The Footprint in the Blood

"To test a person is to admit that you have stopped trusting them. Do it only when you have already begun."

"I do not like it," said Roderick.

"You have said so."

"I'll say so again. It is a mean thing. She has done nothing to deserve it."

"She has done nothing that we can prove." Thalessa did not look up from the little stoppered bottle she held. "That is the whole of the difficulty, Inspector. I am not trying to prove her guilt. I am trying to prove her blindness. And I should very much like to be wrong."

It was nine in the evening, and the corridor outside the chapel was dark.

Rain was coming in sheets from the sea. It hammered on the roof, ran down the leaded panes, fell in a thin bright thread from a broken gutter into the cloister garth. The candles in their iron sconces had been trimmed low, and the long stone passage lay in a flickering amber dusk, full of moving shadows. At the far end, a half-open door gave on the chapel and the three still shapes under their sheets.

Thalessa knelt on the flags, in the middle of the corridor, and uncorked the bottle.

"What is it?"

"Cochineal and gum. It will look like blood in this light. It will smell of nothing, and it will not dry for an hour." She tilted the bottle, and a thick dark-red fluid ran out on the stone in a slow, glistening tongue, and spread. "It's the stuff I use for teaching. The students cannot bear the real thing."

"I should not blame them."

"I should not either." She worked the stopper back in. "There."

The stain lay across the corridor like a spilled cup of wine. It was two feet across, and perfectly dark, and the candlelight made a bright wet eye in the middle of it. It could not be avoided. It stretched nearly from wall to wall, and any person passing along that passage must either step over it, or step in it, or turn back.

A person who could see it would step over it.

A person who could not would walk straight through.

"I'll be in the alcove," said Roderick, in a low voice. "With the door ajar. If she goes round, I shall see it."

"And if she does not?"

"Then I shall have been wrong, and you right, and we can leave her in peace." He paused. "Thalessa. If she is what you think she is. If she is the Captain's sister..."

"I know."

"Then she has a better reason than any soul in this house."

"I know it." Her voice shook very slightly. "That's why I need her to be blind."

He stood looking down at her. Then, without a word, he put his good hand briefly on her shoulder, and went away into the dark.

…

She heard Vespera before she saw her.

It was the smallest of sounds: the soft click of a latch somewhere below, the whisper of cloth, the very faint rhythmic tapping of a slender cane on stone. It came up the back stair, slowly, steadily, and turned along the east passage, and drew nearer.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Thalessa stood up and moved to the wall, behind the bulk of a carved oak chest. She drew her coat round her. She counted her own pulse. It was a small, hard, quick thing in her throat.

A light appeared at the end of the corridor, a single candle in a pewter stick.

Vespera Haze came into the passage with her cane in one hand and the candle in the other, her gray skirt trailing, her pale hair tight under its white cap. She walked as she always walked, with her chin a little raised, and her head tilted a little to the left, in an attitude of listening. The light of the candle fell on her face from below, and showed it plain and quiet and utterly composed. Her eyes were open and pale and fixed on nothing.

Thalessa stopped breathing.

Ten feet. Eight. Six.

The cane went out before her, swinging in a slow low arc. The tip of it touched the stone. It touched the edge of the stain. There was a small sticky sound.

The cane stopped.

Vespera stood quite still.

For one moment, one long frozen moment, Thalessa thought she was going to turn. The blind girl bent her head slightly. The candle flame leaned. She seemed to be listening to something very far away.

"Oh," said Vespera, softly. "Something's been spilled."

She put out her left foot, in a gray cloth slipper, and stepped into the middle of the stain.

The red closed over her instep. It squelched. It ran up the side of the shoe in a bright wet flame. She took another step, and another, quite unhurried, and left behind her a trail of small neat footprints, each one perfect, each one placed with the exactness of a signature, across the width of the corridor and out the other side.

She stopped on the dry flags beyond. She stood a moment looking down, or seeming to look down, at her feet.

"How careless of someone," she said gently. "I do hope it isn't wine. It will stain the stone."

Nobody answered.

She stooped, and touched her fingers to the floor behind her heel. She brought them up and rubbed them together. She lifted them to her nose.

And Thalessa stepped out of the shadows.

"It is not wine," she said.

Vespera did not start. She turned her head with perfect composure toward the sound, and the candlelight slid across her face.

"Ma'am," she said. "I did not hear you."

"I was standing very still."

"Yes. I thought there was someone. The air was different." The faint smile came. "It smells of lamp-oil, and of cloth, and of something sweet. Is it cochineal?"

"It is."

"Then it is a test." Her smile did not alter. "I have been tested before, ma'am. The doctors do it. They hold a lamp in front of my face and ask me what I see. They pass a hand before my eyes. They are very kind." She tilted her head. "Did you wish to know whether I should walk through it?"

"I wished to know many things."

"And do you know them now?"

"Not yet."

"I walked through it." Vespera lifted her slipper a little, so that the candlelight caught the dripping red sole. "A person who could see would not have done so. A person who could see would have been afraid of it."

"Perhaps."

"Perhaps." She smiled again, very gently. "Would you like to look at my eyes, ma'am? In the light? I am quite used to it."

Thalessa hesitated.

"Yes," she said.

…

She had never examined a living eye before, not like this, with the lens held an inch from the face, the lamp turned up to full, the subject seated on the oak chest with her chin lifted and her hands folded in her lap. It was an extraordinary sensation. It was like looking into a pool of water in which a face seemed about to rise.

The iris was a very pale gray, with a faint darker ring at the edge. The cornea was clear. The whites were slightly bluish, as in a child. At the center, a small black disc, perfectly round, floated in the gray like a coin in a well.

The pupil, thought Thalessa.

She took a small lantern, a hooded one, from her chest. She drew back the shutter a crack. A thin beam of white light sprang out.

She passed it slowly across Vespera's face.

She was watching the pupil. It was her whole attention, her whole being, that single trembling black point. The beam crossed it. It reached the left eye, hovered, passed on. And the pupil, hardly at all, but unmistakably, contracted.

She drew a long breath.

"Did you feel that?" she said.

"A warmth, ma'am. On the left." Vespera's voice was quite calm. "I perceive light. I told Inspector Thorne. I see the lamp as a sort of glow, like the sun through a closed eyelid. It was all that the fever left."

"You said you were blind."

"I am blind, ma'am. I cannot see a face. I cannot see a letter, or a candle, or the color of a sleeve." She turned her head slowly. "But a person can tell day from night, you know, even with her eyes shut. It is not seeing. It is only knowing that the sun is up."

It was a perfectly good answer. It was the answer of a woman whose condition was well understood, who had given it a hundred times. And Thalessa, the lens still in her hand, found that it satisfied her not at all.

Because she had been watching the other eye.

The right eye. The eye she had not touched with the beam. The eye that had been in the shadow, turned a little away, looking at nothing.

It moved.

It had moved only once. A tiny flicker, no more than a twitch, when the light crossed the left. As though it had flinched at a flash that it could not possibly have seen. As though, for the space of a breath, it had looked at the lantern.

She lowered the lens.

"Thank you, Miss Haze," she said.

"Have you finished?"

"For the moment."

"Then may I go to the chapel? The candles want changing." She rose, smoothing her apron. "I should not like Lady Aurelia to lie in the dark."

"By all means."

"Thank you, ma'am." She took up the cane and the pewter stick. At the threshold of the chapel she turned, with her pale eyes lifted to the place where Thalessa stood, and her little smile grew, very faintly, a shade deeper.

"You are very kind, Scholar Ashwood," she said. "I can see that."

She said it lightly, and went in.

The door closed softly behind her.

Thalessa stood looking at it for a long time. The rain beat on the roof. The candles guttered. On the floor before her, across the width of the stone passage, a trail of small red footprints ran straight and neat as a line of print, each one set squarely down the center, out of the stain, and into the dark.

"Roderick," she said, without turning.

"I'm here."

He came out of the alcove, soft-footed, and stood beside her. His face in the candlelight was somber.

"She walked straight through the middle," he said.

"Yes."

"A blind woman would."

"A blind woman would. But look at her feet." Thalessa pointed with the lens. "Look at the prints. Each one is perfect. Each one is exactly the length of the last. She did not drag. She did not hesitate. She did not slip. A blind woman crossing a wet floor puts out a foot, and sets it down uncertainly, and lets her weight settle. This woman placed every step. She walked across the width of a blood-stain with the precision of a dancer." She lowered her hand. "She knew the stain was there before the cane touched it. She knew where the edges were."

"She smelled the cochineal."

"She did. She smelled it, and felt for it with her cane, and she told us so. She was very careful that we should see her do it." Thalessa's voice fell. "Everything she does, Roderick, is done so that it may be seen."

"You think she's acting."

"I think she is the best actress I have ever met." She turned and looked at him, and he saw that her eyes were wet. "And I think that I am going to be sick."

"Thalessa—"

"It's nothing. It will pass." She put her hand to her mouth. "It is only that I liked her. I had begun to like her. She is gentle, and clever, and brave, and she has lost a brother, and I thought: here is somebody in this wretched house who has been wronged. And now..."

"Now you think she's the one who wrongs."

"Now I think she is both." She wiped her eyes. "That is what I cannot bear. That she might be both."

He was silent.

Then, very slowly, he drew her to him with his good arm, and held her. It was an awkward embrace, with the sling between them and the chest-strap digging into his side, and neither of them said anything. She stood stiffly for a moment, and then, quite suddenly, she let go. She put her forehead against his shoulder. She felt the warmth of him through the coarse cloth, and the dull drum of his heart, and the sleet-cold smell of his coat.

"We have no proof," she said, into the cloth.

"No."

"A twitch of an eye. A footprint. A turn of phrase."

"No."

"I would be laughed out of any court in the kingdom."

"I wouldn't laugh." His breath stirred her hair. "I've not laughed since the St. Jude."

She drew back. She looked up at him. His face was very close, and the candles made it gold, and in the gray eyes was something that she had no name for and did not need one.

"We shall find the proof," she said.

"We shall."

"And then?"

"And then," said Roderick, "we shall decide what kind of people we are."

Behind the chapel door, very low, a voice had begun to sing. It was a thin sweet voice, hardly more than a breath, and the tune was an old one, a sea-song, slow and sad as a tide. Thalessa did not know the words. She only knew that she had heard the tune before, long ago, in a kitchen, from a woman scrubbing a pot. A song about a boat, and a lantern, and a man who would come home.

She closed her eyes.

Come home, come home, when the dark tide's turning,

Come home to the lamp that I keep for thee.

And in the dark, behind the door, somebody was weeping as she sang.