A Law Without a Door

"Justice is a house with many rooms. The trouble is that someone has locked the one we need."

The cat's name was Pilchard.

It was a fat gray tom of no particular family, with one torn ear, and it had lived in the kitchens of Blackwood Manor for six years on the strength of an unbroken record against mice. It sat now on the deal table in the pale morning light with its paws tucked under its chest and its tail curled round its body, regarding Thalessa with an expression of deep mistrust.

"I am sorry," she said to it, quite seriously. "It will not hurt. It's only a drop."

The cat said nothing.

She had set up her instruments on the end of the table: the spirit lamp, the glass dish, the little brass scale, the pipette. In the dish lay a few spoonfuls of dark brown fluid, scraped from the shards of the green bottle with a clean knife. It smelled of bitter orange, and of something under the orange, faintly sweet and faintly rank, like crushed leaves left in a damp cellar.

She had boiled it, and filtered it, and let it cool. She had run the jade strip through it, and the strip had not changed. Wisteria was not what she was looking for. She had a better test, older than her profession, as old as the first herbalist who ever noticed what the nightshade did to the eyes of a cow.

"Hold him, please," she said.

The cook's boy, who had been summoned to assist, and who had gone the color of tallow when he heard what was wanted, took the cat firmly in his arms and turned its head into the light. Thalessa drew up a pipette-full of the tonic, diluted it with a dram of distilled water, and let a single drop fall into the left eye.

The cat blinked. It flinched. It gave a small indignant mew.

"There," said Thalessa. "Now we wait."

She took out her watch, and set it on the table, and sat down.

…

"You are going to blind the poor beast," said Roderick from the doorway.

He had come in without a sound, which she was beginning to understand he did when he was troubled. He wore a clean white shirt, and his arm was in its sling, and the shadow under his eyes was blue. He had not slept. Neither of them had slept since the shot.

"I'm going to do nothing of the kind. I'm going to show you something."

"Tell me."

"The Duke was not mad." She kept her eyes on the cat. "Not before the tonic, at any rate. He was frightened. He was guilty. He was hag-ridden, and I have no doubt that he saw the Captain in his dreams. But when he opened that door, with a pistol in his hands, he was not a man in his senses. He was a man who had been poisoned into a vision. The thing he saw was in his head, and the thing that put it there was in this bottle."

"Belladonna."

"Or henbane. Or the seed of the thorn-apple. They all do it. They all have the same active principle, the same cruel little alkaloid, and it does three things to a man." She ticked them off on her fingers. "It dries him. It flushes him. And it widens the pupil of the eye until the iris is a hair's width of color round a pit of black."

"The Duke's eyes."

"The Duke's eyes were like a cat's in the dark." She glanced at the watch. "It is eleven minutes. Look."

She took the cat's chin between finger and thumb, and turned its face to the window.

The left eye had changed. It was no longer a narrow green slit. It had opened, slowly, into a huge round gleaming disc of black, bordered by the thinnest ring of gold. The right eye, untouched, remained a green line.

"There," said Thalessa. "It's a hundred years old, that test. They used to put it on cattle."

"And the bottle?"

"The bottle is poison, as sure as I sit here. It contains a good ounce of the extract, concentrated, in a little wine and orange peel. A man who took a spoonful a night would see strange things in a week. A man who took a spoonful every hour would see them by morning." She released the cat. It leapt off the table in one bound and fled under the dresser. "I'm sorry, Pilchard," she called after it. "It will pass by evening."

"Whose hand put it there?"

"Whose hand pours the tonic?"

They looked at each other in silence.

"Miss Haze," said Roderick at last.

"Miss Haze. Who measures it by the weight of the spoon." She folded her hands. "She put it in, Roderick. She said so herself, in a way. The doctor trusted me with it. She has dosed that man for four years. Perhaps with the true medicine. And the last week, with the other."

"We cannot prove that."

"No."

"A bottle of poisoned tonic. A footman who said the dose was measured by her. A spoon." He rubbed his forehead. "It is the sort of case a clever barrister would drive a coach and six through."

"I know."

"If she says that Malakor himself must have changed the formula before he died, who can contradict her?"

"I can. I'd say it was an impossibility." Thalessa's voice was tight. "A man dosed with the same drug for years would have tolerance. He wouldn't have gone raving in a night. Someone raised the dose, recently, drastically. Someone who knew exactly how much to put in."

"And who is going to say that in a court?"

"I am."

"A woman. A toxicologist. A fiancée of one of the dead, with an interest in the case." He said it gently. "They will say you are biased, Thalessa. They will say that you came here looking for a villain, and found one."

"I did not find one. I found three."

"They will say that, too."

She stood up, abruptly, and walked to the window. The glass was streaked with rain. Beyond it, the kitchen garden lay gray and sodden under the cliff, with a few blackened cabbage-stalks standing in rows like the stumps of a burnt village.

"Then what is the law?" she said, without turning. "What does it say? That we may do nothing, and let her do the rest?"

…

The law, as Roderick explained it, in the weary measured voice of a man reciting a litany he has long since stopped believing, was this.

There was a Duke of the realm in this house. Under the Peerage Act of the previous reign, no peer could be detained, charged or questioned in a criminal matter without the written warrant of the Lord Chancellor, countersigned by two Law Lords. There was no such warrant. There was no Lord Chancellor within forty miles. The telegraph line to the village had been down since the landslide, and the road would not be passable for another two days.

There was, moreover, a dead man in the upper gallery with a ball through his lung, and the person who had fired it was the Duke. That was clear to anyone. But the Duke had been drugged. A man who has been poisoned into madness is not a murderer, in the eyes of the law; he is a victim. And the person who had drugged him, if she could be named, was a blind housekeeper of no rank, no property, and no reputation but that of a quiet, faithful servant with a drowned brother.

"And if I arrest her," said Roderick, "I do so on my own authority, as an officer of the Crown, without a warrant. Which I may do, for a felony. But I must then take her before a magistrate within twenty-four hours."

"There is no magistrate."

"There is none. And if I lock her in a room for two days, on suspicion, with no charge, no evidence, and no court, and she is later found innocent..." He spread his good hand. "It is false imprisonment. I would be dismissed. And worse, the case would collapse. Everything we have found would be inadmissible. The petals, the knots, the ink. They would be thrown out as the fruit of an illegal detention."

"Better a dead Duke than a dismissed policeman."

"That is unjust."

"It is not unjust. It is accurate." She turned. Her face was white and drawn. "You are telling me that the machinery of the law is so very careful of the rights of a woman who may have killed six people that it cannot touch her, and so very careless of the rights of the six that it has not a word to say for them. And I understand it, Roderick. I do. I have lived in that machinery all my life. But I am so tired."

"I know."

"I am so tired of being on the side that has rules."

He crossed the kitchen. He stood in front of her, close, with the weak morning light from the window falling on his face. She saw that he was trembling very slightly, the fine fatigue tremor of a man who has gone too long without sleep. She saw too the hard line of his mouth, and the calm of the eyes above it, and understood that he was not in the least calm, and that it was costing him dearly to appear so.

"There is one thing the law allows me," he said.

"What?"

"A peer may be placed under protective guard. Not arrest. Not detention. Guard, by the Crown's officer, for his own safety, in his own house, if there is cause to believe his life is in danger." The corner of his mouth moved. "I should say there was cause."

"For the Duke."

"For the Duke. I shall sit on his door myself. Nobody will enter that room but you and I. Not his food, not his drink, not his sheets, until we have examined them." He looked down at her. "I cannot stop her. But I can see that she does not reach the last of them. And if she tries..."

"Then we have her."

"Then we have her in the act. Which no barrister on earth can drive a coach through."

She stared at him. Slowly, an expression crossed her face that was almost a smile.

"You are a very devious man, Inspector."

"I am a very legal one." He shrugged his good shoulder. "It's more or less the same."

…

The Duke woke at two.

She was with him when it happened. She had spent the morning at his bedside, in the cold high bedroom with its shuttered windows and its faded crimson hangings, administering what she had in her chest. A grain of calabar bean extract in a little water. A tincture of opium, to bring down the fever. A cold cloth for his burning forehead. He had slept like a dead man, flushed and shallow-breathing, with his mouth open and his silver hair stuck to his temples.

He opened his eyes slowly, as a swimmer breaks the surface.

The pupils had shrunk. They were still wide, but no longer the dreadful wells of the night before; the gray irises showed again, rimmed with red. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the bed-curtains. He looked at Thalessa, sitting by the bed with her hands folded, and a long slow frown crept over his face.

"Where is Uriah?" he said.

"Mr. Finch is dead, Your Grace."

"Yes." The old man closed his eyes. "I thought that I'd dreamed it."

"You did not."

"I shot him."

"You did."

He lay quite still for a long time. A tear crept out beneath the closed lid and ran sideways into his hair.

"I did not know it was he," he said. "I swear to you. I saw the Captain. As clearly as I see you. I saw his coat and his face and the blood on his shirt. I thought: he's come at last." He swallowed. "And I thought: if I kill him again, perhaps he will stay dead."

"Again."

"Yes."

"Your Grace," said Thalessa gently. "You have said again."

The old man's eyes opened. They were blue and clouded and very tired.

"Have I?"

"You said you thought that if you killed him again, he would stay dead."

For a moment she saw the old reserve start across his face like a shutter coming down. His mouth thinned. His hand twitched on the coverlet. And then, quite suddenly, the whole structure gave way. His face crumpled. He turned his head against the pillow and shut his eyes, and she saw the tears start in earnest.

"I have not slept in four years," he said. "I have not slept one night. I lie down in the dark and I see him. And I cannot even weep, you know. I have forgotten how. It is as though the water has all run out of me."

"It has not run out now."

"No." He laughed shakily. "It seems it has not."

She sat quietly, and did not speak.

"Will you tell me something, young lady?" The voice was very low. "Will you tell me whether you believe in God?"

"I believe," said Thalessa, "in the chemistry of the body, and the justice of the law, and the kindness of certain people. I have not always found it necessary to go further."

"That's an honest answer."

"It is the only one I have."

"Then I shall give you an honest one in return." His eyes opened and fixed on her face. "I will tell you everything. All of it. To you, and the Inspector, and the Lord Chancellor if he likes. But not now. Not while I am sick." His fingers closed on her sleeve with a surprising strength. "Give me a night. One night, and a clear head. I will write it out. I will sign it. I will put my name to every word."

"Your Grace—"

"Only promise me this." The grip tightened. "Promise me you will not let her bring my tray."

Thalessa did not move.

"Whom do you mean?"

"You know whom I mean."

"Say the name, Your Grace."

"I can't." His voice cracked. "I haven't the right. I haven't the right to say it. She has been so kind."

Thalessa looked down at the thin hand on her sleeve, the knuckles knotted with age, the veins standing up like blue cords, the gold seal-ring loose on the shrunken finger.

"I promise," she said.

"Thank you." He sank back. His eyes closed. "Thank God. Thank God. Someone ought to have said it, a long time ago."

She sat beside him until he slept.

Then she rose, quietly, and went to the window. She drew the curtain aside a hand's breadth and looked down at the dim gray garden, the dripping trees, the broken wall. Nothing moved there. The rain fell. The wind had dropped.

Far below, in the kitchen yard, a small figure in a gray dress was crossing the flagstones toward the pump, a bucket swinging from one hand, her face turned up to the sky.

She was walking, Thalessa noticed, without her cane.