Thorne & Ashwood

"The sea gives nothing back whole. But it gives back something, in time, to those who wait on the shore."

The brass plate had been polished that morning, and by half past nine the first sunlight of October lay across it in a long warm bar.

THORNE & ASHWOOD, it said. Inquiries, Analysis & Consulting Science. And below, smaller, in a hand that Thalessa had insisted upon: Poisons examined. Stomachs read. Cats welcome.

She stood on the pavement of Wimpole Row with a pot of tea in one hand and a duster in the other, and regarded it with deep satisfaction.

It had been a year.

A year, almost to the day, since the lifeboat had slipped out of the broken cave at Blackwood into a gray dawn. A year since a house of black stone had gone down into the sea, one tower after another, with a bell tolling eleven strokes. A great many things had happened in it. She could hardly believe how many. They had taken three cases in the winter, a forged will and a poisoned pigeon-fancier and a baffling business involving a Bishop's wine cellar; they had taken seven in the spring, and been nearly ruined by the fifth; they had gained a clerk, a landlady, a kettle that whistled in B-flat, and a stray tabby who had adopted the brass plate and could be found asleep beneath it in all weathers. His name was Josiah. Roderick had objected, and then given way.

"It's a perfectly good name for a cat," Thalessa had said.

"It's the name of a boy of fourteen who—"

"Who would have been delighted."

He had given way.

She finished her tea. She dusted the plate, though it did not need it. And then she looked up, as she did each morning, at the first-floor window, where a tall figure in shirtsleeves stood with a pen in one hand, reading something with a frown.

He saw her. He lifted the pen in a small salute. She lifted the duster back.

It was foolish. She was a Scholar of the Royal College, a Crown assessor, a woman of three-and-thirty. She had no business standing in the street at nine in the morning grinning at a window like a schoolgirl.

She went in anyway.

…

The letter was waiting on the hall table, in a gray government envelope.

She knew the hand before she turned it over. It was the careful, upright, painfully correct script of a woman who had learned to write in the dark, and then relearned it in the light, and who did not trust either.

She carried it up the stairs, past the tidy shelves and the glass cabinets and the long table where she had spent so many hours with Roderick's maps, and into the study, where the fire had been lit against the October chill. Roderick was at the desk. He looked up as she came in, and his face changed.

"From Newgate?"

"From Woking. They moved her in August."

"Shall I go out?"

"Don't be absurd," said Thalessa. "Sit."

She sat herself, on the arm of the old leather chair, and broke the seal.

Dear Miss Ashwood,

I hope you will forgive the liberty. They allow me one letter a quarter, and I have thought a good while about whom to spend this one on.

I have a place in the school now. They put me with the little ones first, the ones who have only just lost their sight, and cannot yet read the dots with their fingers. It is slow work. They get frightened. They think the world has gone out. I sit with them in the dark, in the afternoons, and I teach them the shapes. First the A, which is one dot. Then the B, which is two. Then the whole alphabet, a letter at a time, as the Captain once taught me to read the stars.

It is a strange thing. I am more use to them than I was ever any use to anyone. I have, God help me, a gift for the dark.

They ask me sometimes why I am here. I tell them I am here because I did a terrible thing. They ask what it was. I tell them I will tell them when they are older. They accept it. Children do.

I think of the twenty names every night. I say them over, as the old women taught me to say a rosary. I have not missed a night. I do not expect to.

Please tell Mr. Thorne that the seed cake you sent in the spring was the best I have ever eaten, and that I know it was your housekeeper's, and that I thank her.

I remain, with a gratitude I shall not have the right words for,

Vespera.

P.S. The matron says there is to be a visitor on the first Saturday of the month, if you should care to come. I have said I should not presume. But if you would care to, I should like it very much.

Thalessa read it twice. Then she folded it carefully and held it against her knee.

"Well?" said Roderick.

"She wants to know if we will visit."

"And you?"

"I thought," said Thalessa slowly, "that I might take the cake."

He got up. He came round the desk and sat on the other arm of the chair, so that their shoulders touched, and neither of them said anything. The fire popped. Outside a carter shouted at his horse, and was answered by a cab.

"You have been writing a letter yourself," she said, after a while. "At the window. I saw."

"It is a draft."

"To whom?"

"The Admiralty." He grimaced. "I have been trying for eleven months to persuade them to reopen the board of inquiry on the St. Jude. To correct the muster. To have the record say what happened. Not that the captain was swept overboard in a storm, but that he stayed with his men to the last and asked them to live."

"And?"

"And they have sent me eleven letters beginning We regret." He gave a short dry laugh. "I do not mind. I have a long reach, and no other occupation. And in the meantime—" He paused.

"In the meantime?"

"In the meantime I have been given something."

He went to the side table. He took up a long flat parcel, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and laid it in her lap.

…

It was heavier than it looked. She slit the string with her thumbnail.

Inside lay a short, polished plank of oak, perhaps four feet in length, black with age and salt and the long slow work of the sea. It had been cut cleanly at both ends and fitted with a small brass bracket. And along one face of it, shallow, worn nearly smooth, but still there if the light fell right, ran a line of marks.

She tilted it to the window.

GH, she read. St. Jude. Day 5.

Her breath stopped.

"It's the keel," she said.

"A piece of it. They found the boat at Harrow's Reach in May. Two fishermen, working the tide. She'd drifted nine miles in the night and fetched up on the sand like a thing laid down on purpose. She was nearly whole." Roderick's voice was rough. "The Port Calder men have been telling me they want her for the harbor chapel, the whole hull, on a plinth, with the names. They've cleaned her. They've done what they could."

"But the carvings—"

"The sea had most of them. You saw how it was. A year of salt. But the part the captain cut first, the part at the stern end, the part nearest the water, was too deep for it." He touched the plank, lightly. "The chapel committee thought you ought to have a piece. For the office. They said it was owing."

She could not speak.

She sat with the old oak across her knees and her thumb on the worn letters, tracing them, as one traces a name on a stone. GH. Gabriel Haze. A man in the dark, with a knife, with almost nothing left, who had used what he had to say I was here. Who had said, Do not make a monster of yourself on my account. And whose daughter had, after all, lived long enough to read it.

"It's very strange," she said at last, unsteadily. "I never knew him. I know his hand, now. I know what he feared. I know his handwriting better than I know my own father's."

"I know."

"And I think—" She drew a breath. "I think I shall hang it over the door."

"Over the door?"

"Where it can see who comes in." She smiled, wetly. "The captain would like that, I think. He was a man who liked to see who was coming."

…

The bell below rang at ten.

It was a thin bright note, brisk and impatient, and a moment later they heard the clerk's quick tread on the stair and the low murmur of a voice in the hall. Thalessa wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Roderick, with great tact, studied the ceiling.

"A client," he said.

"At ten. On a Monday."

"We shall have to put on our faces."

"I have only the one."

"It will do." He stooped, and, quite without warning, kissed her. It was a quick light kiss, to the corner of the mouth, the kiss of a man who has done it forty times and still cannot believe he is allowed. "Courage, Scholar Ashwood."

"It's Thorne & Ashwood, I'll have you know. I relented. Once."

"It is, God help us. Alphabetical." He grinned. "I let you win on the cat and you let me win on the name on the plate. I think we are even."

"We are not remotely even. I am owed three pies."

"Then I shall get you pies."

The door opened. The clerk, a thin earnest young man named Pettigrew who had once been a bank cashier and had, by his own account, become bored of figures that added up, put his head round it.

"Beg pardon, Inspector. Scholar. A lady. She says it's urgent." He dropped his voice. "She says someone has been sending her flowers."

"Flowers?" said Roderick.

"Wisteria, sir. By post. Every Monday for six weeks." Pettigrew swallowed. "And each time, a petal's gone from the bunch."

Silence fell on the little study.

Thalessa found, with a sort of faint astonishment, that her hand had gone to the plank in her lap. She felt the old letters under her palm, shallow and warm. She looked at Roderick, and he was looking at her, and neither of them smiled.

"Show her up," said Thalessa. "And Pettigrew, bring tea. Plenty of sugar."

"Yes, Scholar."

He went. Roderick drew a slow breath, and straightened his waistcoat, and turned to the door.

"It will be nothing," he said.

"Very probably."

"A jilted lover."

"Or a florist with a grudge."

"Or a prank."

"Yes."

They stood side by side in the firelight, and listened to the footsteps on the stair, light and quick and uncertain, coming up. The tabby, Josiah, who had slipped in at their heels, leapt onto the desk and settled himself among the papers with the air of one who has seen a great deal and is not easily impressed.

Thalessa laid the keel plank gently on the mantel, beside the clock, where the sun from the window fell across its dark grain. She smoothed her skirt. She set her shoulders.

She had been afraid, once, of what she might find in a locked room. She had been afraid of the dark, and of old men with their handkerchiefs, and of the faces of those she had loved. She had been afraid of the sea.

She was still afraid, a little. She thought she always would be.

But the door was opening now, and a pale woman in a gray traveling cloak was standing on the threshold with a bunch of dead flowers in her hands. And behind Thalessa the fire burned warm, and beside her a man stood who would not leave, and above them on the wall the old oak keel held the light.

"Come in," said Thalessa Ashwood. "Sit down. Tell us everything. We have time."

THE END