The Mayor Refuses a Crown

The address had to be spoken clearly. Celia had written it on a card for Mira, though Mira knew it by heart. The card kept Celia's hands busy while they waited for the salt in the wall to clear.

They stood beneath the old fish market, where the passage narrowed before the mayor's address. Brenda had brought a dry board to lay across the wet stones. Jonah held the lantern. Its oil smelled sharp in the close air, and Celia found herself watching the flame more often than the wall. The lighthouse lamps had made it easy to forget that light consumed something.

Mira stepped off the board and stopped a hand's breadth from the salt.

“Are you there?” she asked.

For a while the wall gave them only the slow drip of water. Then a voice came through, thin but distinct.

“I am here. Is this Mira?”

“Yes.” Mira pressed her palms against her skirt rather than the wall. “It's me.”

“You said you had news of my daughter.”

Celia lowered the card. Artur Vellane had asked before, but Mira had needed time to answer him. No one had hurried her here today. Even Jonah, who could wear a path through a floor while waiting for a reply, stood still beside the lantern.

“Clara got out,” Mira said. “You wanted to know that first. She escaped.”

A faint scrape came through the wall. A chair, perhaps, moved on a floor Celia could not chart from here.

“She reached the upper city?” Artur asked.

“She did. In 1900.”

“That is many years.” He paused. “Did she find someone to help her?”

“Yes. At the chapel. And a nurse.” Mira glanced at Celia, then back at the salt. “Elena Marrow was her name.”

Artur repeated it with care. “Elena Marrow.”

“She stayed with Clara,” Mira said. “She did what she could.”

The lantern hissed. Celia had carried her mother's letter across the sea, certain its unanswered question belonged to her. Now her mother's name had crossed the wall without the letter, offered by the woman who had a better right to tell this part of the story.

“How is Clara?” Artur asked.

Mira's fingers closed around the hem of her skirt. She pulled until a seam showed white.

“She had a daughter,” she said. “Me.”

For several breaths, only water answered. Then Artur said, “Mira.”

She made a small sound in her throat. “Yes.”

“Clara lived to see you?”

“She died when I was born. In 1900.”

The scrape came again, harder this time, and stopped. Celia held the edge of the board beneath her boot. There was nothing useful to measure in the distance between his question and that answer.

“I am sorry,” Artur said at last.

“You didn't know.”

“No.”

“She wasn't alone,” Mira said. “I want you to know that. I don't know all that was said to her, or what she wanted at the end. Sister Ilse has the record, and Celia has her mother's letter. But there were people with her.”

“Thank you for telling me what you know.”

Mira let go of her skirt. The seam stayed stretched. “I've wanted to ask you a hundred things. Whether she laughed like I do. Whether she hated being told to rest.”

“She hated that,” Artur said, and a little breath escaped Mira before he went on. “She would ask for a task, however small, and then do twice what was asked. When she was a girl, she mended a torn net badly rather than let me send it out. We lost fish through the knots.”

“That's a poor defense of her.”

“It is the story she allowed me to tell.”

Mira smiled at the wall. Celia could not see Artur, and she was glad of it. His voice was enough. For a few minutes Mira asked him about Clara, and he answered when he could. Some questions reached across the years cleanly. Others did not. When the salt began to cloud, Mira promised to come back. Artur asked her not to make the promise at the cost of her safety.

“I'll decide when it's safe enough,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said. “You will.”

His voice faded as the salt went dull. Mira stayed near it until Celia lifted the board's dry end and said they ought to leave before the next rise. She came without argument, though she looked back once.

At the loft, Jonah set his lantern on the table beside Celia's Dry Impression Atlas. Damp had curled one corner of a loose sheet. Celia weighted it with her measuring chain while he took out a clean page of paper.

“He answered as her grandfather,” Jonah said. “If people hear that, it changes what they'll believe.”

Mira sat on the stool by the window. She had not taken off her coat. “Some people.”

“Enough to start with.” Jonah looked at her. “The council has spent a century acting as if Lower Maren never had a mayor. You're his granddaughter. If you stood up as its mayor, people would have to listen.”

“No.”

“I don't mean you should run their meetings forever. A public claim. Something they can't file away as a patient's dream.”

“You said mayor.”

“A symbol, then.”

Mira rose. The stool knocked softly against the wall. “You can put that word on paper if you want, Jonah. You can't put me inside it.”

He set his pencil down. “I should've asked. But your name could bring people out to hear the rest.”

“And what do I say when they come? That my grandfather can speak, so I get to speak for every person below him?”

“No. You tell them what you've heard.”

“Then let me tell them that.” Mira came to the table and laid two fingers on his blank page. “Don't print an office over my head to make the words look larger.”

Jonah looked at her hand. “I was trying to give the story a face.”

“It's got faces. You need to ask them before you use them.”

Celia loosened the chain from the atlas sheet. The links left a row of small dents in the paper. Jonah picked up his pencil but did not write.

“What would you be willing to say?” he asked.

Mira kept her fingers on the blank page. “Artur Vellane answered me at his address. He knew Clara before she escaped. The chapel records say she died giving birth to me in 1900. I can tell people what he said today, if he agrees to that. I can tell them what happened to me when I tried to get anyone to listen.” She drew her hand back. “That's mine to say.”

Jonah turned the pencil between his fingers. “And the title?”

“He was mayor. I wasn't.” Mira pulled out the stool and sat again, facing them both. “Write that part exactly.”