The Man I Thought I Knew

"We love a man for the part of him he lets us see, and we are murdered by the part he does not."

She had put it off for three days.

It lay at the bottom of her ebony chest, wrapped in oilcloth, under the spare gloves and the folded linen and the little rack of glass slides. It was only a small flat bundle, no bigger than a prayer-book. She had taken it from the pocket of his coat when the courier brought him home, and she had looked at it, and she had put it away, and she had not looked again.

Thalessa Ashwood sat on the edge of the bed in the room Vespera had given her, with the fire burning low and the sleet gone to a fine, whispering snow, and unwrapped the oilcloth with hands that were not entirely steady.

There was a diary inside.

It was a plain thing, bound in black calf, with a brass clasp and a loop of faded ribbon. She knew it. It had lain on his desk in the laboratory for as long as she had known him, and in three years she had not once seen it open. He used to put his hand on it when he was thinking. She had asked him once what it contained.

Nothing worth reading, he had said, and smiled.

She lifted the clasp.

The first pages were ordinary enough: the clipped notation of a working chemist, formulae and measurements, the dates of experiments, the names of colleagues. Here and there a line in his small upright hand was struck through. Here and there she found her own name, T.A., in the margin beside a result. T.A. thinks the reagent is impure. She is right. T.A. says the sample is not what we were told. Check.

She read it with a thickening throat, turning the pages gently. It was like finding his handwriting on the wall of an empty house.

Then she came to the place where the paper had been torn.

It was a clean violent tear, not cut. The stub of the page stood up from the binding like the stump of a branch, and below it the leaf that remained was written in a different hand. Not different in shape, she saw at once. The same careful letters. But they sloped. They crowded. The pen had been pressed so hard in places that it had gone through the paper.

She took out her lens. She read it twice, three times, with her lips moving. Then she sat very still.

I cannot write this. I cannot not write it.

Day 9.

The rest of it is such a long time ago that I have begun to wonder if I invented it. But I have this, which I did not invent. I have the taste.

We are not bad men. That is the thing. We were not bad men. I want that set down, if nothing else is. We were frightened and starving and out of our minds. We said it was the only way. We said it was only flesh. We said that God would understand, that He would see that we were not murdering, that we were only

The line stopped.

Beneath it, much smaller, in a hand that shook:

He asked us to be quick. We were not quick.

Hunger on the rescue boat. That is what I will call it, if I am ever made to call it anything. Hunger on the rescue boat.

And then nothing. The rest of the page had been torn away.

Thalessa laid the diary on her knee.

She did not weep. She had not wept at the funeral, or at the laboratory, or in the carriage that had brought her up the cliff road in the dark. She had the sort of grief that sits in the chest like a swallowed stone and does not rise. She sat quite still and looked at the fire, and felt the whole shape of her life shift very slowly, as a sheet of ice shifts when the water beneath it begins to move.

We were not bad men.

He had said it to her once, in other words. She remembered now. It had been in the spring, in the laboratory, during a long wet afternoon. She had asked him a foolish question, why he never spoke of his years at sea. He had stood very still with his back to her, one hand flat on the diary, and he had said, Because there are things which a man does not wish to be forgiven for. He wishes to be allowed to go on without them.

She had thought it a figure of speech.

…

A knock came at the door, two raps and a pause.

"It's Thorne," said Roderick's voice. Then, with a brief dry cough: "That is, it's Thorne the Inspector. I beg your pardon. It is a poor choice of name for this house."

"Come in."

He entered with a tray, of all things, with a covered dish and a pot of tea, which he set down on the writing desk with the faintly guilty air of a man who has been caught being kind.

"The footman brought it. I took it from him at the foot of the stair." He lifted the cover. "Eggs. Toast. You have not eaten since last night."

"Have you tasted it?"

"I have not died."

"That is not a test."

"Nor is it a refusal. Eat."

She looked at the tray. She was surprised to find that she was hungry. It seemed an unforgivable thing, in the circumstances, but the body has its own opinions. She pulled a chair to the desk and took up the fork.

Roderick stood with his back to the door, hands in his pockets, looking at the diary in her lap.

"That is Valerius's," he said.

"Yes."

"May I?"

She hesitated. Then she closed the cover and handed it up to him, and watched his face as he read.

It did not change much. His jaw moved. His eyes went to the end of the page, and back, and a faint, hard line came between his brows. When he had finished he stood a moment with the book open in his hands, and then he said, very carefully, "Day nine."

"Yes."

"He wrote about a day nine. Of what?"

"Of the boat." She put down her fork. "He does not say so, but there can be no other reading. And he does not say what was done on it, only that it was done in hunger, and that it was not quick. And that he tasted—"

She stopped.

The word hung in the air between them. Neither of them reached for it.

"The scars," Roderick said slowly.

"Yes."

"Placed where the meat is best."

"Yes."

"A surgeon. A pact. Twenty-one days, and three days of bread." He closed the diary. His voice had gone flat. "Scholar Ashwood. If I am reading it as I think, then we are not looking for a man who tortured five people. We are looking for—"

"No." She put up a hand. "Do not say it. Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because I am not able to hear it yet." She said it quite calmly. "And because I do not know it. I know a torn page and a scar and a word. I will not build a man's grave out of that."

"His grave?"

"His reputation. Mine. Theirs." She rose and walked to the window. "I loved him, Inspector. I did not think I did, quite. I thought he was a kind, quiet man who was good at his work, and who I was fortunate to marry, and who bore his troubles lightly. I thought I understood him. And I find that I was engaged for three years to someone I could not have described." She laid her forehead against the cold glass. "I was a poisoner's apprentice. I was taught to see what is in a stomach, in a cup, in a drop of blood on a cuff. I could not see what was in a man's own diary, on his own desk, for three years."

"That is not a failure of the science."

"No." She laughed, a faint cracked sound. "It is a failure of the scientist."

The snow ticked at the window. Behind her she heard him move, the quiet creak of leather, and then he was standing beside her, not touching her, with the diary held loosely in one hand.

"If I may say so," he said, "you have not asked the question that matters."

"Which is?"

"Whether he was one of those who did it. Or one of those who could not stop it."

She turned her head and looked at him.

"I have seen the page," Roderick went on. "We said it was the only way. We said it was only flesh. He wrote we. But he also wrote He asked us to be quick. A man who held the knife does not write that. A man who held the knife writes I was. This is the writing of a man who was in the room." He paused. "And who has been paying for it."

"For four years."

"For four years. In a laboratory, I'd imagine, with a woman he did not dare to tell."

She said nothing. She could not.

"I do not know what he was," Roderick said. "I am not going to tell you that he was good. I do not think you would believe me. But he was afraid. That, at least, I will swear to. A man of that sort, who writes that page and then tears it out and carries it about with him for four years—" He stopped. "That man did not wish to be what he had been."

Thalessa closed her eyes.

For a moment she allowed it, the thing she had held away since the courier came. She let it rise, the swallowed stone, up through her chest and into her throat. It did not break. It only ached, an enormous clean ache, like a tooth in the heart.

"Thank you," she said.

"For what?"

"For not telling me he was good."

He was silent. When she opened her eyes she found him looking at her with an expression she could not read, and she turned back to the window before she could try.

…

He had hardly gone, taking the empty tray, when a second knock sounded. It was lighter, hesitant, three small taps like a child's.

Thalessa slid the diary under the pillow before she opened.

The Duke stood in the corridor.

He had changed his coat. His silver hair had been combed flat, and his face was shaved to a raw pink, as if by a hand that had scraped too hard. He held his hat before him in both hands, turning it round and round by the brim.

"Scholar Ashwood," he said. "Forgive me. I should not trouble you."

"Your Grace is not troubling me."

"I wished to ask..." He looked past her shoulder into the room, at the fire, the bed, the open chest. His eyes touched everything and rested on nothing. "I wished to ask whether Mr. Valerius left any papers. Any effects. When he came to you. I knew him well, you understand. He was a very dear friend. If there were letters—"

"There were none."

"None at all?"

"His instruments, a coat, a watch." She held his gaze. "I looked, Your Grace. I was very thorough."

"Ah." The hat went round. "Of course. Of course you were."

"Is there something in particular Your Grace hoped to find?"

"No. No. Only..." He gave a short, wretched laugh. "A man leaves things behind, doesn't he? Things he had better not. One wonders what a friend may have written down, in a weak hour." He raised his eyes at last, and they were wet and red-rimmed and entirely without cunning. "He was always the soft one. The conscience of us all. I used to tell him that it would ruin him."

"I think it did," said Thalessa quietly.

For one instant the old man's face worked, with something that might have been shame and might have been rage. Then it smoothed.

"You are very like him, you know," he said. "He too had a gift for saying the thing."

He bowed, stiffly, and went away down the corridor, wiping his hand on his coat.

Thalessa stood with the door half closed, listening to his steps, and felt the weight of the diary against her back through the mattress like a second heartbeat.

He wishes to know what Thorne wrote, she thought. Not whether he wrote. What.

She locked the door.

…

The afternoon went. The light failed early, as it does on the north coast in winter, and by four it was dusk in the corridors and by five it was dark.

At six the dinner bell rang, a thin cracked note from somewhere below, and the household assembled in the long hall with the carved ceiling and the portraits of dead Blackwoods. There were only five at the table: the Duke, the surgeon, Lady Aurelia, the Inspector, and herself. Thalessa sat at the foot with her hands in her lap and watched them eat nothing.

Nobody spoke.

The wisteria vines scratched at the glass behind the heavy curtains. The fire burned. At the sideboard, Uriah Finch poured a thin gold wine from a decanter into four glasses, and his hand trembled so that the neck of the bottle chattered against the rim.

Vespera moved among them like a gray shadow, laying down the napkins, touching the edges of the plates.

Thalessa watched the glasses. She watched the blind girl's fingers, the delicate exact touch of them, the slight pause beside each setting. She watched until she was sure of the count.

"Miss Haze," she said at last.

"Ma'am?"

"Which is mine?"

The housekeeper tilted her head. "On your right, ma'am. At the end of the knife."

"Thank you."

She did not touch it. She did not touch anything. And across the table, as Aurelia lifted her own glass to her lips with a shaking hand, Thalessa saw Roderick, very slowly, shake his head.

Aurelia put the glass down.

"I'm not thirsty," she said, in a small voice. "I think I should like to go upstairs. I think—" She pressed a hand to her mouth. "I think I should like it if someone would sit with me tonight."

"I will have a footman outside your door," said Roderick.

"It isn't enough."

"It's all that I have."

Aurelia looked at him. She was a beautiful woman, and frightened, and it showed. She looked, Thalessa thought, like a woman looking at a closed door and knowing what lay behind it.

"Then I shall lock the window," she said, "and pray."

She left the table. The others sat on in silence while her footsteps faded up the stair. And in the high dark above the hall, in the place where no light reached, something began, very softly, to turn.

Click. Click. Click.

Thalessa looked up.

It was the tower. It was the wheel. It had begun again, slow and patient and unhurried, like the beating of a heart.

She looked at Roderick.

He was already on his feet.