What the Body Remembers

"Scars are the only honest autobiography. They are written in a hand that cannot be forged."

She returned to the chapel at noon, with a lamp, a lens and a determination not to be afraid.

The snow had stopped. A pale and tentative light fell through the window and lay across the gray velvet like a sheet of tin. Lady Aurelia lay where she had been left, with her hands folded and her gold hair combed. The cold had kept her well. She looked like a figure on a tomb, delicate and remote, a woman who had been dead for a hundred years.

Thalessa set her chest on the bench and drew on her gloves.

Her left side, Malthus had said. I would advise you to go no further.

It was, she thought, a remarkably unwise piece of advice to give to a toxicologist.

She turned back the sheet.

She began at the shoulder, and worked slowly down, in the old methodical way, with the lens held an inch above the skin. The left arm was clear. The ribs were clear, save for the wound over the heart, already shrunken and gray at the lips. Below the ribs the skin was fine and white and slightly puckered, as though from the pressure of corsets. She moved on to the hip.

And stopped.

There, on the outer curve of the left thigh, where the nightdress had ridden up, lay a pale band. It was narrow, no wider than two fingers, and perhaps four inches long. The edges were clean. The surface was silvery and slightly sunken, with the glaze of ancient healing. At either end, a row of tiny puckered dots marked the places where stitches had once drawn the lips together.

She laid her fingertip along it. It was smooth as a satin ribbon.

She drew a breath and went on.

There was another on the inner thigh, shorter, deeper, almost round. A third at the back of the upper arm, where the flesh was soft. A fourth, very faint, near the base of the spine. She counted them slowly, aloud, in the empty chapel, to hear her own voice.

"Four."

She drew the sheet back up to the waist. Then she sat down on the bench, because her knees had begun to shake.

…

She told him at three.

Roderick had been put to bed, over his protests, in the room at the end of the east corridor, with a fire, a pitcher of barley water and orders to lie flat. He sat propped on three pillows with the sling across his chest and a gun on the coverlet, and he looked at her without speaking while she gave her report, in a low and measured voice, from the foot of the bed.

"Four scars," he said, when she had finished.

"Four. Older than the wreck by nothing. I should say four years, and not more than five. All healed by first intention, and well. Cut by a steady hand, closed with fine stitches, dressed with care." She folded her hands. "And all of them in the soft places. The thigh. The upper arm. The flesh that is thickest and least vital."

"The best meat."

"You said it, not I."

"It was in your mind."

"It was." She closed her eyes. "It has been in my mind since the chapel."

He was quiet.

"Ragnar had three," he said. "The Duke has at least one. Aurelia has four. The surgeon, I'd stake my pension, has more." He shifted against the pillows. "They cut themselves."

"Yes."

"Not each other."

"Not only each other. Look at the cuts, Inspector. The length of them. The ones on the Lady's body are small. Narrower than Sterling's, and shorter. The width of a finger, the length of a hand's breadth. She gave less. A woman gives less, I suppose, who has less to give." Her voice was perfectly flat. "But she gave. And I think they all did. I think that they each, in turn, laid their own flesh upon the knife."

"For what?"

"To prove a thing. To one another." She opened her eyes. "To swear."

"I don't understand."

"Neither do I. Not yet. But think." She began to walk slowly up and down at the foot of the bed. "Twenty-one days. Three days of bread. By the tenth, the eleventh, the whole company is starving. Delirious. The strong and the weak. The mad, if any are mad. What does a surgeon do, who has a company dying before him and a knife in his bag?"

Roderick said nothing.

"He says: there is meat. There is always meat. He says: I will take it from myself first. And he does. And the others, shamed, frightened, hungry, follow him, one at a time. Each lays his arm upon the thwart and holds it out." She stopped. "They feed each other. They keep each other alive. Out of their own bodies, a little at a time, so that none shall have the burden of being the only one who did it."

The fire shifted.

"That's a thing that has happened," said Roderick slowly. "In the old accounts. In the Arctic."

"Yes."

"But they would not speak of it. It is a thing men take to the grave."

"It is. And they have." Her mouth was dry. "Four of them. Five, with Valerius. A pact of silence, and a pact of blood, sealed in the flesh. And now someone has come to claim a debt."

"Whose?"

"Of the ones who didn't survive."

"The crew."

"The twenty." She shook her head. "Or the captain."

Neither spoke. Outside, the light was already failing. The window had turned the color of old pewter.

"Say it," said Roderick.

"What?"

"The thing you haven't said. I think you have been holding it in your mouth since the chapel, and it's heavy." His voice was very gentle. "Say it, Thalessa. Here. Nobody will hear."

She stood at the foot of the bed with her hands clasped before her, the lamp throwing her shadow tall against the wall.

"They ate," she said.

It was a small flat sound in the stillness.

"They ate," she said again. "Each other. A little at a time. To live." She drew a long breath. "And Thorne was one of them."

He did not answer at once.

Then, in the same low voice, he said, "And you still came."

"I did not know."

"You do now."

"Yes."

"And you are still here."

"Where else would I be?"

"I could think of several places." He held her gaze. "Would you like to be in any of them?"

She thought about it, honestly, with the care she gave to all her questions.

"No," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I wish to know who did this to them." Her voice was steady, and strange. "Not out of vengeance. I'm too tired for it. But somebody has made a ritual of their sin. Somebody has laid their guilt out upon a table and is eating it with a spoon. And I wish to know why."

"For justice."

"For comprehension. Which is rarer." She almost smiled. "I'd settle for either."

…

The knock on the door was a servant's knock, two quick raps and a pause.

Thalessa opened it on Uriah Finch.

He stood in the corridor with his cap in his hands and a folded paper clamped under his arm. His face was gray. His thin shoulders were hunched, as if against the pull of a draft that no one else could feel.

"Beg pardon, ma'am," he whispered. "Beg pardon, sir. I didn't know where else to go."

"What is it, Mr. Finch?"

"The doctor, ma'am." He glanced over his shoulder, along the empty corridor. "Dr Malakor. He went to the chapel an hour past. I was bringing the candles. I saw him go in."

Roderick sat bolt upright against the pillows, and winced.

"Go on."

"He was in there a quarter of an hour. I heard something. A scraping. And a sort of... tearing sound, sir." Uriah's throat worked. "When he came out, he'd got his bag with him. Black leather. He didn't see me. He went away to his room."

"What did he take?" Thalessa asked, very quietly.

"I don't know, ma'am. But I looked after, when he was gone. At the Lady." The footman swallowed. "I never meant to. But the sheet was lying wrong."

"And?"

"Her side, ma'am. Her left side." He shut his eyes. "Somebody had cut it."

Thalessa did not remember crossing the room. She was in the corridor before the footman had finished, in the cold gloom of the stair, running with her skirts in her fist. She took the chapel steps two at a time, thrust back the door, caught up the lamp from the bench.

The sheet lay where it had been left. She tore it down.

The thigh was bare. The four silver scars were gone.

Where the first had been, on the outer curve, there was a raw rectangle of exposed flesh, neatly squared, perhaps four inches by two. A clean cut, no more than an hour old. The edges were gray and bloodless. Whoever had made it had known exactly where to cut, and had taken the skin and the first layer of muscle beneath, in one piece, like a man lifting a sod from a lawn.

The others had been done the same. Four neat squares. Four clean holes.

She stood in the lamp-glow, with the sheet in her fist, and felt the room go slowly white around her.

He took the evidence.

He cut the proof from the body of a dead woman.

Behind her, the footman had stopped in the doorway. She heard him gasp. She heard the Inspector's heavy tread, and his hand, hard and warm, close round her arm. She did not turn.

"He knows," she said. "He knows what we know."

"Thalessa."

"He knows what the scars would tell, and he cut them out. He couldn't take the body, so he took the page." Her voice cracked. "He is destroying the record, Roderick. One by one. Before the killer can."

"Or before we can read it."

"Yes."

Roderick looked at the raw gray rectangles. He did not speak for a very long while. And then, in a voice she had not heard from him before, flat, cold and terrible, he said:

"Doctor Malakor is going to tell me everything he knows. Tonight."

"He will not."

"He will, or I shall break his neck."

"With one arm?"

"I've had worse odds."

She turned at last. His face was white and set, and his eyes were blazing. A thin line of red had come up through the bandage on his shoulder. She put her hand against it, firmly, and felt the heat of his blood.

"You are bleeding," she said.

"I don't care."

"Then I do." She pressed. "Sit down. We shall see him together. But we shall see him when I have restitched this, and not before, and if you argue I shall give you laudanum in your barley water."

"You would not."

"I have a very low opinion of your resolution, Inspector. I would."

He looked at her. A muscle moved in his jaw. And then, slowly, unwillingly, as though against his own will, the ghost of a smile touched his mouth.

"God help the man who marries you," he said.

She turned away to hide her face.

God help the man, she thought, who is fool enough to try.

…

Doctor Malakor's room was at the head of the north stair, behind a door of black oak that had a brass number on it, like the door of an inn.

It was eleven at night. Roderick had been restitched, rebandaged, and forbidden anything stronger than tea. He walked down the corridor a pace behind her with his revolver in his right hand and his left arm bound across his chest, and he did not complain once, which she took as a very bad sign.

She knocked.

"Doctor Malakor."

No answer.

"Doctor, it is Scholar Ashwood. I should like a word."

She waited. She heard the wind in the chimney, and the small settling groans of the old house. From somewhere below, a clock struck the quarter. No other sound.

Roderick tried the handle. It turned.

The door swung open on darkness, and on a smell that stopped her where she stood. It was a sharp, clean, bitter reek of spirits and ash, and under it, faint and sweetish, the smell of something that had been burned that ought not to be.

"Lantern," she said.

He held it up.

The room was bare as a monk's cell. A narrow iron bed, neatly made, the blanket tucked to hospital corners. A washstand. A single wooden chair. On the wall above the bed, a framed certificate from the Royal College of Surgeons, a little askew. Nothing else. No books. No pictures. No sign that anyone had lived there for four years.

The bed had not been slept in.

The black leather bag was gone.

She crossed to the hearth. It was a small grate, and someone had lit a fire in it, and then, by the look of it, fed it with something that did not wish to burn. The coals were black and glassy. A scrap of curled gray paper still clung to the bars. And in the ashes, fused to the iron, lay a few shrunken things like pale leather, curled and blistered at the edges.

She did not touch them.

"Thalessa."

"Yes."

"Look at the desk."

There was a writing-table by the window, bare but for a blotter and an inkwell. A sheet of notepaper lay squarely in the center of the blotter, face up, and on it, in a small crabbed hand, a few lines had been written and abandoned. The pen lay beside it in a blot of dried ink.

She bent over it by the lantern's light.

Inspector Thorne,

I find that I cannot do as I was asked. I have tried for four years to put it from my mind. I find that I cannot. There is a thing in this house that I am afraid of, and it is not the thing you suppose. If you wish to know the truth of what became of the Captain, you must

The line stopped dead.

There was no more.

"Of what became of the captain," Roderick read slowly. His voice was low and hard. "He was going to tell us."

"He was going to write it down. He was afraid to say it."

"And someone stopped him."

"Or he stopped himself." She straightened, and pressed her fingers to her temples. "Look at the blot. The pen was set down in the middle of a word. The ink has not run. There was no struggle. Nobody dragged him from the chair."

"He simply got up and left."

"Yes."

"With his bag."

"With his bag, and the burnt pieces of Lady Aurelia, and the one thing in all the house that frightened him enough to write this." She stared at the broken line. "Roderick, where would a man go who was afraid, and wished to be somewhere safe?"

"Not his room."

"No."

"Not the hall, where the rest of us were."

"No."

Neither of them said it. They did not have to. The thought was already in the air between them, black and cold as the draft that rose from the keyhole.

Far above their heads, in the thick dark of the roof, a door that had been locked for four years swung slowly open on its hinges.

They both heard it.

It was a long rusty groan, like a door in a dream, and it was followed, after a moment, by the soft, patient, unmistakable tick of a great wheel beginning to turn.