since sunrise. A boy on a bicycle. Agnes. The egg man. The egg man's dog."
"What did they say?"
"That you have a leather bag and a nice jacket. That you laughed at the icebox." She tilts her head toward Biscuit, who has padded past Jasper's legs and found the warmest square of floorboard near the stove. "That he picked you."
"He picked a porch last night. I don't think it counts."
"It counts." She turns back to the case. "Come in or go out. Don't stand in the door. It lets the heat go."
He closes the door behind him, and the floor sticks, and he leans into it.
She sets another line before she speaks again. He watches her hand. It goes into the case, comes out, drops, and goes in. The letters make no noise except the tick. When the tray fills, she lays it on a flat stone table beside the case, slides a wooden frame around the lines, and tightens it with a small key. The frame locks. She taps it with the heel of her hand, and the whole block of metal holds together like a single slab.
"What are you setting?" he asks.
"Thursday's notice."
"What does it say?"
"Read it."
He crosses the floor and bends over the stone. The letters sit in rows, glossy where ink still shines on them. He leans in until his breath fogs the metal. He reads the first row and gets a jumble of reversed shapes, a d where a b should sit, and a q that might be a p. He shakes his head. Another row. The characters run backward, mirrored, and the lines climb upward from the bottom of the frame.
"They're backward."
"They're correct." She comes to stand beside him. She smells of oil and warm metal, with lemon peel underneath. "Left to right on the sheet is right to left on the stick. Top to bottom on the sheet is bottom to top. You set the page the way it looks in a mirror. When you print it, the mirror flips it back."
"You read it like this."
"I read it like I read a page." She points with her chin. "Grange. Thursday. Seven o'clock. If your chair is broken, bring a stool."
He straightens. His neck cracks. "Eleven words."
"Thirty-one." She flicks a finger toward the gaps between the rows, the spaces that separate each word from the next. "You didn't count the spaces."
"Spaces aren't words."
"They're metal." She reaches into a drawer and pulls out a small lead block, as long as a matchstick and as thick as her smallest finger, and drops it into his palm. It is heavier than it looks and cold, and its top is smooth and blank. "Every gap on a page is a piece of lead somebody chose. If I get it wrong, the word is "crowds." If I set it too wide, the line looks like a mouth with a tooth missing. I set the white by hand, same as the black."
He turns the block over. It has nothing on it. It prints nothing. He sets it on the stone as if it might wake.
"Find me a q," Wren says.
"Where?"
"In the case." She nods at the slanted wood, with its hundred compartments, some wide as a saucer and some narrow as a thumb. "Lowercase. Don't think about it."
He steps up to the case. The boxes hold letters of every size he can name, and none of them sit in the order he learned. The e has the biggest box, right at the center, heaped with silver slugs. Out at the edges the boxes shrink and the letters thin. He reaches toward the upper left, where a person would put a q if a person arranged the alphabet, and finds a pile of capitals. He checks the bottom row. Commas. A drift of tiny dashes. He lifts a slug from a box near the middle and turns it over to read the face, and the face is blank, flat, and smooth as a river stone.
"That's an en quad," Wren says. "A space. You're holding half a gap."
"The Q is hiding."
"The q is next to the p. Everybody grabs the wrong one." She does not move from the table. "Which way does the tail go?"
He pinches the letter he picks and tips it to the light. The tail drops from the left side of the bowl. He pictures it printed, the mirror flips, the tail swings right, and the picture slides out of his grip. Left, then right, then he cannot say which side the paper sees.
"A p," he says.
"A p." She smiles. It is short, and it leaves a dimple in her left cheek. "Put it in the box next door. Mind your p's and q's. My father said it first, and every apprentice since has heard it from somebody else."
"I thought that was about manners."
"It's about type. Manners came later." She takes the slug from his fingers and drops it into the compartment without looking. "Everything starts as a job. Ask what the job was, and the rest tells itself."
He wipes his fingertips on his jacket. They have gone silver-grey with a fine dust of lead that rubs off on the cloth. He examines the smear and finds he does not mind it.
"Forty minutes," he says. "For a notice about chairs."
"Closer to fifty, with the proof."
"A slab would do it in four seconds. You tell it the words, it lays them out, and it prints a hundred copies." The sentence has the shape of something Marlow wrote, and he slows down because he does not like the taste of it. "I'm asking why. I want to know."
Wren studies him. Her fingers find the rag again and twist it around two knuckles.
"Because making something isn't the same as producing something," she says.
"That sounds like a slogan."
"It is a slogan. Everyone here has one. Ask Bart and you'll get forty." She walks to the press and lays a hand on the iron. "You asked why. A machine produces a notice. It gives you a notice. This." Her hand taps the frame. "This gives you a notice that Wren Abara made, on a Tuesday, with a cold in her head, and the e in grange sits a hair high because her hand shook when the egg man knocked. A hundred of these will go up around the town. Each one will carry that hair."
"Nobody will see the hair."
"I will." She says it flat. "And so will anyone who reads it long enough."
He opens his mouth to answer and finds nothing in it. The pen stays still in his fingers.
A boy's voice carries from the street, and then another, children shouting a counting rhyme, and a cart wheel rattles past the window. The room waits for them to go by. Wren does not fill the silence. It is the same habit Delphine has, and the woman with the hatchet. These people let a pause sit on the floor like a dog.
He glances at the pinned sheet above the case. Her handwriting fills it, a neat upright hand with the descenders cut short. A note under the sentence reads, in smaller letters: Check the e.
"You already knew," he says.
"I always know." The corner of her mouth moves. "That's the problem."
His thumb finds the camera in his jacket without being told.
It rides in the left inner pocket, a flat card of black glass the size of a playing card, with a lens set into one corner and a ring of amber at the edge. It records without a signal. Marlow's circuits are dead in this town, but the card never needed her. He draws it out and presses the ring, and the ring glows, and he angles the lens at the wall of drawers, then at the press, then at Wren.
She stands at the case with her tray in her hand, and she has gone still.
It is the best light he has had all morning. The north windows throw a cool grey bar across her forearms, and the ink on her skin shines like wet slate, and a curl hangs across her cheekbone. The tray holds a half-built line, letters glinting in a row. Her thumb rests on the lip of the steel. His frame holds all of it. The shot would open a feature.
"Could you do that again?" he asks. "The letter. Case to stick. Slower, if you can. The wrist is beautiful."
She lowers the tray to the table.
"Put it down."
"It's for my notes. I'm not publishing it. Reference only." The lens stays on her. "I'll show you the file. You can delete anything."
"Did you ask?"
The question lands. Delphine's voice rises from the steps of the grange: You ask every time, mind. He has crossed this threshold and stood in this room for ten minutes and has not once said the words.
"I'm asking now."
"You're not." Her voice is level. "You're telling me what you've already done."
Biscuit lifts his head from the floorboards. He studies the room, one ear flopped and one ear up, and climbs to his feet with a groan that shakes his ribs. He crosses the boards in a slow, shambling walk and lies down against Wren's boot, flank pressed to her ankle. She does not look down. Her hand lowers and rests on his head, and her fingers curl in the fur above his skull.
Jasper lowers the card. The amber ring still burns. His thumb finds it and presses, and the light goes out.
"Somebody stood where you're standing last spring," Wren says. "He didn't knock. He stood in my door with a slab and filmed my hands for six minutes. I had my back to him. I thought the draft was a customer." She turns one palm up and studies it, the black in the creases, the dry ridge of callus below the fingers. "I found out when Delphine put a visitor's slab in front of me. There were my hands. They had a caption over them, in letters bigger than my press. Somebody had put a sound under it. Violins."
"I've seen it." His mouth is dry. "The whole world has seen it."
"I haven't watched the end." She closes the hand. "A woman drove nine hours from Ohio to see me work. She stood where you stand. When I looked up, she asked me to move left, into the light."
"I'm sorry."
"You didn't do it."
"No."
"A man like you did." She does not raise her voice. The words come level, each one set in its place, and they are worse for it. "I don't hang in a case. I'm in the middle of a day."
His collar goes tight. He holds the camera by its edges, a black card going warm in his fingers. A man in a pressed jacket points glass at her wrist and asks her to do it again for the light.
"Tell me what you want me to do," he says.
The sentence is short, and it startles him. Nobody has ever needed to tell him. Marlow supplied the next line and the posture to deliver it.
Wren studies him for a long breath. The stove ticks. A drop falls from one of the hanging sheets onto the floor.
"Ask," she says. "Every time. If I say yes, you ask again when something new comes up. If I say no, the slab goes in your pocket, and it stays there, and you don't take it out again to check that I meant it."
"All right."
"And you don't point it at my hands."
"All right."
"Then put it away."
He slides the card into the inner pocket. The glass drags against the lining. He zips the pocket shut, which he has never done, and the zipper catches his thumb. Biscuit watches the whole operation with a patient eye.
"May I write?" He lifts the notebook. "In here. This is what I have."
She looks at the notebook as if checking its credentials.
"That's paper," she says. "Fine. A page holds what you had time to write down. The slab holds everything, including what I didn't mean."
"I'll ask when I want to quote you."
"You'll ask when you want to write me down at all."
He nods. The notebook weighs nothing in his hand, a small and inadequate thing, and Wren does not argue with its size.
She returns to the case. She says nothing about forgiveness. She lifts the tray again and drops her hand into a compartment, and the tick resumes, small and exact. After a minute her shoulders loosen a fraction. Biscuit has not moved from her boot.
"Sit," she says. "The stool by the stove. Don't lean on the proof table. It's wet."
He sits. The stool has three legs, and one of them rocks, and he plants his boot against the floor to hold it still. The stove puts out a dry, even heat that finds the back of his knees. From here he has her in profile: the line of her jaw, the knot of hair, the curl at her ear, the hand that moves from case to tray. He opens the notebook to a clean page and writes Wren Abara at the top. Underneath: Backward. Spaces are metal. He underlines the second line, then reads it again and cannot say whether he has written something true or something clever.
"You touch your ear," Wren says.
His hand has risen to the side of his head. He lowers it. "Do I?"
"Every minute or so. Since you walked in." She sets a letter. "Is it hurt?"
"There's a dent."
"Show me."
She does not turn. It is an instruction. He lifts a finger and presses the hollow in his left ear, where the cartilage has kept the shape of a pearl-grey bead. "There was something in here. An earpiece. Eleven years."
"Marlow."
"Delphine told you that too."
"The egg man did." The corner of her mouth moves again. "Does it hurt where it was?"
"It's tender. Like the pale stripe under a ring." He said this to himself last night, to the dark. Saying it aloud to another person stings differently. "I keep waiting for it to tell me something."
"What does it say?"
"What time it is. What I'm going to feel about the next thing." He turns the pen in his fingers. "If I'm walking into a room, it says who's in the room and what to ask them about. It reads my sleep. It tells me when to eat."
"And now?"
"Now it's quiet."
"That sounds loud."
A laugh opens in his chest and stops there, because she has said it with no weight at all, the way another person might mention the weather.
"It's loud," he says.
Wren nods. She finishes a line and slides the strip of lead along it. For a minute neither of them speaks. The tick runs on. The drops fall from the wet sheets to the floor, one every few seconds, and he counts them the way he counted the refrigerator last night.
"My father set that first row of type," she says.
She lifts her chin at the long wall of drawers behind him. He turns on the stool. The cases stand in tiers, with wooden edges worn dark and glossy at the thumb height of a man taller than Wren. Hollows have formed there. They are shallow, the kind of dip a stream cuts in a stone over a thousand years, and each one fits a thumb.
"He came out here with the founders. He was twenty-six and he could set type faster than anyone alive, and nobody wanted a printer, so he printed the grange minutes for free for six years." She sets a letter. "I stand at his case. See the left corner, where the wood goes dark? That's him. My thumb fits."
"Does it?"
"Almost." She holds up her right hand and spreads the fingers, and the thumb stretches to its limit. "I have to reach. I'll fill the hollow in a few more years."
"What happened to him?"
"He retired to his garden. He's in the second terrace, with the beans." Her voice does not change. "He sends me notes about my kerning. In pencil. On the back of seed packets."
He writes: Father. Beans. Kerning (pencil). The words look like a list somebody else dictated. He crosses out Beans and writes it again, smaller, and the pen skips.
"What does he say about the kerning?"
"That I crowd my capitals." She sets a letter and frowns at it. "Last week's packet said, Give the A room to breathe. It was a Scarlet Runner packet. He signed it with a drawing of a bean."
"Do you do it?"
"I give the A a hair more room." Her thumb brushes the edge of the tray. "Then I tell him it was my idea. He writes back that the beans disagree."
Jasper laughs, a short unpracticed sound that bounces off the drying sheets. Wren does not look up, but the dimple returns to her cheek and stays for the length of a line.
"What do you write?" Wren asks. "When you aren't standing in doors."
"I find the quote."
"What does that mean?"
"A story needs one line a reader remembers." He shifts on the stool, and the short leg rocks. "I ask questions until somebody gives me one. Then I build the piece around it. Marlow sorts what I record by what people will share, so I know which sentence to keep. It's efficient. It takes about an hour."
"Which sentence did you keep today?"
He flips the notebook around and holds it out. She comes across the floor, wiping her hands on the rag, and takes it by the very edge, thumb and one finger, to keep the ink off the paper. She reads the page upside down, then rights it, then reads it again from the top. Her eyes move over the lines. He watches them and cannot read them.
Nobody. Whoever shows up. Biscuit. Goats are always serious.
"Ruth gave you the goats," she says.
"She said to write it down."
"She says that to everyone. She waits to see who does." She turns the page with the tip of her finger. "Your hand slopes. It runs downhill, and the ink pools where you stop. Here, and here." Her fingernail, ink-rimmed, touches two spots on the page. "That's where you decided something."
"I don't think I decided anything."
"The pen did." She hands the notebook back. "You could tell me what it was, one day. When you find out."
He takes it. The page where she held it carries a faint grey smudge, the ghost of a thumb.
On the sill of the nearest window, in the grey light, a saucer holds a spiral of small brass wheels, each one a different size, laid edge to edge so the teeth almost touch. A single hairspring coils at the center. His gaze catches on it. He leans a degree to the left for a better angle.
Wren crosses to the window and lays a folded cloth over the saucer.
"Spare parts," she says.
He does not ask.
The door drags across the swollen board again, and a small voice calls into the room. "Is it ready? It's been two days."
Wren's shoulders drop half an inch. The line between her brows smooths out, and she wipes her hands on the rag with attention this time, finger by finger.
"Come in, Pim. Shut it behind you."
The girl from the road crosses the threshold in a coat two sizes too big, the cuffs folded back in thick rolls. She has the gap in her front teeth Jasper saw an hour ago, and a pair of braids that have come half undone. She spots him on the stool and stops.
"You're the man."
"I'm a man."
"You're the man." She says it with finality, as if she has checked a list. "My brother said you cried in the road."
"I didn't cry."
"He said you stood there."
"I stood there," Jasper admits.
Pim nods and marches to the proof table. Wren has already reached under it and pulled out a flat square of card, no larger than her palm. She holds it with both hands, the way she held the paper for him, and offers it across.
It is a bookplate. A heron stands in the middle of it, one leg lifted, its beak a long black line. Above the bird, in tiny capitals, a name: PIM EAMONSDOTTIR. Below it, in an italic with a swash on the P: this book belongs to a person who will return it.
Pim runs a finger over the heron. "His leg's the wrong way."
"It's the way you drew it."
"I know." The girl's voice goes soft. "I like it."
"Then it stays." Wren bends and reaches into a drawer and produces a small stack of cards, the same heron on each, and a jar of paste with a brush. "Forty. I printed more than you asked for. One of them has the leg right. I won't tell you which."
Pim gasps. She takes the stack in both arms and presses it against her chest and turns to leave, and on her way past Jasper's stool she holds one card out, the top one, the bird half an inch off center.
"For you," she says. "In case you need to return something."
He takes the card. The heron's leg has gone crooked at the knee. The ink sits thick along the beak and thin along the feet. The card is warm from the stack against her coat.
"Thank you," he says.
"You're welcome." She examines him a moment longer. "You should write down that you stood there. It was a good standing."
She leaves. The door drags shut. The smell of cold air lingers for a few seconds, then the stove takes it back.
Jasper turns the card over in his fingers. Wren has gone back to the case, but her shoulders are loose, and the tick of the letters has a different beat, quicker and lighter. He wants to ask how many bookplates she has printed. He wants to ask what the girl pays. The notebook lies open on his knee, and the pen is in his hand, and his hand does not move.
"Go ahead," she says, without turning. "You can write that one down."
"The bookplate?"
"The part where I gave a child more cards than she asked for."
He writes: 40 plates. 1 correct. She won't say which. The pen leaves a bead of ink at the end of the last word, and he lets it dry.
"Do you want to see it run?" she asks.
He does. He says so, and he stands, and the stool tilts back on its short leg and clatters. Biscuit lifts his head. Wren motions Jasper toward the press with her chin.
She works the frame of type into a cradle on the press bed with both hands, locking it in with a pair of wooden wedges that she taps down with a mallet. The mallet strikes a muffled note, wood on wood. She flicks a switch on the wall, and a motor hums to life in the corner, a low drone like a hive.
"Electric?" he asks.
"A fan motor. It turns the flywheel." She lifts one shoulder. "I could use the treadle. I do, when Hollis doesn't have the belt tuned. The motor doesn't have an opinion about the type."
"Delphine said the same thing about the icebox. A bend."
"A bend is a good word." She lifts a slab of black paste from a tin and spreads it on the glass plate with a knife, and the paste folds over itself, glossy as tar. A roller whirs through it. Ink climbs the roller in a thin, even skin, and she rolls it down over the frame of letters until each one gleams.
She lays a sheet of cream-colored paper on the platen. It is thicker than any paper Jasper has touched, the edges ragged where someone tore the sheet from a bigger one. She pulls a lever. The platen swings in and presses against the type with a soft, deliberate thud, a sound like a hand pressed against a door. A pause. She pulls back. The platen opens, and the paper peels from the metal and curls at one corner.
She lifts it by the margins and holds it out to him.
"Take it. The ink is still tacky. Don't touch the front."
He takes it by the margin. It is warm. The letters on the front sit crisp and black, a little raised above the paper, like a scab. He reads them the right way round now: GRANGE. THURSDAY. SEVEN O'CLOCK. If your chair is broken, bring a stool. The typeface has a soft, upright, old-fashioned look. It is the least slick object he has held in a decade.
He turns it over. The back of the sheet holds a faint relief where the letters pressed into the fiber, a row of shallow dents, each letter a small valley. He runs the pad of his clean thumb over the back and reads the valleys. The dents have edges. They have depth. The paper has taken the shape of the type and kept it.
"It bites," Wren says. "A good impression bites. You should see it from the back. A machine prints flat on top of the sheet. This goes in."
He keeps his thumb on a valley. "It's warm."
"The ink gets warm in the roller." She watches his hand. "Everyone does that. The thumb on the back. I did it for an hour after I learned. My father had to pull me off the press."
"Why do we do it?"
"Because it's proof something happened here." She turns to the case and busies her hands.
He turns the sheet back to the front. The word grange sits in the second row, and the e rides a hair above the line, a single letter that leans out of the others like a child looking over a wall.
"There," he says. "The e."
"There."
"It's good. Nobody would notice."
"I noticed."
"I noticed because you told me."
"You noticed because you looked." She takes a pencil from behind her ear, sets the point on the margin of the pinned sheet, and writes a short mark. "I'll fix it before the run. I'll re-set the line, drop the sort, pick a better e. Ten minutes. You can have that one."
"The flawed one?"
"It's a proof. I'd throw it out." She keeps her eyes on the case. "If you want it, keep it."
He holds it by the edges, one hand under the sheet. The ink dulls as it dries. He slides it into the back of the notebook, between the cardboard cover and the last page, and shuts it with his palm.
"Why do you bother?" he asks.
He means it. The old reflex would have wrapped it in a joke. This one comes out short and rough, and it lands.
Wren turns from the case. For the first time since he walked in, she lets her whole attention rest on him. He keeps still. He waits for the polished line, the slogan, the sentence that fits a headline.
"Because I can," she says.
The motor hums. A drop falls from a hanging sheet. The answer weighs no more than the lead block he held.
"That's all?"
"It's most of it." She drops the pencil into the pocket of her apron. "Ask me when I can't, and I'll have a longer answer. Right now, I can lift a letter and put it where I want it. I don't know how long I get to." Her gaze goes to the hollow in the wooden case. "I would like to use all of it."
He wants to write the line down. He does not reach for the pen.
"Can I ask something else?"
"Ask."
"How long did you wait before you opened the door?"
Wren's mouth twitches. "Until I finished the line. I don't break a line in the middle." Her eyes go to the dog. "He stayed on the step the whole time. Whoever picks a stranger has to sit on a step for a while. It's a custom."
"He picked me."
"He's still picking." She wipes her hands one last time on the rag, and the rag turns black. "Go and see Bart. He has been listening through that wall since you knocked, and he'll sulk if you take any longer. When you've finished, come back. Knock."
"I'll knock."
"Twice, if you're feeling brave. I like the second one."
He collects the bookplate and the notebook and crosses to the door. His hand finds the latch. It is cold iron, worn smooth, and it sits lower than he expected, at the height of a hip. He stops with his palm flat against it.
"Wren."
"Mm."
"The card in my pocket. The slab." He turns half around. "If I want to record Bart, or anyone, I'll ask them first. I should have said that when I came in."
She sets a letter in the stick. The tick rings out clean.
"You should have knocked and then said it," she says. "You did one of the two."
"I'll do both."
"Then you've done more than the last one." She does not look up from the case. "Shut the door. You're letting the heat go."
He nearly laughs. The latch lifts under his thumb with a short, dry click.
The door drags over the swollen board and lets in the cold. Biscuit squeezes through ahead of him, nails clicking on the black planks, and trots down the step into a street that looks wider than it did an hour ago. The frost has gone from the north wall of the bakery. A boy runs past with a hoop and a stick. Somewhere down the road, a fiddle takes one long note and holds it, and breaks it into a run of smaller ones.
Jasper stops on the step.
The notebook sits in his left hand. The pen sits in his right. He lifts the pen to the page, and his thumb comes into view. The pad of it has gone black. A whorl of ink prints a perfect whorl on the cover of the notebook where he held it, fine ridges around a clean oval.
He rubs it against his trouser leg. The black stays.
The bookplate rides in his left hand, pinned under the notebook against his ribs. He has carried a hundred gifts out of a hundred offices: lanyards, branded pens, tote bags, a glass trophy shaped like a flame. Each one came with a message that told him what to feel when he held it. This one comes with a heron whose leg bends the wrong way and an ink smell that clings to his sleeve.
He rubs the thumb on the cuff of the good jacket. The black stays there too, and a smear spreads across the cloth. His shirts have cleaned themselves for eleven years, and he winces at the stain. The wince lasts a second.
Behind him, through the thick wood, the ticking starts again. A letter into steel. A pause while she checks the line against the page. He stands in the cold with his thumb held out in front of him like something he has borrowed, and the hammer at Hollis's garage answers from down the road, one stroke and a pause and a stroke.
An hour ago he stood on this step with a plan: get the quote, frame the woman, file the piece by nine. He has a bookplate, a proof with a crooked e, a thumb gone black, and a page of notes that holds exactly one sentence he would have kept. Spaces are metal. Marlow would have flagged it. Marlow would have ranked it, tested it against a thousand headlines, and told him it scored eighty-one.
He does not know what score he would give it. He leans toward the question with his whole body, the way he leaned toward the voice in his ear for eleven years, and straightens. The street offers no answer. A hen crosses it. The boy with the hoop sends the hoop into a fence, and it falls over with a ring.
He likes the sentence. That is all he has, and he lets it stand.
He flips the notebook open to Delphine's list and moves the pen down one name. Beside Bart. Bakery. he writes nothing. His thumb has smudged the ink of the word above it, and he leaves the smudge where it is.
Then he looks up at the plank sign. WREN, stacked and crossed in black. It resolves at the first look.
Biscuit waits at the bottom of the step, one ear up, one ear down, and Jasper follows him toward the sound of the laugh.