The back door of Cosgrove's bakery had not been opened in years, and it showed. Hollis worked the rusted latch with hands that trembled now more than they once had, his fingers finding purchase against flaking paint and corroded brass. The hinges screamed when the door finally surrendered, a high metallic wail that scattered across the lane and dissolved into the dusk.
Iris pressed her shoulder against the frame and shoved. The door swung inward on a breath of stale air, carrying with it the ghost of yeast and scorched flour and something older, a sweetness gone powdery with neglect. Custard darted between her ankles and vanished into the dark beyond.
"Custard, wait," she whispered, too late.
The creature was already somewhere deeper, her green eyes catching the last of the streetlamp glow before they winked out. Custard had a talent for finding the one thing in any room that ought to remain undisturbed, and Iris suspected, with the resigned certainty of long experience, that tonight would be no different.
Hollis straightened. He drew himself up the way he always did when he felt tested by circumstance, his spine finding a dignity his knees could not match. His face in the dim light was a study in creased leather and careful pride.
"We proceed," he said, as though announcing a verdict rather than committing a small crime.
Iris produced the folded map from her coat pocket and angled it toward the meagre light that crept through the bakery's filthy front windows. The paper was soft with handling, the ink faded to a brown so diluted it could have been tea. She had traced this route a dozen times by daylight. Now, in the growing dark, the lines seemed to waver. The cellar stair was penciled beneath a hatch near the proving ovens, marked with a small cross and a notation in her own hand: trapdoor, possibly locked.
"The trapdoor," she murmured.
Hollis grunted. "Locked things have not historically deterred this family."
"It deterred Great-Aunt Petunia from the wine cellar in '94."
"Petunia was defeated by moral considerations, not locks."
Custard's bell jingled somewhere ahead, a tiny bright sound swallowed by the cavernous space.
Iris stepped over the threshold. The floorboards registered her weight with a groan, and she froze. The shopfront had been abandoned long enough that the boards themselves seemed to hold their breath, waiting to see what manner of intrusion had arrived. Dust lay thick along the counters, furred over cake stands and trays gone grey with disuse. A wedding cake sat beneath a glass dome on the central display, its icing yellowed to the colour of old parchment, the fondant flowers drooping in their wired stems like sleeping birds.
Hollis followed more slowly, one hand trailing along a wall for balance, the other gripping the head of his walking stick. The stick clicked against the floor as he moved, a metronome keeping time with his careful steps.
"Cosgrove always did overbake," he observed. He peered at a row of rock-hard rolls arranged in a basket near the till, their surfaces cracked and fissured like dried riverbeds. "Look at these. Burnt to a cinder."
"Maybe he was distracted."
"Or incompetent. The two are not mutually exclusive."
Iris smothered a smile. Even now, her grandfather found room for an opinion on technique.
They moved through the shop and into the kitchen proper. The proving ovens squatted along the far wall, their iron doors hanging ajar, their interiors blackened. A wire shelf above them held a clutter of baking tins, all shapes and none of them useful, and a single wooden peel leaned against the brickwork like a forgotten soldier. The smell here was stronger: cooled grease, old sugar, the faint vinegar tang of spoilt fruit that someone had neglected to clear away.
Custard reappeared from beneath a worktable, a smudge of flour across one white ear. She sat and regarded them with an expression that suggested, in no uncertain terms, that whatever they were doing, she would prefer to be elsewhere, and that this fact was entirely their fault.
"Good girl," Iris said, and meant it for finding them.
She crossed to the ovens and crouched, running her fingers along the floorboards at their base. The map was clear: the trapdoor lay within an arm's span of the rightmost oven's outer edge, beneath a scatter of old newspaper and a hessian sack that had gone stiff with age. She moved the sack aside and found what she sought, a ring bolt set into a square of wood set flush with the floor. The wood had been painted over at some point, the colour a sickly cream that matched the surrounding boards so well that only the faintest outline betrayed its presence.
"Here it is," she said.
Hollis lowered himself onto a vacated stool, his breathing a little heavier than it ought to have been. He did not complain. He never did. Complaining, Iris suspected, would have been an admission that he required assistance, and Hollis Thistleberry did not require assistance. He required the world to keep pace with him.
"Open it," he said.
Iris took hold of the ring and pulled. The wood resisted, swollen with damp and the patient pressure of years. She braced her boot against the floor and hauled again, harder. A seam appeared. Cold air breathed up through the gap, carrying with it a smell that was neither yeast nor sugar but something mineral and underground, the breath of stone and stagnant earth.
Custard's ears pricked forward.
One more pull and the trapdoor came free with a sucking sound, as though reluctant to surrender its secrets. Iris swung it back on concealed hinges, the ironwork groaning in sympathy with the door outside. Below, a square of absolute darkness opened in the floor, and from its depths rose a wooden staircase that vanished into the black.
"Down," Hollis said, with the air of a man making conversation.
Iris peered into the opening. The silence from below was complete, the kind of silence that suggested spaces not intended for human habitation. She tried to gauge the depth. The first step was perhaps a foot below the lip of the opening, its edge worn pale by traffic that had ceased long ago.
"Wait here," she said.
"I intend to," Hollis replied. "My knees have their own views on the matter."
She fished in her coat and produced a small torch, the sort used by schoolgirls on country walks, its beam weak but adequate. She clicked it on and played the light down the staircase. The steps descended some eight feet before turning a corner into shadow. The walls were rough stone, mortared and damp, glistening faintly where the torch caught moisture. The air that rose from below was colder than the kitchen, and tasted of chalk and old water.
Custard stepped to the very edge of the opening, her tail low, her whiskers forward.
"Not you," Iris said firmly.
Custard's expression communicated, with perfect clarity, that she had heard this sort of thing before and had ignored it then too.
Iris sat on the edge of the trapdoor, swung her legs over, and found the first step with the toe of her boot. The wood held. She tested her weight, and the step held that too, though it complained under her. She descended with her back to the wall, the torch in her left hand, her right trailing along the stone for balance. The temperature dropped as she went, the cold pressing in through the fabric of her coat. By the time she reached the turn, she could see her own breath in the beam of the torch, a small white ghost that vanished as she watched.
She rounded the corner and found the cellar.
It was larger than she had expected, longer than the bakery above and half as wide again. The ceiling was vaulted brick, dark with soot and the residue of decades, and supported by a row of stone pillars that marched down the centre like the ribs of some buried creature. Along the walls stood wooden racks, and on the racks were ranged bottles by the hundred, their glass green and brown and clear, dusty beyond recognition. A few had lost their corks and lay on their shelves with their contents dried to dark stains on the stone floor. The air tasted of cork and vinegar and the slow oxidation of things long abandoned.
She swept the torch across the far wall. There, on a heavy workbench beneath a smear of damp, sat a shape that made her breath catch. A canister, squat and brass, the metal dulled to a brown patina but unmistakable. The sort of canister one might use to store flour, or sugar, or something altogether more valuable.
She crossed to it, her boots crunching on grit. Custard's bell jingled from above, a tinny complaint.
She reached for the canister's lid. The metal was cold under her fingers, colder than the air could account for, and she found that she hesitated.
Above her, Hollis's voice came down through the trapdoor, thin with distance and the vaulted ceiling. "Well?"
"There's something here," she called back. "A canister. Brass."
"Open it."
She lifted the lid.
Inside, nested in folds of waxed paper gone brittle with age, lay a folded sheet, cream-coloured, the ink on its surface still sharp and dark. A letter, hand-written, addressed in a copperplate she did not recognise. The wax seal had been broken and resealed with less care, the edges pressed but not warmed smooth. Someone had read this letter and put it back.
She unfolded it. The torch wavered in her hand.
The letter began: "Dear Mr. Cosgrove, it is with the matter that I must write to you in confidence regarding the matter of the recipe which is the matter most pressing between us..."
Iris read it twice. The writer's voice was careful, formal, the hand educated but not flourishful. The substance was less careful. There were figures mentioned. There were dates. There was a name she knew, and another she half knew, and a third that made her go still.
"Custard," she whispered.
The cat's bell jingled in reply from the kitchen above, sounding pleased, sounding entirely unrepentant.
Iris tucked the letter into her coat and lifted the canister. The brass was heavy in her hands, heavier than flour would account for. She set it down and looked again. There was something else beneath where the letter had lain. A small leather notebook, bound in red, its spine cracked, its pages swollen with damp. She opened it.
It was a ledger of some kind, columns of figures in a careful clerk's hand, and beside each entry a word or two in shorthand she did not recognise. Some entries were crossed through with a single firm stroke. Others were circled, twice, in red ink. One entry, near the back, had a small drawing in the margin, a symbol she did not understand.
She slipped the notebook into her pocket beside the letter.
From above, Hollis's stick tapped the floor, a summons.
"Iris."
"I'm coming." She took one last look around the cellar, the racks, the bottles, the pillars. A thought was beginning to form, one she did not yet have words for, but which had the shape of something she would need to speak with her grandfather before she spoke to anyone else.
She turned back to the stairs. Custard was already descending, her paws finding the narrow treads with the practised ease of a creature who had clearly been down here before, on her own recognisance, on some errand Iris would only learn of later.
"Custard," she said. "What have you found?"
The cat sat on the third step and licked one paw with great deliberation.
The trapdoor above stood open against the kitchen's dim light, and through it Hollis's silhouette watched her rise, the walking stick across his knees, his face unreadable in the gloom.
"Well?" he said, when her head appeared above the floor.
Iris set the canister on the boards beside the opening, and from her coat she drew the letter and the notebook, and laid them on the floor between them. Custard wound once around the canister and sat, her tail curled about her paws, her eyes fixed on Hollis with the bright patience of a creature who understood that some stories required a long time to unfold.
"There is more here," Iris said, "than Cosgrove left behind."
Hollis leaned forward. The stick slid on the boards. He did not pick it up.
"Show me," he said.
The cellar ledger smelt of dust and something older. Iris had fetched it from the lower shelves where Cosgrove had kept his private papers, and now she spread it across the kitchen table between the cold remains of the morning's custard and a teapot that had stopped steaming an hour ago. The leather cover cracked along the spine as she opened it, and the pages inside were foxed at the edges, the ink faded to a brown that hovered between sepia and rust.
She had not told Hollis where she found it. She had only told him she had found something, and that he would need to see it, and that he would need to sit down first.
He had sat. He had not asked questions. The walking stick lay across his lap now, and his hands, which had been busy a moment ago, were still.
"Read it to me," he said. "My glasses."
"They are on your head, Grandfather."
Hollis reached up. His fingers found the tortoiseshell rims. He drew them down onto his nose, and the kitchen, which had been soft in the morning light, sharpened around him into edges and angles.
"Read it to me," he said again, in a different tone.
Iris turned the pages. The first entries were ordinary enough: dates, sums, names of suppliers. Eggs, sugar, milk. A consignment of vanilla from a broker in Calais that had arrived late and been accepted anyway, with a note in the margin that read for the sake of old times . That would have been Cosgrove's hand. Iris had seen his signature on the lease of the Emporium, a flourish that ended in a small upward tick like a bird taking flight.
She turned the pages forward. The entries grew less ordinary. The sums grew larger. The names grew fewer.
Twenty-third of September. A payment of one hundred and forty pounds to a person identified only as THE BLOOM.
The entry below it, dated the same day: in consideration of continued discretion regarding formulation C-7.
The next month, October. A payment of two hundred pounds to THE BLOOM. The margin note: as before, and to ensure non-disclosure of the cold-set method.
Iris read aloud. Her voice was steady, but her finger trembled slightly on the page as she turned each leaf.
"The cold-set method," she said. "Grandfather, what is the cold-set method?"
Hollis did not answer at once. He had gone very still, in the way he did when something had caught him that he did not wish to be caught by. His hand on the walking stick tightened. The leather grip creaked.
"Continue," he said.
She continued. November, December, January, February. The payments to THE BLOOM continued, irregular in sum but regular in occurrence, and always accompanied by a note referring to some aspect of formulation, some process, some element of craft that Iris recognised from her own work in the Emporium kitchen as belonging to the daily business of making custard.
By the spring entries, the sums had grown. By the summer of the following year, they were startling. And by the second autumn, the notes had stopped being about the cold-set method, and had begun to refer to something else. Formulation, they called it now, not C-7. Formulation the original .
Iris looked up. Hollis was watching her with an expression she could not read.
"The original recipe," she said. "Cosgrove was paying someone to keep the original recipe off the market. For ten years."
Hollis said nothing.
"Who," Iris said, and her voice was not steady now, "is THE BLOOM?"
The cat had been asleep on the windowsill. She lifted her head at the sound of that name, or perhaps at the quality of Iris's voice, and her ears came forward, and her eyes were bright and watchful.
Hollis reached across the table. His hand, which had been trembling a little, was steady now. He turned the ledger toward himself, and he read the entries in silence, his finger moving from line to line as Iris had done, but more slowly, and with a different attention.
He stopped at one entry. It was from early summer, three years before the ledger ended. The sum was larger than any other. The note beside it read: for the destruction of all written records of the founding formula, and for the assurance that no copy shall remain.
"Grandfather," Iris said.
He looked up at her over the rims of his glasses. His face had the stillness of a man who has just understood something he had long suspected but never wished to confirm.
"This," he said, "is what he was paying for."
He did not say who he was. He did not need to. The shape of the story had been there since Iris had read the first line of Cosgrove's letter, and she had only now seen it clearly.
"The original recipe," Iris said. "The one you memorised."
Hollis's hand on the stick tightened again.
"Yes," he said. "That one."
The kitchen was very quiet. The clock on the wall ticked. Custard had come down from the windowsill and was sitting at Iris's feet now, her tail curled about her paws, watching Hollis with the same bright patience she had shown in the cellar.
Iris looked at her grandfather. She looked at the ledger. She looked at the teapot, which had stopped steaming an hour ago and was now cold to the touch.
"Ten years of payments," she said. "To keep one recipe off the market. And at the end, a payment to ensure no written record of it remains anywhere."
"Yes," Hollis said.
"But you have it," Iris said. "In your memory."
Hollis did not answer. He was looking at the ledger with an expression that was not quite sorrow and not quite anger, but something between the two, like a man looking at the place where a wound had been and finding only the scar.
"Grandfather," Iris said. "Who is THE BLOOM?"
The clock ticked. The cat purred. The kitchen waited.
Hollis reached across the table and closed the ledger. His hand rested on the leather cover for a moment, as if to settle something that had been disturbed.
"That," he said, "is what you need to find out."
"From whom?"
Hollis looked at her. His eyes behind the rims of his glasses were bright and a little bleak.
"From Alastair Quince," he said. "From Fern Briarby. From whoever it was that Cosgrove trusted with the name of the person he was paying."
He paused.
"And from Caspian Vanille," he said, "if you can find him."
The name landed in the kitchen like a stone dropped into still water. Iris knew it. Everyone in the trade knew it. Caspian Vanille, the perfumer, who had once been the most famous nose in the county, and who had retired, some said, to a small house on the cliffs at Marston-le-Peak, and who had not been seen in public for the better part of fifteen years.
"What does Caspian Vanille have to do with this?" Iris said.
Hollis was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice was different. It was the voice he used when he was telling her something he did not wish to tell her.
"The original recipe," he said, "was not mine."
Iris went still.
"It was my mother's," Hollis said. "And her mother's before her. And it had been in the family for three generations before that, which is as far back as anyone remembered to write it down. It was the foundation of the Emporium. It was the reason the Emporium existed. And when I was a young man, my mother gave it to me, and I memorised it, because she told me that written records could be lost, but a recipe held in the head was a recipe that no one could take away."
He paused.
"I was wrong," he said. "About the part that could not be taken away."
Iris looked at her grandfather. He was sitting very straight in his chair, and the stick was across his lap, and his hands were folded on top of it, and his face had the expression of a man who has just set down a weight he had been carrying for a long time.
"Who took it?" Iris said.
Hollis looked at her. Then he looked at the cat. Then he looked at the ledger, closed on the table between them.
"That," he said, "is what you need to find out."
He paused.
"But you will not find it in that book," he said. "Cosgrove was careful. He paid THE BLOOM in cash, and he kept no record of who it was. The payments are there, but the name is not. And if the name is not in that book, it is somewhere else. In a person. In a memory."
He paused again.
"And," he said, "you will not find it by asking questions of people who have reason to lie."
Iris looked at him.
"Then how," she said, "do I find it?"
Hollis reached for his stick. He leaned on it as he stood, slowly, and the chair scraped against the floor, and Custard rose and stretched and arched her back against his ankle as he passed.
"You find it," he said, "by finding out who stood to gain."
He paused at the kitchen door. He did not turn around.
"Ten years," he said. "That is how long Cosgrove was paying. Ten years is a long time to pay for a kind of silence. It is also a long time for someone to be planning."
He paused.
"Who," he said, "would plan for ten years to take a recipe that has been in one family for six generations?"
He did not wait for an answer. He walked out into the hall, and Iris heard his stick on the stairs, and then the door of his study closing, and then the quiet of the house settling around the shape of what she had just learned.
Custard sat on the kitchen floor and looked up at her.
"Someone," Iris said to the cat, "is going to have a great deal of explaining to do."
The cat blinked. The cat yawned. The cat sat down again and began to wash one ear with great deliberation.
Iris looked at the ledger. She looked at the letter. She looked at the notebook, still where she had left it on the floor by the cellar trapdoor.
She had three names. Quince. Briarby. Vanille.
She had a question that none of them would wish to answer.
She picked up the cat and set her on the windowsill, where she belonged, and she picked up the ledger, and she carried it out of the kitchen and into the front parlour, where she kept her business papers, and she locked it in the desk there, and she put the key in her pocket.
Then she went to the door, and she put on her coat, and she picked up her hat, and she looked at herself in the mirror by the door, and saw a young woman with red hair and a face that was not afraid.
She opened it.
The morning was sharp with cold and the smell of frost on the lane, and the village of Lower Mallowford lay half-asleep under it like a creature holding its breath. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys and hung low in the air, pale as milk in glass, and the butcher's boy was only just unbolting his shutters, and the postman was still at his round on the Green, and the bell of St. Asaph's rang six slow notes for the hour.
She walked quickly, her boots crisp on the rime, her breath a small white cloud that hurried ahead of her like a scout. In her pocket the key to the parlour desk knocked gently against the folded letter. In her hand the notebook, in its leather cover, was a sober weight. She turned left at the forge, where Master Penny was already at his anvil, the first sparks leaping up like startled minnows, and he raised a hand to her, and she raised hers back, and she did not stop.
Briarby's shop was at the corner of Apothecary Lane. It was a narrow building, wedged in between a tea importer and a place that sold nothing but buttons, and it had not changed in fifty years; the same green paint, the same brass bell, the same smell of dried sage and powdered root and something older, something that Iris could never put a name to but which she had decided, when she was seven, was the smell of other people's secrets.
The brass bell rang when she pushed the door, a thin bright sound, and the shop was dim and warm and lined to the ceiling with jars and boxes, each one labelled in Fern Briarby's neat upright hand. Behind the counter, a kettle was beginning to hiss on a small spirit lamp. Behind the kettle, Fern Briarby was sitting in a high-backed chair reading a small leather book, and she did not look up.
"Miss Thistleberry," she said, without turning a page. "You are earlier than usual. Is it about your father?"
"It is about my father," Iris said. "And a great many other things besides."
Fern turned a page. She was a tall, thin woman of perhaps fifty, with dark hair pulled back severely and a mouth that looked as if it had been designed for the expression of faint, polite disapproval. Her hands were stained at the tips with the brown of walnut husk, and her apron was the deep green of a forest floor. She turned another page, and then she closed the book and laid it down and looked up.
"Sit down," she said. "The kettle will be hot in a moment. You look as if you have not slept."
"I have not slept much."
"Then we will not talk about sleep." Fern stood, and went to the counter, and brought down two cups and a small brown pot. She poured. The tea was dark and resinous and smelled of pine. "Drink," she said. "It will not make you less tired, but it will make you more patient."
Iris drank. It tasted of woodsmoke and something almost bitter, and then, surprisingly, of pear.
"Tell me," Fern said, and sat down again, and folded her hands.
Iris told her. She told her of the cellar, and the hidden room, and the ledger with its long thin column of payments to Cosgrove, and the letter from a dead man to a living cousin. She told her of Alastair Quince and his two alibis and his silver-handled stick. She told her of her father's collapse in the yard, and of the words he had used that were not his own, and of the smell of pears in an empty room.
Fern listened. She did not interrupt. When Iris had finished, she was silent for a long moment, and then she reached out and took the folded letter from Iris's hand, and read it, and read it again, and laid it down on the counter between them.
"Cosgrove," she said, "was a careful man. A great many people have cause to know that."
"I know that," Iris said. "He was my father's solicitor for thirty years. He was also my uncle's friend for twenty. He was also, apparently, a cousin of yours, which is a piece of information that has not, until this morning, come to my attention."
"Many pieces of information have not come to your attention, Miss Thistleberry. That is not, in itself, a sin." Fern's mouth twitched. "Cosgrove and I shared a grandmother. His mother and my mother were sisters. We were not close. We corresponded at Christmas and at the death of a relation, and that was all."
"Did you know he was being paid to keep something out of sight?"
"I knew he kept many things out of sight. That was his business. People paid him to keep things out of sight. It is, after all, what solicitors do."
"Did you know what was in the cellar?"
"I knew there was a cellar. I did not know there was a hidden room in it. I did not know there was a ledger. I did not know there was a recipe. I am, as you see, a well of ignorance."
Iris looked at her. The shop was very quiet. Outside, a cart went past on the lane, and someone shouted at a horse.
"I am trying to decide," Iris said, slowly, "whether you are a very good liar, or whether you are telling the truth."
"I am telling the truth. I was never a good liar. It is one of my few charms." Fern picked up her cup and drank. "What do you want from me, Miss Thistleberry?"
"I want to know who came to see Cosgrove the week before he died."
"I cannot help you with that. Cosgrove did not discuss his clients with me. We were not close enough for that, as I have said. I can tell you only what I know of my own knowledge. He had a visitor on the Thursday before he died. I saw him on the road, walking up to Cosgrove's cottage, and I was surprised, because I had not seen him in that part of the village for some years."
"Whom did you see?"
"I saw Caspian Vanille."
The name sat between them like a stone in a stream. Outside, the bell of St. Asaph's struck the half hour, and the sound came in faintly through the glass.
"Vanille," Iris said. "The pastry cook."
"The pastry cook." Fern set her cup down. "He had not been to the village for a long time. He was living in the city, I was given to understand. He was doing well, I was given to understand. He had no reason to come back to Lower Mallowford, as far as anyone knew. And yet I saw him on the road, walking up to Cosgrove's cottage, on the Thursday before Cosgrove died, and on the Friday morning Cosgrove was found dead in his chair."
"And you have said nothing?"
"I have said nothing to the police, because I was not asked. I have said nothing to anyone else, because no one has asked, and because, Miss Thistleberry, it is not my habit to fling other people's business about the parish."
"Did Vanille inherit anything from Cosgrove?"
"I cannot say. The will has not, as far as I know, been read. Cosgrove had no children. He had a brother in the city. He had a nephew, I believe, who is a clerk in a shipping office. I do not know whether Vanille was in the will. I have made no inquiries."
"But you knew him."
"I knew him as a boy. He came into the shop sometimes, when he was small, to buy bull's-eyes for his grandmother. He was a quiet boy. He had clever hands. He went away to learn his trade, and he did not come back, and that is twenty years ago, or more."
"Was he a friend of my uncle's?"
"He was an apprentice in the kitchen at Thistleberry's for two years, before your uncle took him on. Did you not know that?"
Iris set her cup down.
"I did not know that," she said.
"He was a good apprentice. He was careful. He had a feel for sugar, which is not a common thing, and a feel for heat, which is rarer. Your uncle thought well of him. I remember him saying so. And then he left, and went to the city, and made his name, and that was the last I heard of him, until I saw him on the road that Thursday."
"And you said nothing."
"I said nothing. I had no reason to say anything. He had a right to visit his old solicitor if he wished. Cosgrove was, after all, a great many people's solicitor."
Iris finished her tea. The cup was cool in her hand.
"Was Quince his solicitor too?"
"Quince was nobody's solicitor. Quince was a man who kept bees and wrote poetry and had opinions about everything. He had no business with Cosgrove that I know of."
"But he had a silver-topped stick. He had a stick with a silver handle."
"Many men have silver-topped sticks. It is not a hanging matter."
"It is a matter," Iris said, "when one of the men who might have such a stick was in Cosgrove's cottage on the Thursday before he died."
Fern looked at her for a long moment. The kettle ticked on the spirit lamp. A jar on the shelf above them held a small dried foxglove, and its purple caught the light from the window.
"Miss Thistleberry," Fern said, "I think you are a young woman who is not easily turned from a path. I think also that you have not yet understood the size of the thing you are walking into. Your uncle did not die of a fall. Your father did not collapse of his own accord. These are not small things. These are the kind of things that have endings in them, and the endings are not always comfortable."
"I am aware of that."
"I am not sure that you are. I am not sure anyone could be, until they have stood where you are standing." She folded her hands again. "But I will tell you what I know. I will tell you that Cosgrove received a visitor on the Thursday before he died. I will tell you that the visitor was Caspian Vanille. I will tell you nothing more, because I know nothing more. And I will ask you, as a favour, to be careful. Be very careful. There are people who do not like to be asked. And there are people who will do a great deal to keep from being asked."
"I will be careful," Iris said. "I am always careful."
"You are not always careful. You are brave. That is not the same thing."
Iris stood. She left the brown pot and the cups where they were. She thanked Fern for her time, and Fern inclined her head, and the brass bell rang again when she went out into the lane, and the cold air came at her like a wall.
She stood for a moment in the lane and looked up at the sky. It was the colour of pewter, and a few snowflakes had begun to drift down, thin and purposeless, melting as soon as they touched the ground. The village was waking now; she could hear the school bell in the distance, and the far-off clatter of a trap on the high road, and someone calling to a child. Somewhere, a dog was barking, and would not stop.
She had two names now. Vanille, who had been in the village on the Thursday. Quince, who had the silver-topped stick and the two alibis. And Briarby, who had given her Vanille freely, as a woman gives up a card she no longer needs.
She walked on, towards the Square, where the pastry cook had his shop, and where the shutters were not yet open, and where the bell over the door hung still and glinting in the thin light.