Chapter 4: The Woman From the Red Quarter

On Sundays the red quarter reeked of onions and the day's wine and woodsmoke, and Stephen Albrecht walked into it like a man walks into cold water: all at once and with his jaw set. It was a two hour walk from Vareth Hall down the long avenue of lindens, along the river road and through the tanners' gate where the air grew thick and sweet with rot, and into the maze of lanes where the capital kept the people it preferred not to look at. Laundry hung between the upper windows like surrendered flags. Children with bare feet and old eyes played at a game involving a dead rat and a great deal of shouting. A woman on a doorstep, a dockhand's wife with a bruise fading yellow beneath her eye lifted her chin as he passed and said, “Her ladyship’s boy,” and meant it as a kindness. He had never been able to decide whether she did. In the Quarter, kindness and contempt wore the same clothes.

Mara's rooms were above the dyer's shop on Alder Street, up an outside stair that had been painted blue once, long ago, and that now showed only a few stubborn flakes of colour. The door stood open. It always stood open on Sundays. Through it came the smell of lamb, rosemary and the green sauce she made with parsley and capers and a pinch of something she refused to name.

"You're thin," said his mother, without turning from the pot.

"I've been fed twice a day for a fortnight."

"Then they're feeding you badly." She turned, wiping her hands on her apron, and looked him over with the fierce, assessing tenderness of a woman checking a child for injuries. She had been beautiful once in a way that made men do foolish things, and she was still lovely now in the softer way of a lamp that has burned a long while: dark hair threaded with silver, dark eyes crinkled at the corners, a mouth built for laughing that had learned to be careful. "Sit. Eat. Tell me everything. And don't say nothing, because your face is saying a great deal."

He sat. She set a bowl before him, and he ate, and for a while there was only the scrape of the spoon and the slow Sunday murmur of the street below. He told her about the greys. He told her about old Garrick's hands and Hobb's smile. He did not tell her about the Vesper Gardens.

She knew anyway. She always did.

"She said something," Mara murmured, sitting opposite him with her chin in her palm. "The girl."

"Mother."

"I'm only saying. They always do." She smiled, and it was gentle, and it did not reach her eyes. "What was it?"

"It doesn't matter."

"It matters enough that you're holding that spoon like a dagger."

He looked down. He set the spoon in the bowl.

Outside a pair of men went by arguing over a debt. Somebody's baby was crying. A bell rang the quarter-hour from the temple of the Seven Lamps, and the sound drifted over the rooftops like something dropped from a great height.

"She asked about my father," Stephen said at last.

Mara's face did not change. That was the terrible thing about her. In nineteen years he had learned to read every shade of her, the little rounded silences, the way her fingers drifted to the locket she never opened, but he had never once seen her flinch at the word.

"And what did you tell her?"

"That I had none that I knew of."

She laughed. It was a real laugh, surprised out of her, warm and a little cracked. "Oh, my love. That's very good. That's going to cost you."

"I know."

"Did it feel good?"

"No." He rubbed his face with both hands. "Yes. For about a breath."

"That's how you know it was the right sort of insolence." She reached across the table and took his wrist, her thumb pressed to the pulse as though she could count his anger there. "Stephen. Listen. I'm going to say a thing, and you're going to hate it, and you're going to remember it anyway."

He waited.

"That girl," said Mara, "was raised in a house where cruelty is a language, the way yours was raised in a house where kindness is. She isn't cruel because she's wicked. She's cruel because it's the only thing she's ever been taught gets listened to.“That’s no excuse.”No. But it's a reason. And a reason is a handle." Her grip tightened. "You can hold a thing by its handle. You don't have to be cut by the blade."

He wanted to argue. He wanted, savagely, to say that a handle was no use to a man whose hand was already bleeding. But the lamb was fragrant, and his mother's eyes were tired, and there was a small tin box on the sill by the window that he had noticed on arrival and had not mentioned: a plain thing of battered brown metal that she kept letters in. It was open. One of the folded pages had been taken out and lay beside it, smoothed flat.

"You've been reading," he said.

"I'm old," said Mara lightly. "Old women read their letters."

She closed the box. She did it casually, quickly, the way one closes a door on a draught.

It was only later, walking back in the dusk with the lamb in a cloth against his chest, that Stephen realized he had never in his life seen his mother read a letter that was not a bill.