The Unclaimed Register

Sister Ilse had set two cups on the table, though Celia had asked for records, not tea. One cup stood beside Ilse’s chair. The other marked a place for Celia beneath the chapel window, where the light was good enough to read without moving close to the lamp.

Celia took the offered chair. Through the wall came the scrape of a child dragging something heavy across the floor, followed by Ilse’s soft call to lift it instead.

“You said there were other drawings,” Celia said.

“There are. You copied what the children wished to show you.”

“And the records?”

Ilse rested her hands around her cup. The tea smelled of mint, steeped too long. “The records include people who never drew a thing.”

Celia laid her notebook on the table but left it shut. On her first visit, Ilse had taken one look at the handwriting on Mother’s Unanswered Letter and put her private register away. Celia had come prepared to ask about that. Now that Ilse sat before her, she could not make the question small enough.

“Mira corrected Dr. Sable’s account of her own speech yesterday,” Celia said. “He changed it.”

“That was right of him.”

“He had written that she claimed to know a room she had never entered. She had described a window. Those are different claims.”

Ilse slid her cup aside. From beneath the table she lifted a leather-bound book with a cracked corner and laid it between them. It was thick enough that its worn spine no longer lay straight.

“This book is not a diagnosis,” she said.

Celia opened her notebook at last. “I won’t copy a name without asking.”

“Some of them are dead. Some are not here for you to ask. We can begin with the addresses.”

Ilse opened the register near its middle. The pages gave off the dry, faintly sweet smell of old paper, with none of the sharp salt that warned Celia away from a ledger page. Ilse held the book flat while Celia read.

A boy had woken calling for the woman at a house whose street was absent from the city plan. He gave a door number, then described the crack across its step. On the next page, a girl had spoken of the same street but a different house. She had asked why its back room was locked when the weather was fine. Ilse had entered the dates, the children’s words, and the names of adults who had been with them. Beside each entry sat a short note in darker ink.

Celia bent closer. “Rejected by the parish clerk.”

“Yes.”

“This one says no such address. The child gave it twice.”

“He gave it for four mornings.” Ilse touched the edge of the page, not the boy’s name. “By the last morning he was tired of answering me.”

Celia turned a leaf. The next entry was an adult woman who had come to the chapel each autumn asking after a sister at an address no carrier would take a letter to. Ilse had kept one of the letters, unopened, until the woman stopped coming. The official reply, copied beneath it, called the address defective.

“How many were refused?” Celia asked.

“I have not counted them for you.”

A fair answer. Celia drew a line down a clean notebook page and stopped with her pencil at the top. She had meant to put names on one side and addresses on the other. There was no column for the woman who had paid postage year after year.

Ilse turned back several pages. “These children did not all dream the same place. Look here.”

Celia compared two entries dated eleven years apart. One child had described a courtyard pump with a loose handle. Another had asked for the tailor above it and given the number of his door. The addresses fitted the lower streets Celia had measured from the pages, but they did not point to one shared picture passed around the chapel. The children had supplied small, stubborn differences.

“Were they together?” Celia asked.

“Not in the same years.”

“Did you show the later child the earlier account?”

“No.” Ilse’s finger stayed on the page. “I asked whether the pump gave water. She said she had never used it. She wanted the tailor.”

Celia rubbed the flat of her pencil against her thumb. Sable’s amended notes had made room for what Mira knew without calling it illness. This register had been making room for such accounts for years, in the narrow spaces left after officials sent them back.

“Why keep the refusals?” she asked.

“Because an unanswered request is still a request.”

Ilse lifted the book to its first leaves. The binding resisted, and Celia put a hand under the cover to support it. A folded slip had been sewn into the margin beside an entry from 1900. Ilse eased out the fold but did not yet open it.

Celia knew that year. Mother had served a nursing tour on the island in 1900. She had said little of it afterward, and Celia had never pressed her while there was time.

Ilse read the first line aloud. “Clara Vellane. Arrived at the chapel from Lower Maren.”

The name sat plainly on the page. Celia kept her eyes on the date.

“Who brought her?”

“The watchman who found her at the quay would not sign. I recorded his words as he gave them.” Ilse opened the sewn slip. Its paper had gone thin along the fold. “He said she came up alone and asked for a nurse.”

The entry did not reduce Clara to an address. Her shoes had been tied with strips torn from a sheet. She would drink water only after someone promised to leave the door open. She had asked Ilse to take down the address of a house in Lower Maren, then made her repeat the number until she had it right. Ilse had written it out in full.

“She was pregnant,” Ilse said.

Celia looked below the address. A second hand had entered the hour of the birth. Beneath it was a single line for the child, a daughter. Clara’s death was recorded the following morning.

There was room left after that line. No account of what Clara had wanted the nurse to know, or why she had crossed. Only a clerk’s note in the margin: origin unverified. Ilse had drawn a careful stroke through the note without covering the words.

“The daughter?” Celia asked.

Ilse folded the slip again, slowly enough not to split it. “She lived.”

Outside, someone struck the chapel bell once, a dull testing knock. Celia drew her notebook nearer but did not set down the child’s name. Her mother’s 1900 nursing tour had taken place in the year Clara came through. Mother had written to Vey afterward. The letter was still in Celia’s bag, its crease worn soft from being opened for a reply that had never come.

She wrote down the date of Clara’s arrival, and beside it, the date of Elena Marrow’s tour. The two lines met on the page.