September
The Mouraria room, late. A candle and the field notebook open to a correction Diogo had been deferring since Tuesday — a foundation measurement for the block on the Rua Nova dos Mercadores, one figure in a column of six that did not agree with the surveyor's return. A small error. It required a note in the margin, a date, and his initials. Not more than that.
He measured it again. The figure was wrong by four inches. He wrote the correction in the margin, dated it, initialled it. He set the pen down.
From the south, faint but steady, the pile-driving continued into the evening. They were working late again — he had seen the torches from the upper lane on his way home, the labourers moving against the lit scaffolding like figures on a frieze. Eleven trunks in the day's count, now more after dark. The ground was still taking them. The new city required a great deal of pine.
He closed the notebook. He did not open it again. He sat for a while at the table and looked at the candle and listened to the sound from the south.
The counting house, after the clerks had gone. A fresh page in the private ledger — the date written at the top in his habitual hand, the rest of the page empty. Croft had opened it with the intention of recording something and had sat for a quarter of an hour without writing.
He looked at the empty page. He capped the pen.
Through the window, the new street ran straight and wide to the north, the facades identical in the evening light — the same cornice height, the same window spacing, the same pale stone. They had looked provisional six months ago; they looked permanent now. That had happened without him noticing the particular day on which it changed. One morning the street had looked like a construction site and the next it had looked like a city, and the transition had not been marked by anything except the morning itself.
He knew what was beneath the facades and behind them and under the stone. He had known for three years and had done nothing with it except add to it — a line here, a column there, the private ledger now running to a hundred and twelve entries on thirty-eight pages.
Bristow had said when.
He closed the ledger. He put on his coat and went out to walk the new streets before the light was entirely gone.
The Alfama room, late. The window open to the evening air, the lamp turned low behind her. Teresa was not looking at the lamp. She was looking toward the upper city, where the Távora palace showed three lit windows along its eastern face — faint from this distance, but there. She had looked for them, the past three evenings, and they had been there each time. Lit windows meant people inside. People inside meant the household had not yet understood what was coming, or had understood and believed they could wait it out, or had understood and decided the lit windows were the right gesture. She did not know which.
Behind her, on the table, the ledger lay open to the diagram. The question mark beside the final node. Her father's notebooks to the left, open to the page she had marked weeks ago: o instrumento e a testemunha são coisas diferentes. The instrument and the witness are different things.
She knew what proof meant when it shifted from instruments to confession. She had known since June. She had not said this to Diogo because there was nothing to say that the diagram did not already say, and the diagram said it without her.
She was not frightened. She had been frightened in June, for three days, and had come through to the other side of it, which was simply this: a clear understanding of what she was going to do.
She watched the windows until they went dark, one by one, and then she turned from the window and sat down at the table and opened the ledger to a fresh page.