Warmth Among the Ruins

"There are hours when a person stops being a witness and becomes a hand to hold."

The old watch-house stood at the edge of the garden where the cliff began, a squat ruin of black stone, roofless on the seaward side, with the wind-bitten stump of a chimney still standing at one end.

It had been built, Roderick said, in the days of the smugglers, when the first Blackwoods kept a lookout for the revenue cutters. Half of it had fallen into the sea. What was left was a single room with three walls, a lean-to of rotten beams, and a hearth piled with the nests of long-departed gulls. The fog lay thick in the doorway. Beyond the fallen wall there was nothing at all, no sea, no sky, only a pale and breathing blank.

"We can't go in by the front," Thalessa had said, steering him across the garden with his weight on her arm. "Whoever laid that deadfall will be watching the house. If you walk in with your arm bound, they will know it worked."

"It didn't work."

"It worked enough." She had looked at his face. "You are the color of a candle. Come."

So they had come here, to the only roof that was not the Duke's.

Now she knelt on the stone floor with the lantern at her side, the ebony chest open at her knee, and a clean white cloth spread on the flags before her. He sat with his back against the wall and his legs stretched out in front of him, his coat off, his shirt cut away from the left shoulder. He was breathing slowly, through his nose, with his eyes on the broken roof.

"Tell me when it hurts," she said.

"It hurts now."

"More."

"Then I'll tell you."

She lifted the bandage.

It was worse than she had thought. The stone had not merely grazed him. It had flayed the skin from the point of the shoulder to the elbow, in a long ragged tongue, and driven a splinter of granite into the muscle beneath. The wound was welling steadily, a thin bright seep that had soaked the linen and run down his arm in dark streaks. Beneath it the shoulder was already swelling, mottled purple and yellow, hot to the touch.

"Hold still," said Thalessa.

"I'm holding."

"You're clenching. Don't."

"Then I shall hold the hearth."

She smiled in spite of herself, bent to her work, and did not look up again for a long time.

…

She had done this before, many times, but only upon the dead.

It was a strange and exacting thing to touch a living body with the hands that had been trained to taking apart the other kind. Everything was different. The skin gave under her fingers, and pushed back. The blood was hot. The man under her hands flinched when she probed, and drew his breath, and said "Go on" in a thin voice that cost him something to produce. She felt the pulse leap in the hollow of his throat when the forceps found the splinter, and she felt him force himself still.

"There," she said, and drew it out. It was no larger than a thumbnail, gray and jagged and wet.

"May I see?"

She held it up. He looked at it with a kind of grim interest.

"I shall keep that," he said.

"Why?"

"A man likes a souvenir of the day he nearly died."

"Do not say that."

"I'm only saying—"

"Roderick." She did not raise her voice. "Do not say it."

He was silent. The wind came in through the broken wall and set the lantern flame bowing. She poured spirit over the wound, and he said a single short word, and she said "I beg your pardon," and he said "You're not sorry," and she said "No, I am not." They both nearly laughed.

She threaded the needle.

It was a curved surgical needle, fine as a hair, with a length of silk from her chest, boiled in the spirit lamp that morning. She held it up to the lantern and turned it. The thread caught the light.

"This is the part I dislike," she said.

"Stitching?"

"The first stitch. It is always the first. After that it is only sewing."

"Then think of it as sewing."

"I'm trying."

She set the needle against the lip of the wound and pushed.

He did not make a sound. But his hand, the good one, which had been lying open on his knee, closed slowly on the folds of her skirt where it hung beside him, and held on.

She did not remove it. She went on with her work.

Seven stitches, neat and small. Then ten. She tied each off with a flick of the forceps and snipped the thread. Her back ached; her eyes stung with the strain of the poor light. The gulls' nests stirred in the draft and fell apart, and a feather drifted down and settled on the cloth. The fog pressed on the doorway like a held breath. She had stopped hearing the sea.

All she heard was the sound of his breathing, slow, ragged, then slow again.

"You are very good at this," he said at last.

"I am very good at the dead. The living are a recent study."

"You'd never know."

"You are generous, because you are in pain."

"I am generous," said Roderick, "because I have been stitched by three surgeons in my life and one of them was drunk, and you are the first who has apologised."

"I haven't."

"You have. Twice."

"I said I was not sorry."

"You said it as though you were." He turned his head against the stone and looked down at her. His face was only a foot from hers. The lantern made a hollow of each cheek, and the gray eyes were very dark. "Ashwood."

"Thalessa," she said, without thinking.

The word hung in the air.

"Thalessa," said Roderick, quietly.

Her hands had stopped. She looked at them, at the needle between her fingers and the thread trailing from it, at the red-brown stain on her cuff, and for the first time in many days she felt the tight iron band around her chest loosen by a single notch.

"You should not say it like that," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I am engaged to a man who has been dead three days."

It was out before she could stop it. She felt her face flush hot, and then drain cold.

"Are you?" said Roderick.

"I..."

"Was he a man you would have married?"

She stared at the stitch under her hands. "Yes."

"Did you love him?"

"I thought I did."

"Do you now?"

"I don't know what I loved." She laid the needle on the cloth. Her voice was very low. "I loved a man who was gentle. Who was careful with his hands. Who stood very still when I spoke, and listened as though what I said were important. And I find that I do not know where he went in the evenings. Or what he dreamed. Or what he carried on his body that he would not let me see." She drew a breath. "I should like to have the right to mourn him. I do not know if I have it. I do not know whether to weep for a good man, or flinch from a bad one."

"Perhaps there is no difference."

"There is always a difference."

"Not always." He was gazing at the broken roof. "I once arrested a man for murder who had saved eleven children from a burning orphanage. He killed his wife with a candlestick because she would not stop singing. He was the gentlest man in the parish. I do not know what he was. I never found out."

"What happened to him?"

"He was hanged." Roderick's mouth twisted. "He asked me to hold his hand."

"And did you?"

"Yes."

She looked at him. In the lantern light his face was weary, grave, rather lovely in its ugliness. She thought: he is a man who holds the hands of the condemned.

"That is the sort of thing," she said, "that you ought to have been given a medal for."

"I got a lecture from the Commissioner."

"Then the Commissioner is a fool."

"He is. But he is a fool with a large pension." Roderick shifted, winced, and settled again. "Thalessa. I am not going to ask you anything you don't wish to tell me. But I would like you to know a thing. Whatever Valerius was, whatever he did, you are not it. You are not answerable for him. You were the person who loved him, and went on loving him, and still came here to find out the truth. That's not the act of a woman who is hiding."

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Don't," he said gently. "Please. If you cry I shall have to do something about it, and I have only the one arm."

She laughed, and it came out wet. She wiped her eyes with her wrist.

"Hold still," she said. "I have three more stitches."

"I'm holding."

"You are holding my skirt."

He looked down. His hand was still knotted in the gray wool, white at the knuckles.

"So I am," he said, and did not let go.

…

"Who was it meant for?" said Roderick, a little later.

She had finished the last stitch. She was cleaning the needle in the spirit, and the sharp smell of it filled the little room.

"The trap?"

"If the killer wanted a single victim, he'd have set it in the house. A deadfall on an outer stair, in the fog, is for anyone who happens to climb it. For us."

"For whoever went to the tower."

"Which means the killer knew we would go. Knew the hour. Knew the weather." He closed his eyes. "The Duke told no one but ourselves that we meant to go at first light."

"Yet someone knew."

"Someone who was listening. Or who had already guessed." He opened his eyes. "Or the Duke himself."

"A man who set a trap for the investigator, then sent word that he was ill?" She shook her head slowly. "It would be very cunning. And very stupid. He'd be the first man we looked at."

"A cunning man makes himself the first man you look at, so that you will look no further."

"That is a clever notion."

"It's not mine. It's the Commissioner's. He is, you will remember, a fool." The corner of his mouth moved. "But fools sometimes stumble on the truth."

She took the black waxed line from her pocket, unwrapped the handkerchief and laid it across her knee. The anchor bend sat at the end of it, small and neat and tight, a little knot with a great deal to say.

"Whoever tied this has tied it a thousand times," she said. "The hand did not hesitate. It is perfectly dressed, perfectly drawn. And it's the same as the one on Sterling's wrist."

"A sailor, you said."

"Or a sailor's pupil." She turned it over. "Captain Gabriel Haze taught his sister her letters, Inspector. Mr. Finch told us so, in his way. A man who whittled toys for the children of a fishing village. I think it likely that he taught her her knots too."

"A blind girl cannot tie a deadfall on a stair, in the dark, in a fog."

"No."

"A blind girl cannot ignite a cold-box in a bell tower or wind a clockwork that has been ticking for months."

"No. She cannot." Thalessa wrapped the line in the handkerchief again, slowly. "That is the thing that troubles me. Everything in this case points to a skilled and sighted hand. And everything that touches that hand has Miss Haze's fingerprints upon it, invisible and light as a moth's. I cannot make the two lie down together."

"Then one of them is false."

"Yes."

"Which?"

"I wish I knew." She tucked the little bundle into her sleeve. "That is the thing I most wish to know in the world."

…

By the time she had bound the arm and strapped it across his chest, the fog was thinning.

It lifted in rags. Through the broken wall she could see the gray cliff edge now, and beyond it, far below, a long white ribbon of surf. The sea lay like lead under a sky of the same color. And in the face of the cliff, where the black rock plunged down to the water, something square and dark and regular showed in the stone.

Thalessa shaded her eyes.

"What is that?"

Roderick followed her gaze. "A boathouse. The Duke keeps a skiff there. It has a stair cut in the rock." He frowned. "Why?"

"There is a door." She leaned out as far as she dared. "Below the boathouse. A second one. Cut into the cliff, at the waterline."

"A sea cave."

"Miss Haze said the cliff was a honeycomb."

"So she did."

They looked at each other. The wind lifted a strand of her hair and laid it across her mouth, and she did not brush it away.

"It's tidal," she said. "The cave. The door is just above the swell mark, you can see the weed. At low water one could row a boat in. At high tide the sea would hide it entirely."

"A man could come and go from that door at night, and no one in the house would hear a step."

"Or a woman."

"Or a woman." He pushed himself up from the wall with his good hand, swaying, and she put out an arm to steady him. "Tomorrow," he said. "At low water. We'll go down and look."

"You'll do no such thing. You'll lie in bed for a week."

"A week is a long time."

"A week is exactly as long as it takes a shoulder to knit."

"Then I'll have to be quick about the rest." He looked down at her. His face was close again, and his breath warm on her cheek. "Thank you."

"For stitching you?"

"For the apology. I rather hope you'll make it again some day."

She felt the color rise in her face, and turned away to pack the chest. "Come," she said brusquely. "The fog is going. We shall be seen."

He came. And behind them, as they went out into the gray and thinning morning, the ruined watch-house settled once more into its silence, its gulls' nests, its stained white cloth upon the floor, and one small drop of red on the hearthstone, drying, where the wind could find it.

…

They came into the house by the kitchen door, as quietly as thieves, and met no one but the cat.

On the back stair the air was warm and smelled of bread. Roderick leaned on the wall for a moment with his eyes shut, his coat draped over his shoulders to hide the sling. A clock somewhere struck nine. Voices came faintly from the hall, a clink of china, the rustle of a newspaper.

"I will see you to your door," said Thalessa.

"I can manage."

"You can't. You're the color of whey."

"Then I shall manage slowly."

They had reached the second-floor landing when a tall figure stepped out of the shadow of the linen press and stopped before them.

Doctor Malthus Malakor stood with his hands clasped before him, his long face composed, his spectacles flashing in the gray light of the window. He looked at Roderick's drawn mouth. He looked at the sling beneath the coat. He looked, for rather longer, at the dried blood on Thalessa's cuff.

"You've been hurt, Inspector," he said.

"A fall."

"A bad one, by the look of it." He took a step forward. "Allow me. I have a little skill in the matter."

"We are obliged to you," said Thalessa, "but the arm has been seen to."

"By you?"

"By me."

"Ah." The thin mouth turned down. "I should like to see your stitching."

"I think not."

"It is only that infection can be quite dangerous, in a wound of that depth." His voice was soft, concerned, courteous. "I would not wish to see another death in this house. Especially one so easily prevented."

"You are very kind."

"I am a physician."

"You are," said Thalessa, "a great many things, Doctor."

For a moment the two of them stood looking at each other across the width of the landing. Roderick, between them, kept very still. Then Malthus inclined his head with the faintest of smiles, as a man does who has been refused something he did not particularly want.

"Another time, then," he said.

He stepped aside to let them pass.

She did not look back. But when they reached Roderick's door, and she had seen him into the chair by his bed, and drawn the curtains and poured water and stood a long moment watching his chest rise and fall, she realised that her hand, which had been resting on the bedpost, was trembling so that the wood rattled against the wall.

He looked at my cuff, she thought. Not at the arm. At the cuff.

He wanted to know how much blood there was.