STARVED

"The last letter of a riddle is never the answer. It is only the place where you stop being able to pretend that you do not know it."

They did not touch the petals for a long time.

They stood in the doorway of the chapel with the cold gray light behind them, and looked at the row of small violet shapes laid out on the velvet like a line of print. S. T. A. R. V. E. D. The black capitals were as sharp as a surgeon's incisions. The ink on the white velvet beneath, where the finger had written, was still wet.

Thank you for bringing him home.

"She was here," said Roderick, "twenty minutes ago."

"Less."

"She walked past us in the passage. She came up another way. She came and laid out the word, and wrote on the velvet, and went."

"Yes."

"While we were weeping over the body."

"While we were weeping." Thalessa's voice was dry. "She knew we should be. She has never once made a mistake about what we would do. It is almost admirable."

"It is monstrous."

"It is both. They are not exclusive."

She crossed the chapel. She took up the first petal with her forceps, very carefully, and laid it on a clean square of linen. Then the second. Then the third. She laid them in a line, S to D, with a space between each, and stood over them with her hands behind her back, as a general stands over a map.

"Starved," she said.

"We've known the word for three days."

"We've known the letters. We've not known the order." She tapped the S with the end of her forceps. "I told you the death order was TSARVED. I told you that someone had put the first two petals in the wrong sequence. I thought it was a mistake."

"It was not."

"No. It was a necessity." She looked at him. "Roderick. The word was meant to be spelled in the order of their guilt. In the order of what they did on the ninth of October, as the Captain set it down. And the killer meant to kill them in that order. Read the keel."

He frowned.

"Mr. Sterling picked it up," said Thalessa, "and struck me."

"Ragnar."

"S. The first blow. The first violence. The thing that made it a murder and not a scandal." She moved her forceps to the second petal. "Mr. Valerius had my arms. T. He held the Captain down. He was not the one who struck. He was the one who stood still." She touched the third and fourth. "A and R. Lady Aurelia. Two letters. Why two?"

"I don't know."

"Because she did two things. She held the lantern, in the hold, so that they could see to bore. And she turned the key in the padlock on the chain. The key and the lantern. The Captain does not say so, but the Duke does, in his statement. Lady Aurelia had her own reasons, which I shall leave her to state. The reason was a son in Bath. And she turned the key." She moved on. "V. Malthus. Dr Malakor had the cutlass. He drew steel on a man he had known for years. And then he cut him, afterward, for twelve days, with the same neat hands. And D."

"The Duke."

"The Duke, who stood at the rail." She looked down at the last petal. "I ran up the ladder and left them there. He is the last because he is the least. He did nothing. He only let it be done. And for that, to her, he was the worst of all."

"Why?"

"Because it was the sin that every one of us commits." She said it very softly. "Every day. In small ways. We stand at the rail."

The chapel was quiet. The candles on the altar guttered in a draft.

"Then what was the E?" said Roderick.

She was silent a moment.

"The E," she said at last, "does not belong to any of them."

"Uriah."

"A footman. A thin man with a pitted face, who could not swim, who carried boxes up a staircase for a frightened girl and showed her which stair creaked." Her voice broke slightly. "He did nothing. He knew nothing. He was in no ledger, in no hold, in no boat. She needed a seventh letter. She needed it for the word. And she took it from the one person in the house whom she had no cause to hate."

"Because it would not otherwise spell."

"Because it would not otherwise spell. And because—" She stopped.

"Because?"

"Because I think it was meant as a sign." Her mouth trembled. "A letter for the innocent. One for the twenty in the hold, and the two children, and the cat. One life taken from those who had done no wrong, that the word might be whole. She wrote starved, Roderick, and then found that she needed a victim who did not deserve it, to make the point. And she took the nearest."

"That is not justice."

"No. It is the thing that happens when justice is done by hand." She looked at the row of petals. "I think she knows. I think that is why she wrote thank you. She is not boasting. She is apologizing, in the only language she has. Look at the writing. It is smaller than the rest."

He bent. It was.

…

They searched the house for her.

It took all that afternoon. They went through the rooms systematically, as bailiffs go through a bankrupt's property: the kitchen, the pantry, the cellars, the servants' passage, the laundry, the linen room, the stable loft. They questioned the cook, a stout shaking woman named Mrs. Penhallow, who had not known there was a body in the Duke's room until the sweep came down the back stairs screaming. They questioned the stable hand, a slow young man named Davy who could not say a sentence without wringing his cap. They questioned Ned the sweep, who burst into tears.

"I never meant it, sir. I never knew. She said it was only to tell you the damper was loose. She gave me a shilling."

"When?"

"This morning, sir. In the kitchen. She come in, and she was ever so kind. She said the Duke was poorly and wanted a fire. She said: just say it's clear. And I did." The boy wiped his nose on his black sleeve. "She was ever so sad. She was crying a bit, sir."

"Was she using her cane?"

"Her cane, sir?"

"Was she walking with a stick? Feeling her way?"

The boy stared. "No, sir," he said. "She come in straight. She came right up to me and looked at me. She said I'd got soot on my face."

Thalessa closed her eyes.

They found Vespera's room at the back of the servants' wing: a narrow whitewashed cell with an iron bed, a deal chest, a crucifix, a jug and basin. Everything was in order. The bed was made. The blanket was folded. On the pillow lay a small hand-mirror with a cracked back, and under the mirror, a school exercise book, much thumbed.

Thalessa picked it up.

"Her eyes," she said. "She trained them."

The book was filled from cover to cover in a small clear hand. It was not a diary. It was a drill. Page after page of instruction, written as a child writes lines. Look past them. Do not follow the light. Do not blink at the flame. Count three before you turn toward a voice. The right eye follows the left; keep them still. Below each rule, dated, a tally of marks, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. The last page was dated the previous autumn. Four years. Not once.

"She practiced," Thalessa said. "In the mirror. Every night. For four years she taught her own eyes to be dead." She turned the page, and her voice thickened. "And once, when I swept the lantern across her face, the right one flinched. Once. In four years."

"A very small slip."

"A very small slip, for a girl of sixteen, with a lifetime of habit to unlearn." She shut the book. "I wonder how many nights it cost her."

"And in the chest?"

Roderick had opened the lid. He stood looking down into it with an expression that she could not read.

She came and looked.

The chest was nearly empty. A change of linen. A shawl. A hairbrush. And at the bottom, wrapped in a clean square of oilcloth, a bundle that she lifted out with both hands.

It was the log.

A thick black-bound ship's logbook, swollen with sea-water and stiff with salt, its spine split, its edges warped. The cover bore a name in faded gilt: St. Jude, of Port Calder. A strip of paper had been glued along the broken spine, with great care, by someone who knew how to mend a book. Some of the leaves had been cut out with a sharp knife, close to the binding. Others were still there, covered in a spidery, slanting pencil.

She opened it at random.

Day 2. Calm. Very hot. A clear night, with a half moon. I could not sleep, and lay on my back and counted the Pleiades. All seven. It seemed to me a great kindness. I do not know why I should write it down.

She shut it.

She held it against her chest, in both arms, and stood for a moment without speaking.

"She left it," said Roderick.

"Yes."

"For us."

"For us." She swallowed. "She has put it where we would find it. She has given us everything. She has opened every door, one at a time, in order, like a hostess. She wanted us to read it all."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

"You do," said Roderick, gently. "You've known since the cave."

She closed her eyes.

So that someone would know.

"Because the Captain asked it," she said. "So that someone will come after, and read, and know. She has not been hiding, Roderick. She has been waiting. She has been waiting for four years for someone to come to the end of the road, and stand in the cave, and read. And now we have. And now there is nothing left for her to do but tell us the rest."

"Or finish it."

"Or finish it."

He stood very still.

"Thalessa," he said. "What does she do next?"

"I don't know."

"Think."

She thought. She stood in the narrow cell with the sea-stained book in her arms and the milk-white spectacles in her hand, and looked at the crucifix, the folded blanket, the clean white wall. She thought of a small figure in a gray dress, walking without her cane. She thought of a candle burning in a jar. She thought of a twenty-first lamp, unlit, on a square of black velvet.

"The lamp," she said.

"What?"

"She said she would light it when he was avenged. And she has been waiting to do it. And now the last of them is dead." She raised her eyes. "She will go down to the crypt tonight. She will light the twenty-first lamp. It's the thing she has been working toward for four years. She will not be able to do anything else."

"Then we'll be waiting."

"Yes."

"And take her."

"And take her." She hesitated. "Roderick. I should like to be the one who speaks to her."

"Why you?"

"Because I think she will not run from me." She held the log tight against her breast. "And because there is something I wish to say to her. I wish to tell her that I read it. I wish to tell her what he said, at the end. Do not make a monster of yourself."

"She knows."

"She knows. But she has not heard it said, in a voice that was not her own." Her lips shook. "I think she has been waiting for that, too."

Outside, the light was already failing. The gray sky had gone the color of a pewter plate. In the courtyard below the window, a flurry of snow had begun, thin and dry and small, sliding sideways on the wind.

It was the last snow of the long storm, though neither of them knew it.