Chapter Fourteen: Air

They brought the chair back that evening.

The same two porters, the same canvas aprons, the same trolley. They carried it up the stairs one step at a time, and Mira stood on the landing and listened to it creak its way towards her, louder, and louder, until it came round the turn of the stairs and she could see it. Dark wood. Thin cushion. Arms worn smooth.

"Where would you like it, miss?" said the porter.

"In the corner," said Mira. "By the window."

They set it down exactly on the pale square, as if they had measured. The older porter gave the cushion a little pat, the way you pat a horse, and then looked embarrassed about it.

"The clerk said to tell you," he said, at the door. "The season turns tonight. Some time before morning." He hesitated. "Sorry. I don't know if that's good news or not."

"Neither do I," said Mira.

"After, it'll just be a chair." He turned his cap round in his hands. "We could come back for it, if you like. Place it somewhere."

Mira looked at the corner by the window.

"It's placed," she said. "It's somewhere nice. Thank you."

When they had gone she stood in the middle of the room for a while, looking at it.

Then she did something she had not done once in three years.

She sat in it.

Not beside it. In it. She lowered herself down onto the thin cushion and put her arms along the smooth wooden arms, where her mother's arms had worn them, and leaned back.

It was warm. Of course it was. It was warmer than it had ever been, and the old wood settled under her with a long, slow creak that went all the way through her, like an arm going round her shoulders. Mira closed her eyes. She was small enough to fit, she found. She had always been small enough. She had just never let herself.

"We won," she said.

The chair creaked. A short creak, rising at the end.

"Yes, really. The judge on the left said it was a good letter." She laughed, and it came out wet. "And there's a man called Edmund who you'd have liked very much, and who you'd have told off for wearing the same cardigan for three hundred years. He's gone for judgement. I don't know what they'll make him. I'm not going to look it up." She thought about that. "I think he'd like to keep it to himself."

The chair said nothing. It held her.

"And I'm on probation for a year," she went on. "Everything I sign gets countersigned. Which is fine. I'm going to ask every one of them why it's wrong, properly, and then I'm going to listen. And I've got a form to finish for a girl called Agnes, who's been waiting three hundred years." She opened her eyes and looked at the dark window. "I'm sorry I was angry. In the letter, you said you hoped I wasn't angry. I was. For a long time. Not with you. With everyone who ever said that headline out loud. But a bit with you, for leaving." She swallowed. "I'm not anymore."

The creak that came then was long and low, a settling sound, the sound of something old letting its whole weight go.

Mira knew what it meant. She had spent three years learning to hear it.

I know, love. I know.

She stayed there a long time, while the street went quiet and the city went on running slightly sideways from the world it had come from. Somewhere a bell was ringing, slow and far off, as if remembering a tune. She did not count the hours. There were no hours here, not really. Only the turning of seasons.

Some time before morning, the warmth began to go.

It did not go all at once. It went the way warmth leaves a cup of tea you have forgotten about, slowly, from the edges in. First the arms. Then the back. Then, last of all, the cushion under her, where it had always been warmest. Mira did not move. She sat very still and felt it go, and did not try to keep it, because it was not hers to keep.

And then it was just a chair.

A good chair, as far as chairs went. Dark wood. A cushion gone thin at the edges. Arms worn smooth in the places where someone used to rest their hands. It did not creak when she shifted. It was the temperature of the room.

Mira sat in it until the window began to go grey.

Then she got up, and crossed to the window, and undid the latch, which had been stiff for three years because she had never once opened it. It gave with a little crack of old paint. She pushed it wide.

The air came in. Cold and clean, and smelling of the river and of the morning, and of something else, very faint, that she could not quite name. Lavender, perhaps. Or perhaps just a world where it was safe to open things.

She stood there and breathed it.

Then she went to work, and she left the window open behind her.