The Forgotten Frame: The Second Room

The tumblers fell into place with a sound like a small bone cracking, and Bartholomew Wren withdrew his picks from the lock with the careful deliberation of a man defusing something volatile. The brass had not been opened in years, perhaps decades, judging by the greenish patina bleeding from the keyhole into the surrounding wood. He slipped the picks back into the leather roll that lived in his breast pocket, next to a handkerchief his late wife had hemmed with her own initials, and pressed his palm flat against the door.

Dust. He could feel it through his skin, that particular grittiness of a room left to its own devices. There were other textures layered beneath it, the faint tack of old varnish gone sticky with age, and beneath that the unmistakable mineral dryness of photographic chemicals long since evaporated. He had catalogued enough Victorian darkrooms to recognize the residue.

"I suppose," he murmured to himself, the way he had taken to doing since the flat grew too quiet, "we shall see what Lord Vesper found worth photographing in a chapel that has not seen a congregation since the Reform Acts."

The door resisted for a moment, swollen into its frame, then surrendered with a groan that carried through the corridor. Light from the hallway sconces spilled across the threshold, revealing a room no larger than a generous wardrobe, its ceiling low enough that Bartholomew had to duck as he stepped inside. The smell hit him immediately: silver nitrate, old paper, and something fainter beneath, organic and faintly sweet, the ghost of a scent that did not belong.

His eyes adjusted. Shelves lined three walls, laden with leather-bound volumes and rectangular shapes wrapped in muslin. A writing desk occupied the fourth wall, its surface bare save for a brass-handled inkwell and a single key that did not match the lock he had just opened. The journal lay open upon the desk as though Lord Vesper had risen mid-sentence and never returned to finish his thought.

Bartholomew drew the journal toward him, handling it with the reverence his profession demanded. The leather was soft from years of handling, the spine cracked in three places. He recognized the handwriting at once: an educated copperplate, the sort taught at public schools before the Great War had rendered such niceties obsolete. The ink had faded from black to a brown that recalled weak tea, but the words remained legible.

"Twelfth of September, 1887," he read aloud, listening to his own voice bounce off the cramped walls. "The Confraternity met at the chapel tonight for the second gathering of the autumn. Quill conducted the preparation of the plates with assistance from young Fenwick, whose hands are steadier than I had credited. I remain uneasy about the nature of what we are summoning, but the proceedings were orderly and the manifestations, if one can call them such, were confined to the frames."

He turned the page. The next entry was dated three days later.

"I have developed the plates in the darkroom behind the orangery, and the results are troubling. The figures appear in every frame, yet none of them were present during the sitting. Quill insists this is evidence of success. I confess I find their presence on the emulsion more suggestive of something other than success. There is a face in the third frame that I recognize from my grandmother's miniature collection, a woman who died before I was born. I cannot shake the conviction that she is looking at me."

A draught moved through the room, though the door behind him remained closed. Bartholomew glanced over his shoulder, found nothing, and returned to the journal with the stubborn focus of a man who had learned to trust paper over atmosphere.

The wrapped rectangles on the shelves drew his attention next. He unwrapped the first, careful to preserve the muslin for future storage, and found himself staring at a daguerreotype mounted in a hinged leather case. The image showed a circle of figures arranged on stone flags, their robes heavy with embroidered symbols he did not recognize, their faces turned toward a central point that lay outside the frame's boundaries. The light quality was wrong for a daguerreotype of that period. Too sharp at the edges, too soft at the center, as though the camera had failed to agree with itself about what it was recording.

He unwrapped another. And another. Each plate showed the same chapel, the same stone flags, the same assembled figures, but the configurations shifted in ways that made his stomach tighten without quite understanding why. The faces in the early plates were recognizable: a young Quill with mutton chops and a high collar, a younger still Fenwick whose jaw had not yet developed its later severity, a woman whose features recalled the Calloway lineage though he could not have said how he knew this.

In the later plates, the faces changed. New figures appeared, or rather, old figures wore new expressions, and there were others behind them that Bartholomew could not place at all. A child with her hair cut brutally short stood at the edge of one composition. An elderly man with no eyes visible in their sockets occupied another. The backgrounds, too, shifted. Where the earliest plates showed the chapel's crumbling arches bare against a grey sky, the later ones revealed shapes in the shadows that resembled architecture but followed no geometry Bartholomew had ever studied.

He set the plates in a row along the desk, careful to keep them in chronological order based on the dates penciled onto their cases. Fourteen in total, spanning what appeared to be a decade of gatherings. The progression was unmistakable, and it troubled him in the way that only a pattern could trouble a man who had spent his life arranging chaos into catalogued order.

"Confraternity," he said, testing the word against the silence. "I shall have to ask Mrs. Calloway what her husband was involved in, though I suspect she will not thank me for the question."

He closed the journal and slipped it into his satchel, then reconsidered and removed it, wrapping it in the muslin from one of the empty plate cases before replacing it. The plates he left in their arrangement on the desk, but he made a careful sketch of each in his notebook, noting the position of every figure, the symbols on their robes, the dates, and the anomalies that pressed against the edges of each composition.

The key on the desk caught his eye again. He turned it over in his fingers, noting its unusual bow, the wards cut into its shaft. It was not for any lock in this room. He pocketed it regardless, having learned through long experience that abandoned keys rarely remained abandoned for long.

The draught returned, stronger now, carrying with it a sound that might have been a whisper or might have been the old house settling into its evening posture. Bartholomew did not look up from his work. He had attended enough estate sales and catalogued enough forgotten collections to know that buildings of a certain age developed opinions about who was permitted to disturb their contents. He preferred to work through such objections rather than dignify them with acknowledgment.

"The chapel," he said, addressing the room or perhaps himself. "I shall need to see the chapel before I can make any sense of these compositions. The geography of the place must inform the reading of the plates."

He gathered his notebook and his satchel, checked that the muslin-wrapped journal was secure, and stepped back into the corridor. The door to the second sealed room remained open behind him, its lock now picked, its contents now known. He did not close it. There was no point in pretending the room had not been opened, and besides, the air inside had begun to move in ways that suggested it preferred to breathe.

He paused at the head of the stairs, listening. Below, the grand hall lay quiet, the afternoon light slanting through the tall windows and laying golden rectangles across the dusty parquet. From somewhere deeper in the house, perhaps the kitchen, came the faint clatter of Mrs. Calloway going about her duties. The housekeeper had a way of making her presence known without ever quite appearing, a quality Bartholomew had come to respect in the week since his arrival.

He descended the stairs with measured tread, his hand resting on the banister, his mind turning over the images he had just examined. The faces in the later plates, the way they seemed to watch from within the silver. The symbols on the robes that recalled, he now realized with a small lurch, certain marginalia he had encountered in a Hartwell manuscript years ago, a volume he had been asked to suppress rather than catalogue, and had suppressed, and had tried to forget.

He had not succeeded.

The chapel, then. He would need to see the chapel. And he would need to ask Mrs. Calloway about the Confraternity, and about Lord Vesper's involvement with it, and about the plates that showed faces no living person could have worn.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward the corridor that led to the rear of the house, and to the ruined chapel beyond.

The corridor swallowed the light within a dozen paces.

Bartholomew moved through it with the careful economy of a man accustomed to narrow aisles and crowded stacks, his shoulders angled to avoid brushing the walls, his eyes adjusting by degrees to the dimness. The parquet gave way to flagstones here, worn smooth and pale by generations of footsteps, and the air grew cooler against his skin, carrying a mineral chill that spoke of cellars and unlit rooms. He could smell something faintly floral beneath the cold, dried roses perhaps, or the ghost of beeswax from candles burned long ago.

Mrs. Calloway was not in the kitchen when he passed its open door. A copper pot sat on the scarred wooden table, its surface still beaded with condensation, and through the window he glimpsed her in the kitchen garden, a dark smudge among the herb beds, her hands moving with the same unhurried purpose she brought to every task. She did not look up. He did not interrupt her.

The rear of the house opened into a flagged passage that ran along the base of the east wing, its walls hung with portraits he did not stop to examine. He could feel their attention regardless, a weight at the periphery of his vision, oil-painted eyes tracking him from darkened frames. The Hartwell Museum had held a room like this once, a corridor of faces that the board had wanted sold and Bartholomew had catalogued instead, noting each sitter's name, each painter's hand, each small imperfection in the varnish that proved the work had been done by someone breathing, someone present.

He had saved what he could. Not all of it. Not nearly all of it.

The passage ended at a door of warped oak, its hinges crusted with verdigris, and beyond it Bartholomew found himself standing in a vestibule that had once been elegant and was now only gaunt. Tiles rose partway up the walls in a pattern of blue and white that he recognized as Delft, though broken in places and replaced with plain squares where no replacement could be found. A stone bench ran along one side, cracked down the middle, and above it hung a single painting in a tarnished gilt frame, the canvas so darkened with age that he could make out only the suggestion of a woman in pale drapery, her face a blur of shadow.

The chapel lay through a second door, smaller than the first, its wood so old it had taken on the grey color of driftwood. Bartholomew pushed it open and felt the air inside shift, a current that had been waiting for him, and the smell of it struck him at once: incense, old and stale, layered over stone and damp and something else, something metallic and sweet that he could not place but did not want to taste.

He stepped inside.

The chapel was small, perhaps twenty feet by thirty, its vaulted ceiling lost in shadows that the single clerestory window could not reach. The east wall held the altar, a slab of dark marble on a raised platform, and above it a reredos of carved wood depicting figures he did not recognize at first glance. Saints, perhaps, or scholars, their robes falling in deep folds, their hands holding objects he could not quite discern from where he stood. The glass in the lancet windows beside the altar had been broken and replaced with boarding in some places, clear in others, and through one clear pane the afternoon light fell across the altar steps in a pale wedge.

Bartholomew moved down the center aisle, counting the pews beneath his breath. Seven on the left, seven on the right, oak like the doors, their surfaces scratched and worn. The kneeler at the end of the sixth pew on the left had been pulled aside, and on the stone beneath it someone had scratched a symbol in the stone, a circle crossed by a vertical line, the line itself bisected by a shorter horizontal stroke. He crouched, careful of his knees, and examined it without touching. The scratches were old, the stone within them the same grey as the stone around them, but the edges were sharp in a way that suggested they had been cut with something finer than a chisel.

The symbol was not in any catalogue he had compiled at Hartwell. It was not in any of the marginalia he had been asked to suppress. And yet, as he looked at it, he felt the same small lurch he had felt in the room of plates, the recognition of something seen before and not remembered properly, a shape at the edge of waking that dissolved when he turned to face it.

He straightened, his joints protesting, and moved on toward the altar.

The reredos was finer work than he had first credited, the carving deep and patient, the robes of the figures falling in folds that seemed to breathe with the air currents from the broken windows. He climbed the two steps to the platform and stood before the central figure, a woman holding a book, her face calm and downcast, her hair bound in a net of carved pearls. The wood of her robes was darker than the wood of the altar, a different species, and the book she held was inlaid with something that caught the light and threw it back in small, cold flashes.

Mother-of-pearl. He had seen inlay like it in the Hartwell collections, in a missal cover from the seventeenth century that the board had wanted deaccessioned and Bartholomew had argued, successfully for once, into keeping.

He did not touch the book. He looked instead at the faces of the figures flanking her, two men on her left, two on her right, each holding a different object: a key, a scroll, a mirror, a sprig of something leafy. Their faces were individualized, distinct in feature and expression, and Bartholomew found himself studying them with the attention he had once given to the sitters in the Hartwell portraits. The man with the mirror had a long nose and a skeptical mouth. The man with the key had eyes that seemed to follow him. The man with the scroll had a beard divided in the middle, a style he associated with the seventeenth century, and the man with the sprig had a scar across his cheek that the carver had rendered with a delicacy that bordered on tenderness.

None of them were saints he could name. And yet the altar had been consecrated, he could tell by the marks of blessing on the marble, by the small crosses incised at the four corners of the slab, and by the faint residue of chrism that had seeped into the grain of the stone over years of anointing.

Bartholomew turned back to the body of the chapel. A wooden door stood set into the west wall, plain and unpainted, and beside it a brass plaque green with age. He crossed to it and read the words engraved there, tilting his head to catch the light from the clerestory.

In memory of those taken into the keeping of the Order. May their likenesses preserve what their lives could not.

He read it twice. A third time. The phrasing was careful, ecclesiastical, and it said nothing and everything at once.

The door was not locked. He opened it and found himself looking into a room not much larger than a closet, its walls lined with shelves of the same dark wood as the reredos, and on the shelves stood a row of leather-bound volumes, their spines facing outward, their leather the color of old blood.

A library, then. A small one, and a private one, and judging by the dust on the upper shelves, one that had not been disturbed in some time.

Bartholomew reached for the nearest volume and drew it from its place with the care he had been taught to use in the stacks at Hartwell, supporting the spine, letting the weight settle into his palm before he lifted it clear. The leather was stiff but intact, the gilt on the spine bright enough to read: Journal of the Capturing, begun the year of our Lord 1847 .

He carried it to the doorway, where the light was better, and opened it to the first page.

The handwriting was careful, slightly archaic, the ink brown with age but still legible. He began to read.

The Capturing was conceived in this house in the autumn of 1846, at a meeting of the Confraternity of the Steadfast Lens, and was brought to fruition in the chapel adjoining this library in the spring of the following year. The purpose of the Capturing is the preservation of likeness against the corruption of the flesh, and its method is the transfer of the sitter's image from the plane of the living to the plane of the silver, there to remain fixed and incorruptible until such time as the Order may require its return.

He turned the page.

The first sitting took place on the seventeenth of April, 1847, and the sitter was Evangeline Vesper, daughter of the house and consort to the Master of the Confraternity. Her likeness was taken in the presence of the full Chapter, and was found to be of such clarity and force that the Master declared it a sign of the Order's favour. Evangeline received the congratulations of the Chapter with becoming modesty, though I observed in her a tremor of the hand that she could not wholly suppress, and a pallor of the cheek that the candles did not account for.

Bartholomew's eyes moved down the page, skipping the formalities, searching for the next mention of the name.

The second sitting was undertaken in May, and the sitter was a serving woman named Hester, who had been in the household since girlhood and who volunteered for the procedure out of a devotion to the Master that I will not characterise here. Her likeness was taken without incident, and was found to be of acceptable quality, though lacking the force of the first.

He turned more pages. The entries continued in the same careful hand, a record of sittings and outcomes, of likenesses taken and likenesses refused, of technical difficulties and adjustments to the apparatus. He read without stopping, his thumb marking his place, his eyes growing accustomed to the slant of the writing.

June 25th. The likeness of Evangeline has been examined by the Chapter and found to be without fault. It has been set in its place among the plates, and a prayer of thanksgiving offered for the success of the procedure. Evangeline herself was not present at the examination, by her own request, and the Master has instructed that she not be troubled with matters pertaining to the Order until such time as her health is fully restored.

July 3rd. Evangeline remains confined to her rooms, though her physicians can find no sufficient cause for her continued weakness. The Master has expressed concern, and has ordered that no further sittings be undertaken until she is recovered, lest the effort of the procedure have contributed to her decline. The Chapter has agreed, though with reluctance, as the plates await their complement and the Master is eager to see the work completed.

He paused on the page, his finger pressed against the entry for July the third, and read it again. The phrasing was careful. The Master's concern was noted, and his order recorded, and the Chapter's reluctance given its due, and yet between the lines Bartholomew could read something that the journal did not say directly, a question that the writer had been at pains not to ask.

Evangeline had been the first to sit. Evangeline had been found without fault. Evangeline had been confined to her rooms since the procedure, with no sufficient cause her physicians could name. And the Master had ordered that no further sittings take place until she was recovered, as if he suspected the procedure itself of having done her harm.

He turned the page.

July 19th. Evangeline has asked to see me, and I have visited her in her rooms this evening at her request. She was sitting by the window when I entered, wrapped in a shawl despite the warmth of the day, and she did not rise when I came in. I asked after her health, and she answered me in a voice so low I had to lean close to hear it. She said: "I can see them, Mr. Quill. I can see them in the silver, and they are not at rest."

I asked her what she meant, and she shook her head and would say no more, only that I must tell the Master that the plates must not be completed, that the likenesses must not be fixed, that Evangeline could not be allowed to leave the house until the Order had determined what had been taken from her in the sitting and whether it could be returned. I promised her I would convey her message to the Master, though I confess I did not understand it, and I left her by the window with the evening light coming through the glass behind her and her face in shadow.

Bartholomew closed the journal.

His hands were steady, but his mouth was dry, and the metallic sweetness in the air of the chapel seemed to have thickened in the time he had been reading. He stood for a moment with the volume against his chest, feeling the weight of it, the old leather and older paper, the words of a man named Quill who had been dead for the best part of a century and whose caution had come too late for the woman he had been sent to visit.

Evangeline Vesper. Daughter of the house. The first to sit. The first to be taken, if Quill's record was to be believed, not in the sense the Order had intended but in some other sense, some sense that left her weak and watchful and speaking of figures in the silver that were not at rest.

He thought of the faces in the plates, the way they had seemed to turn toward him, the symbols on the robes that matched the scratches on the chapel floor. He thought of the reredos and the woman with the book and the cold flashes of mother-of-pearl in the carved pages. He thought of the brass plaque at the door of the library and its careful, ecclesiastical phrasing, the likenesses preserving what their lives could not.

He opened the journal again and turned forward, past the entries for July, past the records of further sittings undertaken in defiance of the Master's order, past the notations of likenesses taken from servants and tenants and a visiting clergyman who had complained of a heaviness in his chest afterward and left the house before the week was out. He turned until he found the entry he was looking for, marked in the margin with a small cross in red ink that had faded to the color of dried blood.

November 2nd. Evangeline was found dead in her bed this morning, by her maid, who had been bringing her morning tea. The Master was informed, and he expressed his grief in the appropriate terms, though I observed in him a relief that I do not think he intended me to see. The likeness of Evangeline, which had been set among the plates after the first sitting, was removed from its place by the Master's own hand and locked away in the cabinet in the upper room, where the plates of the founding members of the Order are kept. The key to this cabinet was given to me for safekeeping, with the instruction that it was not to leave my possession until the Master himself should request its return.

I have placed the key in the iron box beneath the floorboard in my chamber, and I have written this entry in the journal in the hope that whoever comes after me will understand what was done in this house and will have the wisdom to leave it undone.

Bartholomew read the entry twice, and then he closed the journal and stood for a long moment in the doorway of the library, holding the book in both hands, looking at the row of volumes on the shelves that he had not yet touched and did not now intend to.

The chapel was quiet. The light from the clerestory had moved while he was reading, and the pale wedge that had lain across the altar steps had crept sideways across the marble, leaving the altar in shadow and the reredos above it in light, the carved faces of the figures watching him from their frame of dark wood with expressions he could not read and did not want to interpret.

He thought of asking Mrs. Calloway about the Confraternity. He thought of asking her about the plates, about the cabinet in the upper room, about the key that Quill had hidden beneath a floorboard in a chamber that might or might not still exist in the upper reaches of the house.

He thought of the entry for November the second, and the Master's relief, and the likeness of Evangeline Vesper locked away in a cabinet whose key had been placed in an iron box by a man who had hoped whoever came after him would have the wisdom to leave it undone.

He had not had that wisdom. Neither, it seemed, had anyone since.

Bartholomew tucked the journal under his arm and stepped out of the library, pulling the door closed behind him, and stood for a moment in the body of the chapel, listening to the silence and the small movements of air through the broken windows, the smell of stale incense and something metallic and sweet that he still could not place and still did not want to taste.

The afternoon was passing. The light would not last much longer in the rear of the house, and there was a cabinet upstairs that he had not yet examined, and a housekeeper in the kitchen garden who would answer his questions more readily if he asked them before the day was done.

He moved down the center aisle between the pews, past the kneeler with its scratched symbol, past the stone bench in the vestibule and the tarnished painting of a woman whose face he still could not make out, and out into the flagged passage that led back toward the rear of the house and the kitchen beyond.

He had questions. He intended to ask them. And he intended, before the day was out, to find the cabinet in the upper room and see for himself what had been locked away there by the Master's own hand, in the year of our Lord 1847, when a woman named Evangeline had been found dead in her bed and a man named Quill had hidden a key beneath a floorboard and hoped for a wisdom that had never come.

The kitchen garden lay behind the house in a square of ragged lawn, bounded on three sides by a low wall of the same stone as the house itself and on the fourth by a border of lavender gone wild and leggy with neglect. Bartholomew paused at the threshold to let his eyes adjust after the dimness of the passage, and in that pause he became aware of three things at once.

The first was the quality of the light. It had thickened while he was inside, losing its earlier clarity, taking on the bruised amber of late afternoon. The sun had dropped behind the line of elms at the garden's western edge, and the shadows of those trees lay long and ragged across the grass, stirring faintly in a breeze he could not feel.

The second was the smell. The lavender contributed something clean and resinous, but beneath it there was the richer, darker note of turned soil from the kitchen garden proper, and under that, almost buried, the faint oily sweetness of something cooking indoors, onions perhaps, or bacon, or both. The housekeeper, then, was in. The housekeeper, then, was preparing a meal.

The third was the figure at the far end of the garden, halfway between the apple tree and the flagged path that led to the scullery door. A woman, stooped but sturdy, in a dark dress and a pale apron, kneeling on a square of sacking beside a row of cabbages with a trowel in her hand. She did not look up at his approach. Either she had not heard him or she had decided not to acknowledge him. He could not, at this distance, tell which.

He walked the length of the path between the borders, feeling the gravel shift and crunch under his boots, and stopped when he judged himself to be at a polite distance, near enough to be heard without raising his voice and far enough not to crowd her among her cabbages. She went on working for a moment, setting a small plant into a hole she had made in the soil, firming the earth around its roots with her thick fingers. Then, without looking up, she spoke.

"You're the one from the museum."

It was not a question. Bartholomew inclined his head.

"I am. My name is Bartholomew Wren."

"Thought you might come out here eventually." She set the trowel down on the sacking beside her and brushed her hands together, once, twice, three times, sending a faint shower of dry soil onto her apron. "Mrs. Calloway. You'll want to ask me about her."

It was, he thought, the most economical introduction he had received in some years. He did not dispute the premise.

"I would. If it is not an inconvenience."

"Inconvenience." She repeated the word as though tasting it, finding it both odd and slightly comic. "Nothing about that house has been an inconvenience in twenty years. Nothing about that house has been anything at all. We've just been sitting in it, like a pair of old photographs in a drawer nobody opens."

She climbed to her feet with a small sound of effort, one hand pressed briefly to the small of her back, and looked at him then for the first time, frankly and without deference. Her face was weathered, brown from years of outdoor work, creased at the eyes and mouth in patterns that suggested both laughter and the absence of it. Her eyes were grey and clear and did not flinch from his.

"You'll have questions," she said. "I can give you answers, some of them. Others I gave up years ago asking myself. You take what you can get and you don't press for more, because pressing won't do any good. The house has its secrets and so do the people in it, and I've learned which of the two is the more dangerous to meddle with."

"I have no intention of meddling," Bartholomew said, and was mildly surprised to find it was true.

"Good." She bent, with the same small effort, and picked up her trowel, and then, with a jerk of her head toward the scullery door, indicated that he should follow her. "Come inside, then. There's tea on, and I can spare you ten minutes if I move the bacon. After that I have to see to the meat for tomorrow, and Mrs. Calloway senior will be wanting her broth at six as regular as the clock."

He followed her along the path and in through the low door at the back of the house, into a flagged scullery that smelled of lye and dried herbs and the faint warm ghost of yesterday's bread. The kettle was already singing on the hob of the range beyond, and she lifted it without ceremony and set it on a trivet and began, with brisk efficiency, to measure tea into a brown earthenware pot.

"Ask, then," she said, without turning around. "I've got the bacon to mind."

"The woman in the daguerreotype," Bartholomew said. "The one whose face you said you could not make out."

"Aye."

"Tell me what you can tell me about her, and what you cannot."

Mrs. Calloway gave a short breath through her nose, neither a laugh nor a sigh, and poured the boiling water over the tea leaves with a steady precision that suggested long practice.

"I can tell you she came to the house in the summer of forty-seven, in the company of a man who was not her husband and who was not, as far as I ever knew, any relation to her at all. I can tell you she took up residence in the room above the chapel, the one with the locked door, and that she was seldom abroad in the daytime and very often abroad at night, though I never saw her abroad at night myself. I can tell you she had a name, which was Evangeline, though I never heard her called so by any of the household. And I can tell you that she died in the November of that same year, and was buried in the family plot behind the lych gate, and that her grave has no stone and no record in the parish register."

She turned then, the teapot in one hand and two cups hooked by their handles onto the fingers of the other, and set them on the scrubbed table that stood beneath the window.

"What I cannot tell you," she said, "is what she was doing here. What she was to the Master. What she was to him in the night when I could hear her footsteps crossing the floor above my head. And whether, when they found her dead in her bed, she had been dead for an hour or for a week or for twenty years before that."

She poured the tea, dark and strong, and pushed a cup across to him.

"That's the truth of it. Drink your tea. The bacon's beginning to catch."

Bartholomew sat down at the table. The cup was warm between his palms. The tea smelled of something faintly tannic, faintly smoky, and he thought, absurdly, of the room above the chapel and the smell of the lavender on the landing and the dust in the cabinet that had tasted of metal and sweetness when he had disturbed it.

He drank. He set the cup down. He looked across at the housekeeper, who had turned back to the range and was rescuing a pan of bacon with a deft turn of the wrist and a wooden spoon.

"Mrs. Calloway," he said.

"Mm."

"The cabinet in the upper room. The one with the small lock."

"Yes."

"What is in it."

She did not turn around. She stood for a moment with the spoon arrested above the pan, the bacon sizzling beneath it, and the steam rising around her face.

"A book," she said at last. "A photograph. And a small wooden box, sealed, that I have never opened and never had any intention of opening."

"How do you know what is in it, if you have never opened it."

"Because the Master's journal describes it. Because I have read the journal. Because there is nothing else in that room that the journal describes, and so I have always known what must be there, even if I never saw it with my own eyes."

She turned then, and set the pan down on the trivet beside the range, and looked at him across the small dim kitchen with an expression that he could not quite read.

"You've seen it, though," she said. "Haven't you."

"I have seen the box," he said. "I have not opened it. I have seen the daguerreotype, and the book."

"And the daguerreotype."

"I have seen the daguerreotype."

"Did it show her face."

He thought of the plate he had held in his hands in the dim light of the upper room, and of the woman seated in the chair with her back half turned, and of the surface of the image itself with its bloom and its silvery tarnish.

"No," he said. "It did not show her face."

She nodded, as though this confirmed something she had long suspected but never been able to verify.

"It never did," she said. "None of them ever did. There were three plates, in the beginning, before the one in the cabinet was the only one left. And none of them showed her face. The Master tried. The Master tried more than once. And every time he tried, what came back was something else. Something he hadn't meant to take. Something he couldn't, in the end, look at, and so he locked it away and put the key under the floorboard and told himself that was the end of it."

She picked up her cup and drank, and the steam rose around her face like a veil.

"It's not the end of it," she said, more quietly. "It never has been. The house knows, and the rooms know, and whatever is in that box has been waiting a long time for someone to come and open it. I won't be the one. That's not my work. But you, Mr. Wren. You came up the drive this morning with a measuring tape in your pocket and a notebook in your hand. You're here to make an inventory of the contents of a dead woman's house. And I think, if I'm any judge of such things, you'll find you can't make a true inventory until you've opened the box and looked at what's inside. And I think, when you do, you'll wish you hadn't. But you'll do it anyway, because that's the kind of man you are, and I think that's the kind of man the house has been waiting for, these twenty years and more."

She set her cup down and turned back to the range.

"Now drink your tea," she said, "and let me see to my bacon. You've got work to do upstairs, and I've got a broth to put on, and the light's going fast, and neither of us has got time to stand here trading ghost stories with the cook."

Bartholomew finished his tea. He set the cup down on the table beside hers. He stood.

"Thank you, Mrs. Calloway."

"Don't thank me," she said, without turning around. "Just be careful what you open, and be sure of your reasons before you open it. And when you've done what you've come to do, you go back down that drive and you don't come up it again. Not for the museum, not for the family, not for anybody. You go, and you don't look back, and you put the house behind you, the way I've put it behind me, the way the Master put it behind him in the end, only the house won't let any of us put it behind us, not really, not for long. So you go. And you remember it as a place you once did a piece of work in, and nothing more. Can you do that, Mr. Wren."

"I can try," he said.

She gave a short breath through her nose.

"Aye," she said. "You'll try. And that may be enough, or it may not. Time will tell. Now go on with you. The light's going."