Where the Scientist Broke

"There is a point past which a mind that has held everything in order will simply let go, as a hand lets go of a rope."

They went up through the dark in single file.

The tide was making. Behind them, in the cave, the sea had found the keel of the boat and was lifting it from the cradle with a sound like a long sigh, and through the closed iron door of the crypt came the muffled boom of water against stone. Roderick led, with the lantern in his good hand and the Duke on his arm. Thalessa came last. She carried her chest on her back and the roll of tissue in her arms, held against her breast like a child, and she put one foot in front of the other, and did not think.

It was possible, she found, not to think. It was a skill she had learned in the dissecting room: one fixed the eye on a single point, a seam, a stitch, a flaw in the porcelain, and let the rest of the world go soft. She fixed her eyes now on the heel of Roderick's boot. Up it went, up and down, up and down, with a sticky wet sound. Eleven steps. Twelve. The stair was steep, and the roof low, and the walls streamed with sweat.

At the head of the steps, in the brick passage, the Duke stopped.

"I must rest," he said. "Forgive me."

"Of course," said Roderick.

The old man sank down against the wall, with his bare feet stretched before him and his white head thrown back. His breath came in short gasps. In the lantern light his face was the color of tallow. Roderick crouched beside him, and felt for his pulse, and made a small grim face.

"Thalessa. Your bag."

She did not answer.

"Thalessa."

She did not hear him. She had stopped on the top step, with her back against the cold stone, and was staring at nothing. A strange thing had happened. The heel of Roderick's boot had gone out of focus. The brick wall, the lantern, the stooped figures in the yellow light, all had begun to drift, slowly, as if she were seeing them through water. A high thin ringing started in her ears.

He held the arms.

She heard it quite distinctly, in a voice that was her own.

Thorne held the Captain's arms.

She stood quite still, with the tissue crushed to her chest.

He held the arms, and the surgeon cut, and he was sick over the side. And then he ate. He ate, and he came home. And he sat at my table. And he put his hand on mine.

"Thalessa?" Roderick was on his feet. "Are you unwell?"

"No."

"You're white as paper."

"I am perfectly well." Her voice came out thin and high and strange. "I am only thinking."

"About what?"

"About his hands."

She looked down at her own. They were trembling, very slightly, a fine fast tremor like the beating of a moth. She spread them out in front of her in the lantern light, and looked at them as if they belonged to someone else.

"He had beautiful hands," she said. "Did you know? Long, and narrow, and very clean. A chemist's hands. They never shook. I used to watch him pour. He could pour a drop of reagent into a flask from a height of a foot and never spill a bead." Her voice cracked on a little laugh. "I told him once that I should have trusted those hands with my life."

"Thalessa—"

"He held the arms."

She heard the scream before she knew it was hers.

…

It was not a loud scream. It was a thin, hoarse, broken thing, such as a creature might make in a trap, and it went flying away down the black tunnel and came back in a hundred echoes. She clapped her hand over her mouth. It did no good. The sound came out between her fingers.

"I let him kiss me," she said.

"Thalessa."

"I let him kiss me. On the steps of the laboratory. In the rain. He had a smell of carbolic soap, and I thought: this is a good man. I thought, this is a man who washes his hands. And he did. He washed them for four years, he scrubbed them raw, he was always at the basin. I used to laugh at him." She laughed again, a high raw peal. "I thought it was a tidiness. I thought it was a scientific tidiness."

"My dear—"

"Don't."

He stopped. She had held up her hand, palm outward, as she might have to a charging horse.

"Don't," she said. "Please. Don't be kind. Not now. If you're kind I shall be sick."

"Then be sick."

"I do not wish to be sick. I wish—" She broke off. Her whole body had begun to shake. "I wish to know why. Why he came to me. Why he sat in my laboratory, three years, and let me love him. Why he said nothing. Why he did not say Thalessa, I have done a thing which I cannot bear. I would have listened. I would have understood. I am a scientist. I would have said: it was an extremity. It was a pathology of starvation. There is a literature on it. There are precedents."

"He could not tell you."

"Why not?"

"Because you would have understood."

She stared at him.

"Because you would have forgiven him," Roderick said, very gently. "And he could not bear to be forgiven by you."

The tunnel was quite silent. The lantern light shook on the wet bricks.

And Thalessa Ashwood, who had stood in a room with six corpses and not wept, who had watched a man die with a bullet through his lung and not flinched, who had put her hands into the chest cavity of the merchant Ragnar Sterling and found there nothing but a cold clean anatomy, felt something give way inside her, like a dam going out in the dark.

She slid down the wall.

She sat on the bottom step with her skirts in the dust, and the roll of tissue in her lap, and her face in her hands. She cried as she had never cried in her life. She cried without grace, without restraint, with great tearing sobs that shook her to the ribs, and she heard herself saying things, over and over, that she could not afterward remember. His name. Her own name. The words I'm sorry, and I didn't know, and oh, Gabriel, and a long confused stream of nonsense, such as a fevered child will speak.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. It was not Roderick's. It was thin, and cold, and unsteady.

"Child," said the Duke.

She lifted her wet face.

He was kneeling on the stone beside her, in the dirt and the wet, in a stranger's coat, with his white hair in disorder and the tears running down his face. He looked like a prophet in a picture. He looked like the oldest man in the world.

"I have something to tell you," he said. "If you will hear it."

"I don't want—"

"It is about Thorne."

She was silent.

"He did not come to the reunion to see us," said the Duke. "I have thought about it, these last days. I have gone over and over it. Thorne did not come here because he wished to see us. He came because he had a letter."

"From you."

"From me." The old man's voice shook. "I have never written him a line in four years. We none of us have written to each other. It was in the pact. We should meet only if one of us fell ill, or in the event of the investigation. And then, in September, I received a letter. It was in my own hand. I know it was in my own hand, because I read it twice, and I could not tell it from mine. It invited me to Blackwood Manor on the anniversary. It said that it was time."

"A forgery."

"Yes. I thought, at first, that it was Ragnar's. I wrote to him. He had the same. And Malthus, and Aurelia. We had each been invited, in our own hands, by each of the others. And I knew, then, that something had begun." He wiped his face. "And then I thought: Thorne. He would be the one. He was always going to be the one. He was going to tell."

"Tell what?"

"The truth. To the Crown." The old man leaned toward her. "Child, he had been writing to a woman in Port Calder, the widow of the carpenter, for a month. Anonymously. We did not know. We found out afterward, in his papers. He told her that the Captain was not the one who had scuttled the ship. He told her the names. He was going to confess, you see. He was going to come to the manor on the anniversary and stand up before us all and say: I have written it down. I shall give it to the Inspector. And if you wish to join me, God keep you; and if you do not, God have mercy on you."

"He wrote to Mrs. Pym."

"He did."

"And you didn't know?"

"I did not know. I swear it, Scholar Ashwood. I would have embraced him." The old man's face crumpled. "He was the only one of us who had the courage to do the thing that we should all have done in the first week. And he was the first to die."

Thalessa put her hand to her mouth.

She sat looking up at the old man for a long moment. The tears still ran down her cheeks. But her eyes had changed. Something in them had steadied and cleared, like a pond after a storm.

"He was going to tell," she said.

"Yes."

"Before he died."

"He was going to confess. In front of all of us." The Duke bowed his head. "And I think that is why she poisoned him first."

…

She did not know how long they sat there.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour. Perhaps more. The lantern burned lower. The sea muttered far below. The Duke slumped against the wall with his eyes shut, and Roderick stood a little way off, with his back to them, as if to give her privacy, his shoulders very straight.

She wiped her face on the sleeve of her coat. She drew a long shuddering breath.

"I should like to say something," she said.

"Say it."

"I have been angry for a week." Her voice was small and hoarse. "I have been angry at Thorne for dying, and at myself for loving him, and at the whole wretched machinery of law and science that I thought I could hide inside. I have wanted someone to blame. I have wanted it so badly that I made a villain of a girl whose only crime is that she loved her brother." She laughed shakily. "And now I am here, in a hole in the ground, with a Duke, and an Inspector, and a roll of tissue-paper, and I find that I cannot hate any of you. Not even him. Not even Thorne."

"Then you are a better person than I."

"I am not." She wiped her nose. "I am an exhausted one. It is quite different."

The corner of the Duke's mouth moved.

"I am glad," he said, "that he loved you."

"Did he?"

"He spoke of you in the boat. On the ninth day. He said that there was a girl in the capital who knew about poisons, and who did not mind the dead, and who laughed at him when he was solemn." The old voice softened. "He said that if he lived, he would like to marry her. And that if he did not, he hoped she would never know."

She said nothing.

She sat with her hands in her lap and the tissue-paper crushed against her knees, and the tears began to run again, silently this time, without effort, down her cold wet face. They were different tears. They were slow and clean and strangely easy.

Roderick turned round.

He did not say anything. He crossed the passage in three steps, and went down on one knee in the dust in front of her, and put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to the light. He looked at her for a long moment. Then he drew out his handkerchief, the same one, she saw, that she had wept into in the morning room, and wiped her face with it, gravely, as one wipes the face of a child.

"There," he said.

"Roderick—"

"Hush."

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I—"

"If you say that again," said Roderick, "I shall put you over my shoulder and carry you."

"You have one arm."

"I would manage."

She laughed. It was a broken, wet, shaken sound, and it turned halfway into a sob. He gathered her against his chest, awkwardly, with the sling between them and the cold bricks at her back, and she buried her face in his coat and let it come.

Behind them, in the lantern light, the Duke of Blackwood sat with his head against the wall and his eyes closed. A great stillness had come over his face. For the first time in four years he looked like a man who might sleep.