Ewan stood at the top of the stairs. He was not performing. His face – usually animated, usually held in the configuration of charm that was his default operating system – was stripped. Raw. His mouth was set in a line that had nothing to do with humour. His eyes were on the Ledger, on my hand, on the red ink under my fingertip.
He came down the stairs slowly. His footsteps were loud in the vault’s acoustics. He reached the table and stood across from me and looked at the page and his face did something I had never seen a face do – itcollapsed inward, the architecture of the performance failing, the charm and the warmth and the ease dissolving in a single breath and leaving behind the man underneath.
The man underneath was wounded. Old and deep and carrying it the way a building carries a crack in its foundation – you can’t see it from outside, you can’t tell from the surface, but the whole structure is organised around it.
“You found her,” he said.
“I found a name.”
“That’s all there is. A name and a date and a cost that Lachlan absorbed, because I asked him to, and the asking was the reason I’m here.” He looked at me. The green light of the vault caught his jaw, his throat. “Everything I’ve told you about why I joined – it’s true. But it started with her.”
I didn’t speak. I took my hand off the page. I closed the Ledger carefully and I sat in the cold chair and I looked at Ewan Ramsay with his cracked face and his exposed wound and I didn’t know what to say to a man who had just shown me the thing he’d been hiding behind every smile, every joke, every bright and warm and perfectly deployed gesture I’d seen from him in three weeks.
“Will you tell me?” I said.
He sat down on the vault floor. His back against the stone wall. His knees drawn up. He looked at the Ledger on the table and then he looked at me and he said: “Not here. Upstairs.”
He got up. He held the door. We went upstairs and the vault sealed behind us with the cold, pressurised sound of a room returning to its secrets.
CHAPTER 17
The Stolen Grace Reveal
MORVEN
He followed me from the vault. He closed the door of my room behind him and sat on the floor with his back against the wardrobe. I sat on the end of the bed. Neither of us spoke for a while.
The room was dark except for the landing light filtering under the door and the distant glow of the Clyde through the curtains – the silver-grey light that Cairndhu produced at night, when the moon caught the water and the water threw it back and the whole coastline existed in a permanent state of half-illumination. It was enough to see his face. It was enough to see that the face he was wearing was not the one he wore for the world.
“Cat was my half-sister,” he said. “Different mothers. Same father – Callum Ramsay, who was a dockworker and a drinker and a man who loved two women and married neither of them and left them bothwith children he couldn’t afford and memories he didn’t deserve. Cat’s mother was a woman named Jean Alloway. She lived in the council flats on the east side. She worked in the chip shop on Marine Parade.” He paused. “The same chip shop.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Cat danced. She started at St.Jude’s when she was eight. Isobel took her in – Isobel takes in everyone who walks through the door with the right feet, and Cat had the right feet. She was –” He stopped. His jaw worked. The landing light caught the line of his throat and I watched him swallow the word he’d been about to say and replace it with a different one. “She was gifted. Not in the way people use the word when they mean good. In the way they use it when they mean something they can’t explain.”
“She auditioned for the junior company recommendation,” I said.
“She was sixteen. She’d been working towards it for three years. She practised every day. She walked to St.Jude’s from the east side every morning before school and every evening after, and Jean worked double shifts to pay for shoes and leotards, and Cat was going to be the thing that proved it had been worth it. All of it. Every chip she’d fried and every shift she’d pulled and every night she’d gone to bed exhausted in a flat that smelled of cooking oil and bleach.”
He looked at the floor.
“Isobel said no. She said Cat wasn’t ready. She said she needed another year, maybe two. She said the technique was there but the maturity wasn’t, and she wouldn’t recommend someone who would crack under the pressure of a professional environment.”
“Was she right?”
“I don’t know.” He met my eyes. “I’ve never been able to work that out. Whether Isobel was being honest or being protective or being the kind of teacher who makes decisions about other people’s lives and believes the decision is theirs to make. I don’t know. I was nineteen. I was angry. I watched my sister come home from that studio and not speak for three days and then stop dancing entirely, and I didn’t know who to blame so I blamed Isobel, and then I blamed the girl who got the recommendation instead.”
The room was very quiet. The Clyde moved outside the window.
“Me,” I said.
“You.” He didn’t say it with venom. He said it flat, exhausted, like a man who’d carried a thing for seven years and had examined it from every angle and had discovered that the anger, when he finally took it apart, was not anger at all. “Morven Gault, fourteen years old, recommended by Isobel Drummond for the summer intensive at the Royal. The one Cat should have got. The one that led to everything – the vocational school, the apprenticeship, the company. You got the trajectory. Cat got the chip shop.”
“What happened to her?”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was looking at the wall behind me, at the plaster, at nothing.
“She applied for university. Social work. She lasted a year and a half. There was a boyfriend – not a good one. Jean got ill.Cat came back to look after her. Jean died. Cat was twenty-one and alone in the east-side flat with no qualifications and no mother and no ballet and no brother who was doing anything useful about any of it, because her brother was already inside the Syndicate by then, already doing what Lachlan told him, alreadytelling himself that the money he sent to Cat every month was enough.”
