The door opened without a knock, which was how Eleanor Ashworth liked it. Visitors to her salon in Mayfair learned quickly that knocking was for people who expected to be turned away. Clara Whitmore had knocked anyway, a hesitant tap against the dark wood, as if she were apologizing for existing.

Eleanor did not look up from the mirror she was polishing. "Come in," she said, and the words were not unkind but they were not kind either. They were simply true, the way a fact is true.

Clara entered. She was young, perhaps twenty-five, with hair the color of wheat and eyes that had not slept properly in weeks. Her dress was expensive but worn at the edges, the kind of woman who had once had money and was now counting pennies.

"You're the one they call Madame Ashworth," Clara said.

"I am."

"They say you can make people disappear."

Eleanor set down the mirror. "I make women look in the mirror and see what they've become. That's all."

Clara swallowed. Her throat moved, a small bird trying to fly upward inside a cage. "I want you to ruin my face."

The word ruined hung in the air between them like smoke. Eleanor had heard it before. Not often, but often enough. Women came to her salon with broken hearts and broken bones and broken spirits, and they all wanted the same thing: to be unrecognizable, to be invisible, to be safe.

"Sit," Eleanor said, pointing to a chair upholstered in faded crimson velvet.

Clara sat. The chair groaned beneath her, as if it remembered other women, other requests, other tears that had fallen onto this same floor and soaked into the wood and would never come out.

Eleanor walked around the chair and studied Clara's face. It was a good face, not classically beautiful but beautiful in the way that made people turn their heads and then turn them back. Dark circles under the eyes, a mouth that had been crying and was now trying not to. A woman who had been followed home for three weeks, who had changed her locks twice, who had taken a self-defense class she would never use.

"Your face," Eleanor said, "is not the problem."

"It is to me."

Eleanor walked to a cabinet against the far wall and opened it. Inside were bottles, hundreds of them, arranged on shelves from floor to ceiling. They were made of ivory, carved with intricate patterns, each one stoppered with wax and sealed with a ribbon. Some were white, some were yellowed with age, some were cracked and repaired with gold lacquer.

"Each of these bottles contains a tear," Eleanor said, running her fingers along the spines. "A woman's tear. Collected here, in this room, over the course of one hundred and forty years."

She pulled a bottle from the shelf and held it to the light. The tear inside was dark, almost black, and it seemed to move slowly, like oil on water.

"1704. Isolde of Whitby. She was chosen for the Saxon royal court at sixteen, beautiful enough to be a queen, smart enough to know that being a queen meant being a pawn. She was married to a man she had never met, a duke thirty years older than her, and on their wedding night he told her that her beauty was a gift from God and she was grateful for it, and she realized then that she was not a person, she was a possession."

Eleanor placed the bottle back on the shelf and pulled another. This one was pale blue.

"1547. Catherine de Vere. Noblewoman, married into the Tudor court, beautiful enough to be noticed by Henry VIII's favorite, Thomas Cromwell, who used her to get close to the king. When she refused his advances, he had her husband accused of treason. Her husband was beheaded in 1540. She was confined to her estate for the rest of her life, never allowed to leave, never allowed to see her children, surrounded by servants who reported everything she said to the Crown."

Eleanor pulled a third bottle. This one was clear.

"1815. Marie Laurent. She was a nurse at Waterloo, tending to the wounded on both sides, French and British, and she fell in love with a British officer named James Whitfield, who was dying of fever. She stayed with him until the end, held his hand while he died, and when the battle was over and the survivors were counted and the wounded were sent home, James's regiment left without her, and she was alone in a field full of dead men with nothing but the clothes on her back and a name she could no longer use because her hospital had been burned and her records destroyed."

Clara was crying. She did not try to stop it. The tears ran down her face in silent streams, and Eleanor watched them with the same expression she might have used to watch rain against a window.

"1832. Rose Blackwood. She was seventeen, working as a servant in a house on Berkeley Square, when the merchant who employed her began to visit her room at night. She did not resist, because resistance meant losing her position, and losing her position meant losing her bed, and losing her bed meant starving. He paid her with food and a roof and a key to a back door that he expected her to use for him whenever he called. She used it for two years, until he married someone else and she was thrown out with nothing but the dress on her back and a reputation that made nobody in London want to hire her."

Eleanor pulled a fifth bottle. This one was red, the color of dried blood.

"1837. Henrietta Shaw. She was a factory girl, sixteen years old, working twelve hours a day at a textile mill in Manchester, and the owner came to the factory one evening when most of the workers had gone home and told her that if she slept with him, he would give her a promotion and better hours and a room in the owner's house. She said no. He fired her the next morning. She walked the streets of Manchester for three days without food, and on the fourth day, a charity worker took her in and gave her a room in a workhouse, where she gave birth to a daughter who was taken from her before she could learn to walk."

Eleanor placed the bottle back on the shelf. She turned to face Clara, who was still crying, who had stopped trying to stop crying ten minutes ago and had simply let herself go, let the tears fall and fall and fall until there was nothing left but salt and water and the memory of whatever it was that had made her cry in the first place.

"I have collected three hundred and twelve tears in this salon," Eleanor said. "Three hundred and twelve women who came to me with broken hearts and broken bodies and broken spirits, and I gave them nothing. I gave them a place to cry and I collected their tears and I put them in bottles and I told them stories about other women who had cried in this salon before them. I thought that would be enough. I thought that would be comfort. It was not. It is not."

Clara wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Then what is?"

Eleanor looked at her for a long time. The salon was quiet except for the sound of Clara's breathing and the distant hum of London traffic, carriages and motorcars and the endless movement of a city that did not care about any of this, about any of these women, about any of these tears.

"I don't know," Eleanor said.

The words were simple and they were devastating. A woman who had lived for one hundred and forty years, who had collected three hundred and twelve tears, who had built a salon that women came to in their darkest hours, and the answer was I don't know.

She walked to the far wall of the salon and pulled aside a curtain of heavy velvet that Clara hadn't noticed. Behind the curtain was a door, and through the door, a staircase that led down.

"Come," Eleanor said.

They descended together, the old woman and the young woman, and reached a room that was not a basement but something older, something built into the foundations of the house itself. It was small and circular, with shelves that ran from floor to ceiling and on those shelves, hundreds of ivory bottles, each one containing a single drop of liquid that glowed faintly in the lamplight.

"In here," Eleanor said, "are every tear a woman has shed in this house since 1704. Every sorrow. Every grief. Every moment of despair so complete that the only thing the body could do was produce salt water and call it relief."

She picked up a bottle that was different from the others. It was smaller, and the tear inside was not dark or blue or clear or red. It was silver, and it seemed to pulse slowly, like a heartbeat.

"1889. Eleanor Ashworth."

Clara stared at the bottle. "That's your name."

"It was my mother's name. She was thirty when she had me, and she was dying of consumption, and she cried when I was born, not because she was happy, but because she knew she would not live to see me grow up. She gave me this salon, this house, these bottles, and she told me to collect the tears of other women because tears are the only honest thing a woman has in a world that demands she be beautiful and silent and obedient and useful and none of those things at once."

Eleanor placed the silver bottle on the shelf between two others and turned to face Clara.

"I have lived for one hundred and forty years, Clara. I have watched three hundred and twelve women come through that door and sit in that chair and ask me to ruin their faces, and I have never been able to do it, because I cannot ruin what was never meant to be preserved. Beauty is not something you can remove with a knife or a chemical or a prayer. It is something you carry, and it is carried you this far, and it will carry you further if you let it."

Clara looked at the bottles, hundreds of them, stretching from floor to ceiling, each one containing a woman's sorrow, each one a life, each one a story that ended in tears and nothing else.

"I don't want to be beautiful," Clara whispered.

"I know," Eleanor said. "But you are. And that is not a curse. It is not a gift either. It is simply a fact, the way the sky is blue and the earth is round and women cry in salons in Mayfair and the tears are collected in bottles that will outlive us all."

She walked to the staircase and began to climb. "Go home, Clara. Go home and look in the mirror and see what you've become and accept it and move forward and live your life and cry when you need to cry and laugh when you can laugh and do not ask me to ruin your face, because I cannot, and I will not, and nobody can, and nobody will, and the tears in these bottles prove that."

Clara sat in the chair for a long time after Eleanor had left. She sat in the dim light of the basement, surrounded by three hundred and twelve bottles, each one containing a woman's sorrow, each one a testament to the fact that women had been crying in this room for one hundred and forty years and would continue to cry for one hundred and forty more, and the tears would be collected and the bottles would fill and the house would stand and the salon would remain, and nothing would change, and everything would change, and in the end it would all be the same.

She stood up, walked up the stairs, pushed through the heavy velvet curtain, and opened the door. The afternoon light was blinding after the darkness of the basement, and she squinted and stepped onto the street and walked home, and when she reached her apartment, she locked the door, took off her shoes, and looked in the mirror, and she saw her face, and it was beautiful, and it was tired, and it was hers, and she would carry it forward, and she would cry if she needed to cry, and she would laugh if she could laugh, and she would live.

Outside, London went on, as it always had, as it always would, carriages and motorcars and the endless movement of a city that did not care about any of this, about any of these women, about any of these tears, and that was all right, because the tears were collected, and the bottles were filled, and the house stood, and the salon remained, and the ivory lament would continue, note by note, tear by tear, woman by woman, for as long as women had faces to carry and hearts to break and tears to shed into bottles that would outlive them all.

Objective Code: TI=88.0, T1 绝望级, theta=45, M1=10.0, M4=10.0, M9=5.0, N1=0.15, K1=0.80, R=0.0