The Stone in the Fog

"Courage is only a decision made once. Fear makes it again at every step."

The fog came in with the dawn.

It rose out of the sea in the dark, a slow gray tide that climbed the cliff face and spilled over the lip of the headland and filled the gardens to the brim. By first light the world had been rubbed out. The wisteria on the south wall was a pale blur. The stable roofs had vanished. The lantern that Roderick carried made no more than a small yellow bubble in the whiteness, and the snow underfoot, soft and crusted, sent up a dull, muffled crunch with every step.

"I don't like it," said Thalessa.

"You've said so."

"I'll say so again. It is the one weather in which a man could stand ten feet from us and not be seen."

"Then we shall have to be uncommonly pleasant to anyone we meet."

She glanced up at him. He was wrapped to the chin in his leather coat, with a crowbar over one shoulder and the lantern in his left hand, and his breath came out in short white plumes. He had slept, she thought, about as much as she had. Which was to say, scarcely at all. There was a bruise of fatigue under each eye. But his mouth had the faint dry upward tilt she had begun to look for, and she found, to her annoyance, that it steadied her.

"The Duke?" she asked.

"Sent word that he is unwell. Finch brought the message at five." Roderick shifted the crowbar. "Take that as you will."

"I take it as cowardice."

"I take it as information. A man who is afraid of the top of a stair will find an illness at the bottom."

They had come to the foot of the east cloister, where the arches ran out into the dark. Beyond them, a narrow flight of weathered steps climbed against the outer wall of the building, hugging the stone, with a rusted rail on one side and a sheer drop on the other. It was the old outer stair to the tower, the one that had been used by workmen in the days when the clock was built, long before anyone thought to put a door inside. It ran up into the fog like a thread into a cloud.

"Thirty-one steps," Thalessa murmured.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Miss Haze. She said the tower stair had thirty-one. That is the inside stair." She looked up. "I never asked about this one."

"Why would she know it?"

"Why indeed."

He put his hand on the rail, and tested it, and found it sound. "I'll go first."

"You shall not."

"Ashwood—"

"I weigh nine stone and I have been climbing the steeples of the capital since I was sixteen, in pursuit of a sample of lead from the roofs." She took the lantern from his hand. "You will follow me, Inspector, and you will mind your coat."

"You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met."

"Thank you."

"It was not a compliment."

"I know."

She went up.

…

The stair was slick with frost. Each step was a block of old granite, worn hollow in the middle by two centuries of boots, and each was dusted with a skin of fine snow. She climbed with her left hand on the rail and the lantern held low in her right, and she set each foot with care, counting. Seven. Eight. Nine. The fog was thicker here, almost solid, and cold as wet cloth against her face. Behind her, Roderick's tread was slow and even. Beneath them, somewhere far down, the sea was knocking on the rocks.

At the twelfth step she stopped.

"What is it?"

"Hush."

She held the lantern lower. Its light spilled over the stone, over the dusting of snow, over a faint, narrow, scuffed groove that ran up the center of the stair like a path worn by a small and regular foot.

Salt. There was salt in the groove again.

"Someone has come this way every night," she whispered. "Not once. A hundred times. See how the snow is packed."

"But the door at the top is locked."

"Then they have the key. Or they do not come to the door." She looked up into the white. "Perhaps there is another entrance. Perhaps a window."

"A blind woman on an outer stair, in the dark, in the fog?"

"I did not say blind woman."

"No. You said someone."

"Yes. I do try to be careful."

She moved on. Fourteen. Fifteen. Her breath was loud in her ears. She was aware of the weight of the ebony chest strapped across her back, and the prickle of sweat under her collar, and a small hard knot of dread that had settled beneath her breastbone and would not melt.

At the twenty-first step, she saw the thread.

It was so fine that she would have missed it, except that the lantern caught it at an angle and turned it for an instant to a hair of white fire. It ran across the stair at the height of her ankle, from the rail on the left to an iron ring set in the wall on the right. It was not a wire. It was a line, such as fishermen use. Black, waxed, strong as a bowstring.

She stopped with one foot in the air.

"Roderick."

"I see it."

"Do not move."

"I'm not moving."

"Look up."

He looked.

The fog hung in a pale curtain above them, thinning here and there, and through one of its rents Thalessa saw what she had not seen before: that the wall of the tower, sheer as a cliff, was pierced twenty feet over their heads by a broad stone ledge. The ledge jutted out over the stair. On it, balanced on its edge, a great gray block of masonry, a coping stone or a fallen corbel as large as a trunk, was held in place by a single iron pin.

From the pin, a black line ran down the face of the wall.

To the ring.

To the thread.

"A deadfall," Roderick said quietly.

"Yes."

"If we'd broken the line—"

"It would have dropped on the stair, and taken both of us with it down the cliff." She was whispering, quite steadily. "I had my foot in the air. Another half inch."

He said nothing. Then she heard the creak of leather as he shifted his grip on the crowbar, and she knew that he had made up his mind, and that she would not like it.

"Don't," she said.

"I'll cut the line."

"You will drop it on yourself."

"No. If I come at it from the side—" He eased forward, one step, two, his hand on the rail. "Give me the lantern. Move back, Ashwood. Down the stair. Ten steps."

"I will not leave you."

"You will, if I ask it."

"You do not ask. You order." She felt her voice rise and could not stop it. "You are very free with your orders, Inspector, for a man who is standing directly under a ton of rock."

"It is a very small ton."

"Roderick!"

It was the first time she had used his name.

He turned his head. In the thin yellow light his face was strangely open, as though a shutter had been lifted. For an instant they looked at each other, quite still, in the white silence. Then he smiled. It was the smile of a man who has suddenly understood something that does not matter in the least.

"Go down," he said gently. "Please."

She went down.

She went down ten steps, and a further two, and then she turned and stood with her back against the wall and her hands pressed flat to the stone, and watched him.

He worked with the economy of long practice. He crouched, drew a knife from his boot, and laid its blade against the line at the point where it crossed the rail. He did not cut at once. He ran his fingers along the thread to the ring, tested the knot, and found it. Then he nodded to himself, as if he had learned something from the knot, and cut.

The line parted with a tiny, snapping tink.

For a heartbeat nothing happened.

Then, high overhead, there came a long, slow, grinding groan, the sound of something enormous that had been waiting very patiently, and had at last been told that it might fall.

"Roderick!"

"I know—"

The pin had not been drawn by the line. The line had only been a trigger. The real pin was somewhere in the dark above, and it was a spring-loaded one, and it had been released by the cutting of the thread as surely as if a hand had pulled it. The great block shuddered. It leaned. It tilted off its ledge in the fog with a sigh like a dropped sack.

He threw himself sideways. She saw it all in the stretched dreamlike slowness of a nightmare: his body flung against the rail, the lantern spinning out of his hand and arcing away into the white, the stone falling past him, so close that its edge tore the sleeve of his coat from shoulder to elbow. It struck the stair below him with a crash that shook the world. Fragments flew. The granite step under it broke like a biscuit. The rail twisted off its pins and went screaming over the edge.

And Roderick, who had been standing on the step above, went down on one knee with a sound she would never forget.

"Roderick!"

She was up the stairs before she knew she had moved. She dropped beside him on the broken step, in the settling dust, with the whole stair trembling under her. He was on his side with his left arm folded under him, and his face was gray, and his teeth were clenched so tightly that she could see the muscles stand in his jaw.

"I'm all right," he said.

"You are not."

"I am. It missed me."

"It didn't miss you. It grazed you. It took your coat." Her hands were already on him, running over his arm, his collar, his ribs. "Where does it hurt? Don't lie."

"The shoulder."

She found it. The left shoulder was not where it should be. Under the torn cloth the bone stood out at a wrong angle, and when she touched it, very lightly, he made a short, sharp sound between his teeth.

"Dislocated," she said. "Probably cracked, as well. Don't move."

"I wasn't planning on it."

"Don't talk."

"You asked me not to move. You did not say anything about talking." He tried to laugh, and broke off with a gasp. His face was running with sweat in spite of the cold. "You called me Roderick."

"I did no such thing."

"You did. Twice."

"I was frightened, you idiot."

"I know." His good hand came up and closed round her wrist. It was cold, and damp, and held on hard. "I know. I'm sorry."

She looked down at him, at the gray lips and the bright, pained, strangely peaceful eyes, and found that she was shaking from head to foot.

Somewhere far below them, in the fog, the sea went on knocking on the rocks.

She drew a long breath.

"I am going to put it back," she said, in the level voice she used in the dissecting room. "It will hurt. You may swear."

"I never swear."

"Then you may start."

…

It was done in a minute and a half, on the stair, with her knee in his armpit and his teeth locked on a folded glove. There was a wet, sickening shift, and a gasp that was nearly a sob, and then the arm hung quiet and heavy and no longer wrong. She bound it to his chest with strips torn from her petticoat, and he sat on the broken step with his head down and his eyes closed, and breathed.

"There," she said. "It's in. You will want a sling, and a week of idleness, and you will take neither."

"No."

"I know."

She knelt beside him. After a moment she realised that her hand was still resting on his good shoulder, and that she had not taken it away.

She took it away.

"The knot," she said.

He opened his eyes.

"You studied it before you cut. You tested it, and then you nodded." She wiped her palms on her skirt. "What did it tell you?"

"That the one who tied it knew what they were doing." He moved his head wearily toward the rail. "Go and look. It's still on the ring."

She went. The black waxed line hung from the iron, snapped clean, stirring a little in the mist. Where it was tied to the ring it had been made fast with a hitch that she had last seen binding a dead man's wrist.

It was an anchor bend.

She stood a long while looking at it. And then, because there was nothing else to do, she took out her pocket-knife, and carefully, steadily, cut it free.

…

They went down together, very slowly, his good arm across her shoulders and her arm round his waist, one step at a time. The fog shifted about them, thinning, thickening, parting for an instant on a glimpse of black rail and then closing again. Behind them the broken stair hung in the white like a staircase in a dream.

At the foot, in the mouth of the cloister, someone was waiting.

She stood very still among the pillars with her hands folded at her waist, a small gray figure with a lantern, her face turned a little aside. The light threw her shadow far across the flags. She did not speak until they had come within ten feet of her.

"Inspector," said Vespera Haze. "I heard the stone fall."

Thalessa felt the arm across her shoulders tighten.

"From where, Miss Haze?" Roderick's voice was harsh, with the strain of his shoulder in it. "You were in the kitchen."

"I was on my way to the chapel, sir, with the candles for Lady Aurelia. I felt it through the floor." She tilted her head. "Is anyone hurt?"

"Nobody of consequence."

"I am glad." The pale eyes drifted over them, unfocused, serene. "The outer stair is very old. The masons have said for years that it should be taken down. The Duke will not hear of it. He says the clock must have its path."

"A pity he did not hear them."

"A great pity, sir."

"You knew it was unsafe."

"Everyone in the house knows, sir. We do not use it." She smiled gently. "I should not have thought a gentleman of the Corps would."

There was a pause.

"We were looking for a way into the tower," said Thalessa.

"It is a very difficult tower to enter, ma'am."

"So I have found."

"There is a better way up, if you wish it. A servant's way, behind the linen press on the second floor." The smile did not change. "But I am sure the Duke will tell you of it, when he is well."

She bobbed a little curtsey, turned, and went away along the cloister with her lantern swinging, her gray skirts whispering over the stone. She walked without hesitation. She did not touch a wall.

Neither of them spoke until the light had gone.

"A servant's way," said Roderick.

"Behind the linen press."

"She told us."

"She told us because she knew we would find it. Or because she wished us to go in at that door, and not this one." Thalessa stared into the place where the lantern had been. "I do not know which. It is the most disagreeable thing about her, Inspector. I can never tell whether she is helping us or leading us."

"Perhaps she's doing both."

"Yes," said Thalessa slowly. "Perhaps she is."

In her pocket, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay a length of black waxed line with a knot at one end. She closed her fingers round it until the hard little coil bit into her palm.

An anchor bend, she thought. Tied by a hand that learned it on the quay.

And high above them, in the fog, the tower clock began to strike the hour: eight slow notes, each one falling into the white like a stone into deep water, as though someone were counting.