The Man Who Walked Out of a Locked Room

"The third thing a locked room teaches you is that the lock is not the point. The room is."

By eleven, the Duke had written four pages.

Thalessa watched him do it, in the long yellow quiet of the lamp, from a chair she had drawn up by the fire. She sat with her feet tucked beneath her and Roderick's revolver in her lap, and a rug round her shoulders, and the portrait of the young naval officer staring down at her out of its gilded frame. The rain had stopped. In its place had come a deeper silence, thick and windless, such as follows a long illness. Now and then a log settled in the hearth. Now and then the pen scratched.

The old man wrote steadily, without looking up. Once he paused to dip the pen. Once he took a sip of water from the glass at his elbow, and made a face, and set it down. Once, about ten o'clock, he put his hand over his eyes and sat so for a full minute, quite motionless; she had half risen from her chair when he took the hand away, and went on writing.

She did not speak to him. It seemed to her a thing that ought not to be interrupted.

At a quarter past eleven he laid down the pen, and gathered the sheets together with a long breath, and held them out.

"The first part," he said. "I find that I cannot go on tonight. My hand will not. I will finish in the morning. But you may have this, if you wish. In case."

"In case of what, Your Grace?"

"In case I should not be able to." He gave a faint smile. "I am an old man, Scholar Ashwood. I do not expect to see many mornings."

She took the pages.

They were covered in a small upright fastidious hand, all the lines level, all the margins neat. A gentleman's hand. The hand of a man who had written ten thousand letters and had never once been surprised by the contents.

She read it under the lamp.

…

I, Alastair Charles Blackwood, being of sound mind and in full possession of my faculties, do set down this statement on the night of the 24th of this month, at Blackwood Manor, of my own free will and without compulsion, for the information of the Crown.

It is a plain record of events, in so far as I remember them. I shall be brief where I can and exact where I must.

In the summer of the year before the loss of the St. Jude, I found myself in difficulties. I will not describe them. It is enough to say that they were of long standing, and that they were of my own making, and that by the autumn I was in such a state as to be willing to consider any proposal.

The proposal was made to me by Ragnar Sterling. It was made in the smoking-room of his club, over a bottle of brandy, on a wet night in September. He told me that he had been a supercargo for twenty years and had the freight-brokers of three ports in his pocket. He told me that a certain parcel of stones had been consigned to the Indies, and that the insurers would pay five times its value if it were lost at sea.

I asked him how it was to be lost.

He said, "That is the part which requires a ship."

Dr Malakor, whom I had known in the Navy, was brought in a week later. Lady Aurelia Vance had her own reasons, which I shall leave her to state. Mr. Thorne Valerius, who was a chemist and a man of conscience, was persuaded last of all. I think it was the money. I think, perhaps, it was a woman. I never knew.

We took passage on the St. Jude as shareholders in the venture. The Captain, Gabriel Haze, knew nothing of our purpose. He was a plain man and honest, and he believed that the cargo was what it was said to be. I want that to be understood. I want it set down in these pages and carved into any stone that will take it. Captain Haze was not party to the fraud. He was its first victim.

On the night of the 9th of October, in a heavy sea, off the Blackwood cliffs, I went below with Sterling and the surgeon and a carpenter's auger. I shall not describe what we did in the lower hold. It is not a thing I can describe. Captain Haze found us there. He had come down to see to the pumps. He saw the auger. He saw the hole.

He did not shout. He was not a shouting man. He stood quite still in the lamplight, with the water already at his ankles, and looked from one of us to the other. And he said:

"Gentlemen, you will want to put that down."

I put it down. God forgive me, I put it down. But Sterling took it up again. And that is the last thing I will say in this part.

The rest is for tomorrow.

…

She read it twice. When she looked up, her eyes were stinging.

"Thank you," she said.

"It is nothing."

"It is a great deal."

"It is a beginning." The Duke leaned back in his chair. His face in the lamplight was gray and sunken, with the stillness of exhaustion. "I find that it is easier on paper. I had thought I should never be able to write his name. And then I wrote it, and nothing happened, and I wrote it again."

"He was a good man."

"He was the best I have ever known." He closed his eyes. "I have thought about that sentence for four years. Gentlemen, you will want to put that down. He said it exactly as though we were boys with a stolen apple."

She laid the pages on her knee.

"You said Mr. Sterling took it up again."

"Yes."

"And then?"

"And then I ran." The words came out flat. "I ran up the ladder and left them there. I did not see what followed. I heard it. I heard the Captain say something, and I heard a noise like a door slamming, and I heard a man scream. And then I was on deck, in the wind, being sick over the rail."

"Who screamed?"

"I do not know. I truly do not."

"But you know that it was the crew who were in the hold."

"I know that afterwards the hatches were chained." The old man opened his eyes. They were very wet. "I did not chain them. I swear it. But I did not stop it. And I stood on the deck and listened to them pound on the timbers until the sea came in. And I have heard it every night since."

The room was silent.

Thalessa found that she had put her hand over her mouth. She took it away slowly.

"Your Grace," she said. "Tomorrow, when you finish. Tomorrow I shall want to ask you about the boat."

"Yes."

"Will you answer?"

"I will." He looked at her gravely. "If I am alive to be asked."

…

At midnight, the Duke lay down.

He undressed behind a screen, with Thalessa's back turned, and put on his nightshirt and got into the great curtained bed. He lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest, staring at the canopy, and for a time she thought he would not sleep. Then his breathing deepened. His mouth fell a little open. The thin gray face on the pillow looked very small and very old.

She turned the lamp down a little, and settled herself in her chair, and loaded the revolver from the box in her pocket, six rounds, and cocked it. She laid it on her knee under the rug. Outside the door she heard the creak of the chair as Roderick shifted his weight. Once, very softly, he rapped his knuckles twice against the panel, and she rapped back.

The clock in the hall struck the half-hour.

The fire burned down to a bed of red ash.

She did not sleep. She was entirely sure of it. She sat with her eyes open, in a state of cold clear vigilance, watching the shadows move on the black ceiling, listening to the faint tick of the cooling hearthstone and the slow breath of the sleeper, and she was aware of every sound in the house.

It was perhaps one o'clock when she heard the voice.

…

It was a very small sound, at first. A breath. A thread of tune, so faint that she thought it came from inside her own head. She sat up, with her pulse leaping, and listened.

It was a woman's voice. It was singing. It was coming, as far as she could judge, from the wall behind the fireplace, from somewhere beyond the great stone chimney-breast, in the deep thick darkness of the old masonry. A sweet voice, low and true.

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

She was on her feet, with the revolver in her hand, before she knew she had risen.

Come home to the lamp that I keep for thee.

"Roderick," she said, in a low, clear voice.

There was a scrape of the chair in the passage. "What is it?"

"There is singing in the wall."

"I hear nothing."

"You wouldn't. It's only on this side." She was moving slowly toward the hearth, with the muzzle of the gun lowered, her eyes on the dim bulk of the portrait. "It is coming from behind the picture."

"I'll break the door."

"No!" She spoke sharply. "If you break it, you will wake him, and if you wake him..."

She stopped.

The bed-curtains had moved.

She turned her head. The Duke was sitting up in bed. In the dim light his face was a white blur, and his eyes were open, wide, black, and fixed on the portrait over the mantel. His lips were moving. He was listening. His head was cocked a little to one side, like a bird's, and the tears were running down his cheeks and into the collar of his nightshirt.

"Gabriel," he whispered.

"Your Grace, lie down."

"He's calling. Do you hear him?"

"It is a trick. Lie down."

"He's calling me home." The old man swung his feet out of the bed. He stood up, swaying, in his bare feet on the cold boards, with his white hair on end and his thin arms hanging at his sides. "He said he would. He said he'd light the lamp. Oh, God, he's kept the lamp for us, all this time."

"Alastair." She dropped the formality, thrust the gun into her pocket and caught his arm. It was thin and cold and trembling like a wire. "Alastair. It is not Gabriel. Gabriel is dead. It is somebody pretending. Do you understand?"

"Let me go."

"I will not."

"Let me go, child." He turned his head, and she saw his face, wet, serene, strangely radiant. "I am going to be forgiven."

He pulled his arm out of her hand with a strength that stunned her. She grabbed again, caught the silk of his sleeve, and felt it rip. And at that instant, from the hearth, from the wall behind the great carved mantel, came a deep dull sound, like the closing of a vault.

Something moved.

The portrait swung outward.

It swung as a door swings, in one piece, frame and canvas and gilded pediment, with the young naval officer's proud gray eyes sweeping across the room in a slow arc. Behind it where the plaster should have been, a black rectangle opened, tall as a man and narrow as a coffin. A breath of cold came out of it, wet, salt, ancient, a smell of rock and weed and the bottom of the sea.

She had time to think, with perfect clarity: the sword hilt. It was the lever. It was in the painting all the time.

Then the Duke walked through.

He did not hurry. He crossed the hearth and stepped over the fender and passed between the frame and the wall, and was gone, into the dark. She heard his bare feet on stone, going down. She heard a voice call his name, close, soft, a woman's voice, saying: "Come, Your Grace. Come."

"No!" Thalessa threw herself after him.

She struck the edge of the open portrait with her shoulder, and the whole massive thing swung back on its hinge with the weight of a falling tree. The frame caught her across the temple. The room whirled. A blaze of white light went off behind her eyes. She felt herself falling, slowly, as in a dream, and the floorboards coming up to meet her, and the sound of the door closing, a deep, stony, final thud.

She heard Roderick's voice from very far away, shouting her name.

Then she heard nothing at all.

…

When she came to, the lamp was out and the room was full of faces.

They swam above her in a red haze: Roderick, gray, wild-eyed, his hair on end; the cook's boy with a lantern; a stable-lad in his nightshirt. Someone was holding a cold cloth to her head. Someone was saying, over and over, in a cracked voice, "Thank God. Thank God."

"The Duke," she said.

"Lie still."

"Where is the Duke?"

"He's gone," said Roderick.

She sat up. The room tilted and settled. She was lying on the boards by the hearth, with her cloak under her head, and a lump the size of a pigeon's egg throbbing over her left eye. She looked at the bed. The curtains hung open. The sheets were rumpled. The pillow still held the hollow of an old man's head.

She looked at the fireplace.

The portrait hung in its place. It hung perfectly straight, perfectly flush, a young man in a naval coat with his hand on a sword and a faint, proud smile. There was no crack in the plaster. There was no break in the wall. It looked exactly as it had that afternoon, when she had stood before it and found nothing.

"I broke the door," said Roderick. His voice was flat and dreadful. "It took me four minutes. The bolt was shot on the inside. You were on the floor. The window was barred. The chimney was solid. The bed was empty." He looked at her. "Thalessa. A man cannot walk out of a locked room."

"He did not walk out of it."

"Then where—"

"Through the wall." She struggled to her feet, with the whole room swaying, and caught at his arm. "Roderick. The painting. It's a door."

Together they looked at the portrait.

The young man in the gilded frame looked back at them, calmly, with gray eyes that followed them round the room.

On the escritoire by the window, the Duke's four pages lay where she had left them. But the pen was gone. And the ink bottle, overturned, had spilled a long black tongue across the blotter, and in the middle of the ink, drawn with a fingertip, small and neat and perfectly legible, stood a single capital letter.

D.