with his generation, believed himself to be in the midst of a grand struggle that would alter the face of the world. I didn’t have such pretensions, but I did sense, however dimly, that I had, however incidentally, caught on to something significant beyond my small life.
I continued this routine for a month, with little alteration, until one evening, when I went down underneath the house and there was Corrine in place of Mr. Fields.
“And how are you finding things here?” she said.
“Most strange,” I said. “It is another life.”
Corrine yawned quietly and sat down. She put her elbow on the desk, and her chin in her palm, regarding me with tired eyes. Her hair was pulled back in black curls. The lantern-light tumbled shadows onto her face. Her aspect was of an ancestress though she barely outranked me in years. I recalled her time with Maynard and felt myself becoming enthralled by the breadth of her deception. How little I had known of her then, her intelligence, her savvy, her cunning. Then I felt a shock of fear roil through me. Corrine Quinn, who wore the mask of Quality, was mysterious and powerful. And I had no real notion of her capacities.
“Even you,” I said. “It is a lot to consider. I just…I would never have imagined. Not in a thousand years.”
“Thank you,” she said. And she laughed, clearly delighted in the grand sweep of her deception. “Do you enjoy the writing?”
“I have seen so much lately,” I replied. “I have felt a need to record it, especially my experiences here.”
“Careful with that,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “It dies with me. It does not leave here.”
“Hmm,” she said, her eyes now alight. “I have heard that you have made the library your quarters,” she said. “And that some nights, you have to be practically dragged from its depths.”
“It reminds me of home,” I said.
“And would you go back, if you could? Home?” she asked.
“No. Never,” I said.
She studied me for a moment now, for what I could not be sure. They were always studying me down there. I could feel it, even my fellow agents in training, it seemed, always probing me with questions, watching me when they thought I was not looking. I answered them with as much silence as possible. But there was something about Corrine that compelled me to speak. There was something to her own silence that communicated a deep and particular loneliness, and though we never spoke directly upon the origins of this feeling, I felt it to be cousin to my own.
“When I was down, back there, back at Lockless,” I said, “I had my freedoms—more than most, I should say. But I was still property of another man. Even speaking it as such, here right now to you, lowers me.”
“Indeed,” she said. “And some of us have been down since the days of Rome. Some of us are born into society and told that knowledge is rightfully beyond us, and ornamental ignorance should be our whole aspiration.”
She chuckled and paused a moment, waiting for me to catch her meaning. And when it was apparent that I did, she said, “The mind of woman is weak—this was the word, you see. But now they say that any and all who would aspire to the rank of lady must have some touch of the book. But not too much. No hard study. Nothing that might injure the delicate and girlish mind. Novels. Tales. Proverbs, that sort of thing. No papers. No politics.”
Now Corrine stood and walked over to the desk. And from the desk drawer she retrieved a large envelope.
“But I have not let them dictate to me, Hiram,” she said, holding the envelope. “And I have not simply read, my boy. I have learned their language and custom—even those that should be beyond my station, especially those that should be beyond my station, and that has been the seed of my liberty.”
She walked back over and placed the package before me.
“Open it,” she said.
This I did and found inside of it the life of a man. There were letters to family. There were authorizations. There were certificates of sale.
“This is yours for one week,” she said. “We can’t hold on to this man’s effects forever. What we have here is a selection, random enough so that its absence should not yet alarm him.”
“And what am I to do?” I asked
“Learn him, of course,” she said. “This is a lesson