Two Petals, One Letter Too Many

"When a riddle has more letters than there are mouths to speak them, someone has not yet been counted."

The fingers did not want to give it up.

Thalessa worked at them with the patience of a woman picking a lock. First the little finger, then the ring finger, easing each one back from the palm a fraction of an inch at a time, while the cold of the chapel crept into her wrists and the candle guttered at her elbow. The skin was waxen and slightly damp. There was a smell of lavender water and, beneath it, the thin metallic sweetness of the poison.

The last finger yielded with a faint dry crack.

On the white palm, pressed flat and nearly bloodless, lay two wisteria petals.

She stood motionless for a long moment, her breath held. Then she drew out her forceps and lifted the first one free.

It was a pale violet, slightly bruised, curling at the edge as the petals do when they have lain in warmth. On its surface, in thick black India ink, in the same hard capital stroke she had come to know, stood the letter A.

She laid it on a square of white linen. She lifted the second.

R.

Two letters. One woman. And a third thing, which she did not at first understand and did not wish to look at, which lay behind her ribs like a splinter of cold glass.

Two.

She stood a long time, looking at them, side by side on the linen. Then she crossed to the door and drew the bar.

"Inspector," she said.

He was there at once. He had never gone beyond the cloister. He came into the chapel with the snow still melting in his hair, and looked at her face, and then at the linen, and said nothing at all.

…

"T," said Roderick. "S. A. R."

He had set the four petals in a row on the altar rail, the two from the morning and the two from the days before, which Thalessa had kept in a flat glass case lined with lint. They looked very small there, very pale, under the black iron crucifix. Four bruised scraps of violet and four black letters.

"T for Valerius. S for Sterling. A and R for Lady Aurelia." He was speaking slowly, as a man does who is feeling for each stone in a river. "In the order they died."

"In the order we found them. Which may or may not be the same."

"Tsar."

"It's a word."

"It's an emperor. A Russian emperor." He frowned. "What has a Russian emperor to do with a brig out of Port Calder?"

"Nothing at all." Thalessa had her hands folded behind her back. "That is the first thing that is wrong with it. And the second is that there is no such spelling. It is tsar, or czar. I have seen both. I have never seen T-S-A-R."

"Star."

"The same letters, mixed." She tilted her head. "Rats. Arts. Tars."

"Tars," said Roderick, and stopped.

"Yes."

"Sailors."

"Common sailors. The men below." She did not look at him. "It is a pleasing coincidence, Inspector, and I distrust it. A killer who spells a word in petals does not give up the answer at the fourth letter."

"You think there are more."

"I know there are more." She lifted the glass case and set it down again with a precise little click. "Count with me. Five survivors came to this house. Five men and women who sailed on the St. Jude and lived. Mr. Valerius died first, and bore one petal. Mr. Sterling died second, and bore one. Lady Aurelia died third, and bore two."

"Four letters. Three deaths."

"So a victim does not always carry a single letter. Perhaps the killer meant to give Lady Aurelia one. Perhaps it was thought of as a cruelty, a doubling, a mark of special spite."

"Or the word is longer than the number of people on the list."

"Precisely." She turned and looked at him. "Suppose the word has seven letters. Eight. Then five victims cannot spell it, not if each carries but one. Someone else must be given a second. And someone else may not be on the list at all."

"Someone we have not counted."

"Someone the killer has."

The snow whispered at the window. Somewhere in the walls a pipe gave a long, shuddering knock.

Roderick drew a breath. "Finch," he said.

"I have thought of him."

"He was not on the muster roll."

"No. But the muster roll was written by the survivors, was it not? By the owners' agents, from what the survivors said. A man may come to be forgotten, Inspector. A cabin boy. A cook's mate. A man who never signed the articles at all."

"He is thirty-five, perhaps. Four years ago he would have been thirty-one."

"Old enough to have been on the boat."

"Old enough to have been anywhere." He rubbed his jaw. "You are building on a might."

"I am building on a letter too many." She held his eyes. "I do not accuse him. I notice that a man who trembles so, and who knows so much about the noises of this house, and who stood outside Lady Aurelia's door for five hours without once seeing it open—" She stopped. "I notice, that is all."

…

The ink was another matter.

She did the test at the desk in the morning room, with the shutters closed and a spirit lamp lit under a little glass dish, and the petals laid out in a row on the blotter beside her. She worked with the quiet absorption that had once, long ago, made her teachers say she had been born with a lens for an eye.

It was India ink; that she had known from the first. But India ink is lampblack in water, bound with a gum, and the binders vary as the hands of the men who make them. She scraped a fleck from the A, dissolved it in a drop of distilled spirit, and laid it under the glass.

The binder showed first as a faint amber haze on the edge of the drop. Then, as she warmed it, a smell rose from the dish, a faint, flat, unmistakable smell, such as one gets from the stoppers of old glue-pots in the back of a carpenter's shop.

She sat back.

"Isinglass," she said.

"I beg your pardon?" Roderick, from the window, where he had been watching the snow.

"The binder. It is not gum arabic, as in the shop ink. It is fish-glue. Isinglass, from the swim-bladder of the sturgeon, or something near enough to it." She tapped the dish. "It's used in the fishing villages, to waterproof rope and stiffen netting. Net-menders carry it in a pot, with a brush."

"A fisherman's ink."

"A fisherman's binder. Anyone might mix it with lampblack, if they knew how." She stared at the petals, thinking aloud. "A man might know how, who had been to sea. A woman might, who had been brought up beside a harbor."

The silence was very small and very still.

"Miss Haze," said Roderick.

"I did not say her name."

"You did not need to."

"Nor did I say the Duke's, who has the money to buy any ink he likes, or the doctor's, who has the skill to mix anything." Thalessa put down the glass. "Nor a hundred other people in this peninsula, at a hundred other doors. Isinglass is not so rare, Inspector. Half the cobblers in the capital use it. I only say that it is a thing that points to the sea. And the sea is the thing we are afraid of."

"And you think she is afraid of it?"

"I think she is the only soul in this house who speaks of it without trembling."

He crossed the room slowly and stood beside her at the desk. For a moment he looked down at the dish, the amber haze, the four petals in a row, and then, quite suddenly, he put one finger on the blotter and pushed the R an inch to the left.

"Look," he said.

"At what?"

"The shape. All of them. The letters." He drew it out, patiently. "Whoever wrote these has a very particular hand. Square. Heavy. The bar of the T crosses the stem at a right angle, and the loop of the R is perfectly round. It's the sort of hand a clerk learns, or a draftsman."

"Or a woman who has learned to print by touch."

His head turned. "You are determined to hang this girl."

"I am determined to do nothing of the sort." Her voice rose, sharply, and she stopped and lowered it. "I am determined, Inspector, to see everything. And that includes the thing I would rather not."

"Why?"

"Because someone I loved died of this poison. And I would rather know it was her than have it be someone I like."

It fell between them like a stone.

Roderick said nothing for a moment. Then he drew out the handkerchief from his sleeve, and gave it to her without a word, and turned back to the window.

She looked at it, white and clean in her hand. She had not known she was weeping.

…

Uriah Finch's room was a cupboard at the back of the servants' passage, with a narrow bed, a tin basin and a window the size of a Bible.

He stood in the doorway with his cap crushed in both hands while the Inspector went through his possessions. There was little enough to go through. A razor. A second shirt, darned at the elbow. A rosary of cheap wooden beads. A tin box with three letters in it from a sister in service somewhere inland, and a pressed flower that had once been blue.

"Where were you before the Duke?" Roderick asked, without looking up.

"An inn, sir. The Gull and Anchor. At Harrow's Reach."

Thalessa, at the window, did not move.

"That is a fishing village."

"Yes, sir. Down the coast, forty mile. I drew the ale and scrubbed the boards. Eighteen months, sir, I was there. Then the Duke's agent come through, looking for a man to serve table, and Miss Vespera said a good word for me."

"Miss Vespera."

"She'd a cousin lodged at the inn, sir. A very respectable family, the Hazes. They'd always been kind to me." His throat worked. "I was not on any ship, sir, if that's what you're thinking. I was nowhere near the sea. I'm afraid of the water. I can't swim."

"I did not suppose you could."

"I swear it, sir. I never wished anyone harm."

"Sit down, Mr. Finch."

The footman sat, on the edge of the bed, with his cap in his lap.

"You said the Hazes were kind to you," said Thalessa quietly. "Did you know the captain?"

"Captain Gabriel? Everybody knew him, ma'am." For the first time, a faint warmth came into the thin pitted face. "He'd come into the Gull on his shore leave and buy a round for the whole room. He'd sit by the fire with the little ones and whittle them toys. A great big gentle man, with hands like spades. There wasn't a soul in the Reach that didn't love him."

"And his sister?"

"She was a quiet girl, ma'am. Blind, as you see. Went blind with the fever when she was little." He shook his head. "When the news come that the St. Jude had gone down, she sat on the quay for three days, in the wet, and wouldn't be moved. They'd to carry her home."

Thalessa wrote nothing. She stood with her hands in her sleeves, and the lamplight was in her eyes.

"Thank you, Mr. Finch," she said. "That is very helpful."

"Is it, ma'am?" He looked up, wretched. "I don't see how."

"Nor do I," said Roderick, when the door had closed. "What have we got? A footman from the same village as the girl. A girl who recommended him."

"A girl who found him a place," said Thalessa, "in the house of the man who had sunk her brother's ship."

"But she did not know that."

"No. Not at the time." She stared at the closed door. "Or did she?"

Roderick said nothing.

"There is a question I should like answered," she went on softly. "A very simple one. When did Vespera Haze come to Blackwood Manor? Four years ago, she told me. The same month as the wreck. And the Duke, in his generosity, took her in. But he did not know her. He cannot have. A fishermen's family, forty miles down the coast. How did he know where to find her?"

"The muster roll."

"The muster roll says not traced." She turned. "Someone found her, Inspector. Someone sought out a blind girl in a fishing village and brought her to the house of the men who had killed her brother. And I think that someone was not kind."

"You think the Duke."

"I think nothing yet. I am counting."

…

At four in the afternoon the Duke sent for them.

He received them in his study, the same room, the same bookcase, the same leather armchair with the nail-holes still ragged in the desk. He sat behind it with a glass of brandy in his unsteady hand, and he did not rise.

"Inspector," he said. "Scholar Ashwood. I will be brief."

"Your Grace."

"The snow has not stopped. The road will not be cleared for three days at the least. I have ordered the shutters closed on the ground floor and the doors barred at dusk." He drank. "I wish you to know that I place myself wholly in your hands. I will answer any question. I will open any room."

"The tower?" said Roderick.

The Duke's glass paused halfway to his mouth.

"The tower," he said carefully. "Is locked."

"I know that it is locked. I wish it opened."

"There is nothing there."

"Then it will cost you nothing."

"The key was lost." The Duke put down the glass. "Years ago. The lock is a very old one. It will have to be forced."

"Then I will force it."

"Tomorrow." The old man's hand was shaking so that the brandy slopped from the rim. "Tomorrow, at first light, when we can see. Not tonight. I beg you."

"Why not tonight?"

"Because—" Alastair stopped. The color had drained from his face, and in the fire's red light he looked like a skull. "Because the stair is dangerous in the dark. And I am not... I would rather not lose another."

Thalessa studied him. He was telling the truth, she thought. Or a truth. He was afraid of something at the top of that stair, but not, she now believed, of a killer. His fear had a different smell. It smelled of memory.

"Tomorrow," Roderick said, after a long moment. "At first light. And you will go up with us, Your Grace."

"Yes."

"Yourself."

"Yes." The Duke bowed his head. "God help me."

They went out. In the hall, as the door shut behind them, Thalessa caught the faint sound of something being poured, and a glass set down. And then, in a thin cracked old voice, so low that she half thought she imagined it:

"Forgive me, Gabriel."