The Mask Comes Off

"There is no verdict as heavy as the first honest look at a face you thought you knew."

"Especially the first," said Thalessa.

"That I was blind." The girl's mouth twisted. "It is the easiest lie in the world. Nobody asks to see the proof. They only turn their eyes away, because they are afraid it will be catching."

She had put down the taper. It lay on the cloth, burning, at the foot of the great empty jar. She stood with her hands at her sides, quite upright, in her gray dress and white apron, with her dark hair coming loose from its pins. Without the mask she looked younger. She looked, absurdly, like a girl about to be scolded.

"How long did you practice?" said Thalessa.

"A year."

"Before you came to the house."

"On the quay. At night. When the village was asleep." The faint smile. "I used to sit on the end of the pier with a candle and a looking-glass, and make my eyes follow the flame, and then stop. Over and over. My uncle thought I was mourning." She tilted her head. "I got it right in the end. It is only a matter of not wanting to look at things. Do you know that I never once, in four years, looked at a person's face when they were speaking to me? I looked at the place just beside it. It makes people tell you things."

"Why the blindness?"

"Because the Duke could not have borne it otherwise."

Thalessa blinked.

"He could not have borne to be looked at," said Vespera. "Not by me. I knew, when I came to the house, that I could never stand in the same room with those people and meet their eyes. I should have killed them on the spot. And they would have seen it. They would have seen him in my face, I think. I have my brother's mouth." She touched it, lightly, with two fingers. "But a blind girl has no face to see. She is a thing that moves about the room. She hears, but does not look. She can be frightened, and sorry for, and told secrets."

"And the Duke took you in."

"He took me in himself." Something flickered in the clear gray eyes, tenderness, scorn, grief. "I walked the forty miles from the Reach, in October, with a bundle on my back and my hand on a stick. I stood on the doorstep of Blackwood Manor and said: I am the sister of Captain Gabriel Haze. I am blind. I have no one. And he looked at me, and he went the color of lard. And he said: Come in, my dear. Come in out of the wet."

"Guilt."

"Guilt, and horror, and a kind of hope." The mouth curved. "He thought it was God's way of letting him make amends. He gave me a room. He gave me a wage. He used to leave small presents on my bed. A shawl. A box of sweets. A silver thimble. I kept them all." She laughed under her breath. "They are in my chest."

"Did you hate him?"

"Every day."

"And yet—"

"And yet he was kind to me." Her voice had dropped. "That was the worst of it. That was the thing I did not plan for. I had come to this house to hate the man who killed my brother, and I found that he was a gentle old gentleman who wept at the dinner table and made me tea. He was sorry. He was sorrier than any person I have ever known." She looked down at her hands. "And I thought: it does not matter. It does not change what he did. And I thought it every day for four years. And every day it was a little harder to believe."

Thalessa said, "You loved him."

"I did not."

"A little."

Vespera was silent.

"A very little," she said, at last. "As one loves a thing one has decided to destroy."

…

The sea muttered.

The lamps burned on in their long row, gold and steady, and the air in the vault grew warm. Thalessa felt the cold go out of her hands. She stood quite still, with the golden light on her face, and looked at the girl across the cloth.

"I have something to tell you," she said. "From him."

"I know what he said."

"I know you know. I should like to say it anyway."

Vespera's head came up.

"May I?"

A long breath. Then, slowly, a nod.

Thalessa took the log from under her arm. She did not open it. She held it in both hands, and looked not at the girl but at the lamps, at the small golden flames in their jars, and spoke in the plain level voice she used for things that could not be borne.

"As for the five who are with me in this boat," she said, "I ask you to judge them. I ask you to judge them justly, with the law, in open court. I do not ask you to forgive them. That is not for you. But I ask you not to hunt them. I ask you not to do to them what they have done to me. If you are a person who loves me, I ask you this most of all."

She drew breath.

"Do not make a monster of yourself on my account."

The silence in the crypt was absolute.

Vespera Haze stood with her hands clasped before her and her face utterly white. Her lips had parted. Her eyes were fixed on Thalessa with a look that was almost fear, the look of a child who has been told a thing she has always known.

"He said that," she whispered.

"He said that."

"He said if you are a person who loves me."

"Yes."

"I read it on the third night." Her voice had gone thin and young. "I put my hand on it in the dark. I read it with my fingers, one letter at a time, and I came to monster, and I stopped. I didn't go on. I sat there for a long time with my hand on the wood, and then I took it away and went home." She swallowed. "And I never touched that part of the keel again."

"Why?"

"Because I knew that if I read it a second time I would stop."

Thalessa said nothing.

"I have thought," said Vespera slowly, "that he did not understand what he was asking. I have thought that he was too good. That he had never been a woman at a pier for three days with the whole village watching. That he had never lain awake at night hearing nothing but the sea." She drew a long unsteady breath. "I told myself that he was dying, and was kind, and was wrong. That it was the last mistake of a man too gentle for this world. And that it was my business to be the thing the world required."

"Was it?"

"I don't know." The words were a whisper. "I don't know any more."

She put her hands over her face.

…

It was Roderick who moved first.

He came out of the shadow of the recess quietly, with his hands visible, and the revolver holstered at his hip. He crossed the crypt with the slow even tread of a man approaching a wounded animal. He stopped five feet from the girl.

"Miss Haze," he said.

She dropped her hands. She did not look surprised.

"Inspector."

"I am Roderick Thorne, of the Royal Investigative Corps. I am arresting you on suspicion of the murders of Thorne Valerius, Ragnar Sterling, Lady Aurelia Vance, Dr Malthus Malakor, Uriah Finch, and Alastair Charles Blackwood, Fourth Duke." His voice was grave and gentle. "You will be taken before a magistrate at the earliest possible moment. You are not obliged to say anything. Anything you say will be taken down."

"I shall say it all," said Vespera.

"That is your right."

"It is my intention." She drew herself up. "I have been writing it for four years. I have it in my head. I know every word."

"Then you will come quietly."

"Yes."

"You will not resist."

"I will not." She held out her wrists, together, in front of her, with a small flat gesture. "But I would ask a favor."

"What favor?"

"That you let me light the lamp."

Roderick looked at the great jar. He looked at the taper burning on the cloth. He looked, for a long moment, at the girl's thin white hands, held out like an offering.

"Why?"

"Because he is waiting."

"Miss Haze—"

"Four years. Every night, I have lit twenty lamps. And every night I have looked at that one." Her gaze did not waver. "And every night I have said: tomorrow. Tomorrow, when Ragnar is dead. Tomorrow, when the doctor is dead. Tomorrow, tomorrow. And I'm so tired, Inspector. I'm so very tired of tomorrow."

Thalessa put a hand on Roderick's sleeve.

"Let her," she said.

"It is evidence."

"It is a lamp."

"Thalessa."

"Roderick. She is going to hang. You know it. She will stand in the dock and tell the whole of this story, in open court, in a plain gray dress, to a jury of twelve men who will not understand a word of it. And at the end of it they will put a cap over her head." Her voice was low and fierce. "Let her light one lamp."

His jaw worked.

He glanced at the girl. She stood with her wrists still extended, perfectly still. She did not plead. She did not speak. She waited, as she had waited for four years.

He took a long breath.

"One," he said. "And then you come with me."

"Thank you."

She dropped her hands. She turned to the table. She picked up the taper, and held the little flame in front of her face, and for a moment stood so, with her eyes on it, as though weighing its small bright weight.

"Gabriel," she said, quietly.

"I'm sorry I'm late."

She lowered the taper to the wick.

It caught. A small, steady, yellow flame sprang up on the surface of the oil. It grew. It stood. It burned, in the great clouded jar, a little taller than the rest, brighter than the rest, with a clean golden light that reached to the roof of the crypt and set every crystal blazing.

And in the wall behind the table, in the cold black stone, something went click.

Thalessa heard it. She heard it in the pit of her stomach. It was a small flat sound, such as a lock makes, or a catch that drops. And then, far above them, deep in the walls of the house, a long slow grinding groan began, like a mill-wheel waking.

Vespera had turned.

She was staring at the wall. Her face had changed. She was looking at the black stone as one looks at a thing one has dreaded for a very long time and had hoped, against hope, would never come.

"Oh," she said. It was almost inaudible. "Not yet."

"What is it?" Roderick's hand was on his gun. "What have you done?"

"I thought you would be gone." The girl's voice shook. "I thought it was only me. I never meant—" She spun round, with her hands clenched at her sides, and the lamplight was in her eyes like fire. "Run!"

"What?"

"Run! The stair! Run, now, before—"

But the iron was already falling.