Behind the Painted Eyes

"Every great house is two houses. One is built for the guests. The other is built for everything the guests must never see."

The sword hilt moved.

It moved under Roderick's hand with a soft dull click, and the wall answered it. The portrait swung out from the chimney-breast on a pivot she could not see, frame and canvas and gilded cornice, slowly and without a sound, as a door opens on a house where someone has been waiting. Behind it, where the plaster had been, lay a black tall rectangle of nothing.

"I was standing here this afternoon," Thalessa said, in a thin voice. "I was looking at it. I was looking at the hilt."

"So was I."

"I thought: what a handsome piece of work."

"You thought the same as every other person who ever stood in this room." Roderick's face was grim in the lantern light. "That is what it is for. A thing in plain sight is the best hiding place in the world."

He took the lantern from the hook. He drew his revolver with his good hand and held it at the level of his ribs. The bandage on his shoulder had spotted through with fresh red.

"Wait," said Thalessa.

"For what?"

"For me to be sure that you are in a state to go."

"I am not in a state to do anything else."

"You're bleeding through your stitches."

"Then you may restitch them when we get back." He turned his head. His face was white, and the eyes in it were brilliant, and for a moment she saw, quite clearly, what he would look like in fifty years, if he were granted fifty years. "Thalessa. The Duke is down there. The only man alive who can name the rest. I do not mean to lose him because I have a scratch."

"It is not a scratch."

"No," he said. "It's a reason."

She didn't answer. She picked up her chest and strapped it across her back, and drew her own coat close, and tied a strip of linen round the lump on her temple. Her head was throbbing. Her legs felt like water. She took the loaded pistol from the box where he had put it and held it in her right hand.

"Go on," she said.

They stepped through the painted eyes together.

…

It was a stair.

It dropped away at once, steep and narrow, cut into the living stone of the cliff, and the first thing she knew of it was the cold. It was a damp, salt, living cold that came up from below like breath, and it smelled of weed and brine and mold. The steps were hewn out of the rock, shallow, worn into hollows by the passage of many feet. The walls on either side were so close that her shoulders brushed them. The roof was low enough that Roderick had to stoop.

They went down in silence. The lantern threw a small yellow ring round them, and beyond it the dark drank all. Behind them, she heard the great portrait swing closed with a soft tock.

"It will open from this side," Roderick said quietly. "I felt the catch."

"You'd better be right."

"I'm usually right about locks."

"Usually."

"It's a failing."

She almost laughed. She stopped herself, and went on counting steps. Twenty. Thirty. Forty. The air grew warmer, or perhaps she grew colder. There was a faint drip somewhere, and the sound of her own breathing, and far beneath her feet, steady as a pulse, the dull boom of the sea.

At the sixtieth step the stair gave out in a narrow passage, and the passage ran away in two directions.

She stopped. Roderick lifted the lantern.

The walls of the passage were not rock. They were brick, old soot-black Tudor brick, laid in herringbone, and they ran straight and true in each direction as far as the light would carry. The floor was paved with flags. The ceiling was arched. At intervals of a dozen feet, iron brackets stood out from the walls, black with age, some still holding the stubs of tallow candles. In the dust of the floor, plain as print, lay footmarks.

She knelt.

There were two sets. One was large, wide, and bare. The toes were splayed. It was the print of an old man walking barefoot, stumbling, with the left foot dragging a little. It came down the stair and turned to the left.

The second was small. Neat. Narrow. Shod in a soft-soled slipper. It came from the same stair, and went beside the first, and turned to the left as well. It did not drag. It did not hesitate. It was the print of a person who had walked this passage a thousand times.

"Two of them," said Roderick.

"Yes. He was not alone."

"She led him."

"She led him." Thalessa put her fingertip in the dust, lightly, in the mark of the small foot. "She walks without her cane. She walks without a light. She does it as one walks in one's own kitchen."

"She's counted every step."

"She does not need to count." Thalessa raised her head. "Roderick. I have been a fool. She has not been counting. She has been seeing."

He did not reply.

"I wanted to be wrong," she said. "I wanted it so much I made myself believe in a twitch of the eye. But the dust does not lie. A blind woman could not have walked this tunnel, in the dark, without a hand on the wall. And there is no smear on the wall. There is no touch." She stood. "She sees. And she has seen us from the first."

"Then let us go and see what she wishes us to see."

He turned to the left, and she followed.

…

The passage ran for a hundred yards in a straight line, then bent, then bent again.

She understood, as they walked, how large the thing was. It was not one passage but a lattice of them, a maze of brick corridors woven through the thickness of the old house like the veins in a leaf. At each junction a branch ran off into the dark, and at each branch she saw the faint print of the small slipper, and sometimes not, and she knew she was looking at the work of years.

Countless subterranean passages, Vespera had said, on the first night, in the lamplit corridor. But to someone who cannot see the light like me, every corner is crystal clear.

She had meant it as a joke. She had meant it as a challenge. She had told the truth, in her own way, to the face of a woman who would not hear.

At the third junction Roderick stopped.

"Look up."

She looked.

Overhead, in the arch of the roof, a narrow shaft ran upward into the dark, square, perhaps two feet across. It was lined with brick. A rusty iron ladder was bolted to one wall. From somewhere high above, faint but quite distinct, came a flicker of yellow light, as though through a grating.

"The ceiling vent," said Thalessa.

"The study?"

"The study. This is the shaft above the iron rosette." She walked beneath it and looked up the length of the ladder. "She stood here with a pocket full of petals. She climbed. She leaned out over the grille. And she dropped it into his open mouth."

"A fair distance."

"Eighteen feet. A child could do it."

"And the nail?"

"Through the palm. After he was dead." She said it flatly. "She came down through the bookcase, which must swing, which must open on to the passage somewhere near the hearth. She arranged the hand. She tied the wire. She set the pendulum. And she left by the same way, and the door sealed behind her."

"And the lights?"

"The steam valve. It's in the cellar. She would have gone down and turned it." She stood a moment longer. "It was a very careful piece of work, Roderick."

"It is only a ladder and a hole in a wall."

"It is a year's patient labor, done in the dark, by a woman who is not what she said." She drew a breath. "And I am beginning to think that I admire her."

"Admire?"

"I mean that I understand her. I wish I did not."

He said nothing. But when they went on, he walked beside her instead of ahead, so close that his sleeve brushed hers.

…

At the fifth junction they found the first of the rooms.

It was a niche in the wall, no larger than a cupboard, closed with a slatted wooden door that had been left ajar. Thalessa put the lantern in and looked.

A shelf. A cot. A stool. A tin plate and a cup. A lamp with a sooted chimney, a box of matches, a pile of grey blankets. On the floor, in the corner, a heap of old nets, tarred, stiff, smelling of fish.

And on the shelf, in a neat row, as though set out for a visitor, four small objects.

A jar of black ink. A pot of glue, with a stiff brush. A long sheet of heavy paper with a ruler laid across it. And a bowl, full to the brim, of fresh purple wisteria petals.

The petals were soft and moist and perfect, not a day old. Every one of them had been cut to the same shape. Beside the bowl lay a fine pen with a steel nib, and a smudged fold of rag, and a square of paper on which someone, with great patience, had practiced a letter. Over and over, down the whole length of the sheet, in rank after rank of identical black capitals.

D D D D D D D D D D D D D D

"Her workshop," said Roderick softly.

"Her cell."

"She lives here."

"She sleeps here, when the house sleeps. I think." Thalessa touched the blanket. It was warm. "She was here an hour ago."

"Then she's near."

"Very near." She withdrew her hand, slowly, and stood looking at the cot. There was a small crumpled shape on the pillow. She lifted it. It was a child's rag doll, faded, one eye gone, with a fisherman's blue jersey sewn for it out of a scrap of cloth. The stitches were tiny, uneven, the work of a girl of ten.

She turned it over in her hand.

"Her brother made it," she said. "I would stake my life. For her seventh birthday, perhaps. He sewed the jersey himself."

Roderick looked at the doll. He looked at the cot, and the nets, and the little bowl of petals. He did not speak, and his silence was larger than words.

"I know what you're thinking," said Thalessa.

"Do you?"

"That we should find her. That we should take her before a magistrate, and tell the court what she has done. That the law demands it." She put the doll back, very gently, where she had found it. "And I am thinking the same. And I am thinking something else, as well."

"What?"

"That if it had been my brother."

He took her hand.

He didn't say anything. He only held it, and the lantern shook slightly, and the shadows on the wall of the little cell moved like water. After a time she drew a long breath, and let it go.

"Come," she said. "He's not here."

"No."

"Let us find him."

…

They found the sixth junction by sound.

It came to them as they turned the last corner: a low soft hollow murmur, such as one hears at the lip of a shell. It was the sea. But it was not the sea beating on the rocks. It was nearer, and slower, and mingled with another sound, a deep irregular rhythmic knocking, as of something large and soft being moved from place to place in the dark.

The passage ended in a door.

It was a door of black iron, very old, studded with bolts, set in an arch of rough stone. It stood a few inches ajar. A thin thread of yellow light ran down its edge. And from beyond it, rising and falling in the cold wet air, came a voice.

An old man's voice. Cracked, humble, gentle. It was speaking steadily, and it was weeping.

"... I thought it was the end. I thought we had finished it. Forgive me, Gabriel. I never knew you could hear..."

Roderick put his shoulder to the iron.

It swung inward on well-oiled hinges, and the lantern light fell across a threshold of wet stone, and beyond it a long vaulted room hung with salt, and in the middle of the room, in a pool of candlelight, kneeling on the floor with his hands clasped before him, the Duke of Blackwood.

He was alone.

He did not look round. He did not seem to hear them. He knelt with his white head bowed and his bare feet blue with cold, before a long low table covered with a white cloth, and on the cloth, in a double row, burned a crowd of tiny lights.

She counted them as she crossed the threshold. She did not mean to. It was only that her mind, in extremity, seized upon number as a drowning man seizes a spar.

One. Two. Three. Four.

Twenty.

Twenty glass jars, each the size of a quart pot, each half filled with clear oil, each with a little cork raft floating on the surface and a wick burning at the center of the raft. The flames stood quite still in the windless air. Under each jar, on a slip of white card, a name was written in a square black hand.

Abel Whitcombe. Nathaniel Crewe. Ezra Pym. Tobias Marl.

Tim Hallam. Josiah Marsh.

She read them as she walked, the whole long roll, to the end of the table. And beyond the twentieth, set a little apart on a small square of black velvet, stood a twenty-first jar, larger than the rest, of clouded glass, unlit and empty, with a card beneath it that bore no name at all.

The lamp I keep for thee.

A thin cold shudder went through her, from the crown of her head to her heels. She had thought, for a wild moment, that the jars held something worse. She saw now that the thing they held was worse, in its way, than anything her fear had imagined: that someone, for four years, in the dark under the cliff, had lit twenty-one lights every night, and had not let one go out.