The Households That Opened

The chapel door stood open. Ash’s guards had left it that way after their search, and the wind kept lifting the corner of a notice nailed beside it. Celia could read only the word inspection before the paper slapped flat again.

Inside, narrow beds lined the walls. Every blanket was gone. On the floor, a pale strip showed where Ilse’s desk had stood. One guard pressed a hand to the bare boards there, as if a desk might have left a register beneath them.

“Nothing in the cupboard,” the other called.

Ash stepped out of the schoolroom with a key in his hand. “Sister Ilse has been asked to make the children available for review.”

Celia kept her eyes on the key. It belonged to a cupboard whose door was already open. “She no longer has charge of this building.”

“That does not answer where they are, Miss Marrow.”

“No.”

He waited. She had answered the question he had asked. For once, she would not improve it for him.

The guards went through the chapel once more, opening a flour tin and shaking out an empty pillowcase. Ash remained by the door until they were done. Then he locked the cupboard, put the key in his pocket, and left the outside door open behind him.

Celia pulled it shut. Its latch caught on the second try.

At the sail loft, Ilse was mending a child’s sleeve by the window. The Unclaimed Register lay closed beside her, well away from the damp sill. Mira had cleared a place for it among Celia’s dry impressions, but Ilse had not put it there.

“They found no one,” Celia said.

Ilse bit off her thread. “I had hoped they might find the flour.”

“They did. They shook it.”

“There was hardly enough left to shake.”

A woman waited near the stairs with a little boy whose boots were too large for him. She held one boot steady with her own foot while he worked at the laces. Celia knew her from the chapel visits, though she had never learned which name she used there. The boy had spent the last night with her sister, along with two children from the chapel. Now her sister had to return to work at the smokehouse. The arrangement had lasted one night, not a lifetime. That was all anyone had promised.

“My sister can keep them till supper,” the woman said. “After that, I can take my son home. The others need somewhere.”

Ilse set down the sleeve. “May I come to your house this afternoon?”

The woman looked up. “To see him?”

“To see all three, while they are there. I will ask the others’ parents before I visit them in another house.”

“My sister won’t mind.” The woman tugged the boy’s coat straight, then stopped. “I mean, ask her too. It’s her door.”

“I will.”

The boy got one lace into a knot and held it up for inspection. The woman bent to fix it, but Ilse caught her eye and shook her head. He tried again. Celia turned toward the table before he could ask her opinion. Surveyors were poor judges of knots that needed to come undone.

By noon, two of the chapel children had places to sleep that night. Celia walked with one father to the house of a former ward, who agreed to take his daughter while he worked the night boats. The father asked about the window in the back room and whether it opened from inside. Celia tested the catch. It stuck halfway. Between them they freed it, scraping old paint from the frame with a kitchen knife.

“I can come for her at dawn,” he said.

“You can come at any hour,” the former ward told him. “She can stay, too, if you miss the boat. We’ll make room.”

His hand stayed on the window frame. “Dawn, then. Unless I tell you otherwise.”

Celia did not mark the house on her plan of the quay. The street was already there, drawn to scale. She had come with a folding rule, thinking she might need to check a safe way between doors, but the father had walked his daughter over himself. He knew which steps were sound and which neighbor would answer if he knocked.

On the way back, she put the rule away.

They spent the afternoon finding out what each child needed rather than finding a single place for all of them. One girl would not sleep apart from her brother. A parent who could take both wanted Ilse to explain the girl’s waking dreams to the rest of the house, but not to the neighbors. Ilse went there while Celia stayed outside with the brother and helped him pry a bent nail from a fence board. When Ilse came out, the parent invited them in to see the room. The children went first.

Another parent refused the first offer made to her. The house was generous, she said, and too close to the chapel. She chose a room farther uphill and carried her child’s bedding there herself. Celia’s part was to carry the washbasin. It was heavier than it looked.

At the loft that evening, she drew a line across a sheet of spare paper. Mira leaned over her shoulder.

“What’s that one?”

“The distance from here to the chapel.”

“Don’t put the houses on it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

Mira glanced at the pencil in Celia’s hand.

Celia laid it down. “I was considering it.”

The line ran clean and straight. A useful line, if Ilse meant to walk from the loft to the chapel each morning. Useless if anyone seized it and asked what lay between. Celia folded the sheet along the mark, then tore it in half and fed both pieces to the stove.

Ilse came in with cold hands and a heel of bread offered by someone who had little to spare. She set it on the table instead of beside the register.

“I shall visit each day,” she said. “Not in the same order. I’ve asked the parents to speak to me themselves if a visit is unwanted or a child needs more than I can give.”

“And if you’re stopped?” Celia asked.

“I will say where I have been. I won’t say where I am going.”

“That may not satisfy Ash.”

“No.” Ilse warmed her hands above the stove. “A mother asked me today whether I would still come if she took her daughter back to her own rooms. I told her I would, if she wanted me. She did not need to leave the child with strangers to earn a visit.”

Celia looked at the closed register. Ilse had brought it out of the chapel because it held names the city had made too easy to lose. It could not tell her whether that mother wanted company tomorrow.

“Do you want me along?” Celia asked.

“Sometimes. There is a stair with a loose tread, and you have a better eye for such things.”

“A modest use for my training.”

“I hope so.” Ilse took up the bread. “Today you can help cut this.”

Celia found the knife. Ilse held the heel firm while Celia divided it into thin pieces, stopping when the blade met the board. On the first cut the slices came out uneven. No one asked her to measure the next.