The Edge of the Cliff

"There is a kind of courage that has no name. It is simply the decision not to leave."

The rope came down at ten past one.

It came in a long sliding rush out of the dark, a thick brown coil of hemp that unrolled through the broken lens and fell, swaying, to within a man's height of the table. A lantern was tied to the end of it. It swung there in the gust, a small bright yellow bead in the black hole of the roof, throwing wild shadows across the crypt, and the pale green shards of the lens glittered like a shattered window.

"Miss! Miss! Can you see it?"

"We see it, Ned!" Thalessa shouted back. Her voice cracked with relief. "Is it secure?"

"It's round the chimney, miss! Davy's holding the end! He's strong as a horse!"

"Is there a second rope?"

"Davy's gone to fetch it!"

"Then stay where you are!" She turned. "Roderick. Can you stand?"

"I can try."

"Don't try. Do." She put an arm round him and heaved. He came up from the floor with a grunt, swaying, gray with exhaustion, and stood supported against her shoulder. The flickering light gilded the planes of his ruined face. "We'll send Vespera first."

"No," said the girl. She had sat up on the table. The compress had slipped, and her swollen eyes were wet and red, and she was looking at the rope with a terrible fixity. "Not me. You first."

"Don't be foolish."

"I mean it. You've two lives to save. Mine isn't one." She swung her legs over the edge. "I'm not going to the court as a rescued woman. I'll come last."

"You'll come when you're told."

"I'm not a parcel."

"You are, in point of fact, exactly that." Thalessa's voice was brisk and firm. "A parcel with a bad chest and a nasty cough, which is going up that rope in a sling made from the Duke's coat, whether it likes it or not. If you refuse, I shall tie you into it with my own hands."

"You wouldn't."

"I have done it to cadavers."

There was a pause.

And then, despite everything, the corner of Vespera's mouth twitched.

"All right," she said.

…

It took twenty minutes to rig the sling.

They used the Duke's heavy coat, laid flat on the floor, and bound it round the girl's body in a rough cradle with strips of tablecloth, passed under the arms and between the legs, knotted at the chest. Thalessa did it with her tongue between her teeth, tying each hitch three times, remembering the lessons of a childhood in the apothecary's shop. Roderick held the lantern. He said nothing. He watched her hands.

"It's an anchor bend," he said, at last.

She glanced at the knot. "So it is."

"Where did you learn it?"

"From a book." She tightened it. "From the knot-plate in Ashley's. I was looking up the one that Ragnar Sterling's killer had used, in the first week, when I thought I should have to explain it in a court."

"And now?"

"Now I think it was the Captain's." She rose. "It is the first knot a sailor teaches his sister."

Vespera said nothing.

She stood with her arms round her chest, held fast in the sling, small and straight and trembling, and looked at the rope. It swayed. The lantern at its end threw a quivering circle of light on the roof. She drew a deep breath.

"I'm afraid," she said.

"I know."

"I've climbed all my life. I've been up the mast of my uncle's boat in a gale. It's only that—" She swallowed. "It's a long way up."

"Don't look."

"I shall have to look."

"Then look at the light."

"It's a very small light."

"It's the only one that counts."

She nodded. Thalessa put her hands on the rope, and gave three sharp tugs. A voice above shouted, and the line grew taut. The knots creaked. The girl's feet left the floor, and she rose, slowly, turning a little in the draft, a small gray figure in a great brown coat, swinging up into the dark.

Her face went by. It was white and strained, with her eyes tight shut. But as she passed the level of the lamps, Thalessa saw her open them. She looked down. She looked at the long golden table, and the twenty-one small flames, and the great clouded jar with its steady light. For a moment, as the rope turned, her face was lit from below, quite calm, quite young.

"Good night," she said softly.

Then the dark closed over her.

…

The rope came down again at ten to two, and Thalessa went up.

It was the longest journey of her life.

She climbed with her hands wrapped in tablecloth, bracing her boots against the rough walls of the shaft, while the rope above her creaked and strained and the tiny round window of stars grew slowly larger. The shaft was narrow, smooth, and bitterly cold. A wind blew through it like a flute. It smelled of rock and ice and the clean gray smell of the open sea. She could hear Davy's grunts above her, and Ned's shrill encouragement, and her own heart.

She did not look down.

At thirty feet her arms began to shake. At forty, they were numb. At forty-two, a strong hand closed on her wrist, and another on her collar, and she was dragged bodily up through a hole in the ground and tumbled onto a heap of frozen gulls' nests, under the open sky.

She lay on her back and breathed.

It was a night of extraordinary beauty. She would remember it all her life. The storm had blown itself out. The sky was a vast clear dome of black, scattered from rim to rim with hard bright stars, and the stars were reflected in a sea as still as glass. A pale moon had risen over the headland. Beyond the broken wall of the watch-house the cliff fell away into silver, and far below, the long surf fretted the rocks with soft white lace. The cold was bitter. The air was clean as water.

"Miss! Miss, are you hurt?"

She turned her head.

The sweep knelt beside her, black and grinning and shaking, with soot on his face and his cap on the back of his head. He was crying and laughing at once. Behind him a broad young man in a smock held a coil of rope in both fists and gaped at her like a startled ox.

"Ned," said Thalessa.

"Yes, miss."

"You came back."

"Yes, miss."

"You were told to go to the village."

"I did, miss. I went as far as the stile." The boy wiped his nose. "But I stood there, and I thought: she said I did well. And then I thought about Mr. Uriah. And I thought, if I was him, I'd go back." He gulped. "Davy come with me. We saw the smoke out the hearth. Yellow. It stank like the pit. I knew it were bad. I climbed the chimney of the kitchen once with a dead rat in it and I never smelled nothing like it."

"You are the bravest boy in England."

"I'm a sweep, miss."

"It's the same thing."

She sat up. The world swung and settled. At the edge of the ruin, wrapped in a blanket and propped against the stump of the chimney, sat Vespera, with her swollen eyes shut and her face turned up to the stars. Her breath came in short rasping whistles. Her hands lay open in her lap.

She did not look round.

"The Inspector," she said, in a thread of voice. "Where is the Inspector?"

"Coming."

"He is the heaviest."

"I know."

"The rope won't hold."

"It will." Thalessa got to her knees. "It has to."

She crawled to the mouth of the shaft and looked down. A round of dim gold light showed at the bottom of a pit of black. A small dark figure was standing in it, looking up. He waved his good arm. She raised her own.

Come, she thought. Come, come, come.

…

They hauled him up at half past two.

It took the three of them, Davy, and Ned, and Thalessa herself, hauling hand over hand on the straining line, while the hemp hummed in the dark and the great stone at the lip of the hole cracked and shifted under the strain. Twice the rope stuck. Twice it jerked and slipped, and a short cry floated up from below. At last a hand appeared over the lip, bloody, bandaged, scrabbling at the rim. Then a second, white and trembling. Then a face.

"Pull!"

They pulled.

He came out of the earth like a man being born. He rolled onto the gulls' nests, and lay on his face in the frost with his breath tearing in and out. She was on her knees beside him, touching his face, his hair, his shoulders. "You fool," she whispered. "You absolute fool. You're alive."

"Mostly."

"Don't talk."

"I'm to be listened to." He turned his head. His eyes were closed, and his mouth moved in a travesty of his smile. "I've something to say."

"What?"

"I'd like a cup of tea."

She began to laugh. She could not stop. She put her forehead against his shoulder and laughed until her whole body shook, and he lay there under her with a faint dazed pleased look, and the sweep and the stable-lad stood watching, quite unable to guess what the joke was.

And then the ground trembled.

It was a very small movement. A faint, dry, shuddering tremor, such as a dog makes when it dreams. The gulls' nests shifted. A pebble rolled across the flags. Thalessa lifted her head.

"Did you feel that?"

"What?" said Roderick.

"The ground."

It came again, stronger.

Far away, deep in the earth, something groaned. It was a vast, slow, gravelly sound, like a millstone grinding in a cave. It rose and fell. It seemed to come from everywhere at once: from under the floor, from the cliff, from the sea. The watch-house wall began to shake. A shower of loose mortar fell from the lintel and pattered on the ground.

"The cave," said Vespera.

She was on her feet. She stood swaying by the chimney-stump, her face lifted, her eyes still shut, her whole body strained toward the sound.

"It's the tide. It's the furnace. It's the whole hill." Her voice rose. "I built too well. The vaults are all of one piece, they run under the whole headland. If the cave goes, the passages go. If the passages go—"

"The house," said Thalessa.

"The house."

A crack ran across the floor.

It opened under her feet with a sound like a tearing sheet, a black jagged line that ran from the mouth of the shaft to the far wall, and widened as she watched. Davy bellowed. The stone slab at the lip of the hole tilted. The ruined wall of the watch-house leaned, like a drunken man, toward the sea.

"RUN!"

She did not know who shouted. They ran. They ran across the shuddering ground, in a ragged stumbling line, with Roderick supported between Thalessa and the stable-lad, and Vespera in Ned's arms, and the great black crack racing behind them. The watch-house roared. A section of the wall went over the cliff, in one piece, and fell to the rocks in a long soft crash.

They reached the garden wall and turned.

Behind them, on the very brink of the cliff, the ruin of the watch-house tilted, and hung, and slid into the sea.

And beyond it, rising in black majesty against the silver sky, with every window dark and every chimney cold, the house of the Dukes of Blackwood began, very quietly, to fall.