Three lifts up the scaffold, the wind came off the moor and went through the debris netting like it had been waiting all week for someone to climb into it.
Wren Halloway was thirty-one, six weeks into a nine-week contract, and she had climbed enough Victorian parapets to know that a condition survey was always an optimistic document. This one was outright fiction. The Marchbank Institute went up in 1895 with all the confidence of a mill town that expected to matter forever — free library above, public baths below, a carved string course running the whole northern elevation — and a hundred and thirty-one winters had taken the detail off it the way a thumb takes detail off wet clay.
Except in one place.
The guardian figure on the north-east corner had no business being as sharp as she was. Everything around her had gone soft and sugary, the sandstone blown out in sheets where the sulphur got into it, and the figure sat above all that ruin with her arms folded on her knees and her wings folded down her back, and you could still read the individual feathers. You could still read the muscle in her forearms. Wren had put a hand flat on her yesterday and found the tooling under her palm as crisp as if the mason had stepped off the banker that morning to go and have his lunch.
She took her photographs anyway, because the client wanted a record and because photographs were the one part of the job that never argued with her.
They argued now.
The image on the screen had been taken at four o’clock the previous afternoon, in flat grey light, from the same board at the same distance. In it the figure was looking north-west, out over the goods yard, chin tipped down towards the street.
In front of her, in the same flat grey light, the figure was looking at the scaffold.
Wren stood with the camera in her hand until her fingers went numb around it. Then she did the professional thing, which was to eliminate the obvious: same board, same corner, no second carving hidden round the return. Sandstone did not move. Sandstone spalled, and delaminated, and came away in your hand in a way that ruined your afternoon and your programme, but it did not turn its head to see who had arrived.
She climbed down a lift and looked at the string course under the figure’s feet, where her actual work order was. The survey called it decorative banding. It was not decorative. It was a run of banker marks — the private signatures masons cut into their own stone — and they went along the course in sequence, the same mark over and over, one to a block, forty-one blocks of it. Then nothing. The forty-second block was blank. Dressed, set, weathered, and never cut.
Nobody left a sequence like that unfinished. Not in 1895, not on a building the town was proud of, not with the scaffold still standing and the mason still alive.
Her contract said: indent failed blocks, recut banding to match. Nine weeks. She had three of them left.
She came back at nine, which she told herself was about the light.
Nights were the only time the northern elevation was worth photographing. Raking light off the site floods threw the tooling into relief in a way the flat grey daytime never managed, and she had a legitimate professional reason to be up a scaffold in the dark with a torch in her teeth. She held on to the reason all the way up. It got her as far as the top lift.
The corner was empty.
“You’re the one taking the photographs.”
The voice came from behind her, along the run of the parapet, and Wren turned around slowly, because thirty-one years had taught her that the alternative to turning around slowly was falling off things.
The figure was sitting on the parapet with her boots hanging over the drop, and she was not stone. She had the same forearms. She had the same close-cropped hair and the same broad, blunt, unbeautiful face of a woman of about thirty, the face Wren had spent six weeks photographing and had privately come to think of as the best thing on the building, and all of it had gone warm — skin the colour the sandstone must have been before the soot got to it, a mouth that moved, a pulse going in the side of her throat that Wren could see from four feet away. The wings were gone. There was a great deal of her, and she was wearing something that had been a mason’s apron once and had long since stopped being anything but cloth.
“Yes,” Wren said.
“You’ve taken four hundred of them.”
“Four hundred and twelve.”
“Ah.” The woman considered that. “Then you’re thorough. That’s worse.”
“Worse than what?”
“Than the last four.” She unfolded and came down off the parapet onto the boards, and the boards took her weight with a sound Wren felt through her boots. “Nineteen thirty-one. Nineteen sixty-eight. Nineteen eighty-nine. Two thousand and six. Every one of them stood where you’re standing, and every one of them looked at the blank block and wrote decorative banding, recut to match on a piece of paper, and I stayed where I was.” She put out a hand. “Sabeline. It’s what he called me. I’ve had a hundred and thirty-one years to think of a better one and I never did.”
Wren took it. She had braced for cold and got a hand as warm as her own and considerably harder, callus over callus, the specific ruined grip of someone who had held a chisel every day of a working life. It undid her rather more than the wings had.
“Wren Halloway.”
The rules came out over the next three nights, in pieces, in between Wren doing her actual job, because Sabeline turned out to be constitutionally incapable of watching someone work without commenting on it.
Stone from first light. Flesh from full dark. Nothing to be done about the hours between, which she described once as being awake inside a wall and which Wren stopped asking about after that. She could go anywhere on the building and nowhere off it — the boundary was the drip line of the roof, the strip of ground the rain fell on, and she had tested it in every year that had a name. She was not a ghost and had never been a woman. She had been cut out of a block of Crosland Hill sandstone by a mason called Josiah Crane over the winter of 1894, with something already in the block, or so he always said, and she had opened her eyes on a scaffold very like this one in the March of 1895 with the whole of the moor in front of her and no idea at all what she was for.
“And the marks?” Wren said, on the fourth night. She was on her knees on the boards with a straightedge across the failed course, and Sabeline was sitting on the return with her feet hanging in the dark.
“You know what they are.”
“I know what they look like.”
“They’re the tether. Forty-one and it holds. The forty-second closes it.” She said it evenly, the way you give someone a dimension. “Josiah went up and down this elevation for eleven days in the June of 1895 with the chisel in his hand, and came down every single night without cutting it.”
“Closes it how?”
“Closed, I belong to the building. Properly. A hundred years at a time, renewed every time some thorough person recuts the course to match.” She said thorough without any particular weight, which was how Wren knew where it was aimed. “Left open — and it has been open since he died, which is the only reason I can sit here and be rude to you — I belong to nothing. Not free. Just unfinished.”
“And if I cut it the other way?”
Sabeline was quiet for a moment. Below them a taxi went along Marchbank Street and the sound came up the elevation and died.
“Then the stone lets go of me,” she said. “And I don’t know what’s left afterwards. Neither did he. That’s why he came down the ladder eleven times.”
Wren put the straightedge down.
Here was the thing she had not said and did not intend to say, and had been carrying up the scaffold every night. She was good at this because she liked the arithmetic of it. You gave a building forty years and it gave you four hundred back. Everything she had ever cut would outlast her by a factor she could not usefully imagine, and everything she had ever tried to keep — the flat in Leeds, the two years with Priya, the van — had a shorter service life than a bag of lime mortar. She had made her peace with that ratio a long time ago. She had built a whole career on the comfort of it.
And now here was permanence itself, sitting on a return with its boots swinging in the dark, asking to be let out.
“Three weeks,” Wren said. “Then I hand it over and I’m gone.”
“I know how long a contract is.”
“That’s not —” She stopped. Started again, because she was thirty-one and too old to be doing the other thing. “I’m saying that whichever way I cut it, I lose you. That’s the shape of it. I recut to match and you’re here another century and I’m not. I cut it the other way and you might not be anywhere at all. I’ve been up here four nights doing sums and both answers come out the same.”
“Yes,” Sabeline said. “Welcome to the eleven days.”
She dropped down off the return and did it the way she did everything, with too much mass and no ceremony whatsoever, and the boards took that too. She crouched so they were level. Close enough that Wren could see the dust in the crease of her neck — the same dust that was on Wren’s own hands, the building’s dust, the only material either of them had ever been made of.
“You come up here at nine,” Sabeline said, “and the floods are on a timer that kills them at eleven, and you have not once brought the camera.”
“No.”
“Four hundred and twelve photographs, and then none.”
“I know what I did.”
“I’m not accusing you.” Her voice had dropped. “I’m telling you I counted. A hundred and thirty-one years and nobody has ever come back up in the dark for no reason at all, and I have thought about it every night this week, and I would very much like to stop thinking about it.”
The wind came off the moor. Wren was aware of the drop behind her, and the netting, and the fact that she was going to have to explain the fresh tool marks to somebody eventually, and none of it moved her half as much as the flat honesty of I counted.
“Not out here,” she said, and stood, and held out her hand. Sabeline looked at it for a second the way you look at something you have wanted long enough to have stopped expecting. Then she took it.
The mason’s loft was in the roof space above the old lending floor, and it was the reason Wren had wanted the contract in the first place: a long low room with a plaster floor, laid so the men who built the place could scribe their full-size templates straight into it. The scribed lines were still there. A hundred and thirty-one years of somebody’s arcs and radii under a skin of dust, and Wren’s bedroll in the middle of them, because the site accommodation was a Portakabin with a broken heater and she had stopped pretending she was going back to it.
Sabeline ducked under the tie beam without looking, which meant she had been up here before, which meant she had been up here alone for thirteen decades. Wren put that thought down carefully. There was nowhere useful to take it.
“I want to be clear about one thing,” Sabeline said.
“Go on.”
“This isn’t payment. I’m not buying a cut off you.”
“I know that.” Wren pulled her jumper over her head and dropped it on the plaster. “If I thought it was, I wouldn’t be up here. Come here.”
She came. Wren got a hand round the back of her neck and pulled her down and kissed her, and it was clumsy for about two seconds and then it wasn’t at all, and the heat of her mouth was so far beyond anything the stone had prepared her for that Wren made a sound against it she would not have chosen to make.
Sabeline was slow with the rest, and Wren understood after a moment that it was not hesitation. It was greed of a very patient kind — thirteen decades of watching people touch things, and now Wren’s shirt off her, one sleeve at a time, and a palm laid flat on her sternum for a long moment simply to feel it move.
“You’re warm,” she said, wondering.
“So are you.”
“Only since nine.”
Wren took her by the wrist and moved her hand lower, because they had seven hours and she had waited four nights and there was a limit to what she could be gracious about.
They went down onto the bedroll and the plaster together, and the scribed arcs pressed their old geometry into Wren’s shoulder blades, and she found she did not mind being part of the drawing. Sabeline’s weight came over her by degrees, testing, as though the floor might yet object. Wren put both hands in the small of her back and pulled, and got all of it at once, and that was better.
“Tell me,” Sabeline said, mouth at her jaw. “I have watched a great deal and done none of it, and I would rather be told than be careful.”
It should have been funny. It was, a little. Mostly it went through Wren like a struck bell, because nobody had ever asked her that and meant it as a straightforward request for instruction.
“Lower,” she said. “Not yet. Slower than that — there.”
Sabeline’s hand was a mason’s hand, blunt and ruined and exact, and she used it exactly. She had spent thirteen decades learning what things were made of by looking at them, and she brought the whole of that to bear at once, reading Wren by the catch of her breath and the shift of her hips, adjusting with a craftsman’s complete indifference to her own dignity. Two fingers then, with Wren’s hand over hers guiding the angle, and the stretch of it arched Wren off the plaster and pulled an oath out of her at the roof timbers.
“Like that.”
“I know.” A breath of laughter against her throat. “I can feel that I know.”
Wren rode it out with her heels braced on the bedroll and one arm hooked over Sabeline’s shoulders, and when it took her it took her the way weather takes a hillside — complete, impersonal, and absolutely specific to that hour. She was still shaking when she got a knee up between Sabeline’s.
Sabeline made a low, startled, entirely human sound and stopped being patient, and that was the part Wren had wanted most: not the wonder, not the century of restraint, but the moment the restraint went and left a woman gasping into her collarbone with her hips working against Wren’s thigh. Ordinary. Greedy. Here.
She rolled them. Sabeline let her, and the letting was its own gift, all that mass gone pliant on a floor of drawn circles. Wren went down her body with her mouth and took her time over it, because she had spent six weeks learning this shape in stone and knew every plane of it — the flat of the sternum, the hard swell of the shoulder, the long muscle of the thigh she had photographed four hundred and twelve times — and finding it warm under her tongue instead of cold under her palm was very close to more than she could stand.
Sabeline came with one hand fisted in the bedroll and Wren’s name in her mouth, said badly, said like a word she had never once had occasion to say.
Afterwards, in the dark, with the dust settling on both of them, she said hoarsely: “Four hundred and thirteen.”
Wren laughed until her ribs hurt.
She cut it on the last Friday, at seven in the morning, in flat grey light.
She had drawings for both versions in her jacket and had carried them for eleven days, which was not lost on her, and had come down the ladder every night without deciding, which was not lost on her either. Josiah Crane had gone to his grave with the mallet unswung, and Wren had a fair idea now of what it had cost him, because he had not been kind and he had not been cruel. He had simply refused to be the one who chose. He had dressed the forty-second block and set it and left it blank, and left it, deliberately, for a mason who came after.
She set the chisel and cut the release.
It took four hours. It was the best work she had ever done and nobody would ever read it. At eleven she came down off the scaffold with her hands shaking, sat on the bottom lift, and waited out the whole grey afternoon without eating anything.
At half past seven Sabeline came out onto the boards and looked at the course, and then at the sky, which was still light.
“It isn’t dark,” she said.
“No.”
She came down the ladder slowly, gripping too hard, the way people do who have never been afraid of a height and are suddenly afraid of something else. At the bottom she stopped with her boots on the last rung and the drip line a foot in front of her — a channel in the gravel that the rain had cut for itself over a hundred and thirty-one years.
“I don’t know what’s on the other side of that,” she said.
“Gravel,” Wren said. “And a Portakabin with a broken heater.”
“Wren.”
“I know.” Wren held out her hand and did not close the distance, because that part was not hers to close. “I won’t tell you it’s safe. I cut it and I don’t know either. All I can tell you is that I’ve spent my entire life making things that will outlast me, and I have never once wanted one of them to stay.”
Sabeline stepped over the line.
She did not turn to dust. She stood in the gravel of the goods yard in the last of the light, a hundred and thirty-one years old and roughly four seconds into being something else, and Wren felt the hand close on hers, warm and hard and shaking, and understood precisely what she had done. She had taken the most permanent thing she would ever touch and made it temporary. It was the first honest trade of her life.
“It’s cold,” Sabeline said, amazed.
“It gets worse,” Wren said, and took her up to the loft.
