Edmund Vane sat beneath the gaslight at his desk, the tip of a pencil tucked behind one ear, his fingers dark with ink from the hour before. The cipher unfurled across the butcher paper in a sprawl of careful transcription, each symbol rendered twice, once as the original and once beside it in the alphabet he had spent the better part of the night deriving. A tin cup of cold tea rested at the margin, ringed and forgotten. He had not lit a second lamp; the room preferred the gloom, and so did he, in the way that men who spend their days in other men's business learn to tolerate the dark.
The cipher was old. Not in the sense of mere years, though it smacked of the sixteenth or seventeenth century in its cadence, but old in the manner of a wound that has healed poorly. Someone had taught themselves to write in it, and the teaching had been uneven. Certain substitutions repeated with the constancy of a hymn, while others strayed wherever the writer's instinct wandered. Edmund had marked those inconsistencies with a soft pencil line, and from them he had begun to suspect what the map concealed.
He rolled his shoulders and reached for the cold tea, drank, grimaced. The lodging house outside his room creaked in its timbers, a tenant two floors below coughing through a fit that rattled the pipes. Somewhere beyond the window a cart rattled over cobblestone, its iron-rimmed wheels protesting every joint. He let the sounds pass through him the way a surgeon lets the chatter of a theatre pass while he works. Habit. Necessity.
His gaze dropped to the page.
Where the cipher resolved into legible words, the message spoke of London. Not the London of commerce and gaslight he walked each morning, but a London buried beneath it, a London of pits and unmarked ground, of consecrated earth that had been violated and resealed. He read the decoded passage aloud, softly, for the pleasure of hearing it in his own voice.
"At the corner where the old chapel stood, beneath the third stone from the east, lies what was taken from the pest-house. It is marked with the sign of the spider."
Edmund paused. He turned the pencil between his fingers.
The reference was unmistakable. The Great Fire had consumed much of the old city, but the plague had come first, and the plague pits remained, some of them, undisturbed. He had walked past one such site not three days past, behind a gin shop on Cheapside, where the landlord complained of a sinkage in his yard. Edmund had thought little of it then. He thought differently now.
He returned to the cipher and worked another line free.
"In the orchard of the hanged man, beneath the rowan, the hand is buried. It was plucked from the living and preserved in wine. The sign of the spider marks it."
Edmund set down the pencil.
The handwriting, he noted, bore the tremor of age or fear. The writer had known what he described. The specificity was too fine for invention; no fantasist troubled himself with the angle of a stone from the east, or the species of tree beneath which a relic was interred. This was a record. A confession, perhaps, written by someone who had helped commit the crimes it described and who had feared, rightly, that those crimes would not stay buried.
He rose from the desk and crossed to the window. The pane was imperfect, bowed in the middle, and through it the lamplighter's progress traced a slow constellation down the street. Edmund rested his forehead against the cool glass and considered.
The relics of plague victims. The trade in such things was not new. During the worst of the sickness, when the living could not bury their dead fast enough, men with carts and strong backs had collected what they could carry. Some sold to physicians, who paid for parts to study. Some sold to relicmongers, who peddled to the credulous. Some, it was whispered, sold to collectors of a more particular taste, men and women who wished to possess something that had died badly, as though the misfortune of the dead might somehow be absorbed and tamed.
Edmund had been a surgeon once. He knew what the body fetched.
He turned from the window.
The map, as he had begun to think of it, was taking shape. Each decoded entry named a location and an object, and the objects were anatomical in nature. A hand. A tongue. A portion of jaw. A finger, preserved. They were the parts of executed criminals that anatomists had once paid handsomely to obtain, and they were also the parts that the old relic trade had trafficked in, for reasons that Edmund had never troubled himself to understand and now wished he had.
He returned to the desk and unrolled a second sheet, this one a printed chart of the city before the Fire. He had purchased it years ago from a dealer in antiquarian maps, for a case that had never required it. The dealer had assured him it was accurate to within a street's width, based on the Hollar plans and the parish records. Edmund had no cause to doubt him.
He laid the printed map flat and weighted its corners with the cold teacup, a brass paperweight shaped like a skull, and a box of lucifers. Then he began, with a stub of carpenter's pencil, to mark the sites named in the cipher.
The corner where the old chapel stood. He found it near Newgate, the chapel long since consumed by the Fire, the site now part of a warehousing yard. He marked it with a small cross.
The orchard of the hanged man. He puzzled over the phrase for a moment, then remembered. Tyburn. The famous tree had been cut down generations past, but the orchard remained, a memorial ground of sorts where the bodies of the executed had once been buried in unconsecrated soil. He found the location on the printed map, west of the city, near where the new park was being laid out. He marked it.
The third entry spoke of a churchyard behind a dissolved priory. The priory, Edmund recalled, had stood in Southwark, near the river. He marked that too.
By the time he had transcribed the first six entries, a pattern had emerged. The sites were not random. They described a rough arc through the old city, beginning at Newgate and moving south and east toward the river, before curving back west. A circuit. A walk, almost, that a man might take in a single day if he were determined and not inclined to conversation.
Edmund leaned back in his chair and studied what he had drawn.
The sign of the spider.
He had encountered the phrase twice already, and he suspected it would recur. He wrote it in the margin of his transcription and underlined it, then opened the drawer of his desk and withdrew a small notebook, its leather cover soft with handling. The notebook contained, among other things, his observations on the trade in occult antiquities, a hobby of his that had occasionally overlapped with his professional work. He paged through it until he found the entry he wanted.
The spider. A symbol he had first encountered in a pawnshop in Seven Dials, where a dealer in curiosities had shown him a talisman of bone and jet, hung on a cord of braided gut. The dealer had called it a relic of the plague years, though Edmund had suspected the price was invented to match the provenance. The talisman bore the image of a spider at its center, etched in acid and filled with what looked like dried blood. Edmund had declined to purchase it, but he had sketched it, and the sketch was in the notebook now.
The spider, according to the dealer, was the mark of a particular collector. The name had escaped Edmund's memory, but the shape had not. A spider, eight-legged, suspended in the middle of its web. A collector's mark, the dealer had said, though he would not say whose.
Edmund closed the notebook and tapped its cover with one finger.
The cipher spoke of relics that had been stolen from plague pits. The spider marked where they had been reburied. The implication, if one were inclined to draw it, was that the relics had not been reburied by the men who had stolen them. They had been reburied by someone who came after. Someone who had tracked the thefts and wished, for reasons of his own, to undo them.
Or to claim them.
Edmund considered the distinction and found it important.
He reached for the cipher once more and worked at another line, his pencil moving with the slow certainty of a man disarticulating a joint. The symbols gave way beneath his attention, and a new sentence emerged.
"He who reads this and finds the first mark shall know that I have walked the circuit twice. The second time I walked it, the spider had moved. The third time, I did not walk it. The third time, I sent another, and the other did not return."
Edmund read it twice. Then a third time, to be certain.
The writer had walked the circuit himself, the route described by the buried relics. He had done so twice. On the third occasion he had sent a proxy, and the proxy had vanished. The spider, it seemed, was not only a mark of ownership. It was also, perhaps, a mark of guardianship. A thing that watched the things that were buried and resented the company of the curious.
Edmund sat very still.
The lodger downstairs coughed again, a wet and rattling sound that seemed to come from the walls themselves. The lamp on his desk guttered once, twice, then steadied. Edmund became aware, with the particular clarity that comes in moments of suspicion, that the room was very quiet and that he was, for the moment, quite alone.
He reached for the cold tea again, found it empty, and set the cup down with a care that was not quite deliberation.
The cipher had not named its writer. It had not named the relics' original thief. It had not named the spider. But it had done something more disquieting than any of those omissions. It had described a route that a man might walk, and it had done so with a precision that suggested the writer had expected someone else to follow.
Edmund looked at the map he had begun to draw. The crosses dotted the printed page like a constellation not yet named. He counted them. Six, so far. There were more in the cipher, many more, and the night was not yet spent.
He reached for his pencil.
Outside, the cart had passed and the street settled into the particular hush of a city that has decided, for the moment, to mind its own business. The lamplighter moved on to the next block, and the gaslight in Edmund's window dimmed as the man trimmed the wick and passed on. For a moment the room was darker than Edmund liked, and he sat in a gloom that seemed to press against him from every side.
Then he bent once more to the cipher, and the pencil moved, and the map grew.
The morning came grey and damp, the kind of London morning that made the city seem built from the same material as its fog. Edmund Vane left his rooms shortly after eight, having slept perhaps two hours and risen with the particular determination of a man who has decided to do something difficult and would rather not think too long about it.
The Royal College of Surgeons occupied a respectable stretch of Lincoln's Inn Fields, its portico a statement of stone and intent. Edmund had not been inside the building in eleven years. He had been, in another life, a fellow here; he had walked these corridors as a young man with steady hands and a reputation that had not yet curdled. The portico looked smaller now. Everything looked smaller now, and Edmund was not entirely sure whether the buildings had shrunk or he had grown.
He gave his name at the door. A young man in livery consulted a list, consulted Edmund's face, consulted the list again. The delay was not lost on Edmund, who understood perfectly well what the young man was calculating: whether this particular former fellow, this particular disgraced surgeon, was worth the trouble of announcing.
The young man decided he was.
"Sir Bernard Linley will receive you in the conservator's study," the young man said, with the careful neutrality of someone who has been told to be polite regardless of his private opinions. "This way, please."
The corridors were familiar and not familiar. The same portraits hung on the walls, the same brass plates marked the same doors, but the air had changed. It smelled, Edmund thought, of money in a way it had not smelled before. New carpet, perhaps. New polish. The particular self-satisfaction of an institution that had decided to take itself seriously.
The conservator's study was at the rear of the building, overlooking the courtyard where the statue of John Hunter stood in bronze and rain. The young man knocked, opened the door, and announced Edmund in a tone that suggested he had been practising the pronunciation.
Sir Bernard Linley rose from behind a desk that was far too large for the room and far too new for the building. He was a tall man, slender, with a face that had been handsome in its youth and now carried that handsomeness the way a man carries an old debt, gracefully and without acknowledgement. His hair was silver. His eyes were pale. His smile, when he smiled, was a thing of practised warmth.
"Mr. Vane," he said. "How good of you to come."
He gestured to a chair. Edmund sat. The chair was softer than he expected, and he resented it.
"I had hoped," Sir Bernard continued, settling back into his own chair with the ease of a man who has done this a thousand times, "that we might speak plainly. There is no pleasure in it for either of us, I daresay, but there it is."
"Plainly is a luxury," Edmund said. "I have not had it lately."
Sir Bernard's smile did not waver. "Then I shall begin. You have come about the map."
"I have."
"And you wish to know why I have called it a forgery."
"I wish to know whether you are correct."
"Ah." Sir Bernard tilted his head, a gesture of what might have been admiration. "Direct. I was told you would be."
"By whom?"
"By people who remember you, Mr. Vane. The surgical community is small, and grudges are not as private as we like to suppose."
Edmund said nothing. The fire in the grate, which he had not noticed until now, popped and settled.
"Let me show you something," Sir Bernard said. He opened a drawer in the desk and withdrew a sheet of paper, which he laid upon the blotter with the care of a man handling something delicate. "The map you showed to Dr. Marsh. Or rather, a facsimile, since the original is, I believe, in your possession."
"You have seen it."
"I have seen a very good copy, made under my supervision, of the document you submitted to the College for authentication. You will not be surprised to learn that the College keeps careful records."
"I am not surprised."
"Good. Then you will not be surprised that we have compared your map to the known corpus of nineteenth-century anatomical illustration. And you will not be surprised that we have found, in the lines and the lettering and the very particular style of the crosshatching, evidence that the document was not, in fact, produced in 1843."
Edmund leaned forward. "Evidence."
"Several kinds." Sir Bernard's voice was smooth as oil on still water. "The paper is wrong. The ink is wrong. The hand is wrong. And there is, most damningly, a watermark."
"A watermark."
"Yes. A watermark belonging to a paper mill that did not exist until 1891. A full forty-eight years after the map purports to have been drawn."
The fire popped again. Outside, in the courtyard, a porter crossed the wet stones with a measured step, his boots making a soft and regular percussion.
"I see," Edmund said.
"I am glad you see it, Mr. Vane. The College is not in the habit of calling documents forgeries without evidence. We are aware that such a charge has implications. We are aware that the document in question has been circulated to persons of some consequence. And we are aware that the natural conclusion of any reasonable observer would be that someone, somewhere, is attempting to discredit this institution."
"And you assume that someone is me."
"I assume nothing." Sir Bernard spread his hands, a gesture of false reasonableness. "I merely observe that the map came to the College through your hands, and that the map is a forgery, and that the natural conclusion follows."
"The natural conclusion is that I forged a document to discredit the institution that threw me out."
"The natural conclusion," Sir Bernard said, "is that someone did. Whether that someone is you, or a person employing you, or a person you have been manipulated by, is a question I leave to others more qualified than I."
Edmund looked at the man across the desk. Sir Bernard's face was perfectly composed. His hands were perfectly still. His eyes, pale and watchful, gave away nothing. Edmund had known men like this in his former life; men who could commit a murder at breakfast and then complain about the quality of the eggs.
"I did not forge the map," Edmund said.
"I am sure you believe that."
"I did not forge it, and I did not know it was a forgery, and if you suppose I would walk into this building with a forged document and lay it upon your desk, you suppose me a greater fool than I am."
"I suppose nothing about you, Mr. Vane. I have not had the pleasure."
The words were a knife, turned neatly in the wound. Edmund felt it, and let it pass.
"The watermark," he said. "Show me."
Sir Bernard produced a second sheet, this one bearing the watermark in question, a small device of a lion and a crown. "Dixon's Mill, Dartford. Opened in 1891. Closed in 1923. The map bears this mark, faintly, in the lower right quadrant."
"I have not examined the watermark."
"No. You have not. You took the document at face value, as I suspect you have been meant to."
"By whom?"
Sir Bernard smiled. "There, Mr. Vane, is the question."
Edmund sat back in the soft chair. The fire had burned down to a low and sullen glow. Outside, the rain had begun again, a fine and persistent mist that turned the courtyard stones dark.
"Let us speak plainly," Edmund said. "You called the map a forgery within hours of seeing it. You have not, so far as I can tell, submitted it to independent analysis. You have made no attempt to consult the parties named in the cipher. You have, instead, come to me, in private, before any public statement is made, and you have explained your position with a care that suggests you wish me to understand something."
"Such as?"
"Such as that the map is a forgery, and that I am to blame, and that if I pursue the matter further I shall be destroyed."
Sir Bernard's smile did not waver, but something behind his eyes shifted. A door, opening. A calculation, completed.
"Mr. Vane," he said, "you always were too clever for your own good."
"And you always were too smooth for yours."
The words were out before Edmund could stop them, and he saw, with the particular clarity of a man who has said something unforgivable, that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Sir Bernard's face was still composed, but his eyes had gone cold.
"You were a clever surgeon once," Sir Bernard said. "You might have been a clever something else, if you had behaved. Instead, you are a man with a ruined reputation, sitting in a chair that does not belong to him, making accusations he cannot support."
"I have made no accusations."
"You have implied them. And implications, Mr. Vane, are the weapons of men who have lost the courage to speak directly."
The fire popped once more, and a log settled into the grate with a soft and final sound.
"I shall tell you what I think," Edmund said. "I think the map is genuine, and I think you know it is genuine, and I think you are calling it a forgery because the truth it contains is inconvenient to you."
"And what truth would that be?"
"The truth about what was done in 1843. The truth about the bones. The truth about the spider."
Sir Bernard's hands, which had been perfectly still, moved at last. He folded them upon the desk, one over the other, with a deliberation that was meant to be seen.
"You are speaking of matters you do not understand, Mr. Vane."
"Then explain them to me."
"I think not."
"Then we are at an impasse."
"We are at an impasse that will resolve itself, one way or another, in due course. The map will be examined. The forgery will be confirmed. Your name will be associated with a clumsy attempt at fraud, and you will fade into whatever obscurity you have chosen for yourself. That is the natural course of events."
"Unless?"
Sir Bernard did not answer. He rose, and the movement was a dismissal.
"Unless," Edmund said, "the map is examined by someone other than you."
"There is no one other than me. The conservator is the final authority on such matters. I have spoken."
"I could take it to the British Museum."
"You could. And you would find that the British Museum takes a very dim view of forgeries, and that the records of this College are shared in confidence with our colleagues at Bloomsbury. We are not without friends, Mr. Vane."
Edmund rose. The chair, when he stood, exhaled slightly, as if relieved to be rid of him.
"I did not forge the map," he said. "I do not know who did. But I intend to find out."
"I wish you joy of the chase," Sir Bernard said. "I fear you will find it disappointing."
The door opened. The young man in livery was there, waiting. Edmund walked past him into the corridor, and the door closed behind him with a sound that was softer than he expected, and final as a sentence.
He stood for a moment in the corridor, listening to the silence. The portraits on the walls looked down at him with the painted indifference of men who had outlived their controversies. The new carpet was soft beneath his feet.
The map was a forgery. The map was genuine. One of these statements was true, and Edmund was no longer certain which. He had been so sure, sitting at his desk in the small hours, that the document was a key to something. Now he was less sure. A watermark could be faked. A watermark could be genuine. A smooth man behind a large desk could be lying, or telling the truth, or something in between.
He thought of Mrs. Eliza Crowe, the medium, who had handed him the map with the particular care of a woman handing over something she did not understand. He thought of Dr. Abigail Marsh, who had received it and not yet committed herself. He thought of Constable Thomas Hale, who was even now, perhaps, beginning to read the cipher with his methodical provincial attention.
He thought of the spider, and of the bones, and of whatever it was that Sir Bernard Linley did not wish the world to know.
The young man in livery was waiting. Edmund straightened his coat, and walked towards the door, and out into the rain.
The séance was held in the back parlour of Mrs. Eliza Crowe's establishment on Whitechapel Road, in a room that smelled of tallow and dried lavender and something older, something that might have been the ghost of a hundred extinguished candles. The curtains had been drawn against the evening, and the gas had been turned down to a whisper. A single lamp burned on the round table at the centre of the room, its flame guttering in some draft that found its way in from the street despite every precaution.
Edmund Vane sat at the table with his hat in his hands. Dr. Abigail Marsh sat across from him, her notebook closed upon the table's edge, her spectacles catching the lamplight in two small moons. Sir Bernard Linley sat at the head, as was his due, his white hands folded upon the dark wood, his face composed into an expression of patient condescension. Constable Thomas Hale stood by the door, for he had been forbidden a seat and had accepted the prohibition with the quiet endurance of a young man who knew which battles were worth fighting.
Mrs. Eliza Crowe sat at the foot of the table, opposite Sir Bernard. She wore black, as was her custom, and her face was powdered pale as a mask. Her eyes were closed. Her hands lay flat upon the wood, palms down, fingers spread. She breathed slowly, in and out, in and out, and the room waited.
"Mr. Vane," Sir Bernard murmured, "you understand that this is a great favour."
"I understand," Edmund said.
"Mrs. Crowe does not, as a rule, hold séances for parties of mixed interest."
"I understand that too."
Sir Bernard's mouth curved. "I am pleased. Dr. Marsh, I trust you are not offended by the proceedings?"
"I am a scientist," Abigail said. "I am never offended. Only curious."
"A useful distinction."
Mrs. Eliza Crowe did not open her eyes. Her breathing slowed further, deepened, and the lamplight wavered as if the air in the room had thickened. Edmund felt the first prickle at the back of his neck, the first tightening of the skin across his shoulders. He had been to séances before, in his time, and he had never been certain whether what he felt was the presence of something else or merely the contagion of belief.
The lamp guttered again. The flame leaned sideways, held steady, leaned back.
Mrs. Eliza Crowe opened her mouth.
"Is there," she said, in a voice that was not her own, lower and rougher, as if scraped from the bottom of a well, "anyone here who seeks passage?"
The room held its breath.
"We seek passage," Sir Bernard said.
"We do," Edmund said.
"We do," Abigail said, softer.
Constable Hale, by the door, said nothing, for he had been instructed not to speak and was, Edmund suspected, relieved by the instruction.
Mrs. Eliza Crowe's head tilted slowly to one side, as if listening to a sound that came from very far away. Her hands remained flat upon the table. The powder on her face seemed, in the lamplight, to have taken on a faint greenish cast.
"I hear," the borrowed voice said, "a name. A name that has been buried. A name that wishes to be unburied."
"Whose name?" Sir Bernard asked.
"The name is in the room. The name is at this table."
The flame steadied. The silence grew.
"Thomas," Mrs. Eliza Crowe said, and the voice that came out of her was no longer the well-voice but something else, something younger and sharper and terrified. "Thomas Hale."
Constable Hale, by the door, made a small sound. Edmund turned his head. The young man's face had gone the colour of tallow.
"Constable," Edmund said.
"I, sir, I have done nothing, I, sir."
"Be quiet," Sir Bernard said, without turning. His eyes were fixed on Mrs. Crowe.
Mrs. Eliza Crowe's head had come back to centre. Her eyes were still closed, but the lids flickered, and beneath them something moved that was not the ordinary movement of dreaming.
"Thomas Hale," she said again, and the voice was hers now, and her own voice was hoarse with the effort of carrying what it carried. "Thomas Hale, who stands by the door. Thomas Hale, who came to this room believing himself a witness. Thomas Hale, who is not a witness but a name."
"Sir," Constable Hale said, his voice climbing, "sir, I have done nothing, I have served my duty, I have not, sir, I, sir."
"Mr. Vane," Sir Bernard said, "control your constable."
"He's not my constable," Edmund said, "and I cannot control what a ghost says."
"There are no ghosts."
"Then perhaps the medium is unwell."
Mrs. Eliza Crowe's hands lifted from the table. They rose, slowly, palms down, and then turned over, palms up, and in the cup of each palm Edmund saw, or thought he saw, a faint darkening, like the shadow of something pressed there from the other side.
"Thomas Hale," she said, and now her voice was layered, as if several voices spoke through her at once, and Edmund could pick out, beneath her own, the sound of a young man's voice, and an older man's voice, and the thin reedy note of something that might have been a child. "Thomas Hale, who killed in the vaults beneath the cathedral. Thomas Hale, who left the body where it could not be found. Thomas Hale, who walks above the body every day and does not know."
The room broke.
Constable Hale stumbled back against the door. His hand went to his truncheon, then away, then back again. His face was working. His mouth opened and closed without sound.
"Sir," he managed, "Sir Bernard, sir, this is not, I have never, sir, I would not, I, sir, I cannot."
"Sit down, man," Sir Bernard said. His voice was clipped.
"I cannot, sir, I, sir."
"Sit down."
The constable sat. He sat where he was, on the floor, with his back against the door and his hands in his lap and his eyes on Mrs. Crowe as if she were the only fixed point in a tilting world.
"Mrs. Crowe," Edmund said. "Mrs. Crowe, can you hear me?"
Her head tilted again. Her lips moved, but no sound came out for a moment. Then:
"There is more."
"More what?"
"There is more that wishes to be said. There is more that has been waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For the right listener. For the right room. For the right, the right, the right."
Her voice cracked. She shuddered, and Edmund saw Abigail Marsh rise from her chair and move around the table to stand beside the medium, her hand hovering above the woman's shoulder.
"Don't touch her," Sir Bernard said sharply.
"I wasn't going to touch her," Abigail said, in a tone that suggested she did not care for being told. "Mrs. Crowe. Mrs. Crowe, I am here. Take your time."
Mrs. Eliza Crowe's eyes flew open.
They were not her eyes. They were darker, deeper set, and they looked out from her face with an expression of such abyssal weariness that Edmund felt his stomach turn. The medium's hands came down flat upon the table, and the lamp flame leaped to meet them and guttered out, and the room was plunged into a darkness that was lit only by the faint green phosphorescence that seemed, for one heartbeat, to gather in Mrs. Crowe's palms.
Then the gas popped back on, full and hissing, and the room was bright again, and Mrs. Eliza Crowe was herself, slumped in her chair, her powder cracked, her lips grey.
"Water," she whispered.
Abigail moved for water. Edmund moved to the door. Constable Hale was on his feet, his truncheon drawn, his face a mask of professional duty laid over a foundation of pure terror.
"Stand aside, Mr. Vane."
"Constable."
"Sir, I must, sir, I have a duty, sir, I must inform my superiors that, that, sir."
"That a medium named you in a trance? That a ghost accused you of murder in a parlour on Whitechapel Road? What superiors would you inform, and what would you say?"
"I, sir."
"Put the truncheon away."
"I cannot, sir."
"Then hold it, but do not draw it on me."
The constable's hand was shaking. The truncheon rattled faintly against the brass button of his greatcoat. He looked past Edmund at the room, at the medium being revived with sips of water by Dr. Marsh, at Sir Bernard Linley who had not moved from his chair and whose face had taken on, in the renewed gaslight, an expression Edmund could not read.
"Mrs. Crowe," Sir Bernard said, "what did you see?"
The medium raised her head. Her eyes were her own again, but bruised with exhaustion. "I saw a young man," she said. "I saw him standing in water. I saw him with a lantern. I saw him kneel beside something that was wrapped in sacking. I saw his hands."
"Whose hands?"
"A young man's hands. Young and strong and frightened. He was doing what he had been told to do. He did not choose it. He was following, following an order, and the order came from, from, from above."
"From whom?"
"I do not know. The vision was not clear. The vision was, was, was."
She put her hand to her head. Abigail gave her more water.
"Sir Bernard," Edmund said, "I think the medium needs to rest."
"I think," Sir Bernard said, rising from his chair with the unhurried grace of a man who had never been hurried in his life, "that the medium has told us what she was hired to tell us."
"Hired by whom?"
"By me, Mr. Vane. By me, through the good offices of a friend in Whitechapel. I wished to see what would surface, and what has surfaced is, I confess, not what I expected."
He looked across the room at Constable Hale. The constable looked back. The truncheon rattled.
"You will," Sir Bernard said, "put that away."
"Sir."
"And you will, in due course, come to my study, and you will answer some questions, and you will do so without this, this theatre."
"Sir, I have done nothing, sir, I swear on my mother's, sir, I have never, sir."
"Yes," Sir Bernard said. "That is what they all say."
He crossed to the door. Edmund stepped aside. Sir Bernard paused, his shoulder almost touching Edmund's, and spoke very quietly so that only Edmund could hear.
"Your constable killed someone, Mr. Vane. I suggest you find out who, and why, before the newspapers do."
He went out. The young man in livery was waiting for him in the corridor. The door closed.
The room exhaled.
Edmund stood for a moment in the silence. The lamp on the table had not been relit; the gas hissed; Mrs. Eliza Crowe sat in her chair with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed and her face the colour of old paper. Abigail Marsh stood beside her, one hand on the back of the chair, her notebook now open, her pencil moving in quick small strokes across the page.
Constable Hale stood by the door. The truncheon was back in his belt. His hands hung at his sides. He looked at Edmund with the expression of a young man who had come to a door in the dark and found, on the other side, something he had not bargained for.
"Mr. Vane," he said, and his voice was steady now, steadier than it had been, and steadier than Edmund would have expected. "Mr. Vane, I did not kill anyone."
"I believe you," Edmund said.
"Sir."
"I believe you, and I am going to find out who did, and why, and I am going to find out whose name it is that you have been carrying without knowing you carried it. Do you understand me?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then go home. Sleep if you can. Do not speak of this to anyone. Do not, in particular, speak of it to Sir Bernard Linley."
Constable Hale nodded. He unbolted the door and went out into the corridor, and Edmund heard his footsteps on the carpet, and then on the bare boards of the hall, and then on the step, and then the sound of the street door closing, and then nothing.
Edmund crossed to the table. He sat down in the chair Sir Bernard had vacated. Across the table, Mrs. Eliza Crowe opened her eyes.
"Did you see?" she asked.
"I saw."
"It was not what I expected."
"No."
"It was not what he expected either."
"No."
Mrs. Crowe put her hands flat upon the table. The powder on her face had cracked into a fine web. Her eyes, in the gaslight, were very dark and very tired.
"Mr. Vane," she said, "I have been a medium for twenty-three years. I have heard the voices of the dead speak through me. I have never, in twenty-three years, heard a voice name a murderer among the living."
"And now?"
"Now I have. And I do not know what to do with it."
Edmund looked at her. He looked at Abigail, who had stopped writing and was watching him with her head tilted and her pencil poised.
"We find out," Edmund said, "who was killed, and where, and by whose order. We find the body. We find the record. We find the truth, and we put it in a place where Sir Bernard Linley cannot reach it."
"And the constable?" Abigail asked.
"The constable," Edmund said, "is going to need a friend."
He stood up. He took his hat from the table. He looked once more at Mrs. Eliza Crowe, who had closed her eyes again, and at Dr. Abigail Marsh, who had opened her notebook to a fresh page.
"Good evening," he said.
"Good evening, Mr. Vane," Mrs. Crowe said, without opening her eyes.
He went out. The corridor was dim and smelled of tallow and lavender. The young man in livery was waiting at the street door with an umbrella. Edmund took the umbrella and went out into the rain, and the door closed behind him, and he stood for a moment under the umbrella and listened to the water running in the gutter and thought of a young constable walking home through the dark with a name in his mouth that did not belong to him.