Chapter 3: Four a Minute

Gräfin I. v. Rautenberg
Gratz, im Winter 1873

The inscription was on the flyleaf, in brown ink gone the colour of dried tea, in a hand that leaned forward as if walking into wind.

Nell found it on Saturday afternoon, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the curtains shut and the launderette rumbling under the floor. For someone on nights, Saturday afternoon was the middle of the night, and she should have been asleep. She had tried. She had lain there for an hour with the book on the bedside table, wrapped back up in its oilcloth like something that might get cold, and in the end she'd given up and put the big light on.

She looked up Gratz. Old spelling of Graz. Austria. Styria.

She knew that word. She sat with the phone in her hand and felt it land, slowly, like a coin dropped into deep water. Styria was where the story was set. The lonely house, the forest, the overturned carriage. Some idle Victorian in Dublin had picked a corner of Austria that sounded far enough away from anyone who'd complain, and put his vampire there.

And someone had bought a copy of the book a year after it came out and carried it to Graz in the winter, and written her name in the front.

Gräfin I. v. Rautenberg.

The rest took longer. Von, the little word that sat in front of German surnames when the family had once owned whatever they were named after. And Gräfin. She sat there in her pyjamas and scrolled through a website about the minor nobility of the Habsburg lands, which was not how she had imagined spending her week's leave, until she found a line that said the wife or daughter of a Graf was a Gräfin, and that in English this was rendered as Countess.

"Oh, come on," Nell said, out loud, to her bedroom.

Then she read the story.

She hadn't read it since she was nineteen. It was shorter than she remembered, and stranger, and sadder. There was a lot of fainting. There was a doctor who was clearly useless, which she enjoyed professionally. There was the guest, languid and tender and sleeping until noon, and the girl who narrated it all and liked her far too much to see what was happening, and Nell, who had come to it at nineteen expecting a monster, found herself at twenty-nine reading it as a love story that the author had not been brave enough to admit to.

Someone had been there before her.

In the margins, here and there, faint enough that she had to tip the page to the lamp to see it, there were pencil marks. Not underlinings. Not notes. Just one word, in the same leaning hand as the flyleaf, set beside a paragraph and left there like a stone on a grave.

No.

She counted them, because she counted things now. Eleven. Beside the descriptions of what the guest wanted. Beside the explanations of why. Beside the ending, which was the part with the stake and the men with official papers and the grave opened up and everything put neatly back in order, there was a twelfth, pressed so hard the pencil had nearly gone through the paper.

No.

· · ·

Ruth rang on Sunday at four, which was Nell's breakfast time.

"They've found your blood."

"It's not my blood."

"Three units of O negative. In the issue fridge in the transfusion lab. Graham opened it at quarter past four this morning and there they were, sitting on the top shelf with the original Ward 9 labels on." Ruth's voice was very level, which with Ruth meant she was furious with something she couldn't see. "Seals intact. Temperature tags not tripped. Graham says they've been kept between two and six degrees the whole time, wherever they've been. He's binning them anyway, obviously. He's not putting them in a person. He says he's not putting them in a cat."

Nell sat down on the edge of the bath.

"There's a camera in the lab," Ruth went on. "That one works. Graham's watched it four times. It shows the fridge door open at twelve minutes past three, and close again at thirteen minutes past. That's all it shows. A door, opening and closing. Nobody in front of it." A pause. "Estates are calling it a sensor fault."

"What are you calling it?"

"I'm calling it a labelling error at the point of collection," Ruth said, "and an unexplained lab result, and you back on nights from Tuesday. Your interview's the Friday after. And whatever else I'm calling it, I'm not putting in writing. I've done thirty-four years. I'd like to do thirty-five."

When she'd rung off, Nell stayed on the edge of the bath for a long time, looking at the tiles.

She was cleared. Or as near as made no difference. She should have felt light.

What she felt instead was the arithmetic. Sixty-one at midnight. A hundred and thirty-nine by six. And the three units had never gone anywhere near Ilse Rautenberg's veins. They'd been somewhere cold and careful for five nights, and now they were back on a shelf.

So something else had got into her.

· · ·

She knew it would be 03:12 before she looked at the clock. She looked anyway.

She was standing at the window in the dark, in pyjamas and her mum's old dressing gown, with a mug of tea gone cold in her hands. She had been standing there a while. Canal Street was empty, yellow under the sodium lamps, the shutters down on the bookie's and the chippy. The launderette's sign buzzed below her, one letter flickering. Across the road, black railings, and behind them the canal, flat as a sheet of slate.

Under the streetlamp by the railings, Ilse Rautenberg stood with her hands in the pockets of her long coat, looking up at the window.

Nell didn't jump. Afterwards she was quite proud of that.

She put the mug down on the sill. She put her trainers on without socks. She picked up the book in its oilcloth, because it was the only thing she had to hold, and went down the narrow stairs and unbolted the street door and stood in it, with the night air coming in round her ankles.

Ilse crossed the road. She didn't hurry. She stopped on the pavement a yard short of the step.

"You should be asleep, Nurse Harrow."

"I'm on nights. This is my lunch." Nell held up the book. "You left this in my locker. The locker with the code nobody knows."

"Four digits are not a lock. They are a request."

"That's not an answer either."

"No." The streetlight made Ilse's face very white and her eyes very black. She glanced at the book, and then away, the way people glance away from their own photographs. "You read it."

"I read it." Nell turned the book over in her hands. "Gräfin."

Ilse went still.

It wasn't the stillness from the ward, the effortless one, like a statue that had never learned to move. It was the other kind. The caught kind. Nell had seen it on Thursday on the chapel steps, and she knew it now the way she knew a patient's face when the pain came.

"Countess," Nell said. "I looked it up. Countess of where?"

"Of a place that is mostly a reservoir now."

"Right." She hadn't known what she'd expected. Not that. "And the *No*s? You wrote No in the margin. Twelve times."

"He was wrong," Ilse said, "about almost everything."

"Which bits?"

Ilse looked at her for a while. A bus went by the end of the street, lit up and empty, and its sound came and went.

"He thought it was hunger," she said.

"What is it, then?"

Ilse didn't answer. Her eyes went down, very slowly, from Nell's face to the open neck of the dressing gown, and stayed there, and Nell felt it like a hand.

She swallowed. She saw Ilse see her swallow.

"They found the blood," Nell said, too fast. "All three units. Back in the fridge. You said you'd put it right."

"I did."

"So you didn't drink it."

"No."

"Then who wrote my name?"

"Someone who used to know me." Ilse's voice was flat and quiet. "She came to see what had become of me. She found you instead, and she thought it would be amusing. She will not write your name again."

"Is she—" Nell stopped. "Did you—"

"That is a complicated question," Ilse said, "for people like us."

People like us. Nell stood on her own doorstep with the cold coming up through her bare ankles and let that go past her, because if she picked it up and looked at it properly she was going to have to sit down.

"Give me your wrist," she said instead.

Ilse's eyebrows rose a fraction.

"I've wanted to since Monday. And I'm off duty, so it's not a clinical procedure. It's just rude."

There was a pause. Then Ilse took her right hand out of her coat pocket and held it out, palm up, the cuff falling back from a wrist as white as a candle.

Nell put the book under her arm and laid two fingers in the groove beside the tendon and looked at her watch.

Nothing. Cold skin. Ice on a pond. The second hand went round. Nell stood very still, the way you had to, and counted the way she'd been taught on her first placement, under her breath, and the canal lay flat behind Ilse's shoulder, and the launderette sign buzzed.

There. Faint as a moth against glass.

She waited. The second hand went on round.

There.

At the end of a full minute she took her fingers away.

"Four," she said. Her voice had gone odd. "Four a minute."

"I was nervous," said Ilse.

Nell laughed. It came out shocked and too loud, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, and over the top of it she saw something happen in Ilse's face that she had not seen before. It wasn't a smile, quite. It was what happened just before one, the moment when a face decides.

Then Ilse reached out and took Nell's wrist in turn.

Her fingers settled exactly on the pulse, as if they had known all along where it would be. She didn't look at a watch. She tilted her head very slightly, the way Nell had seen musicians tilt their heads to listen to a tuning fork.

"A hundred and six," Ilse said.

"That's my resting."

"It is not."

Her hand left Nell's wrist. It didn't go back to her pocket. It came up, slow enough to be stopped, slow enough that there was all the time in the world for Nell to step back, and Nell watched it come and didn't step back. Cold fingertips touched the side of her neck, just below the hinge of her jaw, where the big artery ran up close under the skin, and rested there.

"Here, I think," Ilse said.

Nell stopped breathing.

The fingers didn't press. They lay along the side of her throat, light as the edge of a page, and under them Nell's pulse went on hammering, stupid and obvious, a hundred and six, a hundred and ten, and she knew Ilse could feel every beat. Ilse's pupils had opened. The black had swallowed what little colour there had been. And for the first time since Monday night, Nell saw her breathe: one long, slow breath in, through the nose, the way a person breathes in on the first warm day of the year.

"Nell," Ilse said.

Just her name. As if it were the answer to something.

On the towpath behind the railings, a fox screamed.

It was the worst sound in England. A woman being murdered, a baby in a well, a door torn off a hinge. It split the street in two, and Nell flinched so hard the book slid out from under her arm and hit the step, and when she looked up the fingers were gone from her neck and Ilse was standing at the kerb, two full paces back, with both hands in her pockets and her face turned towards the canal.

Her jaw was set. Her shoulders under the dark coat were rigid.

Nell bent and picked up the book. Her hands were shaking. She held on to it.

"Right," she said. Her voice came out hoarse. "Right. It's freezing. You're freezing, you're always freezing. I've got a bottle of red upstairs someone gave me at Christmas. Come up."

Ilse turned her head.

"I do not drink wine."

"No, I'd gathered." Nell pushed the street door wider with her back, so that the light from the stairwell fell yellow down the step and over the strip of brass across the threshold. "Tea, then. Or nothing. Sit on my settee and drink nothing. I don't care." She heard herself, and kept going anyway. "I'm asking you in, Ilse. Properly. Out loud. Come in."

Ilse looked at the threshold.

She looked at it for a long time. At the worn brass strip, and the yellow light lying across it, and Nell's bare ankles just inside. Her face did not move. Only her hand came out of her pocket, and hung at her side, and the fingers closed, slowly, on nothing.

She didn't come up the step.

"Why not?" Nell said. It came out smaller than she meant it to.

Ilse lifted her eyes from the threshold to Nell's face.

"Because I'd stay."