It was past ten. The children were asleep, the house locked down to its bones, and Marcus had come into the kitchen in his shirtsleeves for the whisky Mrs. K pretended not to keep in the pantry, on his way to a meeting that was not on any schedule Nora had ever seen. She was at the table with Maisie's reading book and a needle, sewing a button onto Jack's school blazer, and she had been rehearsing sentences for three days and discarded every one of them.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
He stopped with the glass in his hand. In two months no member of his staff had begun a sentence that way, and they both heard it.
"You can ask," he said.
"Do your children know what you do?"
The kitchen clock was the loudest thing in Boston for about four seconds.
Marcus set the glass down with the care of a man defusing something. She had expected anger β she had been braced for it since Tuesday, had written her resignation twice in her head and packed her suitcase once in her mind β but what crossed his face was not anger. It was something older and more tired, a man being handed a bill he had always known was coming.
"What do you think they know?" he said.
"I think Jack knows the house is β " she hunted for the word and refused the easy ones, " β watched. I think he knows men are afraid of you, because he's started arranging himself like the men at the gate, and I think Maisie knows to be quiet in a way that isn't her nature, and I think neither of them has a word for any of it, which is the worst way to know anything. But that's what I think. I asked what they know."
"They know this house is feared," Marcus said. He said it flatly, looking not at her but at the window, where the garden light burned in the sunflower bed. "They know their name opens doors and closes mouths. They know there are men at the gate and that the men are necessary. They don't know particulars. Children don't need particulars." He turned then, and met her eyes properly for the first time in the conversation. "And before you build your whole case on it, Miss Bennett β that is the point of it. The fear is the fence. A man in my position doesn't get to be loved by the street; he gets to be left alone by it. My children sleep safe in a city that leaves them alone because it knows whose they are. That's not an accident of the house. That's the house doing its job."
"Then the house is doing its job," Nora said, "and the children are paying for it."
She hadn't raised her voice. She was rather proud of that, afterward. Her hands, though, had gone entirely still on the blazer, and the needle stood in the cloth like a tiny flag.
"Jack is nine years old and he stands like a sentry at breakfast," she said. "Maisie is five and until this month she had forgotten β no. She had decided there wasn't any laughing in her. You should have seen her face the first time she did it, at the table, over nothing. She looked frightened of herself, Mr. Doyle. Frightened. Of a noise she made. That's the price coming out of their pockets, a coin at a time, and they pay it at breakfast and they pay it at night when the house goes quiet at eight o'clock like a β like a place being shut, not a place being lived in."
"You think I don't know the price," he said.
"I think you know it exactly," she said. "I think you're the only other person in this house who does. That's why the piano was covered instead of sold, and why the photographs went into a drawer and not a fire. I just β " And here the three days of rehearsals failed her completely, and what came out was the plain thing, unarmoured. "I just think somebody should say it in this house, in words, once. The children are paying for the fence. Somebody who loves them built the fence to keep them safe, and it works, and it costs them, and both of those are true at the same time."
The meeting he was dressed for breathed somewhere out in the night, waiting. Shay appeared in the doorway with the car keys and read the room in one glance and withdrew without a sound, and the keys took their small noise with them.
"You were hired for the children's hours," Marcus said at last.
"I know."
"And this is not the children's hours."
"No," Nora said. "It's the kitchen door at ten o'clock. Everything true in this house seems to happen at doors." She picked up the blazer and found her place in the seam again, because her hands needed somewhere to be. "I won't ask it twice. And I won't ask it in front of them, or use it β I'm not gathering evidence, Mr. Doyle. I'm not a detective and I'm not a priest. I'm the person who puts them to bed. I wanted the person who built the fence to know that the person who puts them to bed has noticed what the fence costs. That's all. That's the whole of it."
He stood a long time. Outside, somewhere down the hill, a siren went past and faded, the ordinary music of the city doing its own business. Then he picked up the glass he had set down, and did not drink from it, and put it back, and Nora understood that the meeting in the night had just been cancelled by a man who cancelled nothing, and that whatever he had been on his way to do would now be done by Frankie, worse, and that some part of him knew that too and had chosen the button and the kitchen anyway.
"Finish the button," he said, at the door. "He fidgets it loose again by Friday."
She sewed until her eyes stung, alone in the kitchen of the feared house, with the garden light burning outside the window and the sunflowers β though she couldn't know it yet β an inch taller than they'd been that morning.
Chapter 9: Maisie's Birthday
Maisie's sixth birthday fell on a Thursday, and the house's official machinery had a plan for it.
The plan, as Mrs. K explained it with the air of a woman reading a weather report, was the same as last year's: a cake from the good bakery delivered at four; the children to have their tea in the day room; presents purchased by Mrs. K from a list and wrapped by the shop; Mr. Doyle to be informed; a card to be signed by the staff. Last year this plan had produced, in the day room of the brownstone, a cake, two children, and a silence you could hear through the door β Mrs. K had told Nora that part with her eyes on the stove, once, and never again.