The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Roof Fund

Willa refuses to hand over half her purse and is locked back in the tower for a month, learns every girl pays Ansel, and at midnight Eamon sends up bread and a drawing of the bell rope.

"Keep the other half too," I said. "I won three hundred. I'll take three hundred or nothing."

Principal Ansel set down her tea.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You didn't bleed for it. I did."

The matron, who was standing behind me, took a step closer.

Principal Ansel looked at me for a long moment and her smile went away.

I had never seen it go away before.

Underneath, her face was flat and tired and it did not like me.

"Sit down, Willa."

I stayed standing.

"You have a bed, three meals a day and a roof over your head," she said. "Every bit of it is paid for by my kindness. Do you know what the girls do when I ask them for half?"

"I can guess."

"They say thank you." She turned to the matron. "No pass for the month. The Quiet Room, and the door stays locked."

I was walked up three flights again, past a window where I could see the hayfield.

The lock turned behind me.

My room was narrow, with an iron bed, a bucket and one barred window.

An old iron stovepipe ran up through the floor in the corner, from the warm dormitory below.

I sat on the bed and put my forehead on my knees.

My ribs hurt, my lip was split and the whole room smelled of cold stone.

At ten o'clock the stovepipe coughed.

I thought it was the wind, and then it coughed again, a small dry cough, and a voice came up out of the metal.

"Are you the one who put the miller's daughter on the floor?"

I knelt by the pipe.

"The champion?"

"That's her. Everyone in the dorm knows. A girl who was at the barn told us the whole thing."

It was a young voice, no older than fifteen.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"We don't use names in the pipe. She listens." She coughed again. "I'm the one with the cough. You know me."

I did. She slept at the end of the dormitory by the stove.

"Did you give her half?" I asked.

"We all do. Every girl, every purse." The pipe went quiet and then the voice came back softer. "Nobody ever said no."

"How long?"

"Since I came. Two years." A pause. "I keep count in a notebook in my mattress. It's a lot of money."

I looked at my wrapped hands in the dark.

"Don't write my name in it," I said. "Not yet."

"I wasn't going to."

I heard a small scrape in the pipe and then something dropped down the length of it with a thump.

I reached into the mouth of the flue and found a heel of bread wrapped in a napkin.

"It's from supper," she said. "She'll starve you for the full month. She did it to a girl last winter."

I ate the bread sitting on the floor with my back to the wall.

It was the best thing I had ever eaten.

On the ninth day, Principal Ansel came up herself.

She stood in the door in her good cardigan with the keys in her hand, and did not come all the way in.

"I thought you'd be sorry by now," she said.

"I'm not."

"No." She sighed, and a little of the kindness came back into her face. "You're stubborn. That's from your family. The lawyer calls me every quarter, you know, to ask if you've stopped asking questions."

I went still.

"Which lawyer?"

"Never mind which." She smiled at me. "I told him you were quiet. A quiet girl is a safe girl, Willa. You can stay quiet here as long as you like."

She shut the door and locked it, and I heard the keys go down the stairs.

I sat down on the bed and thought about that word, lawyer.

My parents had a lawyer.

My aunt Odile had a lawyer.

I did not have one, and had never had one, and still somebody called about me every three months.

That night, around midnight, something hit the window.

I stood up on the bed and looked out through the bars.

Forty feet below, a man stood in the hayfield with his collar up and a bag over his shoulder.

He threw another stone, and it clicked against the glass.

I shoved the window open as far as the bars allowed.

"Bannon?"

"Quiet," he called up, low. "Ansel cancelled every girl's pass for the month. Nobody has come to my barn. I wondered why."

"She found out about the purse."

"I figured." He looked up at the tower. "Do you have anything to put on a string?"

I had a sock.

I tied it to the long thread I'd pulled from my blanket and let it down the face of the wall until it swung just above his hand.

He put something in the sock and I hauled it up.

Bread, cheese, two apples and a folded paper.

I unfolded the paper by the window light.

There was a drawing on it, done in pencil, of the east side of the tower.

A rope hung down the outside of the wall from the bell chamber above my room.

Under it he had written: Forty feet. Can you climb down?

I looked up at the ceiling beam I had hung from every day for three years.

Above it was the trapdoor to the bell chamber, painted shut.

I looked at my arms.

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