The Feast of the "Survivors"

"A banquet is only a funeral that has learned to smile."

The great oak door swung shut behind Thalessa Ashwood and swallowed the roaring blizzard whole, and in its place came a close, pressing silence, so complete that she could hear the melting snow ticking from her sleeves onto the flagstones. The iron latch fell into its socket with a dry, solid thud, like the lid of a stone coffin being locked from the inside.

The only light in the entrance hall was a brass candlestick held at breast height by the housekeeper, whose small flame threw a wavering gold across a face of delicate, porcelain pallor. Vespera Haze could not have been more than four-and-twenty. Her pale gray eyes, clouded like milk-glass, did not turn toward her visitor at all but rested on some fixed point of the empty air beyond Thalessa's shoulder, and the flame, held a hand's breadth from them, drew no flicker from the pupils.

"This way, if you please, Scholar Ashwood," she said, in a voice that was clear and soft and as cold as spring water. "Everyone is in the dining hall. Your arrival will make tonight's dinner quite extraordinary."

Thalessa said nothing. She followed the narrow back through the dark, noting that the housekeeper, whose sight had been spoken of in the town as utterly and permanently gone, moved with an astonishing fluency, gliding past the corners of candle-shelves and the projecting ledges of the marble skirting without a hand put out, like a phantom who had learned every millimeter of the house over a lifetime. The deep crimson carpet that ran the length of the Gothic corridor drank the sound of their feet. From the walls, the portraits of dead Blackwoods looked down out of their dusty varnish with the heavy-lidded contempt of people who knew precisely what had been done in their house and had decided to say nothing about it. Bohemian chandeliers hung over the passage, their gaslight turned low, and the crystal drops shivered a little as the two women passed, as though the house had drawn breath.

It was on the threshold of the great hall that her training woke. Beneath the rich warmth of beeswax and sandalwood there lay a second scent, so fine that anyone less practised would have taken it for a fancy: bitter, faintly sweet, with the green coolness of broken stems at its heart. It lay in the folds of the drapes. It rose in slow threads from the copper grilles of the ventilation that ran along the skirting boards and breathed warm air into the house. It was the same scent that had risen from the body of Thorne Valerius when she had bent over it, three days ago, in the cold white light of the operating theater.

Wisteria.

Her fingers tightened on the strap of the ebony chest, and her gray eyes hardened as she began, without seeming to, to record the architecture around her: the height of the cornice, the placing of the grilles, the number of paces to the nearest stair.

…

Vespera stopped before a pair of double doors of carved mahogany, and from beyond them came the clink of glasses and the low undertone of conversation, which stopped the moment the soft knock of the candlestick against the wood was heard. She pushed the doors open.

A room of the most extravagant opulence unfolded in front of them. At its center stood a long mahogany table under a cloth of unspotted white, laid with silver plates and crystal that threw back the light in a thousand fragments, and crowded with dishes: a glazed ham, a brace of roast pheasants, a saddle of beef of a color so deep it was almost black, bowls of winter fruit. A marble fireplace big enough to roast an ox glowed at the far wall with burning pine logs and radiated an intense, almost insolent heat. A footman, a thin man with a pitted face, stood at the sideboard with a decanter of Burgundy, as stiff as an ornament, and Vespera moved at once to the table to set a clean glass at an empty place with a small deft touch, feeling for the rim.

Four people sat around that table. They were the four remaining survivors of the wreck of the St. Jude.

She came into the room in her ash-gray coat, still frosted with unmelted snow, carrying her medical chest, and the effect on them was that of a blast of black wind striking straight into the artificial warmth. Four heads turned together. In that instant, before they had time to arrange themselves, Thalessa saw what lay beneath their noble faces, and she saw it as clearly as if it had been laid bare on a dissecting slab: first astonishment, then suspicion, and last, and strongest of all, a naked, animal panic.

At the head of the table, in the host's chair, sat Duke Alastair Blackwood. He was a man in his fifties, in expensive dark velvet, with silver-streaked hair most meticulously brushed, yet no amount of care could conceal the gauntness of the face beneath it, the deep-sunken sockets and the dark bruised hollows under the eyes of a man who has not slept honestly in years. It was his hands that held her. He had a white silk handkerchief wound round the fingers of his right hand, and he was wiping them, over and over, working between each nail and over each joint in turn, and then lifting the hand close to his face to take in a deep breath of it, and his face twisted in revulsion each time, and he began again.

"The stench," he muttered, very low, so low that in any room less silent no one would have caught it. "The stench is still there."

He seemed haunted by a phantom smell that clung to his skin, and no perfume and no soap on earth would ever wash it off.

On his right sat the merchant, Ragnar Sterling, a massive, obese man with a carefully curled mustache and a brocade waistcoat worked in gold thread, whose whole monumental body had the look of a beast driven into a corner. His eyes never settled. His collar was dark with sweat though the hall was no hotter than a comfortable parlor. Thalessa let her glance slide to his plate, where a slice of rare roast beef lay with its juices spreading in a thin pink pool across the china, and she saw how he looked at it, with a terror so exact that it was almost reverent. His hand shook so hard that his fork rang against the rim of the plate, clink, clink, and he pushed the plate as far from him as his arm would reach, and dragged toward him instead a dish of boiled vegetables and a small heap of dried fruit, and ate from them hastily, with his face turned away.

Opposite him sat the army surgeon, Doctor Malthus Malakor, thin as a dry stake in a crisp black coat, his eyes hidden behind round gold-rimmed spectacles whose lenses gave back two small flames of firelight. He sat quite upright, hands laid flat on his thighs, with a face as cold and ruthless as a statue's, and he alone seemed to have mastered the art of calm; yet she noticed that his thin lips were pressed into a single line, and that the fingers on his knee were twitching, quietly and regularly, in time with the pulse beating in his throat.

The last of the four, at the corner of the table, was Lady Aurelia Vance. She was a woman of some eight-and-thirty years in a low-cut gown of black velvet, with a rope of pearls round her neck, who had once been the most celebrated beauty of the capital and now looked like a ghost that had stepped out of a grave and taken a chair. Her skin was the color of tallow. Her black-gloved hand held a silver spoon, and with it she stirred a cup of chamomile tea in steady, frantic circles, so that the bowl of the spoon rang against the porcelain with an endless thin cadence, tink, tink, tink, that scraped along the edges of Thalessa's nerves like a nail drawn over glass.

"Alastair," said Ragnar Sterling, in a voice that cracked upward and became unnaturally high. "Who is this? The mountain road is closed, isn't it? How did she get in?"

The Duke's handkerchief stopped. He lifted his eyes, which were bright with a splintered, hunted paranoia, and rested them on the intruder.

"Ashwood," he whispered, and his voice scraped like metal on stone. "You are Thalessa Ashwood. The scholar from the capital. Thorne's betrothed."

She took two steps forward, until she stood directly beneath the chandelier, and spoke in a voice that was flat and clear as ice-water.

"I am, Your Grace. I found your letter on his desk, with your invitation to the reunion, and the kind postscript concerning me. I have come in his place, because I regret that Thorne Valerius was unable to come himself."

There was a sharp, bright crash.

Lady Aurelia had let the spoon fall from her fingers onto her plate. The tea slopped over the rim of her cup and spread across the cloth in a pale yellowish-brown stain, and her face, which had been white, now emptied to a deadness beyond white, and her gloved hands rose and pressed against her breast as though to hold in a heart that was trying to leave.

"What did you say?" she breathed, in ragged jerks. "Thorne. What of Thorne? Why did he not come?"

Thalessa looked into each pair of eyes in turn. She saw the Duke's face loosen and drop, and the thick sweat gathering on Ragnar's fat neck, and a tiny, hardly perceptible curve at the corner of Doctor Malthus's mouth, a smirk so small that it might have been the shadow of one.

"Thorne is dead," she said, in three words, without a quiver. "Three days ago, in his own house in the capital."

The silence that fell upon the dining hall was dense and twisting, and outside it the storm seemed to rise in answer, flinging itself against the tall windows with the full weight of the sea.

"Dead?" Ragnar Sterling surged half out of his chair, gripping the table's edge with both enormous hands so that the crystal tilted and rang. "How? A fever? A seizure? Or was it—"

"Poison," said Thalessa, cutting him off, and her gaze fastened on his dilating pupils and did not release them. "A toxin that stops the lungs and the heart together. And upon his lips, at the moment of death, someone had laid, face-up, a deep-purple wisteria petal, with the letter T written on it in India ink."

"Dear God!"

Aurelia gave a thin piercing shriek and threw her head down upon the tablecloth, clutching her hair in both fists, her whole body convulsing as though a current had been passed through it. "It's here! I told you, I told you it would find us! The sentence! The sentence out of the sea!"

"Silence, Aurelia!"

The Duke brought his palm down on the table so hard that the silver leaped on the plates. He had risen, his face dragged into a mask of rage and fear, and the white silk was crushed to a ball in his fist. "Scholar Ashwood," he said, between breaths, "what have you come here to do? To bring us a funeral? To sow panic in my house?"

"I came to find the truth," Thalessa said, and she did not give back half a step. "Thorne was my betrothed. Before he died he spoke of this house, and of the wreck four years ago. I want to know what truly happened on board the St. Jude, and why the four of you have sunk so deeply into the habit of death."

Only now did Doctor Malthus Malakor speak. His voice was low and wholly without tone, the voice of a machine that has been wound and set down. "We offer our condolences, Scholar. But the loss of the St. Jude was a natural calamity, and the Royal Court closed the matter four years ago. A storm at sea sank her. We had the good fortune to survive in a lifeboat. Mr. Valerius's death is a private grief, and it has nothing to do with us."

Thalessa's lips curved in a small, cold smile. She stepped to the table, and her gray eyes passed slowly over the glazed ham and the black beef and the sweating glass of the Burgundy, and over the four faces behind them.

"Is that so, Doctor? Then why will Mr. Sterling not touch a morsel of rare meat? Why does His Grace wash his hands of a smell that is not there? Why is Lady Aurelia driven nearly out of her mind by the sound of a spoon on a plate?" She paused and turned, looking directly at the copper grille that breathed warm air behind the Duke's chair. "And why does this whole house reek of wisteria, the very flower that has just killed Thorne?"

The words fell like a scalpel on a dead man's skin, laying back the false noble surface in a single stroke and exposing the rot and the terror beneath. Ragnar Sterling sprang to his feet so violently that his chair crashed backward onto the stone floor, and thrust a thick finger into her face, bawling: "Enough! Alastair, throw her out! She's mad! She means to hang us for something! She is in league with the killer!"

"Sit down, Ragnar!" The Duke ground out the order through his teeth, though his own voice shook. He turned to Thalessa a face veined with red. "Scholar Ashwood, the road is cut. You cannot leave tonight. Vespera, make up a room for her on the second floor. When the storm clears in the morning I shall send someone to see you off. This house does not welcome you."

"Gladly, Your Grace," said Thalessa, and inclined her head with perfect composure, accepting the dismissal as one accepts a coin one has been waiting for. She knew now that she had struck precisely the old wound they had spent four years hiding, and the violence of their flinching was in itself the first piece of evidence: whatever had happened to the St. Jude had been no simple wreck.

Vespera Haze stepped to her side and bowed, soft as a shadow. "If you will follow me, Scholar Ashwood."

Thalessa turned and went out with her chest in her arms behind the blind girl's candle, and even as the double doors closed on the room she could hear the quarrel break out afresh behind them: a chair dragged, glass shattering on stone, and a voice, high and broken, that might have been the merchant's, screaming. The clock in the corridor struck a quarter to nine.

The feast of the survivors had hardly begun, and the shadow of death already lay across every corner of the room.