The door groaned on rusted hinges, and Constable Bram Quigley filled the frame like a stone wall deciding whether to admit the cold.
He surveyed the room in one sweep, boots planted wide on the warped floorboards, thumbs hooked into his belt. His coat smelled of woodsmoke and damp wool. Behind him, two younger officers hovered at the threshold, uncertain whether the constable wanted them or not.
He did not look at the body.
"Which one of you rang for the constabulary?" His voice rasped, low and unhurried, the brogue thick enough to chew on. He directed the question at no one in particular, as though the ceiling might answer.
Renata Corwin stepped forward from the alcove where she had been standing, her silk mourning dress catching the grey morning light from the high window. She held a folded handkerchief in one hand and nothing in the other. Her face was composed, the kind of composure that had been practiced in rooms where showing surprise cost lives.
"I did, Constable. Renata Corwin. The deceased is my brother, Lord Aldric Corwin."
Bram Quigley grunted. He still did not look at the body. Instead, he tugged a battered notebook from his breast pocket, wet a stub of pencil with the tip of his tongue, and made a mark he would not be able to read later.
"Unattended death, then. No signs of struggle." He glanced at the door to the street, where a knot of servants had gathered. "Who found him?"
"The housekeeper, early this morning. She sent for me. I sent for you."
"Aye, you did." He scratched another mark. "And the solicitor's office, I suppose?"
Renata's expression did not change, but her knuckles whitened around the handkerchief. "The reading of the will is scheduled for noon today. Master Edgar Mulligan has prepared the documents. I see no reason to delay a legal matter on account of a death that, as you say, appears unattended."
Quigley's pencil stopped. He looked at her then, properly, for the first time. His eyes were small and set deep beneath a shelf of brow, the color of river water after a long rain. They held no particular warmth, but they were not unkind.
"You would have me declare the scene cleared before the bells ring nine, Miss Corwin."
"I would have you do your duty, Constable. Which is to record what is before you and allow the household to proceed with its affairs."
"And what is before me?"
He turned, finally, and walked the four paces to the bed.
Lord Aldric Corwin lay on his back beneath a single linen sheet, drawn from chin to floor. The sheet had been laid over him by someone who understood the geometry of dignity, tucked at the corners and smoothed across the chest. His hands were folded on his sternum, one over the other. His face was peaceful in the way that only the newly dead can manage, the muscles slack, the small tensions of living erased.
The constable stood over him for a long moment. The younger officers at the door shuffled and did not enter. Renata watched from her position by the window, the light at her back, her face unreadable.
"No marks on the throat," Quigley said, almost to himself. He did not touch the body, but leaned in, peering. "No bruising about the wrists. Fingernails clean. Sheet undisturbed. Either he died in his sleep like a man with a clear conscience, or someone has had time to tidy the room."
"My brother suffered from a weakness of the heart. The physicians in the capital have treated him for years."
"Aye. And physicians in the capital charge enough to make a man's heart weak for other reasons." Quigley closed his notebook with a snap. "When did you last see him alive?"
"Three days ago, when I arrived from the glass works. He was indisposed. I did not disturb him."
"And the household?"
"His valet, his cook, two footmen, the housekeeper. They have been in residence since autumn."
"The glass works. That would be the family concern, then. The one up on the ridge." Quigley's tone was carefully neutral. "I have heard it employs a great many folk."
"It does."
"And a great many folk do not love the crown as much as they might."
Renata's mouth thinned. "Constable, if you have business with the workers at the glass works, you may take it up with my solicitor after the will is read. My brother is dead. The succession must be settled before the realm can know who holds the title."
"There is no question of succession, Miss Corwin. Your father held the title before your brother. There is no other son."
"There is a question of the estate. The debts. The holdings. The works themselves." She paused, and something shifted in her voice, a crack no wider than a thread. "My brother was careful with his arrangements. I would not see them undone by delay."
Quigley studied her. He had the look of a man who had served in campaigns where women lied as fluently as men, and had learned to weigh the cost of pressing them. He tucked the notebook back into his coat.
"I will need to speak with the housekeeper. And the valet. And any other soul who passed through this corridor after dark."
"You may speak with them in the kitchen. Mrs. Tully will see that you have tea and whatever answers she can give. She is a plain woman, and not given to fancies."
"And you, Miss Corwin?"
"I will be at the solicitor's office, attending to my brother's wishes. You may find me there when you have finished."
Quigley's jaw worked. He was not accustomed to being directed by women in mourning silk, but he had not survived a dozen winters as a mercenary by picking fights he could not win. He grunted again, the sound of a man conceding ground without admitting defeat.
"The body remains here. I will send for the physician to certify the cause of death. Until that is done, the room is sealed."
"Of course."
"And Miss Corwin." He stopped at the door, one hand on the frame. "If there is anything you have not told me, you will wish you had told it now rather than later. Courts have long memories, and so do I."
"I have told you everything, Constable. My brother died in his bed. The will must be read. That is all."
Quigley held her gaze for a breath, then nodded to his men. They followed him down the corridor, their boots heavy on the boards, the sound fading like a drumbeat into the distance of the house.
Renata stood very still.
Then she crossed the room in three steps, knelt beside the bed, and pressed her palm flat against the sheet over her brother's chest. The linen was cool beneath her hand. She closed her eyes and stayed there, counting the beats of her own heart against the silence where his should have been.
When she rose, her face was dry and her hands were steady.
She smoothed the sheet where her knee had creased it, drew a long breath through her nose, and walked out into the corridor without looking back.
The will would be read at noon. Whatever her brother had left her, whatever debts he had hidden, whatever arrangements he had made in those final weeks of his life, she would know before the sun crossed the yard arm. And then she would decide what to tell the constable, and what to bury with the rest of her brother's secrets.
The solicitor's office waited.
The reading was held in the upper gallery of the solicitor's chambers, a long room paneled in dark oak and lit by tall windows that let in a grey, reluctant light. A portrait of some long-dead magistrate gazed down from the wall with the particular severity of a man who had never been confused with anything. The air smelled of ink, old paper, and the faintly sweet decay of the building's ancient joists.
Mara Vance stood near the window, her hands clasped behind her back. She had arrived early. She always arrived early to rooms where she did not know the other guests. It gave her time to choose her position, to watch the door, to decide who she would be before anyone else could decide it for her.
The solicitor, a man named Dorian who wore spectacles he did not need and a waistcoat of a green so deep it bordered on funereal, cleared his throat and invited them to be seated. The chairs were arranged in a half-circle facing his desk. Five chairs. Mara took the one at the far left, nearest the window, where the light fell across her shoulder and left her face in soft shadow.
The others filed in.
The first was a woman of perhaps sixty, broad-shouldered and windburned, with hands that looked as though they had spent forty years hauling rope. She wore a coat that had been good once, cut in the fashion of the shipwright guild, and she regarded the room with the sour patience of someone who had expected to be insulted and was merely waiting for the formality of it. Her name, when Dorian spoke it, was Judith Carnaby, and she was master of a small dry dock in the Lascar quarter. Shipwright. She sat heavily and said nothing.
The second was a man, younger, thin to the point of transparency, who moved as though sound itself might injure him. He carried a case of polished wood that Mara recognized as a violin case, though she could not have said how she knew. He sat in the chair nearest the solicitor, angled himself slightly away from the rest of them, and rested his long fingers on the case as though it were a sick child. Dorian named him Anselm Veil. Violinist. Reclusive, Dorian added, as though the fact required explanation.
The third was a girl. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen, with ink-stained fingers and the wide eyes of someone who had not slept. She wore a courier's satchel across her chest, the leather cracked at the buckle, and she looked around the room with the alert calculation of a creature that had learned young to count exits. Her name was Rose Talbot. Courier. She sat very upright and did not, Mara noticed, remove her gloves.
The fourth was the one Mara had come to see.
Silas March entered last, as though he had measured the exact moment at which his arrival would be most noticed and had timed his walk accordingly. He was a man of medium height, dressed in a coat of grey wool, his hair swept back from a face that was handsome in the way a well-sharpened blade was handsome, useful rather than ornamental. He moved into the room with a particular economy, as though he had calculated the precise number of steps required to cross the floor and would not waste a single one. His eyes found Mara immediately, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a way that did not quite qualify as a smile.
They had not spoken in eleven days. He had not been in the house the night her brother died. She had checked.
Dorian adjusted his spectacles. "Thank you all for coming. I will be brief, as the law requires, and then I will answer any questions you may have, though I warn you that many of the answers are not in my possession to give."
He opened a leather portfolio and drew out a single sheet of paper, thick and cream-colored, folded twice.
"The will of Lucian Corwin, late of this city, gentleman, executed in the presence of myself and two witnesses, dated the fourteenth of last month." He cleared his throat again. "There are, as many of you will have gathered, a number of bequests of a specific and, I confess, unusual nature. I will read them in order."
The room held its breath.
"To Judith Carnaby, shipwright, I bequeath the sum of two hundred crowns, and the contents of a certain strongbox held in my offices, marked with the letter J. The strongbox contains, among other things, a brass key of unusual design, a chart of the harbor drafted in a hand I do not recognize, and a single page of cipher. These items are given to her in trust, to be held until the game is finished."
Judith Carnaby's face did not change. She inclined her head a fraction. Her hands, resting on her knees, did not move.
"To Anselm Veil, musician, I bequeath the sum of two hundred crowns, and the contents of a certain strongbox held in my offices, marked with the letter A. The strongbox contains a tuning key, a piece of sheet music in an unknown notation, and a single page of cipher. These items are given to him in trust, to be held until the game is finished."
Anselm Veil closed his eyes. His fingers, on the violin case, went white at the knuckles.
"To Rose Talbot, courier, I bequeath the sum of two hundred crowns, and the contents of a certain strongbox held in my offices, marked with the letter R. The strongbox contains a sealed letter addressed to no one, a ring of iron, and a single page of cipher. These items are given to her in trust, to be held until the game is finished."
Rose Talbot's lips moved, counting. Her eyes flicked to Mara, and away.
"To Silas March, gentleman, I bequeath the sum of two hundred crowns, and the contents of a certain strongbox held in my offices, marked with the letter S. The strongbox contains a key of brass, a folded map of the lower city, and a single page of cipher. These items are given to him in trust, to be held until the game is finished."
Silas March inclined his head, the faint smile still in place, as though Lucian had bequeathed him a particularly decent cigar.
Dorian turned the page. There was a silence. He cleared his throat once more, longer this time.
"And to Mara Vance, spinster, of no fixed occupation, I bequeath the contents of my house at Blackwater Wharf, together with all that is contained therein, and all that is concealed therein, to do with as she sees fit, without condition, without trust, without oversight, from this day forward. And to her, also, I bequeath the game."
The room did not move.
"The game," Dorian repeated, as though the repetition might render the word less strange. It did not. "I am instructed by the testator to inform you that the game has already begun, and that the first move was made eleven days ago. I am further instructed to inform you that the terms of the game are contained within the strongboxes, one page of cipher to each beneficiary, and that no single page is sufficient. I am not, myself, in possession of any further information. I have not been made privy to the nature of the game, nor to its purpose, nor to its conclusion. I have been retained only to deliver the bequests and to certify the signatures."
He set down the page and removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a cloth that he produced from his sleeve.
"There is one additional clause," he said, and his voice had changed, had grown thinner, as though the words that followed cost him something. "I am directed to read it aloud, and I will do so, but I wish it to be noted that I counseled the testator against it and that he overruled me. The clause reads as follows: To any beneficiary who attempts to discover the nature of the game without first consulting with the others named herein, I leave my curse. To any beneficiary who attempts to destroy or conceal their portion of the cipher, I leave my curse. To any beneficiary who attempts to claim the whole of the inheritance for themselves, I leave my curse. The curse is not metaphorical. The testator assured me of this with particular emphasis, and I have chosen to take him at his word."
He put his spectacles back on.
"Are there any questions?"
Judith Carnaby rose. Her chair scraped against the floor, a sound like a clearing throat. "There are no questions," she said, in a tone that suggested there were many, and that she would ask none of them in this room. She gathered her coat around her shoulders and walked to the door. She did not look at any of them. The door closed behind her with a soft, definitive click.
Anselm Veil rose next. He lifted the violin case as though it weighed nothing, though it must have weighed several pounds, and he moved toward the door with the same careful economy with which he had entered. He paused at the threshold and turned, very slightly, toward Mara. He did not speak. Then he was gone.
Rose Talbot stood, shouldered her satchel, and hesitated. She looked at Mara, and this time she did not look away. She looked at her the way a courier looks at a person who has hired her, assessing the likelihood of being paid. Then she nodded, once, and slipped out of the room with a swiftness that suggested practice.
Silas March had not moved. He sat in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, his hands folded in his lap, watching Mara with the patience of a man who had nowhere else to be.
Dorian gathered his papers.
"I will have the strongboxes brought out," he said. "You may take yours now, if you wish, or you may send for them later. The inheritance is unconditional."
He left the room, closing the door behind him, and Mara and Silas were alone.
The grey light from the window fell between them like a sheet of water. Somewhere in the building, a clock ticked. Somewhere outside, a cart went over the cobbles with the particular indifference of a cart that had places to be.
Silas smiled.
"Well," he said. "He was always a theatrical bastard."
Mara did not smile back. "Where were you eleven days ago."
It was not a question. She had not made it a question.
Silas regarded her for a moment. Then he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped between them.
"I was in the lower city," he said. "I was meeting a man named Dobie who owes me money and who has been reluctant to pay it. I can give you the name of the tavern and the name of the serving girl who can confirm I was there from nine until past midnight. I have not lied to you about it, and I have not lied to anyone else about it either. I will tell you the same thing in front of a magistrate, in front of a priest, in front of the constable if he wishes to ask. I had nothing to do with your brother's death."
"And the game."
"I don't know what the game is." He spread his hands. "I know what Lucian was. I know the kind of man who leaves a curse in his will. I know he had been frightened of something for the last six months, and I know he would not tell me what it was. I know he paid me a great deal of money, over a period of years, to watch certain doors and not to ask what was behind them. That is what I know. That is all I know."
"Then why did he leave you a page of cipher."
"Because he trusted me to keep it, perhaps. Or because he wanted to be sure I would not look at it. Or because he wanted to bind me to the same mystery that he has bound all of you to, and he knew that the only way to do that was to give me a piece of it." He tilted his head. "You have not asked whether I intend to look at it."
"I don't need to ask. You already have."
He laughed. It was a short sound, not entirely pleasant. "Yes," he said. "I already have. I spent the better part of last night sitting at my desk with a magnifying glass and a pot of coffee and that single page, and I have deciphered exactly nothing. The cipher is not a cipher. It is a piece of a cipher. Without the others, it is merely an arrangement of marks upon a page."
"And you intend to gather them."
"I intend," he said, "to find out what your brother was afraid of. That is what I intend. I owed him a debt. I do not like to owe debts to dead men. They cannot be repaid, and they have a way of coming due at inconvenient moments."
He stood. He was shorter than she remembered, or perhaps she had simply been sitting straighter than usual. He crossed to the door and paused, one hand on the frame.
"Your brother was a careful man," he said, without turning. "He did not leave things to chance. If he has bound five strangers together in this manner, it is because he believed that no one of us could see the whole of it, and that all of us, together, might. Or it is because he believed that the game required five players. Or it is because he wished to be certain that, whatever happened to him, the game would not stop. I do not know which of those is true. I suspect you do not know either."
He opened the door.
"The strongboxes will be brought out in a moment. I suggest you take yours. I suggest, further, that you do not open it in the street." He glanced back at her over his shoulder. "I will be in touch, Miss Vance. I imagine we have much to discuss."
He went out. The door closed.
Mara sat alone in the grey light, with the portrait of the dead magistrate gazing down at her, and the clock ticking somewhere in the walls, and the faint and ineradicable smell of ink.
Mara sat alone in the grey light, with the portrait of the dead magistrate gazing down at her, and the clock ticking somewhere in the walls, and the faint and ineradicable smell of ink.
The silence in the room had a texture, a weight. She listened to the house settle around her, the way old houses do, with small complaints of wood and stone. Somewhere beneath the floor, a pipe groaned. A draft moved through the high chamber, stirring dust on the sill and lifting the edge of the sheet on the strongbox as if to wake it.
She did not move for a long while. The chair held her. The portrait watched. The clock measured out the seconds in a voice like a small hammer striking an anvil made of bone.
Then she stood. The movement was deliberate, ungraceful, the effort of a body that had been still too long. Her joints complained softly. She crossed to the writing desk, found a candle and a lucifer, and struck a light. The flame guttered, steadied, threw the room into a warmer and more forgiving shadow. In its glow, the magistrate's face lost some of its severity. He looked merely tired. He looked like a man who had outlived his usefulness to the world and knew it.
Mara turned to the strongbox. She lifted it onto the desk and sat before it the way one sits before a meal one is not certain one wants to eat. The lid resisted for a moment, then gave. Inside, nested in faded velvet, lay a single envelope. The paper was thick, cream-colored, expensive. The seal was plain. There was no name upon it.
She broke the seal. Inside was a single sheet of writing paper, covered on one side in her brother's cramped, slanting hand. She knew the hand before she knew the words. She had seen it on ledgers and on the backs of playing cards, on the margins of newspapers and once, memorably, on the inner wall of a cupboard where he had been hiding a bottle of plum brandy from their father. He had written in haste. The letters leaned against one another like tired soldiers.
The note read:
Mara,
If you are reading this, then I am dead, and you have come to the house, and you have opened the box. I am sorry for the manner of my dying. I am sorry for the manner of your finding out. I am sorry for the box itself. There is no elegant way to leave a person a letter and a puzzle, and I have tried.
There are four others. I will not tell you their names. You will discover them. I will tell you this: they are not strangers to me. They are not strangers to one another. We have met, at one time or another, in one place or another, around one table or another. We have done one another small kindnesses and small injuries. We have, between us, knowledge that is dangerous to certain parties who believe themselves to be the only holders of it. I am one of those parties. Now that I am gone, the others will begin to move.
The four will come to you, or you to them, in the order I have arranged, or in some other order that the world arranges. Trust your instincts about them. They are not perfect. Mine were not. But they are what we have.
There is a thing I learned, near the end, that I did not learn in time to use. It has to do with the founding of the court, and with a debt that was incurred and never paid, and with a man who is supposed to be dead and is not. I cannot write it here. I cannot write it anywhere that another might find it. If you find the others, and if you can make them trust you, and if you can make them trust one another, I believe that what I learned will become clear to all of you. I believe it was meant to be seen by five pairs of eyes.
I am sorry I did not tell you more while I was alive. I am sorry I did not come to see you. I am sorry for the years.
Your brother, Thomas
P.S. Burn this.
She read it twice. She read it a third time, more slowly, her lips moving over the words the way they had done when she was a child learning to read from primers he had bought her. When she had finished, she held the paper over the candle flame. It caught at the corner and burned brightly, a brief bright thing in the grey room, and then it was gone, and she was brushing the ashes into the empty strongbox, and the smell of burning paper joined the smell of ink.
The note had told her very little. It had told her everything she had suspected and confirmed nothing she had feared. It had told her that her brother had known he was going to die and had done nothing to prevent it. It had told her that there were four others. It had told her that something at the heart of the court was rotten, and that her brother had been one of the parties responsible for the rot. It had told her to burn the letter, and she had obeyed, because he had asked, and because there was nothing in it that could not have been inferred by anyone who had known him well enough.
She closed the strongbox and locked it again. She tucked the key into her pocket. She sat for a moment longer, listening to the house, listening to the rain, listening to the absence of her brother in every room she could not see.
Then she stood, and gathered her things, and went down the stairs, and out into the grey afternoon.
The rain had not ceased. It had thickened. The hansom that had brought her waited at the kerb, the cabbie hunched against the downpour in his oilskins, the horse steaming faintly beneath its blanket. Mara gave him the address of her lodgings in Bloomsbury and climbed in. The hansom lurched forward into the wet streets, and the city closed around her, and the house on Chandos Street receded into the rain as if it had never been.
She did not look back. She did not allow herself the indulgence. Looking back, she had found over the years, was a habit that produced more sorrow than information. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and the strongbox between her feet and watched the city pass.
The apothecary, when she arrived, was darker and damper than she remembered. The gas had not yet been lit. The shelves glimmered faintly in the light that came through the street door. Behind the counter, Petra Halloway looked up from a pestle and mortar and set down her work.
"You've come back," Petra said.
"I have come back," Mara said. "I have been to the house. I have spoken with the solicitor. I have opened the strongbox. I have read what my brother left me. I have burned it, as he asked."
"And?"
"And I am to be the lady of the manor, provisionally, for the space of one calendar year, at which point, if I have not perished in some suitably dramatic fashion, I shall inherit the family seat and the responsibility that goes with it. The responsibility being, I gather, the continued existence of the court, the welfare of its citizens, and the entertainment of its enemies."
"That is a great deal," Petra said.
"It is a great deal," Mara agreed.
"And the strongbox?"
"The strongbox contains a small sum of money, in notes of moderate denomination, and a signet ring that belonged to my father, and a key to a private safe-deposit at the Vintner's Bank on Lombard Street, the contents of which I have not yet ascertained. The key is on my person. The money I shall need. The ring I shall wear."
"And the letter?"
"The letter," Mara said, "is gone."
Petra nodded, slowly, as if she had expected this answer. She wiped her hands on her apron and came around the counter.
"There is tea," she said. "There is bread. There is a back room where no one will look for us for an hour. There are also two things I learned this morning, before you came, that I think you should know."
"Tell me," Mara said.
"The first," Petra said, "is that Aldous Crane has been to see the Glass King. This morning, at the hour you were sitting with him, he was admitted to the upper city by a private lift, and spent forty minutes in audience. He came out looking, by all accounts, like a man who has recently been told that his dinner is to be served cold. The Glass King, as far as anyone can determine, did not leave his chambers. He has not left them since the day of the funeral."
"Why would Crane visit the King?"
"That," Petra said, "is the second thing. There is a rumor, current as of last night, that the Glass King is dying. Not metaphorically. Not politically. Dying as a man dies, of a sickness that has taken him in the chest and will not release him. The physicians have said nothing. The court has said nothing. But the lower city knows, because the lower city always knows, and what it knows it tells to anyone who will listen for the price of a drink."
Mara was quiet for a moment.
"If the Glass King dies," she said, "what happens to the court?"
"There is an heir," Petra said. "There is always an heir. The King has a daughter, by a woman no one will name, who has been kept in the upper city since she was a child. She is twenty-two. She is said to be clever. She is said to be more cruel than her father. She is said to have been educated, in secret, by a man who was once tutor to the late Prince of Wales, which is to say she has been educated to rule and to mistrust."
"And Crane is positioning himself."
"Crane is positioning himself," Petra agreed. "He has been positioning himself for years. But if the King is dying, and if the daughter is to take the throne, then Crane must be certain of his welcome. He must be certain of his place. He must be certain, above all, that no one else can offer the daughter something he cannot."
"And my brother," Mara said. "What was my brother's place in this?"
"That," Petra said, "is the question."
She poured the tea. She set the cup before Mara. Mara wrapped her hands around it and let the warmth soak into her fingers, and she thought about her brother, and about the court, and about the four strangers who were now, somewhere in the city, beginning to move.
The rain went on falling.
She had a year.
She intended to use it well.