Chapter Nine: Sequestered

The man on the other side of Mira's desk was becoming a mirror, and he was furious about it.

"A mirror," he said. "A mirror. Do you know what I did for a living?"

"Sales," said Mira, reading from the file.

"I was very good at sales."

"So everyone says." She turned a page. "People remember you as charming. Persuasive. Always told them exactly what they wanted to hear."

"And what's wrong with that?"

"Nothing, until they looked closely and found it was themselves." Mira closed the file. "That's how mirrors work. You stand in front of one and it shows you what you brought."

He sat back. He was a handsome man, in a well-pressed suit, and he had the look of someone searching very quickly for the right thing to say, the way he must have done a thousand times. For a moment Mira almost felt sorry for him. He had spent his whole life getting away with things, and now he was going to spend the rest of it holding still while other people looked at their own faces in him.

"I want to appeal," he said.

"Everyone can." She reached for the form. "Tell me why mirror's wrong."

He opened his mouth, and smiled, and began to tell her. It was a good answer. It was fluent and warm and very convincing, and about halfway through it Mira realised it was exactly what she would have said, if she had been him. It was what she would have written on a notice of correction.

She stopped writing.

"You don't believe a word of that," she said.

The smile went out of his face like a light. He looked, suddenly, very tired. "No," he said. "But it usually works."

She filed it for him anyway. Then she put the mirror on the shelf, facing the wall, because she didn't want to look into it just then.

Crane came at eleven.

He did not knock. He stood in the doorway in his grey gloves, holding a thin folder, and the clerk who pushed the ledger trolley stood behind him, looking as though he wished the floor would open and take him somewhere else.

"I've read your correction," said Crane. "It's very good."

Mira said nothing.

"Very good," Crane repeated. "The hand is excellent. The ink is right. You even found the old bottle. I'd have missed it, I think, if I'd only had the green book to go on." He opened the folder. "But the archive keeps a copy."

Mira felt the floor of her stomach drop away.

"Every page of every effects ledger is copied into the archive registry at the end of each season. It's been done that way for four hundred years. Nobody ever looks at the copies, of course. Nobody needs to." He turned the folder round so that she could see. The same page. The same large capitals and tiny small letters, the same crossed sevens, copied out in a different, rounder hand. Reading glasses, one pair. Door keys, a ring of four. Handkerchief.

And then nothing.

"I do the copies," said the clerk miserably, from the doorway. "I'm sorry, miss. He asked to see them. I didn't know what he was looking for."

"It isn't your fault," Mira said, and found that she meant it. She had suspected him of crossing the boundary. He had never crossed anything in his life. He had just copied things out, every season, carefully, for nobody.

"I'm not here to arrest you," said Crane. "Forging an effects entry isn't a boundary offence, and the boundary is the only thing I'm interested in. You'll answer to the panel for the forgery, when it reconvenes. What I am interested in is that you've now told the panel, in writing, that no crossing took place. And I know that one did." He closed the folder. "So you know who brought that letter across. And you've decided to protect them."

"I don't know anything," said Mira.

"You know exactly who it was," Crane said, not unkindly. "Your correction proves it. People don't forge alibis for strangers." He took a second piece of paper from the folder and laid it on her desk. It was grey, and stamped, and signed in his very small hand. "Since the appellant has interfered with the record, the subject of the appeal is now evidence in a boundary inquiry. It will be held by this Section until the inquiry closes."

Mira read the paper. Then she read it again, because the first time the words had not gone in.

"The subject of the appeal," she said.

"I'm sorry," said Crane. And the worst thing was that he seemed to be.

They came for the chair that evening.

Two porters in canvas aprons, with a trolley, and Crane behind them on the landing, gloves on, not coming in. Mira stood in the middle of her own small room with her arms crossed and watched them, because she couldn't think of anything else to do with her body.

"Careful with it," she said.

"We're always careful, miss," said one of the porters, and he was. He tilted the chair back slowly, and the other one lifted the front legs, and between them they set it on the trolley as if it were made of glass.

The chair creaked.

It was a sound Mira had never heard it make before. Not a settling creak, or a well, or a be careful. It was long and low and uncertain, the sound of something old being moved from the only place it knew.

"It's all right," Mira said, and her voice did something she had not let it do in front of anyone for three years. "It's all right, Mum. It's only for a little while."

She did not know if that was true. She said it anyway.

The porters wheeled it out across the room, past the window, through her front door and onto the landing. Crane stood aside to let it pass. Then the porters took it down the stairs one step at a time, and the creaking went with them, fainter, and fainter, and then it stopped.

Crane was still on the landing.

"The inquiry closes when the season turns," he said. "You still have time to give me a name."

Mira shut the door in his face.

It was the most satisfying thing she had done all week, and it lasted about three seconds. Then she turned round, and there was the corner by the window, and there was nothing in it but a slightly paler square on the floorboards where the chair had stood for three years, keeping the sun off.