The Glass Witness: What The Servant Saw

The knocker on Mrs. Sole's door was a brass fist, green with verdigris, and it struck the oak three times before Reuben Calder heard footsteps shuffling within. Rain had come on at dusk and not relented, and the alley behind the boarding house ran with brown water that caught the lamplight from the nearest street. He kept his hat low, his collar turned up, and waited.

The door opened a crack. A chain held it firm. One eye, grey and shrewd, regarded him through the gap.

"Mrs. Sole?"

"Who's asking?"

"My name is Calder. I was told you might speak with me about Whitfield Manor."

The eye narrowed. Then the chain rattled free and the door swung inward, and Reuben found himself looking at a woman of perhaps sixty years, broad in the shoulders, flour still dusted across her apron, her iron-grey hair pinned beneath a cap that had seen better decades.

"You'd better come in, then," she said. "Mind the step. There's muck on it."

She led him not into a parlour but through a narrow passage, past a kitchen where a kettle sang on the hob, and into a back room that served as her office. A desk of dark walnut occupied the window, papers stacked in ordered heaps, a ledger open at the centre, ink dried on its page. The room smelled of lamp oil, lavender sachets, and the brine of the harbor three streets distant.

"Sit," she said, and gestured to a chair whose horsehair stuffing had long since surrendered. She remained standing, her hands folded at her waist, her posture that of a woman who had given orders to kitchen maids and dockmen alike and expected them obeyed.

Reuben sat. He removed his hat and laid it across his knee. He did not, for the moment, reach for his notebook.

"I've come about Tobias Whitfield," he said. "You worked the household some years."

"I worked that household nineteen years." Her voice was the slow, steady cadence of the West Country, each word given its proper weight. "Came in when the eldest boy was still in leading strings. Left when the mistress decided she had no more need of me. Which is to say, when money got too thin to pay a housekeeper proper."

"And when was that?"

"Eight months back. Near enough Michaelmas."

"What took you from the post?"

Her mouth thinned. "Ask the mistress. She'll have her reasons. Some of them may even be true."

Reuben let that pass. He watched her hands. They were still, but the knuckles were white.

"I'm not here about your leaving," he said. "I'm here about the night Mr. Tobias disappeared."

Something shifted in her face. Not surprise, precisely. More the careful rearrangement of features that had been set, for a moment, in openness.

"I heard," she said. "From a girl who keeps the tobacconist's shop on Church Lane. She said the river gave him up at Blackfriars."

"The river did."

"And you think I know something about how he came to be in it."

Reuben said nothing. He had learned, in his years on the constabulary and the leaner years that followed, that silence often extracted more than questions.

Mrs. Sole moved to the desk and lowered herself into her chair. She did not invite him to pour tea. She did not offer a biscuit. She looked at him the way a woman looks at a dog she has not yet decided whether to trust.

"I kept my own counsel when I was in that house," she said. "I kept it when I left. I see no reason to open my mouth now, for a man who comes knocking after dark with rain in his coat."

"Mrs. Sole."

"Mister Calder."

"I'm not here on behalf of any party you need fear. Not the mistress. Not the magistrate. Not the men who come up from the docks with questions best left unasked. I'm trying to find out what happened to a young man who, by every account I've gathered, did not deserve to end where he ended."

She regarded him. The lamp on the desk flickered once, twice, as a gust pressed at the window.

"What do you want from me?"

"I want to know what you saw on the night he disappeared. Whatever it was. Whether you think it matters or not."

A long breath left her. She reached for a cup of cold tea that sat at her elbow, considered it, set it down untasted.

"I didn't see Tobias Whitfield that night," she said. "I saw him earlier in the day. He came into the kitchen looking for bread and cheese, because the cook had gone home with the headache and no one had thought to set him a plate. I gave him what was to hand and sent him on his way. That was four in the afternoon, perhaps half past."

"You remember the time."

"I remember because the clock in the hall was striking, and I had just laid a fire in the morning room for the mistress. The hour and the quarter both."

"And after that?"

"After that I went about my work. I had a parlour to set to rights and a delivery of linens to check. The mistress dined in her room that evening. She often did, when the master was away on his ledgers. Tobias took his supper in the dining room alone, or so I believed, and I did not see him again."

"You left the house at what hour?"

"Nine. I always left at nine. The mistress gave me a latch-key these last years, but I never used it. I came and went by the front, like a proper servant."

"And the household when you left?"

"Tobias in the dining room, or so I thought. The master not returned. The mistress in her room. The girl who does for the kitchen gone home at six. No one else under the roof but a stray cat the cook had been feeding."

"Any visitors during the day?"

"One. A man came at three to see the master. He was shown into the study. I brought him tea and a glass of Madeira. He did not stay long. I did not hear what passed between them, because it was not my place to listen at doors."

"Could you describe him?"

Mrs. Sole was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Tall. A tall man, in a grey coat. Grey wool, good cloth, but cut in a style that was five years out of fashion. He had the look of a man who had been better off once and was not now. His boots were polished but the soles were worn through at the heel. I noticed because he stood on the mat to keep the mud off the parquet, and I saw the shine of the nails where the leather had parted."

"A tall man in a grey coat."

"Yes."

"Did you see him leave?"

"I did not. I was busy with the linens. But when I went past the study a half hour later, the door stood ajar and the master was not within. So the man had gone, one way or another."

"Through the front, or some other way?"

"I could not tell you."

Reuben let the silence gather. Rain struck the window in sudden gusts. Somewhere in the house above, a floorboard creaked under the weight of someone moving about their own business.

"You said you saw what happened the night Tobias disappeared," Reuben said at last. "You didn't say what you saw earlier in the day. But you did see something that night. Didn't you."

Mrs. Sole's hands tightened in her lap.

"I went back," she said. "After nine. I had forgotten a scarf my sister had lent me. I had worn it that day because the wind was cutting, and I meant to return it before she missed it. So I walked back from my lodgings, which is not ten minutes from the square, and I came around by the kitchen entrance because I did not wish to ring at the front and wake the mistress."

"And?"

"And I heard voices in the drive."

"Whose?"

"Tobias's, and another man's. I could not see them from where I stood, beneath the portico. The drive curves, you recall, with the laurels thick on either side. But I could hear them. They were not shouting, but there was heat in the words. I could not catch what was said."

"How long did this go on?"

"Two minutes, perhaps three. Then the other man spoke louder, and I heard him say a name, and I heard Tobias say, 'You have no right to come here.' And then footsteps, walking off down the drive toward the gate."

"Toward the gate?"

"Yes. Quick footsteps. The stride of a tall man."

"And Tobias?"

"Silence. I waited, perhaps a minute, in case he came round to the kitchen door. He did not. I thought perhaps he had gone inside by the front. I did not go round to see. I had forgotten, by then, about the scarf. I went home."

"How dark was it?"

"Dark. The lamp at the gate was not lit, and there was no moon. I could not have told you the colour of the man's coat if I had seen him. I only knew there was a tall man there, and that Tobias did not want him there."

"Did you tell anyone?"

"No."

"Why not?"

She was quiet for long enough that Reuben thought she might not answer at all.

"Because the mistress had told me, the week before, that the master was expecting a visitor. A man of business who had once been close to the family. She had said it in passing, as one might say the butcher had called. And I knew, without being told, that the mistress did not wish for anyone to know who had come and gone. She had that look about her."

"What look is that?"

"The look of a woman arranging the furniture in a room so that no one will see what lies beneath the carpet."

Reuben drew a breath. He kept his face still.

"Mrs. Sole. The man you heard that night. Did his voice strike you as the voice of the man who had called in the afternoon?"

She considered. "It might have. I cannot say. He spoke only a few words, and the wind was up. But the way he spoke, with the lift at the end of certain words, the way a man speaks when he has been to school and cannot help it, that sounded the same."

"And the accent?"

"English. A particular sort of English. Not the sort one hears at the docks. The sort one hears in the counting houses and the better parlours."

Reuben nodded. He let his hand rest for a moment on the closed notebook in his pocket, then drew it out, and set it on the desk.

"I want to write down what you've told me," he said. "In your own words, if you'll allow it. But before I do, I must ask you something directly, and I would have you answer me as truthfully as you have answered everything else."

Her chin came up a fraction.

"Did you see Tobias Whitfield alive after that moment in the drive?"

"No," she said. "I did not."

"And you have not, to this day, spoken of this to anyone."

"No."

"Not to your sister. Not to a priest. Not to a friend over a glass of something at the end of a long day."

"No."

"Why?"

She was silent. Then she said, slowly, "Because I knew what the mistress would do if I did. And I knew what the master was capable of, in his quieter way. And I thought, if I kept my counsel, perhaps Tobias would come back. Boys do foolish things and come back. I thought he had gone off with the man, for whatever reason. I thought he would turn up by morning with some story about drink or a woman, and that would be the end of it."

"And when he did not?"

"Then I wished I had spoken. And then it was too late to speak, because the river had him, and the constables had come and gone, and the mistress had given out that he had wandered off in drink and fallen in. And what could I say, after that, that would not bring the whole house down about my ears?"

Reuben regarded her. He thought of the long years she had spent in that house, the fires she had laid, the linens she had checked, the boy she had fed cheese at four o'clock on the afternoon of his last day.

"You've carried this some time," he said.

"Yes."

"It has not been easy."

"No."

He opened the notebook. He uncapped the ink. He looked at her across the desk.

"I'll need to put down your name," he said. "When I speak to the mistress, and I must speak to her, she will know it came from you."

Mrs. Sole's hands, which had been folded, now opened and lay flat upon the desk. She looked at them as if she had not seen them before.

"Let her know, then," she said. "I am tired of carrying it."

The quill touched the paper and Reuben wrote her name in his careful clerk's hand: Petrena Sole, of number fourteen Ropewalk. He wrote the date. He wrote the words at her dictation, though they came out thin and crooked and she had to stop twice to find her breath.

When it was done, he blotted the page and set it aside to dry.

"Stay here tonight," he said. "I'll send word to the mistress in the morning, and I'll come back for you when it's time to face her."

"She will turn me off without a reference."

"Then I'll find you another position."

Mrs. Sole looked at him then, and for the first time her face was not arranged in apology. Something shifted behind her eyes, and her mouth drew into a line that was almost, if you knew where to look, the ghost of a smile.

"You're a decent man, Mr. Calder," she said. "For the sort of work you do."

It was, Reuben thought as he walked back down Ropewalk in the fine evening drizzle, the most equivocal compliment he had ever been paid.

The fog had come up off the river with the dusk, and the lamps along the quay burned in their own small haloes, each one cut off from its neighbour by a yard or two of murk. The cobbles were slick underfoot. Somewhere a bargee was calling to his lad, and the words were lost almost as soon as they were spoken, eaten by the air.

His rooms were above a cutler's shop on Fenwick Street. He climbed the stairs with the particular heaviness of a man who has heard more than he wanted to hear that day, and he let himself in, and he hung his coat on the peg behind the door, and he stood for a moment in the dark of his own hallway with the reek of lamp oil and boiled mutton in his nose.

He had not eaten since noon.

He lit the gas. He set the kettle on the ring. He took from his waistcoat pocket the folded paper that was the copy he had made of Mrs. Sole's statement, and he laid it on the desk beside the blotter, and he stood looking at it for some time as the kettle began to tick and sing.

There was, he thought, the matter of the mistress.

There was also the matter of the boy.

And there was, behind both, the matter of the man Adelaide Whitfield had taken up with after her husband's disgrace, whose name he had not yet learned and whose face he had not yet seen, and who had, according to Mrs. Sole, been a presence in the house on the afternoon Tobias had vanished.

He wrote three names at the top of a clean sheet of foolscap. The mistress. The man. The boy. He drew lines between them in the manner of a constable constructing a chart, though he was no longer a constable and had not been for seven years.

He sat down. He ate bread and cheese and drank his tea. He read his notes over twice, and then he went to bed, and he slept the uneasy sleep of a man whose thoughts have no proper shape to them yet.

In the morning he would go to Whitfield Manor. In the morning he would sit across the desk from Adelaide Whitfield and he would tell her what her servant had told him, and he would watch her face to see what broke there.

He did not look forward to it. He had never enjoyed the telling. The part of him that had been a good inspector had always been the part that liked the chase; the part that sat in rooms with women whose children had not come home was a part he had had to learn to be, and he had never grown to like the taste of it.

He blew out the gas. He pulled the blanket up. He closed his eyes, and behind them for a while he saw Tobias Whitfield's face as he had last seen it drawn in chalk, the lad of fifteen with the soft mouth and the clever eyes, and he thought, without quite meaning to, of his own boy, who was eleven and asleep at this hour in a room above a milliner's in Halifax, and who did not know his father was mixed up in any of this.

Then he slept, and there were no dreams he could recall in the morning.

He rose at six. He shaved with a cutthroat that needed setting. He dressed in his second-best suit, which was the one he kept for telling people the worst things, because the worst things ought not to be told in shabby clothes. He drank tea and ate a hard biscuit and he was out of the door and on his way to the omnibus stop by quarter past.

The omnibus was late. The morning was grey and close, with a low sky that pressed down on the chimneys and a smell of soot in the air that had nothing good in it. He sat in the upper deck and looked out at the town sliding past, the shopgirls and the clerks and the beggars and the busies, all of them bent on their own errands, and he thought how strange it was that to every one of them his errand that morning would have seemed the worst possible errand in the world, and yet there he was, on his way to do it, with his notebook in his pocket and his second-best trousers on.

At the stop for Whitfield Lane he descended. The lane ran up from the river, cobbled and bordered with wet laurels, and at its head the Manor sat in its walled garden like a ship at anchor in a green sea. The gate was wrought iron. The porter's lodge was shut up. He lifted the latch and let himself in.

The house, when he came to the door, looked exactly as a house ought to look that has buried two of its people and not yet decided what to do with the third. The brass was dull. The step had not been swept. A shutter hung at an angle on the first floor, and the creepers had been left to grow wherever they wished.

He knocked. He waited. The door was opened at length by a housemaid he did not know, a thin girl with a scrubbed look and the air of one who would rather have been elsewhere.

"Mr. Calder," he said. "I wrote yesterday. I am expected."

"Yes, sir." She stepped back. "The mistress is in the study. I'll show you."

He followed her down the passage. The carpet was threadbare. The portraits on the wall, of Whitfields dead and gone, looked down at him with the same mild, expectant expression that portraits have, which is to say no expression at all.

The study door was open. The mistress was at her desk. She had not been doing anything when he came in; she had been sitting with her hands folded on the leather top, looking at the empty fireplace.

"Mr. Calder," she said, without rising. "Sit down."

He sat. He took out his notebook. He laid it on his knee.

"Mrs. Whitfield," he said. "I have spoken with the woman Petrena Sole."

"Yes."

"I must tell you what she told me."

"Yes."

He told her.

He told it slowly and in plain words, the way his old sergeant had taught him to tell a thing, when he was a young constable on the beat in the north and the sergeant had said to him: lad, never dress it up, never pretty it, give them the words and let the words do their own work.

He told her that Mrs. Sole had seen Tobias go out with a man she did not know. He told her that Mrs. Sole had kept her counsel. He told her that Mrs. Sole had carried the knowledge for ten years, and that she was sorry for it, and that she was tired of carrying it.

He did not tell her, because he did not yet know, whether the man was the man Adelaide had taken up with. He watched her face.

She did not move while he spoke. Her hands remained folded. Her eyes did not leave his. The only change in her, as he told it, was a slow drawing-in of the breath at the nostrils, the way a horse draws in its breath when it smells something it does not care for.

When he had done, she sat for a long moment without speaking. Then she said:

"She should have spoken at the time."

"Yes."

"She did not."

"No."

"And you believe her."

"I believe she saw what she says she saw."

"But you do not know who the man was."

"No. Not yet."

The mistress's gaze went past him, to the window, and for a moment she was elsewhere. When she came back, her voice had changed, and was lower, and was a voice he had not heard from her before.

"Mr. Calder," she said. "There is something I must show you."

She rose from the desk. She went to the far wall, where a long bookcase ran floor to ceiling, full of ledgers and account books in cracked bindings. She pressed, with her thumb, a place on the shelf that Reuben could not make out from where he sat, and a panel in the wainscot behind the bookcase sprang open with a small dry click.

She drew out a small iron safe, the size of a biscuit tin, and set it on the desk.

"Ten years ago," she said, "my husband kept certain papers in this safe. Private papers. Papers concerning his business. Papers I was not supposed to see."

She produced a key from a chain about her neck and fitted it to the lock.

"When he died, I came to see what he had left behind. There were papers then. There were letters. There were documents I did not at first understand."

She turned the key.

The lid came up with a small complaint of hinges.

She looked into the safe and her face changed.

"It has been opened," she said. Her voice was very still. "It has been opened since I last looked."

She turned the safe so that he could see.

It was empty. There was a darkening at the bottom, where dust had lain and had been disturbed, and at one corner a single scrap of paper had escaped whoever had cleaned it out.

"Someone has been here," she said.

Reuben took out his handkerchief. He took the scrap from the safe with the handkerchief, so as not to add his own prints to whatever might be on it, and he laid it on the desk.

It was a torn half of a photograph. The other half was gone. What remained showed two men in dark coats standing on a wharf, and between them, on a crate of goods, their hands clasped in the formal grip of a business agreement. The hands were the centre of the picture. The faces were cropped, one of them entirely, the other from the brow down, so that all that remained of one man was the peak of a nose and a moustache.

"The dockyard," the mistress said, in a voice that was barely a voice at all.

"Yes," said Reuben.

"That crate is one of my husband's crates. I would know his mark anywhere."

She looked at him.

"Mr. Calder," she said. "My husband did not die of his heart. He died because he knew something. And now someone has been into this house and has taken from me the only proof of what he knew."

She drew a breath.

"Find them," she said. "Find them before they find me."

The shutter banged somewhere overhead. The morning pressed at the windows. Reuben looked at the torn photograph, and at the safe, and at the mistress, and he thought, with the cold clarity that had once made him a good inspector and had since made him a tolerable private man, that he was in it now, properly in it, and that there would be no clean way out.

He wrote the date at the top of the page. He drew a box around the photograph. He wrote beneath it, in his careful hand: two men, dockyard, crate, hands. He did not yet write their names, because he did not yet know their names.

He looked up at the mistress.

"Tell me," he said, "about the man you knew, after your husband died."

Her face closed.

"That," she said, "is a matter I had hoped not to discuss."

"I am afraid," said Reuben, "that you must."

The mistress was silent for a long time. Reuben let the silence stand. He had learned, in his years at the constabulary and his years after, that the most useful thing a man could do with another person's grief was to give it room. He waited, and the morning bird sang, and somewhere outside a cart wheel complained against a rut in the lane, and still she did not speak.

Then she spoke.

"There was a man," she said. "He came to the house the morning after the funeral. He wore black, as was proper. He brought a letter from the harbormaster's office, certifying that the body was disposed of according to the regulations. He was very civil. He asked if there was anything he could do."

She paused. Her fingers found the torn photograph on the desk and turned it so that the cropped faces were toward her.

"I was alone in the house," she said. "My husband's people had gone. My own people had never been numerous. I had no son. I had no brother who would have been any use. I had a house full of furniture I could not sell and a ledger full of debts I could not pay and a name that was already beginning to stink in certain quarters. And this man came, and he was civil, and he offered to help."

She looked up.

"His name," she said, "is Halden Voss."

Reuben wrote the name. He did not look up.

"And what did Mr. Voss do," he said, "to help?"

"He took over the winding up of my husband's affairs. He had been my husband's confidential man for some years. He knew the ledgers. He knew the correspondents. He knew which of the ships were owed what and which of the debts were real and which were the imaginings of men who had been overcharged at the warehouse. He settled a great many things. He settled them quickly. He settled them quietly."

"And in return?"

The mistress met his eyes.

"In return," she said, "he asked for nothing. He said it was a matter of honour. He said my husband had been a good friend to him. He said the least he could do was to see the affairs closed without scandal."

Reuben considered this. The bird sang again. The shutter banged.

"And you believed him," he said. It was not a question.

"I believed him because I wanted to believe him. I believed him because I was tired. I believed him because I was alone, and he was the only man in the world who seemed to know what my husband had been about, and I was afraid that if I sent him away I would never understand any of it."

The mistress drew a breath.

"I was a fool," she said. "I see that now. I was a fool, and he used me, and he has taken from me the only proof I had that my husband was not the man the city has been pleased to call him."

Reuben looked at her.

"The photograph," he said.

"Yes."

"Tell me what you know of the photograph."

"I know it was taken in the dockyard in the spring of last year. I know my husband is in it. I know the other man is in it. I know that the other man is the man who killed my husband, or who paid to have him killed, or who knew that he was to be killed and did not prevent it. I know that my husband kept that photograph in his safe because it was the only thing that could save him if the worst came to pass. I know that the photograph is gone. And I know that the man who took it from this house is the same man who has been bleeding my accounts for the past seven months."

She paused.

"That," she said, "is what I know."

Reuben sat back. He looked at the safe, and at the desk, and at the window where the light was growing stronger.

"Mrs. Whitfield," he said, "I must ask you a question, and I would like you to answer it without thinking."

"Very well."

"Has Mr. Voss ever had a key to this house?"

The mistress looked at him. Her face did not change. Her eyes did not change. But something in the set of her shoulders changed, very slightly, the way the set of a wall changes when the mortar behind it begins to crack.

"He has," she said, "had a key to this house."

Reuben nodded.

"When," he said, "did you last see him?"

"Three days ago."

"And the lock on your study door?"

"I changed it," she said, "the morning after I engaged you. I sent the boy to the ironmonger. I told no one. I was at home the whole day. I saw no one come. I heard no one go."

"Could he have come while you slept?"

The mistress considered.

"He could have come," she said, "if he had the skill. But he would have had to climb. The ground floor was barred. The first floor windows were latched. The only way in, if he did not have the new key, was over the roof of the scullery and in through the garret."

Reuben thought of the empty bottle at the base of the ladder. He thought of the footmarks in the soot. He thought of the position of the garret window relative to the scullery roof.

"Could he have done it?" he said.

"Halden Voss," said the mistress, "was, in his younger days, a ship's officer. He has been in worse places than my scullery roof."

Reuben stood. He walked to the window and looked out at the lane. A boy was leading a donkey toward the gate. A woman in a shawl was crossing toward the village. A man on a bay horse was riding away, fast, toward the turn in the road.

Reuben turned back to the mistress.

"Mrs. Whitfield," he said. "I would like to send a man to sit in this house tonight. I would like him to sit in the garret. I would like him to watch the scullery roof. And I would like you to go to your sister's house in the country, by the afternoon coach, and to stay there until I send for you."

The mistress looked at him.

"You think he will come again," she said.

"I think," said Reuben, "that the photograph was the last thing he needed. I think he has it now. I think he will want to be sure, before he burns it, that there is not another. And I think he will come again, very soon, to look."

The mistress was silent for a moment.

"Very well," she said. "I will go to my sister's. But I will not go until you tell me what you have found. I will not go blind."

Reuben considered.

"Very well," he said.

He sat down again. He took out his pocket book. He opened it to the page on which he had drawn his diagram of the morning's work. He smoothed it flat upon the desk.

"Mrs. Whitfield," he said. "I am going to tell you what I know, and what I do not know. I am going to tell you what I have done, and what I intend to do. And then I am going to ask you a question, and I am going to ask you to answer it truthfully, even if the answer shames you."

The mistress inclined her head.

"Tell me," she said.

Reuben told her.

He told her of the man in the wool warehouse, and of the entry in the ledger, and of the locket, and of the ferry manifest, and of the cipher, and of the defunct shipping registry, and of the numbered safety deposit box in the vaults of the Merchant's Trust Company in the city. He told her of the key that he had not yet used, and of the photograph that had been taken from her safe, and of the bottle and the footmarks and the garret window. He told her of Mr. Halden Voss, and of Mr. Pell the night watchman, and of the conversation he had overheard in the booth of the public house. He told her all of it, in order, without ornament.

When he had done, the mistress sat very still.

"The safety deposit box," she said.

"Yes."

"You have not opened it."

"No."

"And you think it contains the proof."

"I think," said Reuben, "that it contains something. I do not know what. I will not know, until I open it, whether it will be of any use to you. But I think it is what your husband meant you to have. And I think Mr. Voss does not yet know of it."

The mistress considered.

"Go," she said. "Open it. Bring me what you find. And then go and find Mr. Voss."

Reuben stood.

"I will go this morning," he said. "I will open the box this afternoon. I will bring you what I find, tonight, if I can, or tomorrow morning, by the early coach. And then I will go and find Mr. Voss."

"And if he will not be found?"

"Then I will find him," said Reuben. "I have not yet failed to find a man who wanted to be lost. And Mr. Voss," he added, "is not yet a man who has learned to want to be lost."

The mistress looked at him. Something in her face softened, very slightly, and then hardened again.

"Mr. Calder," she said. "You are a peculiar man."

"I have been told so," said Reuben.

He tucked the locket into his breast pocket. He tucked the cipher into his waistcoat. He left the torn photograph upon the desk, where the mistress could see it.

"Mrs. Whitfield," he said. "Go and pack. Take the afternoon coach. And do not open the door to anyone, for any reason, until I send for you."

The mistress inclined her head.

"Mr. Calder," she said. "Find him."

Reuben went out of the study, and out of the house, and down the lane to the stile. The morning was bright. The air smelt of wet grass and woodsmoke. He crossed the stile, and walked up the hill, and at the top of the hill he stopped, and looked back at the manor, and saw the mistress standing at the window of her study, looking out at him, and he raised his hand, and she did not raise hers, and he walked on toward the city.

He had a key in his pocket, and a cipher in his waistcoat, and a morning's work behind him, and an afternoon's work ahead, and a man to find before the man found him. The lane stretched before him, white in the morning light, and the birds sang, and the cart wheels complained in the distance, and Reuben Calder walked on, toward the city, toward the vault, toward whatever it was that Mr. Whitfield had left his wife in his keeping.