Page 21 of The Number of Love
Rain like this was too complete. A solid wall, moving in sheets, the drops tripping and pushing one another in their haste to find her umbrella. And her shoes. And the hem of her skirt.
What she wouldn’t give just now for a pair of trousers and some boots. Perhaps one of those so-dubbed trench coats that, accordingto the chattering secretaries, were now all the mode since they were introduced in the military.
Not that she’d had a new coat since her first autumn here, when it had been necessary. Also not, for that matter, that Maman would ever consent to her daughter wearing trousers.
And not that Margot would waste any more than those thirty seconds thinking about, of all things,fashion. Good grief, she could only imagine the way Maman and Dot would laugh if they knew.
Thunder rumbled across the sky as Margot hurried around the last corner. She hadn’t passed her mother anywhere along the route. That and the throat that really was more than alittlesore, now that she thought to pay attention to it, made her think Dot was likely right about Maman having caught the cold or flu or whatever it was going around. It seemed Margot had, and they were always in the same places.
Agent Eighteen. Wolfram. Anthrax.
As if a cold was anything to really fuss over these days. Hurrying through a wet English autumn wasn’t exactly unpleasant compared to what those field agents faced on a regular basis. She shuddered at the memory of some of the words she’d decoded an hour ago. They reported enemy agents—opposite numbers, Thoroton had called them once, which had made her smile—stealing from them, chasing them. Agent Twenty-two, whoever he was, had been arrested last week in Morocco.
Margot wouldn’t snivel over a cold or a broken umbrella. She wouldn’t.
Finally, the door to their building swallowed her up. She shook the water from her now-lowered brolly onto the front step and then let the door swing shut behind her.
It smelled of damp and mold in this front hallway, as it always did. Maman had tried once to scrub it into lemony bliss, but even wood soap couldn’t long hold out against the century or two of damp that had crept into the banisters and floors and walls.
Margot took a moment to wipe her feet—no point in transferringmoremoisture to said floors—and then let them take her on thefamiliar path. Four steps to the stairs. Up nineteen, pivot on the landing. Up nineteen, pivot on the landing. Again. Again. Her right hand trailed along the banister, counting in time to her feet. A knot in the wood on step sixteen, between the first and second floor. A nick at step three on the next span. The missing rung on the eleventh step of the final stretch of the banister, whichdidchange the pitch of her hand running along it, despite Lukas the Pitch Expert swearing it didn’t.
Of course it did. It must. Her ears might not be able to hear it, but her mind could.
Then, finally, the corridor that would lead to the familiar door with the familiar number hanging from it in tin: 3E.
She fumbled in her pocket for her key. Until this flat, she’d never lived in anything but a house, with a number all its own. No letters had ever been required by the number. It was a variable, she’d claimed to her mother when they first moved in. Not just 3E, but 3(e)—three of E—with any number of possibilities for what the value really was. Some days she let it be a mere three of one—three times one, a simple three. Some days she enjoyed the chance to let larger numbers swell, and it became 37,518—three of 12,506.
Today, exhaustion and sore throats and keys that wouldnotfit right in the lock inspired a simpler number. Three of six would do, since it took her six attempts to fit the blasted metal into the blasted hole correctly. Eighteen.
Eighteen. That meant something, but she was too startled by opening the door and finding darkness within to think what. “Maman?” Darkness implied her motherwasn’tthere, though that couldn’t be, could it? She’d not passed her on the way.
She shoved her wet umbrella into the stand, beside the faulty one that still stood in its usual spot, no evidence of it having been growled over and declared impossible. Pushed the door shut. Switched on the electric lights that they were only allowed to use in the daytime, when they wouldn’t shine out the windows and give away their location to any unfriendlies flying overhead.
“Maman?” She must still be in bed. Perhaps the cold had kept herup half the night, and then she’d overslept once she finally found slumber.
But ... no. A faint light shone from under her mother’s bedroom door. Shecouldhave fallen asleep with the gaslight on, she supposed, but it wasn’t likely. Margot hastened to the door, rapped lightly. “Maman?” No answer came. Was she in the toilet? No light shone from underthatdoor though.
She cracked the door open, frowning when she realized it wasn’t the low gas lamp at all, but the brighter electric one. Maman never turned that on until morning. She’d obviously gotten up to get ready, as usual, this morning.
The door stuck at half-open, bumping into something and going no farther.
That was when panic sank its fangs into her throat. This tiny little cupboard of a room fit only a narrow bed and a minuscule chest of drawers. There was no space for anything else, anything that could fall over and impede the swing of the creaking door. No furniture. And Maman was meticulous about picking up her few possessions.
Which meant it wasn’t furniture. Wasn’t a possession.
Margot edged through the opening as quickly as she could, braced herself, and yet still felt punched in the stomach at the sight of the white nightgown draping the legs on the floor. “Maman!”
She lay on her side on the rug, her hair a mass of silver-threaded midnight over her arm—unbraided, wavy. Proving she’d risen as she always had, already reaching to undo her hair so she could brush it and pin it up. “Maman.”
Margot fell to her knees beside her mother, easing her gently onto her back. It was just a cold. Flu, maybe. Dehydration. She’d fainted. Passed out. Perhaps even bumped her head, but it was nothing that serious.
Her hands shaking, Margot pressed her fingers to Maman’s wrist. Where was her pulse, where? “No. No, Maman. Come on. Wake up. Wake up!”
Her hands—her hands were shaking too badly, that was all. Shaking too much to detect the pulse in her wrist. She reached forher throat instead, where it ought to be more easily found, even if it were weak. Thready, wasn’t that what they called it? She could handle weak and thready. Weak and thready left room for hope. For intervention.
But her fingers couldn’t find any thumping in her mother’s throat either. “God! Sixty-two!” That was Maman’s usual resting heart rate. “Fifty-one.” Her mother’s age. “Nine thousand four.” The times she could remember Maman saying she loved her—the times she’d said it back.Je t’aime, Maman.
“Mon Dieu, s’il vous plaît. S’il vous plaît, pas ma maman.”
