Sebastian Ashford's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The little cloth bat sat on Sebastian's mantel for three days before he understood what it was telling him. He had carried it home from the shop and set it there because he had nowhere else to put it. Every time he passed, he saw the shopkeeper's hand pushing it across the counter. Every time, he felt the same thing. He was buying minutes at her counter a penny at a time, and he had never once invited her anywhere in return. He had no anywhere. He had a house he had not shown a single person in town. He walked the rooms that afternoon and tried to see them as she would. The stone front looked severe from the road. Tall windows, iron work above the door, a small glass room off the side where someone had once grown lemons. Inside, the front hall was cold and empty. A purple couch stood alone in the parlor, its velvet split at the seams, its wooden feet carved into claws. The last owner had left it because no one wanted to move it. Sebastian had walked past it for eleven days without sitting down. He went out. He bought firewood from the yard behind the smithy. He bought apples and a small round cheese from a stall two doors from her shop. He bought a kettle from the tinker who had watched him with narrow eyes all week. He paid in small coin each time and said his name when asked. By dusk his arms ached and half the street knew he had a house that needed filling. He cleaned the parlor himself. He beat the couch with a broom until the dust stopped rising. He dragged a wooden chair and a shelf of books into the corner by the window and made a small nook there, cushions from a trunk, a folded blanket over the arm. He set the cloth bat on the shelf where she would see it first. In the morning he went to her shop. He bought another penny doll. Then he said the sentence he had practiced on the walk down. "I have a house at the top of the lane. I have never had anyone in it. I would like you to come for tea tomorrow, if the shop can spare you an hour. Bring your niece if it helps." She looked at him a long moment. She was counting something he could not see. "An hour," she said. "With my niece. Tomorrow at four." She did not smile. She wrote it on the slate behind her as if it were an order. But when he stepped back into the street, he understood that the counter between them had moved. He had a door of his own to open now, and half the town had watched him prepare for her to walk through it.