I didn't answer her.
Not because I couldn't — because the answer was the least useful thing in the room, and I'd learned that evening exactly what it cost to say a true thing without knowing what it was worth. So I asked a question instead.
"When did he start coming round?"
Lizzie looked at the cigarette in her hand as though she'd forgotten it was there.
"That's what you've got? I ask you a straight question and you—"
"When."
"Middle of last month." She drew on it. "After the Lees cut up one of his lads at the Marquis. He came up my stairs and sat on the bed and didn't take his coat off, and I thought, right, he's been drinking, and he hadn't."
"What did he say?"
"I told you what he said. The babies. The house. Martha's not a year gone and the eldest is nine and she's doing the cooking, Jack, nine years old, and he sat there and told me that like I was his priest." She flicked ash onto my floor. "And you're asking me when. Like a copper."
"Did he ask you anything?"
"No."
"Did he say the word."
"No. He talked about the house." Her eyes narrowed. "Three times, he talked about the house. Third time he asked me if I'd ever thought about — not that. About getting off the stairs. What I'd do if I had a different way to live." She stopped. "And I said I'd think about it. Because that's what you say."
That was the third visit. I could see the shape of it now, the way you see a road when the fog goes — not the whole road, just enough of it to know where it went. And I saw something else with it, from six nights before: her hand on her folded arm, on her own landing, the thumb going still at his name and starting again. I'd noticed it and I'd talked myself out of it in the same breath, because I'd known where the story went and hadn't thought the story could already be under way without me.
I'd remembered where the road ended. I hadn't checked whether anyone was on it.
"You're not surprised," Lizzie said.
I looked up.
"John Shelby's been sat on my bed talking about his kitchen, and I've just told you, and you've not blinked. You're not surprised he wants a wife." She put the cigarette out on the edge of my desk. "You're worried what I'll do."
I said nothing.
"You already knew."
"Lizzie—"
"Before I told you. Before tonight." She'd gone very still. "You told Tommy Shelby his brother's going to want to marry and be told no, and you knew who, and you knew it was—"
She stopped.
I watched her get there. It took about a second and it was worse than any of the questions.
"It's me."
I didn't say anything. She'd asked me not to lie to her about the small things and I'd told myself I wouldn't, and this wasn't a small thing, and the only honest thing I had was silence, so I gave her that.
She sat down. Not in her chair — on the edge of the desk, with her back half to me, the way she'd sat on her own bed with the cigarettes. For a while neither of us said anything and I could hear Kettle moving about below, and a cart in the lane.
"Four children," she said eventually. Not to me. "Four."
"Yes."
"I've known him since I was fifteen. I've had him up those stairs more times than—" She shook her head. "He's not a bad man. He's not a good one. He's John."
"Yes."
"And you knew he'd want me before he knew it himself." She turned round. "How."
"I can't—"
"Don't. Don't tell me you can't. You told Tommy you couldn't and he took eighty pound off you for it and you let him. I'm not Tommy. I'm asking."
"I know you're asking."
"Then answer."
I gave her what I could, which was less than she wanted and more than was safe.
"I need him to go to Tommy," I said. "John. I need him to walk into that house and say it to Tommy's face, and I need nobody to have got to him first. Not you, not me, not anybody. He has to do it the way he was going to do it before tonight."
"Why."
"Because I need to know if something I know is still true."
She looked at me for a long moment, and I could see her turning that over and not liking the weight of it.
"That's the strangest thing anybody's ever said to me in this room," she said, "and I've had a man in here who wanted to be called Mother."
"I know how it sounds."
"You don't. You've no idea how it sounds." She stood up. "So let me say it back to you. Six nights ago you came up my stairs with a bottle and told me nobody goes up them but you. You put your name on me. You said your brothers would have to come through you." Her voice hadn't risen. It had gone flatter, which was worse. "And now you're stood there telling me not to get in the way of your brother wanting to marry me."
"That's not—"
"That's exactly what it is. Say it isn't."
I couldn't. It was.
"You want me to sit on my hands," Lizzie said, "and let John Shelby come up my stairs and say the word, so that Tommy can say no to him, so that you win a bet. That's what tonight was. That's what I'm for."
"It's not a bet."
"Then what is it?"
"It's—" I stopped. There was no end to that sentence I could give her. "It's the difference between me being here in a fortnight and not."
Her mouth opened and then shut.
"You're not going to tell me what that means either."
"No."
"Christ." She picked up her cigarettes. "Christ, Jack."
I should have left it there. Every bit of sense I had said leave it. She'd got the shape of the thing and she was frightened by it, and frightened was better than angry, and the smart move was to let her walk out the door frightened.
But she'd said John Shelby come up my stairs and say the word, and I'd seen it when she said it — the bed, the coat still on, his voice — and I heard myself say, before I'd decided to:
"And what if he does?"
She turned at the door.
"What if he comes up your stairs before he goes to Tommy. What if he says it to you first." I didn't know why I was still talking. "What do you say?"
"That's my business."
"Lizzie—"
"What would you like me to say, Jack? No, I'm spoken for? I'm on two pound a week and a key?" She was angry now, properly, and it suited her better than frightened had. "Or yes? So you can watch your brother go and get told no and know you were right? Which one keeps you alive?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I don't know what I'd want you to say. I know what I need to happen and I don't know what I'd want, and those aren't the same, and I've been stood here trying not to find out which one I'd pick. So don't ask me."
She looked at me a long time.
"You'd have him marry me," she said, "if it kept you alive. You'd sit there and let him."
I didn't answer.
"That's what I thought."
She put her hand on the door.
"Here's what you get," Lizzie said. "I'll not go looking for him. I'll not warn him off and I'll not warm him up, and whatever he was going to do he can do without me pushing. That much you can have, because I don't want to be in the middle of whatever this is any more than you do." She opened it. "But if John Shelby comes up my stairs and asks me a question, what I say to him is mine. Not yours. Not Tommy's. Mine. You paid for the desk. You didn't pay for that."
"Lizzie—"
"Goodnight, Mr Shelby."
She went. I listened to her on the stairs — quick, not stopping on the loose one — and the street door, and then Kettle's floor, and then nothing.
She'd taken her cigarettes. She'd taken her key. I stood in the office with five and six in my pocket and worked out that the key was the only claim on her I had left — and it was in her pocket, not mine, and she'd chosen to keep it there.
She was in before me on Tuesday.
I came up the stairs at eight and the door was open and the fire was lit — she'd lit it, from a scuttle she must have carried up herself — and she was at the desk with the post in front of her and a pen in her hand and she didn't look up.
"Morning, Mr Shelby."
"Don't."
"Two letters. One's a bill from the stationer's, which is odd, because you paid him." She set it aside. "The other's from a Mr Hollins on Coventry Road who'd like to discuss a sum of one pound owing and would be obliged if you'd call. He's underlined obliged." She looked up for the first time. "That's the moneylender."
"I know who it is."
"He writes a nice hand for a man who doubles debts."
She went back to the post. It was the most professional she'd ever been with me and every word of it was a small closed door, and I stood in my own office and understood that she was going to be very good at this job and that I'd have to earn the rest back on some other ledger.
James came at half past.
The cut had scabbed along its whole length and pulled at the corner of his mouth when he spoke. He'd shaved round it, carefully. He took his cap off in the doorway and said "Mr Shelby" and "Miss Stark" and stood there until I told him to sit, and then he opened a notebook he'd brought himself and I saw that he'd already begun.
"Every book I know, between here and Sparkbrook," he said. "There's more I don't. Who runs it, what it takes on a good Saturday, what it's meant to take, and where the gap is." He turned the notebook round. Columns. Names. Figures in a neat hand that hadn't wobbled. "Four of them are light. Not skimming — badly kept. A man who can't add. A man who drinks. One who's frightened of the Lees and pays them out the Shelby book to keep them off."
I went to take the notebook and my right hand didn't close properly on it. Two of the knuckles had scabbed and the third was still thick. I picked it up with the left.
At the foot of the last page, under the four light books, in the same neat hand: Fri — wages, £2. He'd written it the way he'd written everything else. A figure that was owed, with a date on it.
He saw me see it and didn't say anything, and I didn't either. A man who keeps books for a living had sat in this office ten minutes and looked at the empty cabinet, and a man who can read a ledger can read an empty one.
Four pound by Friday. Tommy had the eighty. Polly had the books. The office had been paid for with money that no longer existed and now it had to make some, this week, out of streets that had watched me cut a man and hadn't yet decided what that bought.
"The four that are light," I said. "Start with the one who's paying the Lees."
James wrote it down.
"And Lizzie—"
"Miss Stark."
"—who came through that door last week, and what they wanted. All of it. Not the names. What they wanted."
She turned a page in the ledger and I saw that it was already there.
I was still reading James's columns at ten when I heard the boots on the stairs, and knew them: three quick, and the pause on the loose one.
John came in with his cap on and his hands in his pockets and stood in the doorway looking at the room the way Lizzie had on her first morning — desk, cabinet, chimney, fire.
Then he saw her.
She didn't look up. She had the pen in her hand and the ledger open and she wrote something in it, slowly, and I watched John Shelby stand in the door of my office and look at Lizzie Stark sitting behind a desk with her hair up, and I watched his face try to fit the two things together, and from where I sat it didn't manage it.
"Lizzie," he said.
"John."
That was all. She went on writing.
He looked at me.
"Send her out."
"John—"
"Send her out, Jack."
I put the notebook down. Lizzie stood before I'd said anything, and took the post and went out past him onto the landing, and he stepped aside to let her, and she didn't touch him and he watched her go.
He waited until the door had shut.
"Jack."
"What?"
"Need to talk."