MURDER? IMPOSSIBLE. Not Safiye. Lucy walked backward until she found a wall to stand behind her. She rested until she was able to walk to the train station, where she bought train tickets and a newspaper of which she read a single page as she waited for the train to come. She would go where the map in her purse told her to go, she would find Safiye, Safiye would explain and they would laugh. They’d have to leave the continent, of course. They might even have to earn their livings honestly like Safiye wanted, but please, please please please. This pleading went on inside her for the entire journey, through three train changes and the better part of a day. A mountain seemed to follow along behind each train she took—whenever she looked over her shoulder there it was, keeping pace. She liked to think it was her mountain she was seeing, the one she’d first seen in Grenoble, now trying its best to keep faith with her until she found Safiye.
Safiye’s map led Lucy to a crudely hewn door in a wall. This didn’t look like a door that could open, but a covering for a mistake in the brickwork. The key fit the lock and Lucy walked into a walled garden overrun with roses. She waded through waves of scent, lifting rope-like vines of sweetbriar and eglantine out of her path, her steps scattering pale blue butterflies in every direction. Safiye had said that Lucy would laugh at the size of her gift, and perhaps if Lucy had found her there she would have. After all she’d never been given a secret garden before. But the newspapers were saying that this woman who looked like Safiye had killed her employer, and Lucy was very much afraid that it was true and this gift was the reason. At nightfall she considered sleeping among the roses, all those frilled puffs of air carrying her toward some answer, but it was better to find Safiye than to dream. She spent two weeks flitting around the city listening to talk of the killer lady’s maid. She didn’t dare return to the rose garden, but she wore the key around her neck in the hope and fear that it would be recognized. It wasn’t, and she opted to return to Grenoble before she ran out of money. Her gambler was in hospital. There’d been heavy losses at the blackjack table, his wife had discovered what he’d been up to, developed a wholly unexpected strength (“inhuman strength,” he called it), broken both of his arms, and then moved in with a carpenter who’d clearly been keeping her company while he’d been out working on their finances. Still he was happy to see Lucy: “Fortuna smiles upon me again!” What could Lucy do? She made him soup, and when she wasn’t at his bedside she was picking pockets to help cover the hospital bills. They remain friends to this day: He was impressed by her assumption of responsibility for him and she was struck by the novelty of its never occurring to him to blame anybody else for his problems.
—
A FEW WEEKS after her return to Grenoble there was a spring storm that splashed the streets with moss from the mountaintops. The stormy night turned the window of Lucy’s room into a door; through sleep Lucy became aware that it was more than just rain that rattled the glass . . . someone was knocking. Half-awake, she staggered across the room to turn the latch. When Safiye finally crawled in, shivering and drenched to the bone, they kissed for a long time, kissed until Lucy was fully woken by the chattering of Safiye’s teeth against hers. She fetched a towel, Safiye performed a heart-wrenchingly weak little striptease for her, and Lucy wrapped her love up warm and held her and didn’t ask what she needed to ask.
After a little while Safiye spoke, her voice so perfectly unchanged it was closer to memory than it was to real time.
“Today I asked people about you, and I even walked behind you in the street for a little while. You bought some hat ribbon and a sack of onions, and you got a good deal on the hat ribbon. Sometimes I almost thought you’d caught me watching, but now I’m sure you didn’t know. You’re doing well. I’m proud of you. And all I’ve managed to do is take a key and make a mess of things. I wanted to give you . . . I wanted to give you . . .”
“Sleep,” Lucy said. “Just sleep.” Those were the only words she had the breath to say. But Safiye had come to make her understand about the key, the key, the key, it was like a mania, and she wouldn’t sleep until Lucy heard her explanations.