Chapter 16 What Burned

The effects store at Argentonne burned on the night of the thirteenth, and it was, according to the report that was written the next morning, an accident caused by a faulty stove in the room above the stores, and it was, according to everyone who had ever been inside the room above the stores, a room that had no stove in it at all. Milly woke to the smell and to the shouting, and by the time she reached the yard the store was a single sheet of flame and the men were standing back from it in a ring with buckets they had stopped using, because there is a point past which no amount of water matters. The iron door stood open. The fire was inside, and it was being fed, and the person who had lit it had known exactly how to make a store of paper and cloth and leather burn hot enough to leave nothing that could be read. She stood in the ring of men with the heat on her face and watched a hundred men's boots and tunics and letters and photographs go up together, and she thought of the tin of photographs and the group outside the church hall and the careful clerk's hand under the face, and she understood that she had been right about one thing and wrong about another. She had been right that the market would move before the twelfth hour. She had been wrong to think it would only move against her. When the roof fell in, Cradock was standing at the front of the crowd with his coat buttoned and his hands folded, watching, the way a man watches work he has paid for. He saw Milly across the fire and he did not look away, and in that long exchange of glances across the burning store she understood the whole of his position: he had decided that the store was cheaper to lose than to defend, and that a burned store explained everything and proved nothing, and that the only piece of paper in France which could still hang him was not in the store at all. It was in her tunic. It had been in her tunic all along. She went back to the tannery while the store was still burning and wrote, on the eighth page of the document, in the small hand, the date and the hour and the fact of the fire, and beneath it a sentence she had not expected to write: *the store was burned on the night before the delivery, and the register at the school was not burned, and the register at the school is in Danforth's desk and is the only official record that remains.* Then she went to find Danforth, and found him in the corridor outside the schoolroom with his face the colour of the chalk and his hands shaking, and he told her, in a whisper, what she already feared. The register was gone too. Not burned; taken. He had left it in its drawer at midnight, because the register never left its drawer, and at four o'clock he had gone to it and found the drawer open and the register gone, and in its place a message that was not really a message, a single sheet of paper with no writing on it at all, folded twice, which meant: we have it, and we know how much you helped her. "They will use it to make the returns true," Danforth said. "They will write the whole fortnight again, and every man who died will have lived, and every man who lived under a dead man's name will have lived by right, and by the time the inspector comes the school will have a register that is perfect, and I will have nothing, and you will have nothing, and Farlow will say she remembers nothing at all." "You will have something," Milly said. "You will have your memory and your oath. And I will have mine." "What memory is that worth? Against a perfect book?" She did not answer him, because she did not know the answer, and because the fire was still going, and because the order for her transfer said that she was to report at Marlefield on the fourteenth with her kit, and the fourteenth was tomorrow, and the delivery at Vallencourt was tomorrow night, and there was a document of eight pages against her heart that a man with a key had now twice failed to find. By the time the last of the fire was out, the store was a black shell with the iron door hanging off its hinges, and Cradock had posted two orderlies at it, and the establishment was pretending to be more interested in the stove that did not exist than in the hundred men who had just been burned out of their own effects. Milly stood at the edge of the ruin with the heat still coming off it and made herself look, because a person who is going to tell the truth about a fire has to look at the fire first. She took the facts the way she took the wounded, one at a time and in order. The store had burned on the night before the delivery. The register had left its drawer at the same hour. Nobody had raised an alarm until the flames were through the roof. The men who should have been guarding a store were somewhere else, and the man who should have been watching the watch was watching the fire with his hands folded. It was, in its way, a document: a document written in ash and silence instead of ink, and she read it the way she read everything, quickly once and then slowly twice. What it meant was simple and terrible. Cradock had understood, before anyone else, that the store was the weaker position. A store can be searched. A register can be read. A burned store and a stolen register are neither, and a man who burns his own evidence is a man preparing to survive an enquiry. He was not frightened of the inspector. He was arranging, in advance, not to need to be frightened of him. Which meant the black book at the railhead still existed. It had to exist, because it was the thing a blackmailer keeps, and because a man who burns one ledger does not burn the other. And if the book existed, then the whole weight of the trade was still sitting in a room with a fire a mile from where the names were delivered, and no fire at Argentonne could reach it. Milly went to bed that night and could not sleep, and lay on the bench listening to the column settle and to the wind off the ruins, and she did the sum for the hundredth time and got the same answer she had got before: the fourteenth was the only chance, and the fifteenth was too late. The inspector would come on the sixteenth and would find a perfect register and a burned store and a district that had closed its books, unless something happened on the fourteenth that no report could explain. She got up in the dark and went to the door and looked at the black shell of the store and at the road beyond it, and she knew then what she was going to do, and she did not like it, and she was going to do it anyway. She was going to be at the farmhouse near Vallencourt on the fourteenth with everything she had, and if the whole of her evidence was three signatures in a notebook and the testimony of a frightened clerk, then three signatures and a frightened clerk would have to be enough, because there was not going to be anything else. She washed the smoke off her hands, and packed her kitbag as the order required, and put the document, folded small, into the lining of Ted's boot, where an inspector's search would never think to look and a boot, at least, could not be burned without her knowing it. ---