The Inkwell Cipher: Seven Stars

The morning fog clung to the Thames like wet wool, turning Southwark into a maze of grey shapes and muffled sounds. Phineas Whitlock stepped off the omnibus at St. Saviour's Church and turned his collar up against the damp. He had walked this stretch of Borough High Street a hundred times as a younger man, chasing manuscripts and marginalia through the warren of antiquarian shops that once thrived near the old inns. Most had closed now, swallowed by progress and the indifferent march of commerce. But the Seven Stars still stood, wedged between a pawnbroker's and a boarded-up chandler's, its painted sign so faded that only a scholar of tavern signs would have recognised the constellation above the door.

Whitlock paused on the threshold. The wood was dark and splintered, the iron latch green with verdigris. He could hear, faintly, the creak of a floorboard inside and the low murmur of a fire that had not yet caught properly. He pushed the door open and went in.

The taproom was smaller than he remembered, or perhaps he had grown larger in the years since. Three tables stood in a row beneath the window, their tops ringed with the ghosts of tankards. A coal scuttle sat beside an iron grate where a few embers glowed orange and feeble. The smell of old hops and woodsmoke and something faintly medicinal, perhaps laudanum or camphor, hung in the cold air. Behind the bar, a man Whitlock did not recognise was polishing a glass with a cloth that had seen better days.

"We are not open," the man said, without looking up. He was perhaps sixty, with a grey beard trimmed close to the jaw and spectacles perched low on a nose that bent slightly to the left. "Come back at noon."

"I am not here for ale," Whitlock replied. He crossed the room and set his walking stick against the bar. "I am looking for the proprietor. A gentleman named Tobias Grimm. I was told he might be able to help me with a question of an historical nature."

The man behind the bar set down the glass and looked at Whitlock properly for the first time. His eyes were pale grey, almost silver in the dim light, and they narrowed with the careful suspicion of a man who had outlived his faith in strangers.

"Tobias Grimm does not see visitors," the barkeep said. "He has not seen visitors for some years. His health is not what it was."

"I would be most grateful if you would convey to him that his old acquaintance Phineas Whitlock has called, and that the matter concerns the year eighteen eighty-nine."

The cloth went still in the barkeep's hand. He set it down slowly, folded it once, and tucked it beneath the bar with the deliberate care of a man buying himself time to think.

"Eighteen eighty-nine," he repeated.

"The year of a particular gathering that took place in this establishment," Whitlock said. "Under the auspices of a nobleman whose name I will withhold until I am certain Mr Grimm wishes to hear it spoken."

The barkeep studied him for a long moment. Somewhere beneath the floor, pipes groaned and a faint hiss of steam escaped from a radiator that had clearly seen service under two monarchs. The fire spat and settled.

"Wait here," the barkeep said at last. He disappeared through a door at the back of the room, and Whitlock heard his footsteps mount a staircase, slow and deliberate, each tread accompanied by a creak that mapped the age of the building.

Whitlock did not wait with patience. He had never been a patient man, and the coded manuscript in his coat pocket seemed to burn against his ribs like a coal. He turned to examine the taproom. Above the bar hung a framed print of the constellation that gave the inn its name, seven stars arranged in a pattern Whitlock did not recognise from any modern chart. He was still studying it when a voice behind him said, in a tone that suggested he had been there for some time, "You will not find it in any almanac."

Whitlock turned. The man in the doorway was very old. His face was a topography of valleys and ridges, the skin papery and translucent, the eyes set deep in their sockets but burning with a ferocity that belied the frailty of the frame. He wore a velvet smoking jacket of a cut that had been fashionable in the previous century, and his silver hair was swept back from a widow's peak in the manner of a younger man. One hand gripped the newel post at the foot of the stairs. The other held a tumbler containing something amber and faintly luminous in the firelight.

"Mr Grimm," Whitlock said. "Thank you for agreeing to see me."

"I have agreed to nothing," Tobias Grimm replied. "I have merely descended to determine whether you are worth the effort of a conversation. Sit, if you must stand, and be brief about your business. The hour is early and the fire is not yet worthy of the name."

Whitlock took a stool at the bar. Grimm did not join him but remained where he was, a silhouette against the dim light of the stairwell, his drink held like a talisman.

"You spoke of eighteen eighty-nine," Grimm said. "That year is not a year one speaks of lightly. That year is a door one opens at one's peril."

"It is a door I must open," Whitlock said. "I have come into possession of a document. A manuscript, to be precise, written in a cipher I have not encountered in twenty years of work. The cipher was used by a society that met in this very room in that very year. The society was convened by a lord whose name I will spare you until you confirm that you know of what I speak."

Grimm was silent for a long moment. The fire cracked. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe shuddered and was still.

"The nobleman's name," Grimm said at last, "was Vexley."

Whitlock's hand moved, almost involuntarily, to the breast pocket of his coat. The manuscript was there, wrapped in oilskin, a rectangle no larger than a playing card and considerably more dangerous.

"You knew him," Whitlock said.

"I knew of him. I was a young man then, not yet broken by the world. He came here in the autumn, with three others, and they took the upstairs parlour for three nights running. The barkeep at the time, a man named Calloway, was paid a sum that silenced him for the remainder of his natural life. He is dead now, and the secret died with him, except that it did not, because here you are, sitting on his stool, asking questions that ought not to be asked."

"I do not ask lightly," Whitlock said. "A woman died, Mr Grimm. A woman in Surrey, at a house called the Dower House, in circumstances that I believe are connected to the society that met here. I have been engaged, in a manner of speaking, to determine how she died."

"A woman," Grimm repeated. He lifted his glass and drank, the motion slow and deliberate. When he spoke again his voice had lost some of its edge and gained something that might have been sorrow. "There were always women. The society considered itself above the common frailties of the age, but it was as subject to them as any other gathering of ambitious men. Which woman?"

"Aurelia Vexley," Whitlock said.

Grimm set his glass down on the newel post with a care that suggested the post was the only thing keeping him upright. He did not sit. He did not speak. He looked at Whitlock as one looks at a messenger whose tidings are unwelcome but not unexpected.

"Come," Grimm said. "Upstairs. The fire is better there, and the walls have ears, but the upstairs walls are deaf. They were plastered by a man who took a dislike to conversation."

He turned and began the ascent, each step a small negotiation with gravity. Whitlock followed, his stick in hand, and behind them the barkeep emerged from the back and began silently to clear the grate and build up the fire with the efficiency of long practice.

The upstairs parlour was a smaller room than Whitlock had expected, low-ceilinged and warmed by a cast-iron stove that glowed a sullen red. The walls were hung with framed prints of cathedrals and a single large chart of the heavens that covered most of the chimney breast. The seven stars of the taproom sign were reproduced here, larger and clearer, and Whitlock saw for the first time that they were not a constellation at all but a diagram of positions, a map of something, arranged in a pattern that suggested both geometry and motion.

"Sit," Grimm said, lowering himself into a wing chair with the caution of a man who has learned not to trust his knees. "Tell me what you have found, and I will tell you what I can remember, which is less than it should be and more than I wish it were."

Whitlock sat. He drew the oilskin packet from his coat and laid it on the small table between them, but he did not unwrap it. Some objects, he had learned, were best revealed slowly.

"What I have found," Whitlock said, "is a single sheet of vellum, folded thrice, sealed with wax that bore a device I did not recognise. The seal has been broken, but I am told it was intact when the document was discovered. The sheet is covered in script, in an ink the colour of old blood, in a cipher I have spent three weeks attempting to break. The cipher is not a substitution cipher. It is not a transposition. It is, I believe, a constructed language, an entire grammar and lexicon devised to conceal a single message of, I would guess, no more than a paragraph in plain tongue."

Grimm nodded, slowly, as though each sentence confirmed something he had long suspected.

"The cipher," Whitlock continued, "has properties. It is self-referential. Each symbol modifies the meaning of those that follow it. It is, in short, a thing of considerable beauty and considerable danger. I have seen only one other document written in such a cipher, and that document was in the collection of a gentleman who died in the year eighteen ninety, under circumstances that were never satisfactorily explained."

"Vexley," Grimm said again. "Lord Vexley. Edmund Vexley, third of his name, a man of parts and a man of sorrows. He convened the society you have named about, and I was invited to join it, and I refused, and I have regretted that refusal and been grateful for it in equal measure for the remainder of my days."

"May I ask why you refused?"

Grimm was silent for a long moment. The stove ticked. Outside, a cart rattled past on the cobbles, and a child called to another child in a voice that seemed to belong to a different century.

"Because," Grimm said at last, "I had seen what such societies do to the men who join them. I had been a scholar at Cambridge, in a younger age, and I had watched men of brilliance consume themselves in the pursuit of mysteries that were not meant to be pursued. Vexley was a passionate man. He believed that there were truths hidden in the architecture of the world, truths that the great cathedrals had encoded in their geometry and the old printers had encoded in their devices. He wished to assemble a company of men capable of reading those truths and, if possible, of using them."

"Using them for what purpose?"

"That," Grimm said, "was never made clear to me. I was invited only to the periphery. I was to be the cipher man, the one who would construct and break the languages they needed. I declined the role because I suspected that the languages were not ends in themselves but means, and the means were not benign. I have lived long enough, Mr Whitlock, to recognise the scent of a man who is hunting something larger than himself. Vexley was such a man. He was also, I will say this for him, a man of honour in his private dealings. Whatever his public follies, he treated those who served him with consideration. He paid his debts. He remembered the names of his servants' children."

"And yet he convened a society that met in secret and dealt in ciphers that have persisted into the present day," Whitlock said.

"Precisely," Grimm replied. "Which is why I refused. And which is why I have spoken to you now, because you are the first person in thirty years to ask me the right question in the right room, and I am old enough to know that such alignments do not occur by accident."

Whitlock unwrapped the oilskin. The vellum within was pale and supple, and the ink upon it was indeed the colour of old blood, though whether from intention or age he could not say. He laid it on the table between them, and Grimm leaned forward in his chair, the better to see, and the firelight caught the silver of his hair and the deep lines of his brow.

Grimm did not touch the document. He studied it for a long minute, his lips moving without sound, his fingers tapping a rhythm against the arm of his chair.

"I know this hand," Grimm said at last. "I know this cipher. And I know, Mr Whitlock, that you have brought a very dangerous thing into a very small room, and that we have perhaps five minutes in which to decide what to do about it."

The oilskin crackled as Whitlock smoothed it flat against the grain of the table, and the room seemed to contract around the document, as though the fire itself were leaning in to see. Outside, the wind had risen, and the rain struck the windows in sudden sheets, drumming against the panes with a sound like impatient fingers. The lamp on the sideboard flickered, and for a moment the crimson cipher swam and reformed, its seven-pointed star seeming to turn slowly upon the vellum like the hand of a clock counting down.

Grimm's chair creaked as he shifted his weight. His hand moved to the breast pocket of his coat, paused, and withdrew a small object wrapped in chamois leather. He placed it upon the table with the deliberation of a man laying down a weapon, and when he folded back the leather, Whitlock saw a disc of polished hide no larger than a crown piece, its surface tooled with a design that made his breath catch in his throat: a seven-pointed star, identical in every particular to the one inked upon the vellum, but cut through with a central line that divided it into two unequal halves.

The old man ran his thumb across the etched surface, and his eyes grew distant, as though he were listening to a voice that spoke from very far away.

"I received this the morning after the fire," Grimm said. "It came with a letter, unsigned, instructing me to forget what I had witnessed the night before. The letter contained five hundred pounds in banknotes and a warning that I understood then and understand now to have been entirely sincere." He paused, and the rain filled the silence with its grey percussion. "I was thirty-four years old, Mr Whitlock. I was at the beginning of a career that promised everything a man of my temperament could desire. And I was offered a fortune, in an age when a fortune was a fortune, to look the other way."

Whitlock said nothing. He had learned long ago that the most important revelations came in the spaces between words, and that a witness given silence would often fill it with truths he had not intended to speak.

"I kept the disc," Grimm continued. "I have kept it all these years, though I have never shown it to another living soul. I told myself that it was evidence, that one day the law would require it, that justice would have its hour. But that was a lie I told to quiet my conscience. The truth is simpler and uglier: I kept it because I could not bear to let it go. It was proof that I had stood at the centre of something momentous and had chosen, for money, to walk away." He lifted the disc and held it to the lamplight, and the fire within the room seemed to catch in the etched lines. "You will observe that the star is divided. Two halves. The complete design comprises both, and the document upon your table shows but one. There is a companion piece, Mr Whitlock. Somewhere in this city, or perhaps beyond it, there exists a second vellum bearing the other half of the cipher, and without it, what you hold is incomplete."

Whitlock reached into his coat and withdrew a second oilskin packet, smaller than the first, which he laid beside the vellum without ceremony. The old man's eyes widened, and his lips parted, but no sound emerged. The packet bore no seal, and the oilskin was stained with something dark that might have been ink or might have been something older.

"I have not opened it," Whitlock said. "It came to me three days ago, enclosed with a note instructing me to bring both pieces to this address, at this hour, and to speak with the gentleman who would answer the door. I confess I expected something other than a man of letters nursing a glass of claret beside his hearth."

Grimm did not laugh. He reached for the second packet with a hand that trembled visibly, and then withdrew it, as though the oilskin burned.

"You have carried this through the streets of London," he said. "You have held it to your chest, where a passing thief might have cut your throat for the price of your coat. Do you understand what you have risked?"

"I understand that I am here," Whitlock replied. "And that whatever this is, it has cost more than one man his peace."

The old man set down his glass and rose from his chair with a creak of old joints and a grunt of effort. He crossed to the window and stood with his back to the room, watching the rain lash the glass, his breath fogging a small circle upon the pane. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, rougher, as though the confession had stripped some veneer from his throat.

"The night of the fire, I saw three men carry something from the house in a chest bound with iron. I saw Vexley himself standing in the road, directing them, his face blackened with soot, his hands shaking. I saw him take from his pocket an object wrapped in cloth, which he pressed into the hands of the tallest of the three, and I heard him say words that I have never repeated to another living soul until tonight." He turned from the window, and the lamplight caught the wetness in his eyes, though whether from age or emotion Whitlock could not determine. "He said: 'Take it to the seventh house, and hide it where the morning star cannot reach.'"

The words hung in the air between them, and the rain seemed to soften, as though the storm itself were listening.

"Seventh house," Whitlock repeated. "Seven stars. Seven points."

"Seven," Grimm confirmed. "A number that has haunted this affair from the beginning. There were seven members of the society that Vexley convened. Seven questions in the cipher you have brought me. And now, it appears, seven days remain before whatever was set in motion that night comes once more to its appointed end."

He returned to his chair and lowered himself into it with a sigh that seemed to come from the very marrow of his bones. He reached for his claret, found the glass empty, and set it down again with a precision that bordered on anger.

"I took the money," he continued. "I took it and I went home and I burned the letter and I told no one. The following week, I learned that a curator at the British Museum had died in what the newspapers called a tragic accident, and that his rooms had been searched, and that certain papers had been removed from his files under circumstances that the police declined to investigate. His name was Penhaligon, and he had been the first man Vexley had approached when he conceived his society of ciphers." Grimm's voice dropped to a whisper. "I tell you this so that you may understand the company you are now keeping, Mr Whitlock. These are not scholars. These are not antiquarians. These are men who have killed and who will kill again to protect what they have hidden."

Whitlock inclined his head, acknowledging the warning, but made no move toward the door. The vellum lay between them upon the table, its crimson ink seeming to pulse in the firelight, and the seven-pointed star at its centre appeared to watch them both with the patience of something that had waited a very long time to be understood.

"You have told me much, Dr Grimm," he said. "But you have not yet told me the one thing I came here to learn."

The old man's hand tightened upon the arm of his chair, and the leather of the coaster creaked beneath his grip.

"Then ask it," he said.

"You said that Vexley paid you to forget what you saw. You said also that he paid you a specific sum, and that the payment was accompanied by a warning. What you have not said is whether you were the only one he paid that night, or whether there were others who shared your fortune and your silence." Whitlock paused, and the fire popped in the grate, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. "How many men walked away from Vexley's fire with pockets full of money and consciences duly salved? And where are they now?"

Grimm was silent for a long moment. The rain had settled into a steady drumming upon the roof, and somewhere in the house a clock struck the half hour, its tone muffled by the storm. When the old man spoke again, his voice carried the weight of decades.

"Three," he said. "There were three of us. A curator. A solicitor. And a scholar of no particular distinction who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment." He touched the coaster upon the table, and his thumb traced the divided star. "The curator was Penhaligon, who is dead these twenty years and more. The solicitor was a man named Ashworth, who disappeared in the spring of that same year and was never seen again. And I am the third, the sole survivor, the keeper of a secret I have carried like a stone in my breast for longer than you have been alive."

He lifted the coaster and held it out to Whitlock, who took it with both hands, feeling the weight of it, the slight warmth where the old man's hand had rested.

"Take it," Grimm said. "Take both halves of the cipher and this disc, and go from this place, and do not return. Whatever you have stumbled into, it is larger than one antiquarian in a small shop, and it will not spare you as it spared me. I have bought my life with silence, and the price was everything I might otherwise have become." His voice caught, and he cleared his throat with a sound like tearing cloth. "Do not make my bargain, Mr Whitlock. Walk away. Burn the vellum. Forget the name of Aurelia Vexley. Forget the cipher. Forget that you ever set foot in this house."

Whitlock turned the coaster in his hands, feeling the etched lines beneath his fingers, and the firelight played across the divided star.

"I cannot do that," he said quietly. "And I suspect you know I cannot."

Grimm nodded, and something that might have been relief, or might have been sorrow, passed across his weathered features like the shadow of a cloud across a field.

"Then God help us both," he said. "And pray that whoever sent you that packet is an ally, and not the worst kind of enemy."

The lamp flickered again, and the rain redoubled its assault upon the windows, and somewhere in the darkness beyond the curtains, a carriage rattled past upon the wet cobbles, its lamps cutting brief swaths of gold through the night.

Whitlock stepped out into the rain, and the cold struck him like a hand across the face. He drew his collar up and turned his face into the wind, letting the weather scour away the staleness of the closed room, the dust and the lamp oil and the peculiar sadness that clung to old Grimm like the smell of a room where someone had been weeping for a very long time.

The coaster was in his breast pocket now, pressed against the folded vellum halves, and he could feel its edge against his ribs with every breath, a small hard certainty. The seven stars. The cipher. Aurelia Vexley's name, spoken aloud for the first time in years, perhaps, by a man who had been warned not to speak it.

He walked quickly, his boots splashing through the puddles that had gathered in the ruts of the lane, and the wind set the bare branches of the elms to creaking above his head like the timbers of a ship in a heavy sea. There was no moon. The clouds hung low and ragged, and the only light came from the distant scatter of lamps along the village street, each one haloed in its own small sphere of mist.

He was perhaps fifty yards from the gate when he saw her.

She stood at the upper window of the tavern, the one that overlooked the lane, her figure framed against the faint glow of a candle placed on the sill behind her. She was dressed in deep black, unrelieved black from the high collar at her throat to the veil that fell from her bonnet to her waist, and the rain had darkened the bombazine to the color of a raven's wing. Her gloves were black. Her face, what little he could see of it beneath the veil, was very pale.

She was watching him.

He stopped. The wind pushed at his back, and the rain ran down his collar and pooled in the hollows of his clavicles, but he did not move. He stood in the middle of the lane and looked up at her, and she looked down at him, and for a long moment neither of them stirred.

Then she raised one gloved hand and placed it against the glass, the fingers spread wide, and the gesture was so unexpectedly intimate, so much like a farewell or a warning or a benediction, that Whitlock felt the hair rise at the back of his neck.

He lifted his own hand, as if to wave or to acknowledge, and at the same moment he stepped forward, breaking into a run.

He reached the tavern door in seconds, shouldered it open, and plunged into the warmth and the tobacco smoke and the sudden, startling noise of a roomful of people. The taproom was not large. A fire crackled in the grate, and a dozen men sat at tables, some playing cards, some nursing tankards, all of them turning at once to stare at the wild-eyed man who had just burst in from the storm.

Whitlock ignored them. He crossed to the foot of the staircase in three strides and took the steps two at a time, his hand on the banister, his breath coming hard. The upper gallery was narrow and dim, lit by a single lamp set in a bracket on the wall, and there were four doors along it, two on each side. The floorboards creaked beneath his boots.

The first door was ajar. He pushed it open and found a small bedchamber, the bed made up, the counterpane smooth, no candle burning, no sign of occupation. The second was locked. The third opened onto a washroom, empty, the basin dry.

The fourth door was at the end of the gallery, and as he approached it he saw that it stood slightly open, the latch not quite engaged. He pushed it gently with his fingertips and the door swung inward on well-oiled hinges, silent.

The room beyond was dark. He could smell the faint perfume of lavender water, and beneath it the sharper scent of wet wool. The window was open, the curtain lifting and falling in the draft, and rain had spattered across the sill and onto the bare boards of the floor.

He went to the window and looked out. Below him was the stable yard, and across the yard the lane ran toward the church, and in the lane, moving away at a steady pace, was a closed carriage. There were no lamps lit upon it. The horses moved at a brisk walk, their hooves muffled in the mud, and as he watched, the carriage turned the corner by the lychgate and was gone.

She had given him just enough time to see her, and not enough to reach her. It was a deliberate calculation, and it chilled him.

He leaned his hands upon the sill and let his head drop between his shoulders, and the rain blew in and dampened his cuffs. He was aware, suddenly, of how tired he was. The journey, the revelations, the long night in the carriage, the encounter with Grimm, the woman at the window, all of it seemed to press down upon him at once, and he felt the weight of it in his limbs.

He straightened. He closed the window. He drew the curtain across it and stood for a moment in the dark room, listening to the rain, listening to the faint murmur of voices from the taproom below, listening to his own breath.

Then he turned and went back down the stairs.

The landlord was waiting for him at the foot, a broad man with a red face and a towel over his arm. His name was Bream, and Whitlock remembered him now from the earlier part of the evening, a man who had poured the port and taken Whitlock's coin without a word of conversation beyond the necessary.

"You were quick," Bream said, and his tone was carefully neutral. "The lady asked me to tell you that she will be in touch."

Whitlock stared at him. "She asked you to tell me."

"Yes, sir."

"When?"

"Just now, sir, while you were upstairs. She came down the back way and passed through the kitchen and out by the yard, and she stopped long enough to give me her message. A shilling for my trouble, and her compliments." Bream's expression did not change. "She said to tell you that the seventh star is not what you think it is, and that you should be very careful what you assume about Miss Vexley's intentions."

The taproom had grown quieter. The card players were watching over the tops of their hands, and the man with the pipe had lowered his paper. Whitlock became aware, with a prickling at the back of his skull, that he was being observed.

"Did she give a name?" he asked.

"No, sir. She did not."

"And you did not think to detain her."

Bream's eyes narrowed slightly. "It is not my place to detain guests of the inn, sir, particularly ladies in mourning who pay their shot and mind their own business. If you have a complaint, you may take it up with the magistrate in the morning." He paused, and then added, more quietly, "I would advise you to take no complaint at all, sir. That lady had the look of someone who does not wish to be found, and there is generally a reason for it."

Whitlock let out a long breath. He felt the coins in his pocket, the coaster against his ribs, the folded vellum halves in the breast pocket of his coat. He was a man who had come to a country inn to meet a stranger, and now he had two strangers on his hands, and a cipher, and the first warning that the cipher itself might be a trap.

"Have you a room?" he asked.

"The corner chamber, sir. Two beds. The fire is laid. I can have hot water sent up within the quarter hour."

"That will do."

Bream nodded, produced a key from his pocket, and handed it over without ceremony. Whitlock took it, and as he turned toward the stairs he caught the landlord's eye once more, and what he saw there was not hostility, but something closer to pity, as if Bream understood, at least in part, what kind of trouble had walked into his taproom that night.

He climbed the stairs again, more slowly this time, and let himself into the corner chamber. It was small but clean, with whitewashed walls and a pair of brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece and a fire that had been laid but not lit. He set the candle on the table and shrugged off his wet coat and hung it on a hook behind the door, and then he stood for a moment in his shirtsleeves, listening to the rain, listening to the silence.

He drew the vellum halves from his pocket and unfolded them on the table, side by side, and set the coaster beside them, and for a long while he simply looked at them, the seven stars of Aurelia Vexley's cipher, waiting to be read.

He thought of the woman in black. He thought of her gloved hand against the glass. He thought of her message, delivered through the medium of a country innkeeper: the seventh star is not what you think it is.

He thought of Tobias Grimm, alone in his empty house, with his fire going out and his port untasted and his silence purchased at a price he would never recover.

He thought of the packet that had arrived at his shop in Lombard Street, with no return address and no signature, and the phrase that had been waiting inside: I am the seventh star.

He sat down at the table, drew the candle closer, and reached for his pen.