Wednesdays
From the diary of Miss Penelope Holloway, 27th of October:
I am now formally a student of Professor Caelmont. Wednesdays, four o’clock, one mark twenty the month, negotiated by me against my own father, who opened at two marks against himself and never recovered. Today the Professor examined my soul and pronounced it the most ordinary he has ever read. Clara got mirrored and I got ordinary. I have decided to be delighted. Somebody in this group ought to be normal.
Penny Holloway knocked at thirteen minutes to four.
“You’re early,” Lucian said.
“I’m punctual,” she said, coming in. “Four o’clock is when the lesson starts. If I arrive at four, we spend the first quarter hour on how I am, and Mother says I am to stop telling people how I am, because I tell them.” She took the second chair, set a paper bag on the desk (Mottram’s, tied with string) and folded her hands in a fair imitation of a model student. “Those are for the middle of the lesson. There’s always a bad patch in the middle. Where do we begin?”
Lucian regarded his second student.
He had taught Clara Vance on Tuesday and would teach her again on Friday, and that work had the clean shape of an engineering problem: a mislabeled soul, a mirrored curriculum, a measurable climb. He had no idea, sitting down opposite the bag of biscuits, what teaching Penelope Holloway would turn out to be. He had accepted her because refusing her had proved structurally impossible, and because she had recommended him to Clara when recommending him was a joke, and he paid his debts.
“We begin,” he said, “with what you want.”
“From the lessons?”
“From the lessons.”
Penny considered it seriously, visibly, thoroughly, at length, in the way of a person taking an examination she had not studied for and did not intend to fail.
“Wednesdays,” she said at last.
“Wednesdays.”
“I have Wednesdays,” she explained, “and nothing in them. Clara has a purpose now; you gave her one on Tuesday, she wrote to me about it, four pages, both sides; she’s never crossed her lines in her life and she crossed them twice. Tomas (you don’t know Tomas yet) has a purpose, he was born with one, it’s exhausting. I have an allowance and a great many opinions.” She squared the biscuit bag by a quarter inch. “My tutors say I lack application. I’ve decided to apply myself somewhere on purpose and see what happens.”
“Why me?”
“Because your lessons won’t be lessons,” she said. “Nobody who does what you did at the station house teaches out of a primer.”
That was not an answer, and it was also, he noted, a completely accurate prediction. He let it stand.
“Very well. Before anything else, I examine you. Every tutor begins the same way; you’ll find me no different.”
“Clara says you’re extremely different.”
“The examination is the same.”
It was, to the visible portion of a percent. He set out the College’s standard reading-frame and a lens, and did with instruments what the cloud had done from the doorway of the plate-room a fortnight ago, and confirmed, at the pace the instruments permitted, what he already knew.
Penelope Holloway, Circle 2, fourth stage. Density: adequate. Quality: adequate. Lattice: regular, right-handed, textbook. No mirror. No scarring. No anomaly of any classification. He had read several hundred souls since the cloud had given him the means, and hers was, by a wide margin, the most ordinary among them, ordinary to a degree that approached distinction, a soul the Whitsun surveys could have used for their frontispiece.
“Well?” said Penny, who had held still for the lens with her eyes crossed slightly, in case that helped.
“Your soul is the most ordinary I have ever read.”
She took this in.
“The most,” she said.
“Of several hundred.”
“So in a manner of speaking,” said Penny, sitting up, “I’m exceptional.”
“In a manner of speaking so narrow as to be structurally unsound—”
“Clara got mirrored,” she said, with relish, “and I got most ordinary. Wait until I tell her. She’ll be so relieved. She worries one of us is normal and it isn’t her.” She unfolded her hands, the model student dissolving, the real one arriving. “If my soul’s ordinary, why are my marks peculiar? Go on. Nobody’s ever had a theory that survived a term.”
“Describe the peculiarity. Precisely.”
“Examinations: high, but wobbly. Practicals: I pass the ones the tutors expect me to fail and fail the ones they expect me to pass. Drills—” she made a gesture of dropping something small over the side of a boat. “I can’t do drills. I don’t mean I do them badly. I mean I have never finished one. Something happens to time inside a drill. A drill is ten minutes long and four hours wide.”
“Show me. The Whitsun third form, [Ward-knot], as drilled. Ten repetitions.”
She drew her wand (service pattern, scuffed, a strap of ribbon around the grip for no reason he could establish) and began the third form, and Lucian watched the most instructive collapse he had seen in his teaching career, which was, admittedly, eight days long.
Repetition one: clean. Textbook. Better than Clara’s best.
Repetition two: adequate.
Repetition three: the form wandered, developed an unnecessary loop, and finished as something that was not a ward-knot but might have held a parcel closed.
Repetition four did not occur. Penny had stopped, wand lowered, and was looking out the window at the fog with the expression of a passenger on a long crossing.
“Miss Holloway.”
“There,” she said, returning. “You see. Three. That’s my record in company. The loop was new, though. Did you like the loop?”
“Set the wand down.” He took the chalk, considered his second student, and revised the entire premise of the session (which, one thread observed, was becoming the defining activity of his teaching practice). Tuesday’s problem had been a curriculum printed in the wrong direction. Wednesday’s problem was not the curriculum at all. Her forms were sound. Her soul was sound. It was her attention that would not drill: it engaged and vanished on its own schedule, and no repetition survived it.
So he stopped asking her to repeat things.
“New exercise. The porter has confiscated a parcel of Mottram’s biscuits belonging to a student. The parcel sits in the lodge, on the counter, behind the grate. The porter is asleep. The grate is warded with a Whitsun third form. Untie it.”
Penny’s whole posture changed. She came forward in the chair.
“Whose biscuits?”
“Yours.”
“The villain,” she said, took up the wand, and cast the counter-release to the third form (a form she had never completed ten repetitions of in her life) cleanly, precisely, and backward from the standard order, starting from the knot’s far anchor and unwinding it the direction nobody was taught to.
Lucian looked at the dissolved ward-knot for a moment.
“Again,” he said. “The porter has two grates.”
She did it again. Different route. Also clean.
He ran the trial six ways over the following hour, and the pattern held through every one. Ask her to drill a form: three repetitions and the harbor fog. Put the same form inside a story: a locked parcel, a stuck window, a wager with an imaginary porter who grew, over the hour, into a figure of considerable villainy and a name (Mr. Grimble). She executed it instantly, exactly, and by routes he could not predict. The forms came out correct and reversed, correct and inverted, correct and reassembled, as if she had taken the lock apart in her lap and put it back together her own way, every single time, without ever having been taught the standard way properly at all.
“Diagnosis,” he said at last, setting down the chalk. He gave it to her plainly, colleague to colleague, because Tuesday had taught him that this was the only kind of telling worth doing. “There is nothing peculiar in your soul. The peculiarity is in your attention. It does not repeat; it solves. A drill is a solved problem repeated ten times, which is why a drill is four hours wide: you finished it at repetition one and served the other nine as a sentence. Your tutors have been drilling a student who is only present for problems. So. My curriculum for you will contain no drills. It will contain problems that happen, incidentally, to require the drilled forms. You will do every drill in the book this term, Miss Holloway. You will simply never be told which one you are doing.”
Penny had listened to this with her chin in her hands.
“Mr. Grimble will feature.”
“Mr. Grimble is now on the syllabus.”
“This is the finest school in the world,” she said. “What’s my homework?”
He had prepared it while he spoke, two threads assembling the term’s disguises while the front of him talked. “The west sundial in the fellows’ garden runs four minutes proud, and has for years, and nobody knows why. Find out why. You may not ask the gardeners. Report Wednesday next.”
“Is that a real mystery or a lesson dressed up?”
“You’ll never know.”
“Professor,” said Penny, with enormous satisfaction, “neither will you.” She stood, retrieved one biscuit from the bag as commission, and left him the rest (payment, apparently, for the villainy of Mr. Grimble) and gathered her coat. At the door she paused, struck by business.
“Three things. One: when Clara’s ready to show someone the mirror-writing, she’ll want it to be me, so I ought to attend a Friday, purely as furniture. Two: the station house. When’s our next crime? Sergeant Bell’s youngest is teething and I promised the desk a report. Three—” she frowned, recovering it. “Three was about the sundial. It’ll come back to me. Good afternoon, Professor.”
The door closed.
Lucian sat for a moment in the quiet, reviewing the session’s ledger. Somewhere in the past two hours, without any point he could identify as the moment of agreement, he had acquired: a standing obligation to schedule crimes; a Friday observer, pending Clara’s consent, described as furniture; and a syllabus containing a fictional villain to whom he was now apparently committed for the term.
He examined the sequence twice and could not find where refusing any of it had been possible. It was the Watch runner’s experience, and the ribbon-negotiated fee, and her father opening at two marks against himself. The girl did not win arguments. She arranged for them never to occur.
The most ordinary soul in the kingdom. He filed the reading with the rest of Wednesday, and noted, in passing, that his week now had a rota: Lara on Thursdays, Clara Tuesdays and Fridays, Penny and Mr. Grimble on Wednesdays, and the Watch whenever the city produced a corpse worth a guinea. A month ago his week had contained one appointment and a lecture that ended his career.
The fog came up the east range with the evening. Downstairs, pinned to the Commissions Board between a lost cat and a warding inspection, a white card had gone up that afternoon, offering eight marks concerning a chimney in Milk Court that had begun, according to the card, to breathe.
He would see it Thursday.
He turned up the lamp, took out the fold-lattice notes, and gave the night to the seventh family of forms.