By half past seven Mowbray had laid the contract on the sideboard of the breakfast room, and I had read it twice before Edmund came down.
It ran to four pages of consultancy boilerplate and one short clause that did the actual work. Halfway down the third page, between the indemnity language and the routine confidentiality, was a sentence I read again on the second pass: any personal involvement with the patient sufficient, in the firm's estimation, to compromise the objectivity of the medical opinion shall void this agreement and any payment associated therewith. The sentence was the firm's standard. It was also the only one of the four pages with anything to defend.
Mowbray uncapped a fountain pen and held it out without comment. The clause came without invitation to question it; he appeared to expect none from me.
"It's customary," he said, when I had taken the pen and was reading the line for a third time. "Particularly for prolonged residencies."
"How prolonged is mine."
"Through the hearing. Nine days now."
I signed. He counter-signed without sitting down. The pen went back into his inner pocket and the contract into the briefcase, which closed with a single dry click of brass.
"I leave tomorrow on the boat," he said. "The forecast tightens past then. Three days at minimum, possibly five. If anything in your work changes the picture materially before that, telephone me from Mr. Blackwood's study. The line goes through to chambers."
I told him I would. He took my answer at face value, which was, on consideration, a particular failure of imagination on his part — the kind a clever solicitor accumulates without knowing — and I did not correct it.
Edmund came down at eight, in the same waistcoat as yesterday or one identical to it, and he greeted me with the comfortable surprise of a man who had decided in advance to be surprised. He had Pembroke bring up a fresh pot. He spread butter on toast in the small competent way of a man who had been spreading butter on toast in this room for sixty years.
"You'll have heard the family is supposed to be cursed."
"In Edinburgh. Twice."
"It's the line the boatmen run when they're trying to pad the fare." He smiled. "There was a Mortimer Blackwood in the eighteen-eighties who turned this house into a private asylum for five years. Thirty patients, all genteel, all paying. Several died — at the rate one would expect. The locals reckoned he'd been driven to it by the family malady, and the malady acquired its name from him, retrospectively. I confess I find the chronology touching."
"Touching."
"We invented our own curse to explain a thing that had not happened yet." He said it as a small private joke he was sharing with himself first and me second. "By the time the deaths in the family started keeping pace with the legend, the legend was already older than the deaths. I've lost a brother and a father and a nephew to it, and each of them was given, in their own paperwork, a name that was close enough that no one pressed."
I asked him only what I needed to ask: whether anyone in the immediate generation had ever been formally diagnosed with hereditary psychosis. He said no. He added, with the same warm self-amusement, that he had had himself evaluated. Twice.
"The second time I asked them to do it twice," he said. "They were very kind. They told me I was the most boring man in the Hebrides. I keep the report in the drawer when I want to feel young."
The toast had cooled. He pushed the rack toward me. The pot followed. He asked whether I would prefer to see Nathaniel in the small drawing room again, or in his bedroom, where the light was better. I said the small drawing room. He nodded as if he had wanted me to say that.
Nathaniel was waiting. He stood when I came in, the second time he had stood for me in twenty-four hours, and the difference between the two standings was the only differential I needed to log before I opened the kit.
Yesterday his standing had been a movement at a distance from himself, accomplished after the fact. Today he stood the way a man stands when he has decided to stand. He shook my hand. He asked me to sit. He apologized for the abruptness yesterday and did not labor the apology.
I took him through the differential. The standard list. Sleep — fragmentary, three to four hours, broken by dreams he could describe but not narrate, which is to say he had the texture of them but not the plot. Tremor — left hand, intermittent, present yesterday, absent now, returns by evening. Auditory phenomena — yes, he said, the way you say yes to a question you have been turning over alone for some months. Footsteps in rooms above his when there were no rooms above his. Voices in the hall when he could see along the hall and there was no one. The phenomena, he said, were stable. They had not progressed. He found this a useful piece of information.
I wrote.
The vocabulary he had brought to his own symptoms was a clinician's vocabulary, used cleanly. Stable. Phenomena. Progressed. He had taught himself my register and was speaking it back to me without the usual self-consciousness of patients who do.
I asked him to perform the line task. He did. The line was cleaner than the line a man with last night's tremor would have drawn. It was, in fact, cleaner than mine would have been on a good morning.
The kit came out of its case. A fresh sample was not needed — yesterday's slide sat sealed in its protected pocket, and the slide and I had work to do that he was not invited to. The kit came out anyway, because the kit coming out was part of the visit, and I laid each piece in its place — tubes, tourniquet, vials, the small dark bottle on the corner of the side table because that was where it went.
He looked at it.
He had been watching my hands, which is what patients do, but the bottle entered his field and his eye stopped on it the briefest fraction longer than the other items had stopped him. Then his eye moved on, smoothly, to the tourniquet, in the manner of someone who had practiced the motion in advance.
His pulse went in place of his blood. The question about pain came next, and he said there was none worth naming. The kit closed.
"I've had enough of you for the morning, Mr. Blackwood."
"Tomorrow, then." He did not smile, which was the closest he had come to smiling. "I'm worse in the afternoons. Take advantage."
Edmund was waiting for me in the hall with a wool coat over his arm, which he held out as if helping me into the day. "You should see the house. I've kept you in two rooms."
He named every room as we passed it. At each name he gave me a small private fact — which great-aunt had hated which window, which tutor had been dismissed for which improper book. The house resolved into a structure of remembered slights, each one fond.
The orangery sat at the southern end of the east wing, attached by a glassed walk. He led me to it last. The temperature climbed by ten degrees in two paces. The air was wet, green, heavy with the particular medical resin of plants kept in collection rather than in climate. He named them as he had named the rooms. Aconitum napellus. Euphorbia. Nerium oleander. Ricinus. He called the collection his great-grandfather's hobby, with the same fondness, only this time the fondness was partly his own.
"Toxicology must find this room amusing."
"I find it competent."
"Competent." He repeated the word with pleasure. "Yes. The old man kept everything that would kill you and nothing that wouldn't. There was a moral about it, I think."
I walked the length of the central path. The aconite was in flower along the eastern wall, deep blue, late for the season. The spurge in pots. The oleander above the gardener's bench. Where I turned to come back, the air changed.
It changed for one stride, and then it was gone.
Acetone. Small, clean, solvent, against the wall of green.
My pace held. My head stayed forward. I came back along the path to where Edmund stood, and I told him the great-grandfather had been an interesting man. He looked at me with the open warmth of someone who had been waiting all morning to be told this.
"He was," he said. "He was."
We came back through the kitchens because Edmund wanted me to see how the staff were placed, and Pembroke straightened from a long copper pot and wiped her hands on her apron and inclined her head.
"Doctor."
Edmund made the introduction long. He listed her years, her father's years before her, the small terrors of running a house this size without her. Pembroke received the listing without expression. When he finished she said only that lunch would be at one and there would be cold lamb if I disliked the soup, and she went back to her pot.
Edmund stood with me in the corridor afterwards. "She doesn't waste herself," he said, and it was the first thing he had said all morning that he had not entirely chosen to say.
Cassian Blackwood came in twenty minutes late and one glass ahead, and the glass had been a generous glass. He kissed his uncle on both cheeks in the slightly theatrical way of a man performing affection for a witness, and he held my hand a moment longer than the moment required.
"Cousin's doctor. How's the patient."
"The patient is the patient."
"Spoken like a person whose paycheque depends on it." He laughed, and Edmund laughed with him, and the laugh moved past the table without leaving anything on it. He talked through the soup about a horse on the mainland that had thrown him in the spring. He did not say which mainland, or which spring, or which county had a stable he might plausibly own a horse in. He asked, twice, for more wine. Edmund let him. When Pembroke came to clear, Cassian put his hand on her wrist for a fraction of a second too long. She allowed it the way one allows an old draft in a familiar room. Edmund, across the table, looked at neither of them.
I worked through the afternoon and the early evening in the field lab. The log took the morning's exam, the differential, the line task, the auditory phenomena. The half-second on the indicator bottle stayed off the page, by prior decision. There are observations a clinician keeps off the page until she has somewhere to keep them. The writing desk in my bedroom had a shallow drawer with a key. The half-second would go there, when I had words for it.
At nine I went back to my room to fetch the spare notebook I had left in my coat pocket. The corridor was quiet in the way the corridors of large empty wings are quiet at nine — the staff had retired to their flat over the carriage block, the hall below was carrying only the ticking of its clock. Forty seconds in my room, with the notebook in my hand. Then back.
The lab door was as I had left it. Closed. Unlocked. Edmund had been clear there was no need to lock it. I had agreed for the courtesy of the agreement, knowing I would lock it from tomorrow.
Inside, the room had been worked.
Not torn. Not searched in any sense a layman would call searching. The runner on the table sat half an inch off the line of the table edge where I had aligned it. The centrifuge had been lifted and set down close, and close was not exact. The tube rack stood true. One vial had been moved out of the spectrometric set and replaced facing the wrong way — the label faced the wall. The clean blood control I had drawn at noon, sealed and cooling on the wing rack, had been knocked onto its side. The seal had loosened. Most of the fluid had soaked into the paper underneath, leaving a small darker ring around the place where it had pooled before drying.
The phosphomolybdate-indicator stood untouched on the writing desk under the south window.
Whoever had come in had not known to take it. They had known to ruin the ordinary control, which a casual reader of my kit would have recognized as a sample. They had not known what set me apart from the casual reader.
I crouched by the leg of the table. On the wax of the floor — old wax, recent buffing — a partial print. Half a heel. Small rounded cleats arranged in a pattern that had not changed in seventy years. A nailed boot. A working boot. An outdoors boot, brought indoors. Not Edmund's brogue. Not Cassian's loafer. I had paid attention in the morning to who wore what.
The camera stayed in the case. The telephone stayed where it was.
Straightening, I put the centrifuge back to its line. The lamp on the writing desk came next; the wick went down until the room held only the residual light from the corridor under my door. I stood by the door.
Footsteps came along the corridor.
They were measured. Not slow in the way of a person uncertain. Slow in the way of a person who had decided on a pace.
They reached my door.
They stopped.
No knock came. The handle stayed where it was. They stood. Through the wood the small unconscious sounds of a body holding a position came to me — a slight shift of weight to one leg, a breath landing on the door. The hall clock measured the minute without me. I measured it without the clock.
When the footsteps left, they left at the same pace they had come, and they did not pause to take a backward step.
I stood in the dark with my hand on the door. Someone had taken my measure.