What She Wrote for the Crown

"No document is so honest as the one that is written for no one who will ever be able to answer it."

The hiss grew louder.

It was a small sound, and it came from everywhere at once: from the walls, from the roof, from the dark crevices between the stones. It was the sound of a long breath being let out through a narrow gap. Thalessa had heard it once before, in the laboratory, when a furnace valve stuck. It meant that something was coming that would not be argued with.

She put a handkerchief to her face. It smelled faintly of lavender and soot. It would do nothing, and she knew it.

"I should like to give you something," said Vespera.

She had risen from the stool. She stood by the great lamp with her back to the flame, and her hand was at the neck of her dress. She drew out a small flat packet, wrapped in oilcloth and bound with fishing-twine, and held it out across the table.

"What is it?"

"My statement."

Roderick came slowly from the door. His face was drawn and gleaming with sweat, and his left hand, in its sling, trembled slightly. He took the packet, and untied the twine, and unfolded the oilcloth.

Inside lay a sheaf of closely written pages, in the same square clear hand as the petals.

"I wrote it last winter," said Vespera. "In case. I wished there to be a record, and not just a pile of bodies." She stepped back. "Read it, Inspector. Or let Miss Ashwood read it. I should like it read aloud. There are twenty-nine minutes. I do not think I can bear to hear it in my own voice."

Roderick looked at Thalessa.

"Read," said Thalessa.

He read.

…

To the Commissioner of the Royal Investigative Corps, and to any magistrate, juror, clergyman or person of good will into whose hands this may fall:

My name is Vespera Haze. I am twenty years of age. I am the sister of Captain Gabriel Haze, late master of the brig St. Jude of Port Calder, and the daughter of Samuel Haze, fisherman, and Annie Haze, his wife, both deceased. I was born at Harrow's Reach in the county of Calder, and have lived there, except as hereafter stated, all my life.

I have killed six persons.

I wish this to be understood at the outset, in order that nothing that follows may be mistaken for an excuse. I killed them. I killed them with poison, with ice, with wire and with fire, and I killed them by contrivance, so that they should not know the hand that did it. I am not insane. I am not under the influence of any drug. I did it deliberately and with the fullest possible knowledge of what I was doing, and I would ask the court to find accordingly.

I did it because I was told, four years ago, that my brother had been killed by the sea. I found, afterward, that he had been killed by five persons whom I shall name. I wrote to the Admiralty. I wrote to the Crown. I wrote to the insurers, the owners, the magistrate, the coroner, the bishop. I received six answers. All of them said the same thing, in more or fewer words: that the matter was closed.

I wish it to be understood that I did not begin with murder. I began with letters.

I will not say that murder was the only course. I have thought about it for four years, and I cannot say so. There was the law. There was the Press. There was the Church. I may have been a fool. But I was sixteen. I was a girl at the end of a pier. And I had in my hands, in the form of eleven feet of carved timber, the written testimony of a dead man, which proved beyond doubt that five persons had sunk a ship and killed twenty men and eaten the master. And the Crown, in six letters, told me to go home.

I do not ask you to excuse me. I ask you to ask yourselves what you would have done.

…

Roderick's voice had grown rougher as he read. He stopped, once, and drew a breath, and went on.

…

Of the persons I killed, I wish to say the following.

Ragnar Sterling struck my brother with an auger and told him to see to the twenty. I killed him with wine, as I had learned to do in the kitchens of the Gull and Anchor, where the cook kept a pot of wisteria root for the rats. I put it in his glass. I do not regret it.

Thorne Valerius held my brother's arms. He wept. He wrote my brother's log into the keel, and begged for forgiveness in a note. I killed him with a letter, which I wrote in Alastair's hand, and with a tincture of wisteria in a flask of brandy sent by post, with a petal marked T enclosed so that he would know who had sent it, to arrive a week before the reunion. He was the first because he was going to confess. I knew it from the letters he was writing to Mrs. Pym. I could not allow him to confess. I wanted him to be punished, not forgiven, and a man who confesses publicly is forgiven. It was the vilest of my acts, and I shall pay for it.

Lady Aurelia Vance held the lantern and turned the key in the chain. I killed her with ice. It was a clean death. I wished it so, because she wept in the boat, and gave her bread to my brother when she had none.

Malthus Malakor drew the cutlass, and cut my brother for twelve days. He was the cleverest of them. I killed him in the bell, because it was the only place in the house that he was afraid of. I regret nothing about it except that he was the only one of them who truly tried to tell the truth.

Alastair Blackwood stood at the rail. He was kind to me. He lit the fire himself. It was the death he wished.

And Uriah Finch, who was a footman, who did not know my brother, who could not swim, who carried my box up the stair and shared his bread: him I killed because the word required it.

I put it that baldly because there is no other way to put it. I needed seven letters. I had six sinners. I took the seventh from the one person in the house whom I had no cause to hate. I let the Duke shoot him. I let a drugged old man kill an innocent to complete a riddle.

I do not ask forgiveness for it. I do not think there is any. I wish only to record, for the benefit of whoever reads this, that the thing my brother asked me not to become, I became on the night I wrote the letter E on Uriah's petal.

He said: Do not make a monster of yourself on my account.

I did.

…

The reading stopped.

Nobody spoke. The hiss in the walls filled the silence, thin and constant. The lamps burned steadily in their jars, but a faint shimmer had come into the air above them, a clear trembling distortion, like heat over a road. Thalessa saw it, and understood, and said nothing.

Roderick turned the page. His hand was shaking now.

…

To the Court, I have one request.

I ask that my brother's carving be preserved. I ask that the keel of the lifeboat be taken from the sea cave at Blackwood Manor, and set in a public place where it can be read, by sight or by touch, by any person who wishes. I ask that the names of the twenty be spoken in open court. I ask that the Crown, which twice denied them, be asked to say why.

I ask that Mrs. Margaret Pym, widow of Ezra Pym the carpenter, and the families of the other seventeen crew, be given the share of the insurance money that has not been spent. There is a sum of ninety-one thousand pounds in the account of the late Ragnar Sterling at the Royal Bank of Port Calder under the name of R. S. Marlowe. I discovered it last winter. I took no part of it. I ask that it be paid to them.

I ask that the house be pulled down.

I ask that the persons Mrs. Penhallow, Davy Cole and Ned Tolliver, who served in it, be forgiven for what they did at my instruction, and that no blame attach to them, for they did not know. I ask that Ned in particular be told that he did well.

I ask that I be permitted to die by my own hand, if the Court so permits, and not by another's.

If the Court does not permit, I ask that I be allowed to say a prayer.

I do not ask pardon. I ask only to be known.

Vespera Haze.

Written at Blackwood Manor in the winter of the fourth year, by lamplight.

…

Roderick lowered the pages.

He stood for a long moment with his head bent, as if listening to something far away. Then he folded the sheets with great care, and laid them on the table beside the lamp, and put the oilcloth over them.

"It will be read," he said. "In open court. In full."

"Thank you."

"I do not make promises I cannot keep, Miss Haze. I'll say this: I shall do everything in my power."

"That is all I ask."

"I do not know whether it will be enough."

"No." The girl smiled, faintly. "But nothing ever is."

Thalessa had risen to her feet.

She had not been aware of it. She stood now with her hands pressed flat on the cloth, looking across the lamps at the girl in the gray dress. Her eyes were burning. She was aware of a great and terrible anger, and of something under the anger that was not anger at all.

"You wrote I did."

"Yes."

"You wrote that you became what he asked you not to."

"Yes."

"That is not true."

Vespera blinked.

"That is not true," said Thalessa. Her voice shook. "It is a very noble sentence, and it is false. You did not become a monster, Vespera. A monster would not have lit twenty lamps. A monster would not have written the names of the dead in a square clear hand and set them out on a table with such care. A monster would not have wept, as you did, at the foot of the jar, because she was sorry she had been slow." She drew a breath. "You did a terrible thing. Several. You killed an innocent man. You will answer for that, and you should. But you are not what you say. You are a girl who was left alone at a pier. And I am so tired of hearing people call that a monster."

The girl's lip trembled.

"And now," said Thalessa, "I'd like you to do me a favor."

"What favor?"

"Stay alive."

Vespera stared at her.

"I have twenty-seven minutes," Thalessa said, "and a notebook, and some knowledge of chemistry. I do not promise to succeed. But I should very much like to try. And I should like you to hold the lamp."

She took up her pen. Her hand was perfectly steady.

"Roderick," she said. "I'm going to need everything in this room that is made of charcoal, or ammonia, or cloth."

He looked at her.

Then, slowly, for the first time in many hours, he smiled.

"Yes, ma'am," said Roderick Thorne.

Far above them, in the dark, the furnace caught.