Hattie said, “Old Maxwell and your grandfather thought that street names from your part of town would be a good influence on the people in here—over there’s Yorkminster Place, and where we’re going there’s Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle.” Her black eyes flashed at him as she led them into the passage.
“Doesn’t the mail ever get mixed up?” Tom asked.
“There’s no mail here,” Hattie said from in front of him. “No police, either, and no firemen, no doctors, no schools, except for what they teach themselves, no stores but liquor stores, no nothin’ but what you see.”
They had emerged into a wide cobbled lane lined with high blackened wooden walls inset here and there with slanted windows. The same white inset letters, some of which had fallen off or been removed, gave its name as Vic or a Terrace. A crowd of dirty children ran past the front of the lane, splashing in a stream that ran down the middle of the street. Now the odor was almost visible in the air, and Sarah held an edge of the cape over her nose and mouth.
Hattie jumped over the stream and led them up a flight of wooden steps. Another crooked flight, marked Waterloo Lane, led upward toward darkness. Hattie scurried down a murky corridor, and began to move quickly toward the next set of stairs.
“What do they do here?” Tom asked. “How do they live?”
“They sell things to Percy—their own hair, or their own rags. Some get out, like Nancy. These days, most young ones manage to get out, soon as they can. Some of ’em like it here.”
They had come to a wide space where wooden walkways spanned the fronts of the buildings on all sides. Rows of doors stood on the far sides of the walks. A man leaned against the railing of the second walkway, gazing down at them and smoking a pipe.
“You see,” Hattie said, “this here is a world, and we’re in the center of it now. Nobody sees this world, but here it is.” She looked up at the man leaning on the railing. “Is Nancy home, Bill?”
The man pointed with his pipe at a door farther along the walkway.
Hattie led them up the wooden steps to the second walkway. “How is she, Bill?” she asked when they had come near to him.
The man turned his head and looked at each of them from beneath the brim of his soft cap. His face was very dirty, full of hard lines, and in the grey light of the Courts, his cap, face, and pipe all seemed the same muddy color. He took a long time to speak. “Busy.”
“And you, Bill?”
He was staring at Sarah’s hair, and again took a long time to respond. “Good. Helped a man move a piano, two days ago.”
“We’ll go along and see her, then,” Hattie said, and Bill turned back to the railing.
The three of them walked down the creaking boards until they had nearly reached the end of the walkway. Tom looked over the railing, and Sarah asked Hattie, “Is Bill a friend of yours?”
“He’s Nancy’s brother,” Hattie said.
Tom would have turned around to make sure he had heard her correctly, but just then a man in a grey suit and a grey turtleneck appeared, moving soundlessly and easily down the steps of the wooden structure over the drainage ditch. Bill took his pipe from his mouth and stepped back from the railing. The man in grey stepped into the Second Court and began walking in a straight line that would bring him directly beneath Tom. Bill gestured for Tom to move back, and Tom hesitated before pushing back from the railing. The man was bald, and his face was a smooth anonymous mask. Tom did not realize that he was Captain Fulton Bishop until he had begun to move back into the protection of the walkway. Hattie knocked on the last door, and knocked again. Captain Bishop glanced up without breaking stride as Tom moved back, and the boy saw his eyes through the gaps in the railing, as alive and alert as two match flames.
Then the door opened, and Captain Bishop passed out of the Second Court and went deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven. His footsteps clicked against the stone. Tom heard Nancy Vetiver saying, “Who’d you bring me, Hattie?”
She smiled from Hattie to Sarah, and then included him in the same smile. She did not recognize him, but he would have known her instantly if he had seen her on any street in Mill Walk. Her hair, a darker blond than Sarah’s, had been cut to a rough shag, and the lines bracketing her mouth seemed deeper, but she was otherwise the same woman who had helped him endure the worst months of his life. He realized that he had loved her absolutely then, and that part of him still did love her.
“An old patient of ours came calling,” Hattie said.
Nancy looked from Sarah to Tom and back to Sarah, trying to work out which was the old patient. “Well, you’d better come on in and find something to sit on, and I’ll be able to spend some time with you in a minute.” She smiled, looking a little baffled but not at all irritated, and stepped back to let them in.
Hattie went in first, then Sarah. Tom moved into the room. Several children, some of them bandaged, sat in chairs pushed against the wall. All of them were gaping at Sarah, who had pulled her hair out of the collar of the cape. “Oh, my God,” Nancy said as he went past her. “It’s Tom Pasmore.” She laughed out loud—a real ringing laugh that sounded out of place in Elysian Courts—and then put her arms around him and squeezed him. Her head came to the middle of his chest. “How’d you get so big?” Nancy pulled away and crowed to Hattie, “He’s a giant!”
“That’s what I told him,” Hattie said, “but it didn’t shrink him any.”
Now all the children in the chairs gaped at Tom instead of Sarah. His face grew hot and red.
“And I know you too,” Nancy said to Sarah, after giving Tom a final squeeze. “I remember seeing you with Tom, way back then—Sarah.”
“How can you remember me?” Sarah said, looking pleased and embarrassed. “I was only there once!”
“Well, I remember most of the things that happen to my good patients.” Smiling broadly, Nancy put her hands on her hips and looked them both over. “Why don’t you sit down wherever you can find space, and I’ll take care of the rest of these desperate characters, and then we’ll have a long talk, and I’ll find out why Hattie dragged you into this godforsaken place.”
Sarah twirled the cape off her shoulders and folded it over the back of a chair. The children gaped. She and Tom sat on a padded bench, and Hattie plunked herself down on the edge of the little low bed beside them.
Nancy went from child to child, changing bandages and dispensing vitamins, listening to whispered complaints, stroking heads and holding hands, now and then leading some bedraggled boy or girl to a sink at the back of the room and making them wash. She looked down throats and into ears, and when one sticklike little boy burst into tears, she took him into her lap and comforted him until he stopped.
Two old quilts, washed almost to colorlessness, hung on the walls. An ornate lamp with most of its bulbs and fixtures intact stood on a drum table like the one in his grandfather’s living room. An empty gilt frame, clearly salvaged from the dump, hung on the far wall near the sink.
Hattie saw him looking at it, and said, “I brought that for Nancy—looks almost as pretty empty as filled, but I’m looking for another picture of Mr. Rembrandt, like the one I got. You saw it.”
“Oh, Hattie, I don’t need a picture of Rembrandt,” Nancy said, bandaging a splint onto a boy’s finger. “I’d rather have a picture of you any day. Anyhow, I’ll be back in my own place before long.”
“Could be,” Hattie said. “When you are, I’ll come in here, couple times a week, to bandage up these little ruffians. If your brother won’t mind.”
When the last child had been sent off, Nancy washed her hands, dried them on a dish towel, and sat down on one of the chairs against the wall and at last looked at Tom hard and long. “I am so glad to see you, even here,” she said.