A Watch of Nightingales

Chapter One

ONE Mara heard the voice from a long way off, a girl calling the doves. She stood alone in the stone courtyard, listening. She knew without seeing that the girl’s hands were cupped close to her face, as if she were whispering a secret into another girl’s ear. Mara waited, but no bird answered, and so she pulled the heavy door closed, scattering the cote of doves roosting above her. The rush of their wings was like ›uttering pages, a sound Mara believed she had heard all her life: not so much books, but scores, hymnals, librettos, singers ‹nding their places, waiting for the music to begin again. She let her key rest in the lock, and wondered whether she had been the last to leave, if any of the students were still inside. She listened again, this time for the voices of boys, but all she heard was the tick, tick of wet snow. She turned the key and dropped the ring into her bag. Walking in this snow was treacherous, but exhilarating too. The stone and the ice glistened, indistinguishable, in the half-light of early evening. She told herself it was like learning to walk—though no one remembered that feeling, not really—or maybe like having one’s feet bound, and here she slipped and slid downhill, but managed to regain her balance. She was glad the weather had driven everyone indoors, that no boys loitered outside the refectory and the library, beneath the chapel portico. She could see them now, as she passed by, seated at the long tables or wandering between, in search of more milk or dessert or conversation. They looked warm and content. They suspected classes would be cancelled tomorrow, and Mara observed both ease and excitement in their bodies, in the way they lounged over their half-empty plates. She thought they would not notice her, but then one of them, a tenth grader standing beside the window, smiled and waved. The boys near him turned, and one pressed his palms together, furrowed his brow ÷ in mock supplication, mouthed the words, snow day, Mrs. Raynor. Mara slowed further and raised one ungloved hand. She felt their eyes on her as she continued past the refectory and came into the shadow of the cathedral, and she was grateful both for the darkness and for the shoveled, salted steps down to the street. Her bag seemed heavier suddenly, and she wondered why she’d brought home all these ‹les. She knew she wouldn’t read them tonight. She’d bake the defrosted chicken, and then maybe they’d watch a movie if Rachel had ‹nished her schoolwork. A car passed slowly, slid toward her, halted with a shimmy, then continued its descent. Mara couldn’t imagine trying to drive tonight—she tried to remember if she had ever navigated snow in Washington. She heard the squeal of brakes further up the hill, on Wisconsin Avenue, and waited for the muf›ed crunch, the chime of breaking glass. Never. Not once. John always drove because he knew this kind of weather made her nervous. She crossed the street and stopped at the bottom of the driveway, letting her bag fall onto the wet cement. She’d left the light on in the front room, over the piano. She could see the illuminated keys, and a disc of light on the bench below, as if someone were about to enter the room, sit down and begin to play. Another softer glow came from the back of the house, from the kitchen. Mara lifted her bag and started up the driveway, past the snowbound car, around the side of the house and through the back gate. A white slash of snow hung precariously along the arm of the sundial, and it stopped her for a moment, like a hand held up in warning. She heard the telephone ring and then the machine, its brief greeting, followed by a click and the single bleat of the line going dead. In the mudroom, Mara dropped her bag onto the low seat and shrugged off her coat. She reached for a hanger and wondered again how anyone could prefer hangers to hooks, and which one of the previous occupants had decided this question, and why. She sat to unlace her boots, pulled them off, then settled back against the wall, looked down at her watch. A quarter to six. The house was silent, except for a faint...