The Bargain in the Dark Cellar

“An alliance is only a truce between two people who each hope the other will blink first."

They did not speak until they were certain the house had gone quiet.

Roderick stood at the foot of the stair for nearly a full minute with his head cocked and one hand resting on the butt of the revolver. Above them the old building ticked and settled in the cold. Somewhere a shutter knocked once against its frame and was still. The ice house itself breathed slowly around them, a long exhalation of damp stone and sawdust and the faint sweetness of a body that had not yet begun to turn.

Then he came back to the slab, set the lantern on its corner, and said, "The drain."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said he threw it into the drain. Where does the drain run?"

Thalessa looked at him. She had been about to ask the very same thing.

It was a shallow iron grate set into the flagstones beside the slab, no wider than a man's hand, and it ran, she saw when she knelt, to a short length of lead pipe that curved down into the floor. She took a small brass pocket mirror from her chest, angled the lantern, and looked into the trap.

The lead elbow still held a finger's depth of water. Floating in it, thin as a skin of oil, was a pale gray film.

"He did not wash it away," she said slowly. "He only tipped it into the standing water. The trap holds. It would have taken a bucket and a good deal of time to flush it, and he had neither."

"Can you use it?"

"If I am quick."

She was quick. She drew the water off with a glass pipette, a few drops at a time, and let each fall on a clean plate. Then she held the plate over the spirit lamp until the water had gone and left behind a rim of fine yellowish grit. She touched it with the jade strip.

The strip darkened, slowly, from the tip inward. Purple at first. Then the color of a bruise.

"Wisteria," she said. "And mercury. Weaker, of course. Diluted. But there is no doubt."

Roderick let out a short breath through his nose. "So he knew what he was destroying."

"He knew what it was, and he knew it could be tested. That is not the conduct of a man who is merely tidy." She scraped the rim of grit into a small glass vial, stoppered it, and wrote a number on the label in pencil. "Doctor Malakor is an army surgeon. He has seen a hundred men die of poison and gangrene and cold. He would not be rattled by a dead merchant. But he came down here in the dead of night to look at a scar, and then he came to make sure that nobody else could read the stomach."

"Or he came for the scar and happened to see the residue."

"Perhaps."

"You do not believe that."

"I believe that he said forgive me, Ragnar." Thalessa put the vial in her breast pocket and drew her glove back over her wrist. "A man does not ask pardon of a body he has not wronged."

The lantern hissed. A drop of water fell from the roof of the vault and struck the stone with a small, clear sound.

"Now," said Roderick. "I think we have reached the point at which one of us must say something plain."

"Then you begin."

"Why?"

"Because you are the one who held the gun."

His mouth twitched. He pulled out a rickety wooden stool from beneath the slab, turned it round, and sat astride it with his forearms folded over the back. It was a posture she had seen in men of his profession, easy and open, the posture of someone who wished a suspect to forget how quickly he could stand.

She remained on her feet.

"Very well," he said. "Plainly. I have been in this house two days longer than you have. In that time I have been fed at their table, lodged in their guest wing, and lied to by every soul in it. The Duke says he sailed on the St. Jude as a passenger, and that the captain went down with the ship. The surgeon says he was ill below decks and remembers nothing. Sterling said he was a clerk of the cargo. Lady Aurelia says she was seasick, and begins to weep when she is asked how long." He ticked them off on his fingers. "Four stories. All of them exactly as vague as they need to be. And I could not break a single one, because I had no proof, no leverage, and no one to tell me what a thing is when it is cut open."

"And now you have me."

"I have a woman who walked in alone, uninvited by the Crown, and has already told me more in an hour than the Corps has found in four years." He studied her, unblinking. "I should like to know why."

"I told you in my room."

"You told me you had been invited."

"By Thorne." She heard her own voice go quieter. "He wrote to me before he came here. He said that he had been summoned to a reunion. That he was frightened of it, and could not say why, and that when it was done he would tell me everything." The lantern flame made a small wavering gold bead in each of her eyes. "He did not come home. Three days later a courier brought me his body, and a scrap of parchment that said the hunger at sea."

"And the petal?"

"The petal I found in his mouth. I had it wrapped in lint."

"And you came to find out who put it there."

"I came to find out what he was afraid of." She lifted her chin. "The rest is a question for the court."

Roderick was silent for a space.

"That is more honest than I expected," he said at last.

"I have no gift for lying. I have only a gift for not speaking."

"Then we have something in common." He stood. The stool scraped on the flags. "Here is my proposal. I have the law of the realm behind me. I can seal a room, detain a witness, open any door in this house with a warrant that nobody here has seen. But I do not know what the dead are telling us. You do. You have the science, and the nerve to put your hands in it. You have no standing, and no protection, and you have just been caught with a scalpel over a corpse by the only officer in the building." He held her gaze. "Work with me. Under my authority. I will say that you are a medical assessor retained by the Corps. You will have my name between you and the Duke's wrath."

"And in return?"

"You will tell me everything you find. At once, before you tell anyone. Not a cut, not a smear, not a scrap of paper. If you hide a thing from me for even an hour, I will know it, and I will break the arrangement."

Thalessa regarded him with her head slightly tilted. The cold had drawn the last of the color from her face, and her eyes were nearly silver in the lantern light.

"There is a term you have omitted," she said.

"Name it."

"You will tell me everything also."

His eyebrows rose.

"Everything you know about the St. Jude," she went on. "The manifest. The insurance claim. The names of the crew. I do not want the version you give a suspect. I want the file."

"That file is Crown evidence."

"Then bring me the part which is not."

For a moment she thought he would refuse. A pulse was beating in the hard muscle at the hinge of his jaw. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed. It was a short, dry, almost soundless laugh, and it changed his whole face. It made him look ten years younger and rather tired.

"I came down here to arrest an intruder," he said, "and I am being bargained with by the intruder."

"You have it wrong. You came down here to arrest an intruder and found a colleague. I merely drew up the terms."

"Do you always negotiate with a revolver on you?"

"The revolver is back in its holster. It has made no further contribution to the discussion."

He gave her a long, appraising look, the look of a man who has found a better lock than he expected and is not sure whether to be pleased. Then he extended his right hand.

She hesitated, a very small hesitation. Then she stripped off her glove and took it.

His hand was warm and dry and hard with old calluses. His grip was brief and exact. She noticed, absurdly, that his thumb lay across the back of her knuckles for a moment longer than a handshake required, and that neither of them remarked on it.

"Done," said Roderick.

"Done," said Thalessa. She drew her hand back and pulled on the glove. "Then you may begin paying. The file."

"Now?"

"You gave your word a quarter of a minute ago."

He sighed, reached into his coat, and drew out the waterproof leather pouch she had seen in her room. This time he did not toss it. He laid it on the slab beside the dead man, as though the dead were a fit witness, and unfolded the top sheet with care.

"The St. Jude," he said. "Registered out of Port Calder, four years ago this autumn. A merchant brig of three hundred tons, master Captain Gabriel Haze. Crew of twenty, by the muster roll. Passengers five, all of them shareholders in the venture. They are the five at this house, or were." He touched the line with a blunt forefinger. "Cargo declared as grain, wool and ironware. Insured with the Royal Mercantile for two million pounds. Lost in a gale off the Blackwood cliffs on the night of the ninth of October. Five survivors, picked up on the twenty-first day by a passing collier. Twenty drowned."

"Twenty-one days," Thalessa said.

"In an open boat."

"Of nineteen feet, by the survey, with provisions for three days." She looked at the muster roll. Twenty names in a clerk's neat hand, and a single large red stamp across the foot, LOST WITH ALL HANDS BUT FIVE. "Twenty-one days on three days of bread."

"They said they caught fish. They said it rained."

"It may have." Her voice was very even. "It may have rained a great deal."

He looked at her sharply, but she was already reading down the column. At the bottom, apart from the others, someone had added a name in a different ink. Haze, G. (Capt.) — presumed drowned. And beneath it, in a smaller hand, a note that she had to bend close to read.

Brother. Sister, Vespera, minor, at Harrow's Reach. Not traced.

She felt the cold tighten at the base of her spine. She said nothing. A thought had come to her, small and quiet as a dropped needle, and she pressed it down before it could be heard.

"This was never followed up?" she asked.

"The sister was found. The housekeeper. The Duke took her in, as she told you, out of charity." Roderick's brows drew together. "It was entered as closed. I thought it was a kindness."

"It may have been." Thalessa laid the sheet down. "Kindness is exactly what a guilty man buys himself, when he can afford it."

She did not look at him as she said it. She did not need to.

"Now," she said. "The Duke. You said he washed the body."

"He gave the order at ten past nine, before I had even been told. His servant did it. The footman."

"Mr. Finch."

"I found the man scrubbing the blood from Sterling's face with a nailbrush. He looked as though he might die of shame." Roderick frowned. "He swore he did it only because the Duke bade him. He kept saying it was not right, not right to leave a man like that. I did not think much of it then."

"And the Duke said it was decency."

"He said it was decency. But he would not meet my eye."

"Alastair Blackwood fears the dead, then." Thalessa was thoughtful. "Or fears what they carry. He wiped his hands in the dining hall until I thought the skin would crack. That man smells something I do not."

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing. A thought, only." She folded the cloth over Ragnar Sterling's chest. "Hold the lamp, please. I must close him up."

He held the lamp.

She did the work in silence, and he watched her do it, and she was aware of his eyes upon her hands the whole time. When she had finished she drew the linen sheet up to the dead man's chin, and for a moment she laid her palm against the cold forehead as if bestowing a benediction. It was a private habit. She had never let anyone see it. She was almost startled to realize that she had done it before this man.

He said nothing.

"What do we do at dawn?" she asked, to cover it.

"At dawn, I question the household again. The Duke first. Then the surgeon." He considered. "And you will go through the study with me, with that eye of yours, and tell me what in that room does not belong."

"The bookcase," Thalessa said.

"The bookcase?"

"I was not given time to look at it properly. But the room is thirty feet by twenty, and the east wall carries the longest run of shelves, and the shelves have been dusted on the lower three rows and not at all on the higher." She frowned. "Someone who dusts to the shoulder, Inspector, is not someone who dusts the books. She is someone who touches them often."

"She."

"I said someone."

He looked at her, and the corner of his mouth moved again. "You say someone very pointedly for a woman who has drawn no conclusions."

"It is a habit of the profession."

"I'll bear it in mind."

They went up the spiral stair together. He went first, with the lantern held low and shielded, and she followed with her chest in her arms. At the top Roderick paused with his hand flat against the door, listening, and then drew back the bolt. The kitchen beyond lay black and silent, smelling of soap and cold ashes. A line of copper pans hung gleaming on their hooks. A single clock ticked on the wall.

It showed five minutes to four.

He stood a moment in the dark with his back to her.

"Scholar Ashwood."

"Yes?"

"There is a thing I did not say, in the ice house. Because I did not know whether to say it." He kept his voice very low. "When the surgeon came in, I put my hand on your wrist. I'd have done the same for any witness. But I felt your pulse. It never changed. You were as calm as a woman at prayer, and I have never met a person who was calm in the presence of that man's eyes." He turned his head just far enough that she could see his profile. "I should not like to learn what that calm cost you."

She did not answer at once.

Outside, the wind had risen again. It came sobbing round the corners of the kitchen, and the shutters shuddered in their frames, and from somewhere very high in the building came the faint, slow, patient turning of a wheel.

Thalessa lifted her head.

"Inspector," she said. "Do you hear that?"