The Arm That Held Her

"Some tenderness cannot be spoken. It can only be done, and then not mentioned afterwards."

They came up into the Duke's bedchamber a little before eight in the morning, and the sun was shining.

It was the first time in nine days. It lay across the floorboards in long pale bars, striped by the iron grilles of the windows, and fell on the rumpled bed, the spilled ink, the empty hearth. The portrait of the young naval officer had swung shut behind them with a soft tock. In the clear gold light it was merely a portrait again, a proud young man with a sword.

Thalessa stood in the middle of the room, and blinked, and felt the whole world waver.

"Sit," said Roderick.

"I am perfectly able—"

"Sit down, or I shall pick you up."

She sat. It was the Duke's armchair, a great leather wing-backed thing by the escritoire, and it received her like a tide. She felt the chill go out of her bones. Her head fell back. The light on her closed lids was a warm red glow.

She heard the Duke being settled on the bed, and the creak of the mattress, and the thin cracked murmur of his voice thanking someone. She heard Roderick's footsteps going to the door, and a murmured word with the guard, and the bolt. She heard water poured. A cup was pressed into her hand.

"Drink."

She drank. It was tea, hot and sweet and very strong. She had never tasted anything so good.

"Better?" said Roderick.

"Yes."

"You're not going to faint?"

"I never faint."

"You were about to."

"I was not. I was only reflecting." She opened one eye. "Is the Duke well?"

"He's asleep. I gave him a dose of your tincture. He'll lie quiet for six hours." Roderick lowered himself into the chair opposite, on the other side of the cold hearth. His face in the daylight was shocking: gray, hollow-cheeked, with a fine bristle of beard and blue shadows round the eyes. His left arm hung stiffly in the sling, and the bandage showed rust-red through the sleeve. He looked a hundred years old.

"You are bleeding," she said.

"A little."

"I shall see to it."

"In a moment."

"Roderick—"

"In a moment," he said. "I have something to say, and I should like to say it before I lose my nerve."

…

She set down the cup.

She had never seen him look like that. He sat forward with his good hand clasped over his knee, his shoulders hunched, his gaze fixed on the cold ash of the grate. He seemed to be gathering himself, as a man does who is about to step off a high place.

"When I was twelve," he said, "my father drowned."

"You told me he was a drunk."

"He was. And he drowned. He went out in a skiff one night in a gale to fetch a bottle from a ship that was riding at anchor. They found the skiff. They never found him." He spoke flatly. "My mother took in washing. I went to sea at thirteen as a ship's boy, and came back at fifteen with a broken arm and a hatred of the water, and joined the Port Calder constabulary as a runner. I was on the quay the night the St. Jude sailed."

"You said."

"I did not tell you the rest." He turned his head. "I was a junior officer of the Corps then, posted to the Customs House at Port Calder on a watching brief. It was my duty to carry the manifest up to the Collector. I sat on the steps and I read it, because I was bored. I read the cargo. A thousand tons of grain."

"A three-hundred-ton ship."

"I saw it. I put it in my notebook. And I did nothing, because it is the sort of thing one does not like to mention to a Collector who is giving a dinner." His mouth twisted. "Three days later she was gone. And when the claim came in, and the clerk of the Royal Mercantile said it was a perfectly ordinary loss, I walked into his office and said: the cargo was a lie. And he told me to go home."

"Roderick."

"I was thirty. They told me I was making trouble."

He rubbed his face with his good hand. She saw that it was shaking.

"I told myself it was duty," he said. "I told myself it was the law. I wrote letters. I filled in forms. I wrote to the Commissioner, and the Admiralty, and the Lord Chancellor, and a man at The Times. And I was told, again and again, by civil gentlemen in good coats, that there was no case. That it was a pity. That the world was full of pities." He raised his eyes. "And all the time there were twenty men on the bottom of the bay, and nobody ever said their names."

"You did."

"I put them on a list."

"You put a cat on a list."

He laughed. It was a startled, unhappy sound. "I did."

"That is the most remarkable thing I have ever heard of a policeman."

"It is the most foolish."

"They are not different things," said Thalessa, "in my experience."

He looked at her. And something in his face broke, quietly, like a thread.

"I did not come here for the case," he said.

"No?"

"I came here because I was afraid they would get away." He drew breath. "And then I met a woman in a gray coat, in a corridor, with a scalpel in her hand. And she looked at me as if I were a fool, and then she told me what the dead had eaten for supper. And I thought: I have been waiting for this woman for four years. Not for her. For someone who would say what was true, in a plain voice, and not mind who heard."

"Roderick."

"I know. I'm a policeman. I'm in the middle of a murder. You have just buried your betrothed in the dark. It is the wrong time. It is the worst possible time." He gave her a wry, terrible smile. "I thought you should know it anyway. In case we do not get another."

…

The sun climbed. A shaft of it struck the portrait and set the gilt aflame.

Thalessa sat very still.

She had expected, if she had expected anything, to feel confusion. She had expected shame, or fear, or a quick hot flare of the old guilt: how can you? He is not cold. But what came was neither. It was a profound and level quiet, such as follows the breaking of a long fever. She looked at him, and saw him plainly, as she saw a slide under a lens. The tired mouth. The gray in his hair. The fierce, weary, honest eyes.

"I have been married to a dead man," she said slowly, "for three years."

"I know."

"I did not know it. I thought I was alive. I thought the quiet I felt was contentment." She rose, and crossed the hearth, and stood before him. "I think now it was only the absence of anything to say."

"And now?"

"And now I find that I have a great deal."

She put her hand on his unshaven cheek.

He did not move. He looked up at her, and she saw his eyes darken, and the pulse beat once in his throat.

"I am not going to be foolish about this," she said. "I am not going to promise you anything. I do not know what we shall be, in a week, or a month. I do not know if either of us will be alive." She drew a breath. "But I would very much like to be held. Just for a little. Just for a quarter of an hour."

"Thalessa—"

"I have been strong for ten days."

He stood up.

It was not an embrace as the novels have them. It was clumsy, and careful, and full of buckles. His left arm could not move, and his right had to do the work of two, and the sling got in the way, and she bumped her head against his collarbone. But he held her. He held her as if he had never held anything before. And she stood in the circle of his arm with her cheek against the coarse wool and her eyes shut and let herself be taken, as one is taken by sleep.

They stood so a long time.

The sun moved. A bird sang somewhere outside, a thin sweet note, the first she had heard in nine days. In the great bed, the Duke turned over and murmured, and was still.

"I will find her," Roderick said at last, into her hair. "I'll find her, and I'll take her in. I won't let her go. And I won't let them hurt her."

"Hurt her?"

"The law."

"She is a murderer."

"She is. She is also twenty years old, and she read her brother's last words with her fingers." His voice was low. "I don't know what justice is, Thalessa. I used to. I thought it was a thing you did with a book. But I do not think it is that. I think it is a thing you do with your whole heart, and then are sorry for."

She lifted her head and looked at him.

"Kiss me," she said.

He did.

…

It was a short kiss, and very gentle. It tasted of tea and smoke and old coffee, of fatigue and grief and cold. It was the first in her life that she had ever wished to remember. When it was over she stood with her forehead against his, breathing, and the whole room seemed to be made of light.

"That was extremely improper," said Thalessa.

"Quite."

"The Duke is in the room."

"The Duke is unconscious."

"It is still unprofessional."

"I'll make a note of it in my report." He smiled. He had, she discovered, a smile like a door opening in a dark house, warm and astonished. "Item. At eight in the morning, while in the performance of his duty, the Inspector was kissed by a toxicologist."

"Who was entirely in her right mind."

"And did not object."

"And would do so again," said Thalessa, "if the circumstances were suitable."

He laughed.

It was a real laugh, deep and unforced, the first she had heard from him. It startled a pigeon from the sill. She felt it in her own chest like a bell.

And then, behind them, a hoarse thin voice said, from the bed, quite distinctly:

"Is it morning?"

They turned.

The Duke of Blackwood was sitting up among the pillows. His eyes were open. He looked at them for a moment with a mild, lucid, wondering expression, and then, very slowly, a smile crept over his ravaged old face.

"Oh, my dears," he said. "Don't stop on my account."

…

He finished the confession at noon.

He wrote it sitting up in the great bed, with a board across his knees, in the sunlight, with Roderick on one side to hold the ink and Thalessa on the other to hold the paper steady. He did not hesitate. He did not look at the rubbings. He wrote in his fine upright hand, without a blot, for nearly three hours, and when he had done he signed it with his full name and titles, Alastair Charles Blackwood, Fourth Duke, and laid the pen aside.

"There," he said.

"Thank you, Your Grace."

"It is not a favor. It is merely accurate." He smiled faintly. "I have put in everything. The auger. The chain. The cup. The names of the five. And a request, that the Captain's sister be dealt with by a court of law and not a mob."

"You ask that?"

"I ask it with all my heart." He folded the sheets, and held them out. "She has done a terrible thing. But I think she has done it because nobody else was going to. That is a thing I know something about. When one has waited four years for justice, one stops being particular about the hands that bring it."

Roderick took the papers. He read the first page standing, with the sun on his face, and then he folded them very carefully and put them in the pocket over his heart.

"I'll see it's read in open court," he said.

"Thank you."

"It will go hard with you."

"I should hope so."

The old man sank back among the pillows. He was very pale now, and there was a faint blue shadow about his lips. But he looked at ease. He looked as a man looks who has put down a load he has carried a long distance, and has not yet remembered to straighten his back.

"There is one more thing," he said.

"Yes?"

"I am cold."

Thalessa put her hand to his forehead. It was cool and slightly damp. "You have no fever. It is only exhaustion."

"I know. It is not that kind of cold." He turned his head and looked at the empty hearth, the black bars, the heaped ashes of a fire that had not been lit in three days. "I have not been warm in four years, you know. I sit by a fire and I see them. I hold my hands to it and I think: they are in the water. I have tried it a hundred times." He gave a small apologetic laugh. "But I should like to try again. Before the end. If I may."

"Your Grace—"

"Only a small one. A handful of coals. I should like to sit in my chair with a rug over my knees, and look at it."

Thalessa glanced at Roderick.

"The chimney," she said, in a low voice. "I did not reach the top of the flue."

"I know."

"It was narrow. There was soot."

"There was a mouse's nest in the grate and a dead moth under the wardrobe." Roderick looked at the old man. His face was lined with a weariness that went beyond sleep. "I will have it swept. We have a sweep in the house, I understand. The boy who does the kitchen flues. He can be here within the hour."

"Within the hour," said the Duke. He closed his eyes. "Yes. I think I can wait an hour."

"Rest, then."

"I shall."

They sat on either side of the bed in the slanting afternoon light, and watched the old man sleep. His face on the pillow was quite peaceful. His breath came and went in long quiet sighs.

Neither of them noticed that the bell-cord by the bed, which they had passed a hundred times, was hanging a little farther from the wall than it had, and was swaying very slightly, as if someone had lately let it go.