Four Years in the Dark

"A story told in the hour before a catastrophe has a different weight. It is the only one nobody interrupts."

The iron came down in three places at once.

It fell across the crypt door, a sheet of black plate as thick as a man's wrist, with a boom that shook the floor. It fell across the arch to the sea cave, in two leaves that met in the middle with a clang like a bell. And somewhere behind the table, deep in the wall, a third fell, unseen, with a long shuddering rumble, as the great stone slab that closed the secret stair slid across its mouth.

Then the sound stopped.

The echoes ran round the vault and died. The lamps stood unmoved in their row, twenty-one small gold flames. A sprinkling of dust drifted down from the roof and settled on the white cloth. And in the great silence Thalessa heard, quite distinctly, her own heart.

"Shutters," said Roderick.

He was at the door before she had drawn breath. He flung himself against the iron with his good shoulder and she heard the dull thud and the grunt of pain. He tried again. He ran his hand down the seam, and pulled, and found nothing. He turned his face to the arch, and the pale gray glimmer that had shone there was gone; the cave beyond was sealed in black.

"Vespera," he said, without turning. "How do I open it?"

"You can't."

"There is a lever."

"There is none." The girl had not moved. She stood where she was, by the great jar, with her hands clenched at her sides and her face the color of the cloth. "I built it that way. There is a lever on the other side of the wall, in the passage. I have the key. I had meant to turn it, afterward. When—" She stopped. "I thought I should have an hour. I thought I would light the lamp, and sit here, and you would be asleep upstairs. I did not know you'd come. I did not know you'd been waiting."

"What have you done?" said Thalessa.

"A gas."

The word fell between them like a stone into a well.

"It comes from the cellars. From the old wine vaults. The Duke's grandfather had a furnace in them, to burn sulfur and purge the casks. You know the smell. Brimstone." Vespera lifted her eyes, and they were enormous. "There are pipes. They run through the house, to every flue, to every vent. In the old days they were closed with plugs of wax. I opened them all, last winter, one at a time."

"The vents," said Thalessa, slowly. "The ceiling rosette."

"Yes."

"The chimney."

"Yes. They are all one system." She swallowed. "The lamp is the trigger. When I light it, a wick burns down through a chain of fuses. In an hour, a little less, it reaches the furnace. And the furnace sends the gas."

"Into the house?"

"Into the passages and the crypt. Not the house. I closed the upper vents last night." Her voice shook. "The servants went at four. I sent them to the village with a note for the vicar. Mrs. Penhallow, and the boys. They are safe. There was no one in the house but you and I."

"You meant it for yourself," said Roderick.

She did not answer.

"You meant to sit down here with your lamps and let the sulfur take you."

"It's a gentle death," said Vespera quietly. "Gentler than the sea. They say that you only feel sleepy." She tried to smile, and could not. "I did not mean you to be here. I swear on his name, I did not. If I had known—" She pressed her hands to her mouth. "I thought you would have gone up to your beds. I thought you would be asleep. I was only going to light the lamp, and then go up and bolt the stair and sit down."

"With no one to stop you."

"With no one to see."

Roderick turned slowly from the door.

His face was gray. He looked at the girl for a long moment, without anger, without pity, as one looks at an unreadable instrument. Then he said, in a voice that was almost gentle:

"How long?"

"Fifty minutes. Perhaps fifty-five."

"The fuse. Can it be cut?"

"It runs inside the wall. I put it there myself. You would have to break the stone."

"The furnace?"

"Two hundred yards away, behind a locked door, in the cellars. With the stair blocked."

"Then we shall dig."

"You will not get through."

"We will try."

She shook her head. "I know every stone of this place. I built it. It was made to be sealed." She spoke without bitterness, merely stating a fact. "It was made to keep one person in. The shutters are three-quarters-inch plate. The slab is eleven tons. The cave is under thirty feet of water until midnight. There is no way out, Inspector. Not for an hour. Not for a day. There is no way."

There was a long silence.

Thalessa stood with her hand on the table. She felt very strange. She was frightened, certainly; she could feel the old cold dread rising in her belly. But under the fear there was something else, something she had not expected. It was a kind of clarity. It was as though a lamp had been lit in a dark room, a very small one, and by its light she could see, quite distinctly, all four walls.

There is always an antidote, she thought. My father said it.

"Fifty minutes," she said aloud.

"Yes."

"Then we have fifty minutes to think of one."

…

Roderick took the door. He set about it with the methodical fury of a man who cannot afford despair, working along the seams of the plate with his knife and the butt of his revolver, tapping, probing, listening. He found nothing. He took off his coat and flung it down. He tried the arch. He tried the walls. He tried the floor.

Thalessa let him.

She sat down at the long white table among the burning lamps, with her chest open at her elbow and her notebook open on her knee, and began to write. She did not look up. She heard him swear under his breath, and the clang of iron, and once a sound like a groan, and she wrote on. She wrote the formula for the combustion of sulfur. She wrote the temperature of a wine-cask furnace. She wrote the volume of the crypt, estimated from the length of the table and the height of the roof, and the volume of the passages, and the rate at which a gas of that weight would sink and spread.

Sulfur dioxide, she wrote. Heavier than air. Will settle first in the low places. The cave. The stair. The floor of the crypt.

Soluble in water. Reacts with ammonia. Absorbed by charcoal.

How much charcoal in this room?

She looked up.

Vespera had sat down opposite, on the Duke's stool, with her hands folded in her lap. She was looking at Thalessa. Her eyes were red, and her face was drawn, but there was in it a kind of attentive stillness, such as a patient wears who watches a doctor draw up a syringe.

"You are working it out," she said.

"I am trying."

"You can't."

"I can try."

"Why?" said Vespera. "Why do you bother? You could let it come. You could sit with me here and let it come, and be done. It would be easy." She smiled faintly. "You would not have to testify. You would not have to see them put the cap on."

"Do you wish me to?"

"I wish—" She stopped. Her lip trembled. "I do not know what I wish."

"I know."

"You can't."

"I can," said Thalessa. "I have wished it myself."

The girl looked at her.

"I have sat in the laboratory at night," said Thalessa, "with a flask of cyanide in the cupboard, and thought: there is a way out. I never meant it. But I thought it, and it was a kind of comfort. A door in the wall, in case." She laid down her pen. "I do not think it is wickedness. I think it is only exhaustion. I think a person who has carried a thing for a very long time may look at the ground and think how soft it is."

"Yes," said Vespera, hardly audibly.

"So I shall not let you."

"You can't stop me."

"No. I can only make it harder." Thalessa picked up her pen again. "And while I do, you can tell me how it was."

"What?"

"The four years." She did not look up. "I have read what he wrote. I have read what you did. I do not know what you were. I should like to, before the end. If it comes."

Vespera stared at her.

Then, very slowly, she drew a long breath, and folded her hands more tightly in her lap. Her eyes went past Thalessa to the burning row of lamps. And in a low, clear, level voice, a voice that had been kept for a long time in the dark and was now brought out into the light, she began.

…

"I was sixteen," said Vespera. "The day the ship was due, I sat on the end of the pier."

"My uncle had told me not to. He said it was bad luck. But I had been sitting there every Sunday since Gabriel sailed, with my knees under my chin, watching the horizon. I could tell the sails from the clouds before the men could. I always could. It was a gift. He used to say that I had a hawk's eyes, and that I'd be a pilot one day if I were not a girl."

"I had brought a lantern. Gabriel always said that the first light he saw from the sea was the one on the pier, and that it was how he knew he was home. So I lit it, every Sunday, and held it up. And I watched.

"He did not come.

"I waited three days. They told me it was foolish. The collier went by, on the second night, and her master shouted across the water that there'd been a wreck off the Blackwood cliffs and that five were saved. I thought: five. I thought: he is one of them. I ran to the harbor-master's house. He was sitting at supper. He looked up, and I saw his face.

"He said: I'm sorry, Vespa. It was the Captain's ship. They say the Captain drowned.

"I did not scream. I stood in his kitchen, with the lantern still in my hand, and I looked at the fire. I looked at it a long time. And I remember thinking, quite clearly: Gabriel would not have drowned. He swims like a seal."

She paused.

"That was the first thing," she said. "The first doubt. I said it to my uncle, and he told me I was hysterical. I said it to the priest, and he told me to pray. I said it at the inquest, in the town hall, standing up in front of two hundred people. I said: my brother was the best swimmer in the Reach. He would not drown in a gale. And the coroner said: Miss Haze, the gale was very heavy. And I said: He would not drown.

"They laughed. Not unkindly. They laughed as one laughs at a child who has said something true by mistake."

…

"The boat came to the yard in the spring," said Vespera.

"It was a Tuesday. My uncle bought it from a collier's mate at Port Calder for thirty shillings, with the idea that he'd break it up for the planks. It was brought round on a lighter. I was in the yard, tarring a net, and I looked up, and I saw it come in on the tide.

"I knew it. I cannot tell you how. It was a nineteen-foot lifeboat of the usual pattern, painted white, with a patch on the port bow. There were a hundred like it. But I looked at it, and something in me said that is his, and I dropped the net.

"I walked down to the slip. I stood beside it. I put out my hand, and I touched the gunwale. It was wet, and rough, and cold.

"And I thought: it smells.

"My uncle said I was imagining things. He said it was only salt. But I said no. I said it was something else. And he looked at me, and said, Vespa, go to bed. So I went. And in the night, when he was asleep, I got up, and went down to the slip, in my nightgown, with a candle. And I got into the boat."

She stopped. Her hands had tightened in her lap.

"I will not tell you what I did first," she said. "It was a foolish thing. I sat on the thwart and talked to him. I said: Gabriel, are you there? I said it a dozen times. It was cold. The candle blew out. And I sat in the dark with my feet in the bilge and my hand on the keel-board, and I felt something under my palm.

"A line. A kind of ridge. It ran along the wood like a vein.

"I thought: a crack. I ran my fingers down it. It wasn't a crack. It was cut. There was a shape in it, here, and here, and here. A shape that came again, and again, in order, like the teeth of a comb.

"I knew what it was before I had finished the word.

"It was a G."

…

She was quiet for a long time.

Roderick had stopped working at the door. He stood with his back to the iron, his face in shadow, listening. The lamps burned steadily. The air in the crypt was warm now and slightly thick, and smelled of oil.

"I could not read the whole of it that night," said Vespera. "There was no light. I read it by touch. I went along the keel with my fingertips, a letter at a time, mouthing the words, and where I could not make them out I went back. It took me till dawn to get as far as the fifth day. And then I stopped. I could not go on. I sat in the bottom of the boat, in the gray light, with my cheek against the wood, and I wept until I was sick.

"And then I went on.

"It took me eleven nights. I wrapped my uncle's tarpaulin round me, and I sat in the bilge in the dark, and I read. I learned it by heart. I could say it to you now, from the first word to the last." She shut her eyes. "Gentlemen, you will want to put that down. He said that. He said it to them. He was standing in the water, with the hatch chained over his men, and he said gentlemen."

"He was a gentleman," said Thalessa.

"He was a fool." The words came out fierce and low. "He was a good and gentle fool, and he forgave them. He forgave every one of them, in the boat, with his flesh cut away, and I was so angry at him, I thought I should die of it. I lay in the bilge at night and shouted. I said: you stupid, stupid man, you should have killed them when you had the chance."

She laughed, a short cracked laugh.

"I'm not proud of it."

"Nobody would be."

"But it was true. It is true. If he'd struck the auger out of Ragnar's hand, if he'd killed them in the hold, twenty men would be alive." She wiped her eyes. "And I thought: he will not have it so. He would sooner be eaten. And I thought: then someone has to do it for him."

"Vespera—"

"I didn't decide, you know. I want you to understand that. It was not like a decision. It was like falling asleep. I woke one morning, and I had a plan."

She put her hand to her mouth.

"I found the log in the keel-hollow on the ninth night. Thorne had put it there. It was wrapped in oilcloth, in a little oilskin bag, with a note. To whoever finds this. G.H. asked me. Forgive me. T.V. I read it too. I read all of it. Day by day. The weather. The ship's position. The hour at which they cut the lifeboat free." Her voice cracked. "There was a page that said: Today I counted the Pleiades. I took it out, and held it up to the light, and I could see the stain where his thumb had been."

"Why did you keep it?"

"Because it was the only part of him that was whole."

…

She talked for what seemed a long while. It might have been twenty minutes. Thalessa wrote nothing. She had put down her pen. She sat with her chin on her hand, in the golden light, listening to the low clear voice go on and on, telling the story of a girl of sixteen who sat in a boat in the dark and learned to hate.

How she had gone to the harbor-master, and the coroner, and the priest, and the lawyer, and the magistrate. How she had written to the Admiralty, and the Crown, and the owners. How she had waited, through a winter, for an answer. How the answer had come in April, in a long envelope with a crest: Madam, we regret that we are unable to reopen an inquiry in the matter of the loss of the brig St. Jude, the same having been fully and satisfactorily determined.

How she had burned the letter in the grate and watched it curl.

How she had gone, that night, to the end of the pier, and stood looking at the black water for a long time, and then turned round and walked home and begun to practice with the looking-glass.

How she had spent a year in the boatyard, among the nets and tar-barrels, learning to splice and knot and caulk, and a second year learning the Duke's household by letter: the names of his servants, the arrangement of his rooms, the date of his birthday, the habit of his table. How she had learned the cipher of the lamps. How she had found, in a pamphlet in the public library at Port Calder, a plan of Blackwood Manor drawn in the reign of Queen Anne, with a note in the margin: vaults and passages, many.

How she had walked forty miles on a wet October night with a bundle on her back and her hand on a stick.

How the old man had opened the door.

"I looked at him," said Vespera, "and he looked at me, and I saw that he knew. He did not know who I was. But he knew what. He saw the Captain's mouth. And he took my hand, and he drew me in, and he said, 'You are very cold.'

"I thought: you will be colder."

She was silent.

The lamps flickered in a slight draft. Somewhere high in the walls a faint dry hiss began, like the breath of a kettle on a low fire.

Thalessa lifted her head.

"Do you hear that?" she said.

"Yes."

"How long?"

Vespera glanced at the twenty-first lamp, at the tiny trail of smoke that rose from its wick. A thread of black thread lay beside it on the cloth, burnt to a charred stub.

"Thirty minutes," she said. "Perhaps less."