The Letter in the Apron

"There are two ways to hide a word. One is to bury it. The other is to put it in order."

They did not lay Uriah Finch in the chapel until evening.

It was Vespera who asked to wash him. She asked it in a very small voice, standing in the cold dim doorway of the north gallery with her hands knotted in her apron, and her pale face turned a little aside. She said he had been kind to her. She said that when she first came to the house, a frightened girl of nineteen with a bundle on her back, it was Uriah who had carried her box up the stairs and shown her where the pump was and which of the stairs creaked. She said that nobody else would do it properly. She said that she could not bear for him to lie there in his blood.

Thalessa had looked at Roderick, and Roderick had looked at the ceiling, and neither of them could find a reason to refuse.

So it was done, in the chapel, at five o'clock, in the dwindling light, while Thalessa stood against the wall with her arms folded and her eyes on the housekeeper's hands. She had promised herself she would look away. She did not look away for an instant.

She watched Vespera Haze fold back the sheet and unbutton the dead man's shirt. She watched her fill the basin and wet the cloth. She watched her wash the thin gray face, tenderly, with long slow strokes, the brow, the closed lids, the hollow cheeks, the lips. She watched her wring out the cloth and wash the chest, and the stiffening arms, and the long thin hands. She watched her comb his hair. She watched her close his eyes again, when they would not stay shut, with the pad of her thumb, and hold them closed until they stayed.

And all the time the tears ran down her cheeks and dripped on the dead man's collar, and she did not seem to know that she was weeping.

"There," she said at last, in a thick voice. "That's better."

"Thank you, Miss Haze," said Thalessa quietly.

"He was only twenty-nine."

"I know."

"He'd a sister in service, in the north. Her name is Ellen. He used to say he'd bring her down for a summer." She straightened, wiping her wet face on her sleeve. "I shall write to her. If I may. If you will tell me the address."

"It's in his tin box."

"Yes. I'll fetch it."

She went out. Her footsteps died along the passage, uncertain, careful, tapping. Thalessa stood very still until she was sure that they were gone.

Then she let out her breath and crossed to the trestle.

…

It was Roderick who found it.

She had not touched the apron. It was the stained white apron of the serving-pantry, which Vespera had taken off the body and folded, with a housekeeper's neatness, and laid at the foot of the trestle. A splash of dried blood stiffened the bib. The strings were knotted. It looked like nothing at all.

But Roderick, who had been watching from the door, said suddenly, "The pocket."

"What about it?"

"It's heavy on one side."

She went to the apron and turned it over. There was a single patch pocket, deep and square, sewn on at the waist. A fold of heavy cloth, a little stained, with a wide hem. She slid two fingers in.

Something dry and delicate whispered against her skin.

She drew it out with her forceps, very slowly, and laid it on a square of white cloth, and for a moment neither of them moved.

It was a wisteria petal.

It was pale violet, a little crumpled, somewhat dried at the edges, as though it had lain a day or two against a warm body. On its face, in the same black stroke she had seen five times already, shone a single capital letter.

E.

"It was in his pocket," said Roderick.

"Yes."

"Before the shot."

"There is no blood on it." She turned it with the forceps. "No blood at all. It was in the apron when he was hit. If it had been put in afterwards, it would be stained. Look at the pocket. It has been bled through from the front, here, and here, but the inside is clean." She raised her head. "He carried it into that gallery, Roderick. He carried it to the Duke's door. He did not know what he was carrying."

"Someone put it there."

"Someone who knew he would be shot." Her voice was very low. "Someone who knew he would be shot, and where, and when, and that his body would be searched by someone who knew how to look."

"Meaning us."

"Meaning us."

He crossed the chapel, came to stand at her shoulder. She felt the warmth of him through her sleeve.

"The Duke," he said. "The Duke shot him."

"The Duke pulled the trigger." She said it very evenly. "The Duke is a pistol. He's an instrument. A man whose mind has been bent, a spoonful at a time, until he can be aimed. The killer didn't need to be in that gallery, Roderick. The killer needed only to be in the kitchen with a green bottle and a spoon."

"For how long?"

"A week. Two. Gradually." She closed her eyes. "It was done like a clock. A little more each night. I wonder that he lived."

"And we saw nothing."

"We were looking at the towers."

He said nothing. She heard him draw breath, and let it go.

"Six petals," he said at length.

"Six."

…

They laid them out in the morning room, on the green baize of the card-table by the window, under the cold gray light.

She had taken them from their glass tubes and lint, one by one, and set them in a row. Six small bruised wisps of violet lay side by side in the dusk. Each wore its black initial like a scar.

T. S. A. R. V. E.

"Tsarve," said Roderick. He had his head on one side. "It is not a word."

"No."

"Perhaps another language."

"I tried Latin last night. And Dutch. And what little Russian I have." She sat down at the table and drew the petals toward her. "I was wrong about the number. It is not eight. It is six, and a seventh to come."

"How do you know?"

"I don't. I guess." She pressed her fingers to her eyelids. "A killer who wants his work read does not choose a word that is difficult to guess. He chooses one that, once it is seen, cannot be unseen. A word that is plain as a cry."

"A word that matters."

"A word that would have mattered to the Captain."

She took the petals in her fingers, slowly, and began to move them.

It was an old trick of the cipher-room, one she had learned as a student, from a bored professor with a taste for puzzles. You did not look at the letters. You did not read them. You laid them in a row and let your eye go soft, and moved them, one by one, as you might move beads on a string, until something in the arrangement pulled.

T S A R V E.

S T A R V E.

She stopped.

Her fingers had moved without her willing it, and the little violet scraps lay before her in a new order, and the room had gone very still.

S. T. A. R. V. E.

"Starve," said Roderick.

The word fell on the baize like a coin.

She did not say anything. She sat looking at it, the six pale petals in their neat row, the capitals black as hair, the word simple and flat and complete. She had a strange sensation, as though a door that had been shut in her mind for days had swung quietly open and let in a draft of cold air.

Starve.

The hunger at sea.

Hunger on the rescue boat.

It is taking back what it is owed.

"The order was wrong," she said. Her lips were stiff. "Valerius died first, and bore T. Sterling bore S. If the word is to be read in the order of death, it is TSARVE. But that is not the order of the word. It's the order of something else."

"Of what?"

"I don't know yet." She stared at the petals. "Of the order in which they were fed. Or the order in which they fed. It's a count. A list." She touched the T. "Valerius first. Sterling second. Then Aurelia, the double letter, who is two things at once. Then the doctor. Then the footman."

"The footman was not on the boat."

"No. That is the other thing." She turned her head. "The E is an interloper. It does not belong to a survivor. It belongs to a man who was caught in the machinery. A mistake, perhaps. Or a message."

"What message?"

"That the killer does not need the five. That the killer will take anyone who stands in the way." She swallowed. "Roderick. There is a last letter missing."

"The Duke's."

"The Duke's. And I think I know what it is."

He did not ask.

They both sat looking at the six petals on the green baize. In the window, the dull gray of the afternoon was thickening into dusk. Somewhere in the house a clock struck five, a thin silvery chime, and the sound hung in the room a long time after the last stroke, trembling.

"Starved," Roderick said, softly.

"Yes."

"With a D."

"With a D."

"And the Duke is the D."

"Yes." She laid down the petals. "Alastair Blackwood, Duke of the realm." She heard the hollowness of her own voice. "He is the last of them, and he is the last letter. And he is promised us a confession tonight."

Roderick was already on his feet.

"I'll take the door myself," he said. "Now. I'll put a chair against it and sit on it until morning."

"I'll sit inside."

"You'll do nothing of the sort. You'll sleep."

"I shall sit inside, Inspector, with a lamp, and a loaded pistol, and the Duke's own tonic bottle emptied into the slop-bucket." She rose too, and faced him, and her face was a white mask with two bright eyes. "I promised him. I will not break it."

"Then I'll sit outside."

"Then you will sit outside."

"And nobody gets through."

"Nobody," said Thalessa.

They stood looking at one another across the card-table, with the petals scattered between them, and something passed between them that was neither fear nor love but a kind of rough, terrible, mutual resolve. He put out his good hand. She took it. It was warm and dry and it closed round hers, tightly, once.

Then they went out together to keep the watch.

…

The Duke's bedchamber was the largest room in the north wing and the oldest. It had been built for a Blackwood who had loved his dogs and his guns and had not minded the cold, and it was a bleak, high, handsome place, with a black oak ceiling and a floor of worn boards and a great stone fireplace in which a man might have stood upright. Over the fireplace hung a portrait.

It was a full-length portrait, seven feet tall, in a heavy gilded frame. It showed a young man in the uniform of the Royal Navy, with one hand on a sword-hilt and the other resting on a globe. The face was long and fair and rather proud. The eyes were gray. A smile hovered about the mouth like the memory of a smile.

"The Duke," said Roderick, "at twenty-five."

"He has not changed."

"He has changed a great deal."

"I meant the eyes." Thalessa stood before it with her head tilted back. "They still follow one about the room. You see? From whichever side. It is a trick of the brush."

"You've a mind for such things."

"I have a mind that is tired, and sees faces in everything."

They went through the room together, as methodically as two bailiffs.

Roderick took the windows. There were three, tall, narrow, shuttered with iron bars from the outside; he tried each in turn, and tested the bolts, and nodded. Thalessa took the fireplace. She knelt on the hearth and thrust her arm up the flue as far as she could reach, and brought it down black to the elbow, and looked at her sooty fingers with distaste. The chimney was narrow, not more than a foot square at the throat, and a crust of old soot lined it. Nothing could pass there but a bird.

"Clear," she said.

"The floor?"

"I'll look."

She rapped the boards with her knuckles. She rapped them all, in a spiral, from the walls inward, listening to the tone of each. Solid. Solid. Solid. Beneath the bed, a faint hollowness that proved on investigation to be a joist. She tried the panelling. She tried the bookshelves, which held nothing but a set of Gibbon, a rack of hunting-whips, and a pewter tankard. She tried the back of the great carved wardrobe, and found it flush with the wall.

"Nothing," she said, at last. "I find nothing."

"Nor I."

"Then it's a good room."

"It's the best room in the house." Roderick stood in the middle of it, turning slowly. "One door. Three windows, barred. A chimney a cat could not climb. We shall put a chair against the door and a lamp on the table, and nothing in the world will come through that threshold without passing me."

"And if something comes through the walls?"

"The walls are two feet of stone."

"So were the walls of the ice house."

He looked at her. "You think there's another way in."

"I think there is always another way in. I think a house like this was built with another way in." She wiped her hands on her skirt. "And I think I should feel a great deal better if I could find it."

But she could not. They searched for an hour more, and at the end of it they had found a mouse's nest, a dead moth, and a sixpence of the old coinage under the wardrobe, and no door.

The Duke was brought in at seven. He came leaning on Roderick's arm, in a dressing-gown of faded crimson silk, with a shawl round his shoulders and his silver hair brushed flat. He looked very old. He looked at the portrait over the fireplace for some time without a word, and then he looked away.

"I shall write at the table," he said. "Beside the lamp. If you will give me a quire of paper, and a clean pen."

"You shall have both, Your Grace."

"And a glass of water. From the jug. Not from the kitchen."

"From the jug I fetched myself," said Thalessa.

"Good." He sat down heavily. He took up the pen, tested the nib on his thumbnail, and set it to the paper. His hand shook. He looked up, and his eyes were bloodshot and calm. "Inspector. Will you do me a kindness?"

"If I can."

"Will you shut the door?"

Roderick shut it.

It closed with a soft, heavy sound. Thalessa drew the bolt on the inside. Roderick, outside, dragged a chair across the passage and set it against the panel, and she heard it creak as he lowered himself into it. The lamp burned low and yellow. The portrait watched from the wall.

The Duke began to write.

…

And in the deserted morning room, in the thickening dusk, where six petals lay on a card-table like the letters of a prayer, a seventh petal lay on the window-ledge in the last gray light, curled as if asleep, with a black D upon it, which neither of them had seen put there.