The rain came down in silver sheets over the capital, drumming against the slate rooftops and turning the cobblestones of the Rue Saint-Julien into shallow rivers of reflected lamplight. Coraline Ashworth stood beneath the dripping awning of a public house, her hood pulled low, and watched the hansom cabs splash past toward the cathedral quarter. The hem of her mourning gown was muddied to the knee. Three days on the road from Calais, three nights spent folded into cramped seats with her brother's letters sewn into the lining of her bodice, and now she was here at last, a fallen house's last daughter, come to claim a name from a list.
She had rehearsed the story on every mile of track. Her brother, Captain Edwin Ashworth, had marched north with the Aldenwyck Volunteers two years ago and returned, according to the War Office ledger she had stolen from her father's study, to the Convent of Sainte-Croix des Neiges. Not home. Not to their crumbling estate in Kent. To a hospice in the north, where wounded soldiers who had no families to claim them went to learn how to breathe again, or to stop. Edwin had not written. Edwin had been her father's favorite, the heir, the soldier, and his silence had been the loudest sound in the house for twenty-six months.
The list was dated eighteen months past. Edwin's name was there, seventh on a roll of the wounded and the missing, with a single annotation in a clerk's crabbed hand: transferred, Sainte-Croix. No further record. No death notice. No discharge. The space beside his name yawned like an open mouth.
Coraline turned up the Rue Saint-Julien toward the old convent quarter, where the gas lamps grew sparser and the buildings leaned together like old women sharing a secret. She had sewn five pounds and a pearl brooch into her corset. She had her brother's letters, which she had not yet read, bound in oilskin and hidden against her ribs. She had the small carved pendant that had belonged to her mother, which she wore openly, a wolf's head in pale wood, its eyes set with two chips of black jet. Her mother had called it the Ashworth talisman and had made her swear, on the night before she died, that she would wear it into battle and never take it off.
She had never understood what battle her mother had foreseen.
The convent of Sainte-Croix des Neiges sat behind a high wall of pale limestone, its chapel spire lost in the low cloud that clung to the rooftops. At the gatehouse, a brass bell hung from an iron arm. Coraline pulled the cord. Somewhere deep in the wall a bell clanged, muffled by stone and rain.
A small grille slid open at chest height, and a pair of pale eyes regarded her from the dim interior.
"Good evening, sister," said a voice, low and Northern, the vowels rounded by the soft speech of the moors. "You are wet through."
"I am looking for the hospice," Coraline said. She kept her voice steady, the vowels clipped to the neutral English of her finishing school. "I have come from the south. I am told my brother was received here."
"Your brother, my child?"
"Captain Edwin Ashworth. Seventh Regiment of Foot, attached to the Aldenwyck Volunteers. Wounded at the crossing of the Vaire. He was listed as transferred here eighteen months ago."
The eyes studied her for a long moment. The grille did not close.
"Wait there," said the voice.
The small door within the larger gate opened, and a nun stepped out into the rain. She was perhaps sixty, of middling height, her wimple pressed white against her grey hair, her face composed into the particular calm of women who have outlived their surprises. She carried no lantern. The rain freckled her habit and she did not seem to mind.
"You are the sister of Captain Ashworth," she said. It was not a question.
"I am Coraline Ashworth. My brother is, I believe, in your care. Or was."
The nun looked at her, then looked at her hands, then at her face, as if reading something written there.
"Forgive me, miss. Sister," she said, and smiled. "I am Sister Marguerite. You have come a long way."
"From Kent, then from Calais."
"We do not often see the family of the men on our rolls. They are, as a rule, without family. That is why they are here."
"I am the family he has left," Coraline said. "Our parents are dead. There is no other."
The rain hissed against the cobbles. Somewhere in the convent a dog began to bark, then stopped, as if called to order.
"Walk with me," Sister Marguerite said, and turned toward the gate.
The interior of Sainte-Croix was quieter than Coraline had expected. The long gallery that gave onto the cloister smelled of stone and beeswax and something fainter beneath, a thread of carbolic and old wool. Through an arched doorway she glimpsed a refectory, its long table set for no one, and beyond that a smaller room where a single candle burned before a painted wood Madonna.
"Your brother," Sister Marguerite said, as they walked, "is not here in the way you perhaps hoped."
Coraline's step faltered, then steadied. "He is dead."
"He is not dead. He is, however, not here. He was moved, in the spring, to a place where his needs could be better met. The nature of his wound required care beyond what we are equipped to offer."
"What wound?"
Sister Marguerite did not answer at once. They had reached a small chamber off the cloister, furnished with a desk and two chairs and a tabernacle of painted wood. The nun gestured for Coraline to sit, and after a moment, Coraline did.
"The wound he received at the Vaire was, in part, physical. A ball broke his collarbone and took the sight of his left eye. Those injuries mended, in time. There was also an injury to the mind. He does not speak, Miss Ashworth. He has not spoken since the battle. He recognizes his surroundings, he can feed himself and walk, he can read, but the words have gone somewhere he cannot follow."
Coraline sat very still. The rain tapped against the glass of the small window. She could hear her own pulse in her ears.
"And he was moved," she said, "where?"
"To a place that is not mine to name. But he is alive, and he is cared for. I can write to the sister house, if you wish, and ask that you be allowed to visit him. There is a process. The authorities require it."
"I am his sister."
"It is not, my child, a question of your claim. It is a question of the man's state. He is, in some sense, a ward of the crown. The men who come back from the Vaire are, all of them, in some sense wards of the crown. The crown is, at present, very interested in them."
Coraline looked at the nun's face. The candlelight made soft shadows of the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. There was something careful in the way she had spoken, the kind of care that signals a thought held back rather than a thought unformed.
"You mistake me for something," Coraline said.
"I take you for what you say you are. A sister."
"That is not what you meant."
Sister Marguerite was silent for a long moment. Then she folded her hands on the desk and looked at Coraline with the direct, assessing calm of a woman who has decided to risk a thing.
"The convent of Sainte-Croix receives a certain class of person, Miss Ashworth. Not only the wounded. There are those who come to us for refuge, and those who come to us for reasons that are not our business to name. The world outside this wall is at present a complicated place. The king is dead. The queen is dead. There is a regent, and there is a prince, and there are persons about the prince who would very much like to know where the prince is at every hour of every day. Some of those persons believe that the prince writes letters to persons who should not receive them. Some of those persons believe that the letters are hidden in the linings of bodices, or in the soles of boots, or in the bindings of books."
Coraline did not move. The wolf's head pendant lay cold against her breastbone.
"I do not know of what letters you speak," she said.
"No," said Sister Marguerite, gently. "You do not. I have spoken of nothing. I have spoken only of the world, and of what the world believes. Sit still, my child. You are safe inside this wall for as long as you wish to be safe. The world will not come past the gate tonight."
The rain had thickened. Through the small pane of glass, the courtyard was a moving sheet of grey. Somewhere, faintly, a bell tolled the hour.
"You said," Coraline said, very quietly, "that I am taken for what I say I am."
"Yes."
"Then I am a volunteer. I am a woman of good family, come to nurse her wounded brother. I am no other thing."
Sister Marguerite regarded her. The candlelight wavered, then steadied.
"Then you shall be enrolled as a volunteer," she said. "There is a registry. You will sign it with your name. You will be lodged in the east wing, where the other volunteers sleep. You will work, and you will wait, and in time you will be permitted to see your brother. If that is what you wish."
"It is what I wish."
"Then we shall begin." The nun rose, and from a drawer of the desk produced a small leather-bound book, its pages edged in red. She opened it upon the desk. The first page was filled with names, each entered in a clerk's hand, with a date and a parish. "Sign here. Add your parish and your relationship to the man."
Coraline took the pen. She wrote, in her schoolroom hand: Coraline Ashworth, of Kent, sister to Captain Edwin Ashworth, 7th Foot. The ink bled a little into the damp page.
"Thank you," said Sister Marguerite. "Come. I will show you to the east wing. The bell for matins is at four. There will be time, before then, to dry your stockings and to eat something."
They passed through the cloister, past a row of black doors, each bearing a small brass numeral. At the second to last door Sister Marguerite paused and produced a key.
"This will be your cell. It is small, but the bed is good, and the window looks onto the herb garden. In the morning you will smell the rosemary."
The room was indeed small: a narrow bed, a washstand, a prie-dieu, a wooden peg for a habit. There was no mirror. The window was a slit in the thick wall, and through it Coraline could see, faintly, the dark shapes of herbs bent in the rain.
"Rest," said Sister Marguerite. "I will send a novice with broth and a dry habit."
The door closed. The lock turned softly from the outside. Coraline stood in the center of the cell and listened to the rain, and to her own breathing, and to the small sounds of the convent settling into its night.
She unpinned her wet hat and laid it on the bed. She removed the wolf's head pendant and held it in her palm. The jet eyes caught no light at all.
She had been mistaken, in the capital, she reflected, for what she had chosen to appear as. A volunteer. A grieving sister. The world would see her as such, for as long as she was careful, and the world would not see what lay against her skin, bound in oilskin, twelve letters from a prince she had never seen, written in a cipher she had not yet learned to read.
The rain went on. The herbs bent. Somewhere in the convent, a bell began to toll, slowly, for the office of the dead.
The bell ceased. The silence it left seemed heavier than the sound.
Coraline sat on the edge of the narrow bed and pressed her palms against the oilskin packet that lay flat against her stomach. The letters within rustled faintly, a dry sound like the turning of a leaf. She did not remove them. Not yet. The cell was too exposed; she did not know yet who had eyes in the convent, nor who had ears.
She unwound the wet braid from her hair and combed it with her fingers. The candlestick on the washstand held a stub of tallow that gave off more smoke than light, and the smell of burning mutton fat mingled with the wet wool of her habit and the sharper scent of rosemary drifting through the window slit.
A knock, soft as a mouse's footfall.
"It is I," came the voice of Sister Marguerite through the door. "I have brought the broth."
Coraline crossed the cell and drew the bolt. The nun entered bearing a covered earthenware pot, two ceramic spoons, and a folded dry habit of undyed wool.
"Eat with me," Coraline said.
It was not a question. Sister Marguerite regarded her for a long moment, the kind of look in which a woman measures another and decides what to trust her with. Whatever she saw appeared to satisfy her. She set the pot on the floor between them and lowered herself onto the prie-dieu, folding her long hands in her lap.
The broth was leek and barley, thin but warm. They ate in silence for a while. The rain had gentled to a steady murmur, and from somewhere down the corridor came the soft shuffle of a novice on her way to Compline.
"You knew," Coraline said at last, "who I was. Before you opened the gate."
"I knew the name on the papers your brother sent with the courier." Sister Marguerite's spoon paused halfway to her lips. "Ashworth is not a name one hears in these parts. Not for twenty years."
"You knew my brother."
"I knew of him. We corresponded, he and I, when he was still a boy and I was still a novice. He wrote to me when your mother died. He wrote to me when your father took the bad road." She tasted the broth. "He wrote to me, this past spring, and asked that if ever a daughter of his house came north under hard circumstances, I should open the gate and ask no questions until she had rested."
Coraline set her spoon down. "And you obey a letter?"
"I obey a man I have judged." The old voice was gentle, but there was steel in it. "I have answered your brother's letters for twenty years, child. I have read in them the kind of man he is. I do not need to see his face to know it."
The candle guttered. The shadow of the wolf's head pendant, laid now on the bed, leapt and shrank against the wall.
"There is something else," Coraline said.
Sister Marguerite did not move. "I thought there might be."
"A thing I carry. A thing I must put somewhere safe, tonight, before I sleep in a locked cell for the first time in my life." She met the nun's eyes. "I do not ask you to guard it. I ask only that you tell me where in this convent a thing may be sealed against curious hands."
The nun was silent for so long that Coraline thought she had chosen not to answer. Then Sister Marguerite rose, crossed to the door, and listened in turn at the keyhole. Satisfied, she returned to the prie-dieu.
"There is a post-box," she said, "in the cathedral crypt. Sealed to the wall, with a lock older than the Reformation. It was made, in the old days, for the use of the royal household when they hunted in the northern forests and wished to send word without their messengers being seen upon the road." She paused. "No one has used it in forty years. The king who built it is dead. His son reigns in the south. But the lock works, and I have the key."
She drew, from the folds of her habit, a small brass key on a leather thong. It was old, green with verdigris, and shaped unlike any key Coraline had seen.
"Take it," Sister Marguerite said. "Go down to the crypt before Matins, when the cloister is empty. The sexton will be in his bed. The door behind the high altar is not bolted. Behind you as you face the altar, third flagstone from the wall, you will find the box set into the stone. Put your packet in. Lock it. Bring the key back to me in the morning, and I will return it to the place it has lain."
Coraline took the key. It was warm from the nun's habit.
"Why," she said, "do you help me?"
"Because," Sister Marguerite answered, "the Ashworths were not the only house the old queen befriended." She folded her hands again. "And because there is a thing I have not told you, and that I will tell you now, because you have trusted me with the knowledge that you carry something, and so I must trust you in turn."
The candle flared. A draft moved through the cell, and the flame bent sideways, and the shadows leapt, and then were still.
"There is a man," the nun said, "who writes to this convent. Twice a year, at Easter and at the Feast of St. Luke. He writes to the dead."
"To the dead."
"To Queen Liesel." Sister Marguerite's voice was soft. "He writes to her here. He has done so for nineteen years, since the day she died. The abbess receives the letters, and lays them on the altar, and at the month's end they are burned, and the ashes given to the river. No one reads them. No one is meant to."
Coraline's hands had gone cold in her lap. "Who is he?"
"A prince." Sister Marguerite rose and gathered the empty pot. "A prince who loved his mother, and who has no other place to lay his grief. He cannot write to the south, where his letters are watched. He cannot write to the chapels in the capital. So he writes here, where the snow lies thick for half the year and no one thinks to look."
"The man in the window," Coraline whispered.
Sister Marguerite paused at the door. "You saw him."
"I thought I saw a face, in a window across the square. A face that watched me."
"He watches all who come to the convent. He is not mad. He is only afraid." The nun's hand rested on the latch. "He is afraid, child, as you are afraid. As your brother is afraid. As the old queen's memory is afraid, if the dead can be afraid."
"Does he know," Coraline said, "that I am here?"
"He knows. He has known since the courier came down the pass." She opened the door a crack and listened. The corridor was silent. "If he wishes to speak with you, he will find a way. If he does not, you will not see him again."
"And the letters I carry?"
"They are not his. They are his brother's." Sister Marguerite's gaze was on the oilskin packet, still bound against Coraline's stomach. "His brother writes to the dead in another fashion, and to other dead. Be careful what you carry, child. Be very careful."
The door closed. The lock did not turn from outside this time. Coraline sat on the bed with the brass key in her palm and the taste of leek broth on her tongue and the weight of twelve letters against her ribs.
The rain had stopped. Through the window slit she could hear the faint clatter of shutters being closed along the convent's outer wall. The smell of rosemary sharpened in the cold air that came through the glassless opening.
She rose and unpinned the oilskin packet from her chemise. The letters within were dry, and faintly warm, as though they had lain near a heart. She did not open them. She bound them again with their ribbon and held the packet in one hand and the brass key in the other.
The corridor was empty. The cloister lanterns guttered in a draft from the open sky. She crossed the courtyard toward the cathedral, her wet shoes leaving dark prints on the flagstones, and the wolf's head pendant swinging against her breastbone with each step.
The lantern at the cathedral door had burned down to a stub. Coraline stepped over the threshold into the vast dark and let her eyes adjust. The pews were empty. The painted saints stared down from the transept walls, their gilded haloes catching what little light the stub still gave. Somewhere above, a pigeon cooed in the rafters, the sound rolling through the empty nave like a stone in a well.
She chose a pew near the back, close enough to the door that she could hear if anyone came down the aisle, far enough back that the shadows would hide her face. She set the oilskin packet on the bench beside her and unknotted the ribbon with fingers that did not quite obey her.
The first envelope was thick. Cream laid paper, the kind the palace stationers had once kept under glass for state correspondence. The wax seal had been pressed with a signet she did not recognize, a tower above a crescent moon. She broke it carefully, so as not to tear the letter within, and unfolded the single sheet.
The hand was steady. The ink was black, the strokes even, the downstrokes thick as a man's thumb. No tremor. No ragged margins. No signs of the madness the Sisters whispered of, no evidence of a mind unmoored. This was a hand that had been trained, a hand that had once written proclamations and pardons and, perhaps, wedding vows.
My dearest, my doom, my Liesel,
The words opened like a door in her chest. Three endearments, none of them chosen lightly. Dearest was common. Doom was not. It was a word Coraline had read in the old romances, in the verse of the troubadours, where a lady was her lover's doom because to love her was to be undone. The cadence was courtly, archaic, deliberate. This was a man who had read the poets. This was a man who chose his words the way a mason chose his stones.
She turned the page toward the light.
Know that I have not slept since the courier returned without you. Know that I have not eaten. Know that the physicians say grief will kill me if I do not master it, and I have told them grief is the only master I now acknowledge. I have given orders for the chapel to be hung in black. I have given orders for the bells to be tolled at every quarter. I have given no order at all for the succession, and when Lucien asks, I will give him none, because to name my heir is to admit that you are truly gone, and I am not yet ready to admit anything at all.
Coraline lowered the letter. The pigeon cooed again above her. The stub of candle in the iron sconce spat and guttered, and she cupped her hand around the flame to keep the draft from stealing it entirely.
He had loved her. He had loved her so completely that the machinery of the kingdom had ground to a halt. The chapel hung in black, the bells tolling, the physicians wringing their hands. A kingdom held its breath because its king could not bear to draw his next.
She thought of the second envelope. She thought of the brass key Sister Marguerite had pressed into her hand. She thought of the King at the window, watching her pass.
Her hand was steady now. She turned back to the letter.
Know also that I have written to my brother. Know that I have begged him to come home, not for the succession, not for the crown, but because there is no one else in this palace who will sit with me in the dark and say her name. He has not answered. He has not answered any of my letters, and I have written so many that the secretaries have begun to whisper. Let them whisper. There is no shame in a man writing to the dead when the living will not reply.
Know that I love you. Know that I will love you until the bells fall silent and the chapel is torn down and the last priest who remembers your name is himself turned to dust. Know that this letter is my vow, and I will keep it, and the world may do what it will with the rest of me.
Your husband, Adrian
Coraline folded the letter along its original creases. She slid it back into its envelope. She set it on the bench beside her and placed her palm flat against the wood, feeling the grain of the oak, the small ridges where a chisel had once bitten too deep.
He had loved her. He had loved her so completely that he had beggared his own kingdom, and still he had not named an heir, and still he had not let his brother come home. The King at the window was a man frozen in the moment of his wife's last breath, and twelve years had not thawed him.
She thought of Lucien Devereaux. She thought of the man in the mountain, the one Sister Marguerite would not name, the one who had ridden out to meet his brother in the pass. Two brothers. One queen dead. One king mad with grief. One prince in exile writing letters to the dead in a steady male hand. The geometry of it came together in her mind like the closing of a trap.
The door of the cathedral creaked open. Coraline's hand closed over the oilskin packet. She did not turn. She did not rise. She sat perfectly still in the shadow of the back pew, and the pigeon above went silent, and the only sound was the soft footfall of boots on flagstone.
A man's shadow fell across the aisle. He did not approach her. He stopped three pews away, in the dark, and stood with his hands at his sides, and she could smell the leather of his gloves and the wet wool of his cloak.
"You read it." His voice was low, and rough, and unsurprised. "I heard the paper turn."
"I read it." She did not look up. "I read the first line."
"And?"
"It was not what I expected."
"No." A pause. "It never is."
He moved then, not toward her but sideways, to the end of her pew, and she turned her head at last, and the King of Aldenwyck stood in the shadow of the transept with his black cloak still dripping from the rain, and his face was the face she had seen at the window, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had not slept in twelve years.
He did not ask her name. He did not ask her errand. He looked at the oilskin packet in her lap, and his jaw tightened, and he said, very softly, "Where did you find my brother?"
"In a convent," Coraline said. "In a convent in the north."
"Is he well?"
"He is cold. He is safe. He is writing to your wife."
The King's face did not change. Something behind it changed, something behind the eyes, something that had been locked in a single posture for a dozen years. It shifted, and shifted again, and then it settled into a shape she could not read.
"Writing to her," he said.
"Writing to her as though she could hear him."
The King was silent for a long moment. The pigeon above resumed its cooing. The candle stub guttered and spat.
"And you," he said at last. "You are the one who carried them."
"I am."
"Why?"
Coraline lifted her chin. She held his gaze, and she did not look away, and she did not soften her voice.
"Because someone had to," she said. "Because the letters were not madness. Because a man who loved a queen is not mad for writing to her after she is gone. Because your brother deserves to be remembered as something other than a traitor, and your wife deserves to be mourned by more than one voice, and you deserve to know that there is still someone in the world who will sit with you in the dark and say her name."
The King did not move. The shadow of the transept fell across his face. The candle burned down to its last quarter inch.
"You read the first line," he said.
"I read the first line."
"Then you know."
"I know."
He took a step forward. Then another. He stopped at the end of her pew, and he looked down at the oilskin packet, and he said, in a voice so low she had to lean forward to hear it, "Read me another."
Coraline reached into the packet. She chose the second envelope. She broke the seal and unfolded the letter and held it up to the dying light, and the King of Aldenwyck sat down on the pew beside her, and the pigeon watched from the rafters, and the candle went out, and she read to him in a whisper what his brother had written to the dead.