By eight she had lifted the rose and the hair from the pillow and put them where she meant to keep them.
The hair went wound about a fingertip and pressed between two pages of her diary — the pages of household accounts, because those were the pages everyone skipped. The rose went into the back, near the cover, where the stiff binding would hold the stem flat without breaking it.
In daylight the rose was less mysterious and more deliberate. The petals had gone the color of old paper. The stem was firm enough that it had been carried through the house without shedding. Someone had kept this flower in a drawer or in a book for a great while, and then chosen this morning, and this pillow, and laid it down.
She wrote nothing down. To write it would make it evidence, and evidence belonged in a desk one could lock.
The breakfast room faced south. There was tea, and a single rasher of bacon kept too long in the pan, and Lord Halloway, who had already begun. He read nothing. His hands lay either side of his cup.
"Good morning, Miss Lane."
"Good morning, my lord."
"Mrs. Aldercott will conduct you through the house at ten. I shall be in the library at half past nine, but I do not need you before eleven. I prefer you should see where we are first."
"Thank you, my lord."
He had heard which chair she chose by the scrape of its legs. His face stayed turned a fraction away from her when she sat.
"How did you sleep."
"Wonderfully."
The answer came late from his side of the table. The pause was not theatrical. It was the pause of a man permitting a sentence to settle on the cloth. His hand went to his cup. The cup wanted no finding. He had set it where he had set it the day before, and the day before that, and the day before that.
"The east bedrooms are cold in November. There is more peat in the scuttle if you require it. Mrs. Aldercott does not always remember to send up."
"I shall remember to ask."
"Good." He drank. "If anything else disturbs you," he said, as though returning to a sentence he had begun two weeks ago, "you will tell me."
He gave it as a statement.
"Yes, my lord."
He inclined his head a fraction in her direction — the angle of a man aligning an ear, not a face — and went back to his breakfast.
Mrs. Aldercott appeared at the stroke of ten with the keys at her belt arranged differently from the night before. Two large iron ones had been moved from the right side to the left. Verity took note of the change. She had spent a year at Mrs. Marchmount's in the keeping of keys; one learned what was carried near the working hand and what was set out of the way.
"His lordship asks me to begin in the hall, miss."
"By all means."
The hall they had crossed in the dark. By day it was older than she had thought — the panelling Tudor, very dark, scarred at hip height by the cuts of two centuries of swords no longer in fashion. A long Turkey carpet ran down the center, much repaired. Mrs. Aldercott named the doors as they came to them: morning room (not used), library, dining room, his lordship's study (not to be entered without his being present), small parlor. The names came in the same flat voice she might have used for the dishes for dinner.
In the library Verity halted of her own accord. It was a longer room than she had expected — shelves to the ceiling on three walls. Two leather chairs faced one another across a low table, and on the table lay a stack of pasteboard folders tied with red tape.
"His lordship's papers, miss. For your work."
"Thank you."
"There is a smell," Mrs. Aldercott said, abruptly, in the voice in which one apologizes for the weather, "in this room. He keeps a cake of sandalwood in the desk, and a piece of bergamot peel besides. He says he cares little to read in a room that smells of ash."
Verity inclined her head. The question had not been hers to ask.
They moved on. The dining room. The small parlor where she had met him the night before. The morning room. At the head of the inner corridor Mrs. Aldercott paused, and Verity, who had been counting doors as they went, paused with her.
"The east corridor goes back to the kitchens, miss, and you'll have no cause to use it. The west corridor —" with a small economical movement of the hand towards the closed door at the far end, on the right — "is not our part."
"Not your part."
"Not ours, miss. There was a fire."
"I had heard."
"It was made safe. There is nothing to be seen there."
That was the sentence Verity considered afterwards. There is nothing to be seen there. It came not as the sentence of a woman embarrassed by destruction. It came as the sentence of a woman protecting a place she expected to be entered.
"I understand."
Mrs. Aldercott was already moving back the way they had come.
Pendlebury arrived at half past one — a tall thin man in a clergyman's coat, holding a Bible under one arm as a tradesman carries his ledger. He kept his hand to himself. He gave her a name — Vicar Pendlebury — and a look that began at her boots and finished above her hair. The look stayed within propriety. It was the look of a man who had decided in advance what she was and was now verifying his decision.
Lord Halloway received him in the small parlor. Verity, fetched from the library, was introduced and granted two sentences. The vicar had heard she had come from Lichfield. He hoped she would find the air of the moors agreeable. He then turned to Crispin and asked, with the carelessness of a man delivering a wound he had practiced, whether his lordship would be able to attend the Advent service.
"I will not, Pendlebury, thank you."
"Of course. I had thought to enquire."
"You enquire every year."
"I do."
Mrs. Aldercott came in with tea unbidden. Pendlebury rose before the tray was set down. He had remembered, he said, an appointment in the village. He gave his blessing — brief, the kind bestowed on a stranger met in a passage — and went.
Crispin had held his head still through all of it. When the front door closed Verity expected something — a tightening of the jaw, a small sigh. The room offered her neither. He picked up the conversation with her exactly where Pendlebury had broken it.
"You were at the third page, I believe. Begin again at the body was identified."
She read. The leather chair-arm gave cool against her wrist; the sandalwood Mrs. Aldercott had named lay on the air with the dry note of bergamot under it, and beneath both the faint mineral of paper kept too long.
His face did not change at body. His face did not change at identified. His face changed, slightly, in the second sentence — at the words the room had been hers a great while — and the change was not in the muscles but in the breath. He had been breathing in, and went on breathing in for a half-count longer than the sentence required, and let it out.
"Continue, please."
It occurred to her, finding her place again on the page, that the man who had read her at the breakfast table was the same man whom the vicar had refused to drink with, and that the second thing she could not abide.
She read until the light went thin against the windows. He stopped her at the close of the eighth page, told her she had read well, and went up to dress for dinner without his stick.
Before dinner she walked to the end of the corridor.
The door was oak, banded with iron, and the padlock that hung from its hasp was the size of her fist. She kept her hands at her sides. She measured it with her eyes. It was made to be seen, this lock — to be seen from a distance, so that anyone glancing along the corridor would know without thinking that the door beyond was out of use. The shackle was bright. The body of the lock had been oiled within the month. She had grown up around a solicitor's keys, and she knew what a lock looked like when it had been kept up.
It was not the lock of a wing closed against the dead.
It was the lock of a wing in service.
She turned and went back. At her own door she paused — to the empty corridor, to the silence of the house, to her own pulse, which had kept its quickness since the breakfast table. She turned the key for the second night.
Dinner came and went. He did not ask her again how she had slept.
She went up at ten. The grate had been built up. She undressed by it, brushed her hair, brushed it longer than she needed because the brush was a thing the hands could do without thinking. The diary lay closed on the bedside table. The hair was inside it, between the household accounts.
She still lay awake when the sound came.
It came through the inner wall — the wall against which her bed stood — and not from the corridor. It was muffled, because something had been held against it: a hand, perhaps, or the corner of a sheet, or the side of a pillow drawn up over the mouth. A single short cough. Then a second, fainter, as if the first had been a mistake the cougher was attempting to correct.
Then nothing.
She lay listening for the breath that would follow. No breath came that she could hear. Whoever was on the other side of the wall had remembered, after the first cough, that there was someone on this side.
The wall against which her bed stood was the inner wall. It faced neither corridor nor garden.
It faced the west wing.
Verity put her hand flat against the plaster. The plaster was cold. She left her hand there until the cold of it began to feel like nothing, and then lay back, and the diary on the table beside her kept the dark hair pressed between its pages like a thing one would keep for evidence if one were ever to need it.