She went back to Cypress Hill on the Friday before the rite, in the gray car, with her canvas bag on her knees and the blue notebook in it, and Pavel's cousin walking three paces behind her as far as the gate.

It was seven weeks since she had left it. The cypresses were the same, black and straight against a washed September sky. The lawn had been cut. The lemon trees stood along the drive in their pots, with the late fruit hanging gold and heavy, and someone had swept the gravel so cleanly that the wheels left no mark. She sat very still in the back seat with her hands folded and watched the long white face of the house come up out of the trees, and when Marco stopped the car at the foot of the steps she found that she could not at first make her fingers open on the door.

"Take your time, miss," said Marco.

"I'm all right."

"Yes, miss." He did not turn round. "I am only saying that it will keep."

Mrs. Venn was in the doorway.

She stood on the top step in her best black dress, with her gray hair pinned up under the lace cap and her square hands folded at her waist, exactly as she had stood on a night in July in the kitchen with a hamper. She did not smile. She did not say that it was good to see her. She looked at Sienna as she came up the steps, quickly and completely, and then she stepped aside with a small stiff bow, and said, in a voice so dry that it might have been starched, "The east room has been aired, miss. And the other. I did not like to say which you would want."

"Thank you," said Sienna. Her throat ached. "I'll take Dr. Roux's. If it's free."

"It is free." A pause. "It has a bolt."

She went in.

The great hall was full of lamplight and the smell of beeswax. Someone had been polishing the black and white marble for a week, and every tile shone like water, and in the middle of it, at the foot of the curving stair, a man was standing with his hands at his sides.

He wore a plain dark suit and no ornament. He was thinner than she remembered. The collar stood a little away from his neck, and his face had a hollowed look about the cheekbones, with a faint gray shadow beneath the eyes that she had seen on a basement bench at midnight and had hoped not to see again. His hair was brushed back. He had shaved. He stood very straight, like a man waiting for a verdict, and when she came across the marble toward him he did not move a muscle.

"Sienna," said Matteo.

"Matteo."

That was all. It was extraordinary, how much it was. She heard the two names fall into the quiet hall, and the great clock tick over them, and neither of them said anything else. His hands, hanging open at his sides, were steady. She noticed that at once. She noticed, too, that his tie had been knotted correctly, by his own fingers, in the way she had once taught them.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"I said yes."

"You did." The faintest movement touched his mouth, not a smile, only the ghost of one. "I find that I read it every morning. It is a very short letter."

She made herself look away. She looked at the stair, at the marble, at the bowl of white roses on the table that was the size of a child's head. When she looked back he had not moved, and his eyes had not left her face, and they were so open and so quiet and so without demand that she nearly said something she could not have taken back.

"The library," said Sienna. "They'll be waiting."

"Yes." He stood aside. He did not offer his arm. He walked behind her a pace, with his hands clasped at his back, as he had walked on the night of the first dinner, and she felt his attention follow her up the three steps and across the threshold like a hand held a little way from her shoulder.

They were all there.

It was a long, dim, shuttered room, with the green lamp lit on the table and the blackboard standing where it had always stood, wiped clean now of everything but a single line in a slanting hand. We tell each other. Marco shut the door behind them. Helena Roux sat in a chair by the fire with her bag at her feet, composed and gray-eyed, and a large soft man in a shabby brown coat stood at the window with a bowler hat in his fist, looking like a draper's assistant who has wandered into a bank.

"Inspector Hollis," said Matteo. "Mrs. Bellandi."

The large man turned. He had a broad plain face with a drooping sandy moustache and the weary courteous eyes of someone who has listened to a great many people lie. He looked at Sienna for a long moment. "Madam," he said. "I have read your letter twice, and Mr. Marco's report three times. I should like to say that I did not believe it."

"Do you?"

"I should like to." He turned the bowler in his hands. "I have been a policeman in this port for twenty-six years. I have been asked by a great many people to arrest a great many others, and I have found that the most reliable sign of a true accusation is that the accuser does not wish it to be." He drew breath. "The Carrow Star put into Pier Four on the tenth, as you said. Customs boarded her at dawn. They opened forty drums, and found in the thirty-first, behind a false head, forty kilos of a very dull gray powder with no manifest and no name." A heavy sigh. "It is impounded. The lease is in dispute. The clerk who signed for it, a Mr. Ambrose Teale of Vance Maritime Trust, went out of his lodgings on Thursday night in his slippers and has not been seen since."

"Then you have him," said Sienna. "You have the drums."

"I have drums. I have a clerk who has run, and a powder that any chemist will tell me is used to keep water pipes from going brittle." His eyes were sad and direct. "I do not have Mr. Vance. I have a gentleman who has paid his taxes for forty years and who sits upon the board of every charity in the city. If I knock at his door on Monday with a warrant made of a button and a bad forgery, the magistrate will be at his table by supper, and I shall be on the quay by Tuesday, collecting the dead." He looked from one face to the other. "I need to see him do a thing."

"He will," said Sienna. "On Sunday. In front of a hundred and forty witnesses."

"So I understand."

"And you'll be there."

"As Mr. Holloway, of Hartigan Marine Assurance," said the Inspector, with a dry smile. "A cousin of the family. I have borrowed the coat. Mr. Hartigan has a great sense of the theatrical, and was delighted."

She laid it all out on the green leather, as she had laid it out at an oilcloth table in a kitchen on Tern Street, plainly, in order, with her hands flat. She told it as one reads a protocol. The cup, and the cruet, and the old Order with its brown copperplate. The quiet salt in the groove of the glass and the sour thing that would wake it. She told them the hour. A clock had stood on a mantel in a top room, and a man on a rug had looked at it while he held her hand, and he had told her by a fire what it said. Ten minutes before ten.

"The Order puts the cup at the end of the supper," said Helena quietly. "At the old hour. Dario told me so himself, in June. He said it was the hour the first bride came up the hill."

"He has chosen it with a great deal of tenderness," said Matteo.

It was said without bitterness. She looked at him, and he was looking at the table, with his hands loosely clasped, and the muscle at his jaw moved once and was still.

She went on. She told them what she had done on the bench at night, and what could be done in a body to hold a quiet metal, and what must be swallowed beforehand, with food. She had written it all out on a card in her small hard hand, a plain list of three small brown bottles and the hours at which each was to be taken. Helena had checked every figure. Nobody in the room doubted it. It was only that it was a very small shield, and that they would be standing behind it in the front of a hall.

"It slows it," said Sienna. "It does not stop it. I want you to hear that. It might give us an hour. I can't promise more."

"Then I shall put you in a car on the north road," said Matteo.

There was a silence. Helena looked at the fire. Marco, by the door, became interested in the ceiling.

He had said it gently. He had not raised his voice. He sat at the long table with his hands folded, looking at her, and she saw all of it laid out in his face: the old instinct, the locked room, the steel bolt on the inside, and a man who knew exactly what it was and had said it anyway, because he could not have lived without saying it once.

"No," said Sienna.

"I know."

"You asked me to hold you to a rule. I'm holding you to it."

"I know that too." His mouth shook. "I wished only that you should hear me say it. So that it should be said, in this room, by me, and be answered by you, and not live for ever in my head." He drew breath. "You may tell me to be quiet."

"I'm in the room," said Sienna.

It came out very steady. She heard it fall on the green leather. "I'm not an exhibit, and I'm not a piece of evidence, and I am not a person who is to be kept safe by being put somewhere. I'm in the room. I'm going to take the cup from his hand myself, with my eyes open, and I'm going to know what's in it. I'd like you to be there. But I'm going whether you are or not."

He was silent for a long moment. Then, very slowly, as if each word had to be carried over a long distance, he said, "Then so am I."

"You'll take the shield."

"Whatever you give me."

"With food." She looked at him. She had meant to keep her voice cool. It came out cracked. "You have to eat, Matteo. It won't work on an empty stomach. Mrs. Venn says you haven't had a proper meal since..."

"I shall eat," said Matteo.

"Properly."

"On my honor." The smile came back, painful and true. "I find that I have never been given an instruction that I wanted to carry out so much."

She looked away. She felt Inspector Hollis's mild sad eyes pass from her face to his and back, and she did not meet them.

Gavin came in at nine with a long black case under his arm, and she laughed.

He was a thin dry sandy man of forty, with a quick nervous grin and the stoop of someone who has spent his life looking at things from a rooftop. He laid the case on the table and opened it with a flourish. Inside, on a bed of green baize, lay a squat lamp with a violet lens and a coil of flex. "Customs lend them," he said, "for the notes. You'd be surprised, Miss. A forger will get everything right but the thread." He grinned. "I borrowed it for a fortnight. I'd have to bring it back with a story."

She took out of her bag a small flat tin, no bigger than a pill box. It held a pinch of fine, pale, chalky powder that looked like nothing at all. She had made it herself, on the Thursday, from a thing that the hospital used to find the leak in a drain. It was harmless. It could be eaten. It was invisible by day, and under the violet lamp it would burn the color of a gas flame.

They did it at eleven, in the dark library, with the door shut. Marco opened the glass cabinet to the left of the window. The blue leather box lay on its shelf. She lifted the two tall flutes, in her cotton gloves, and set them on a cloth, and with a small camel-hair brush, as lightly as she had ever done anything, she brushed the powder over the stem of each, and the base, and the underside of the foot, where a hand takes up a glass to polish it. She did the neck of the little cruet. She dusted the inside of the lid of the box. Then she stood back.

"Nothing," said Gavin, in a whisper. "I can't see a thing."

"That's the point."

He put on the lamp. He turned the little violet lens on the glass, and a soft cold blue light flooded the cabinet. And there, in the dark, on the stem of each flute, from the foot to the bowl, a glowing mist leapt out, thin and bright as the breath on a windowpane. It shone along the etched leaves like frost. It shone on the brass of the lock. Marco, on his knees, let out a long soft breath through his nose.

"God," said Matteo, from the doorway. It was hardly a voice. "That is very beautiful."

She turned. She had not heard him come. He stood in the shadow of the shelves in his shirtsleeves with the blue glow lighting one side of his face, and he was looking at the glass, and then, with an expression she could not meet, at her.

"I never saw you at work," he said. "Not truly. Not with all of it, at once."

"It's only chemistry."

"No," said Matteo. "It is only you."

He went away before she could answer. She heard his step go down the dark passage, slow and even, and the library clock struck midnight, and she stood with the camel-hair brush in her hand and the whole blue cabinet glowing in front of her like a tiny cold sea.

The gown came on the Saturday, in a long white box, by the hand of a stout boy from the cedar room.

It lay on her narrow bed in the room at the end of the east corridor, in its tissue, like a thing asleep. It was ivory, and very heavy, a pale thick silk gone faintly gold at the folds with age, with a high square neck and long close sleeves and a train of seven feet that took two women to lift. Someone had stitched, in the hem, a line of very small seed pearls in a pattern of leaves. It had been made for the wife of the first Matteo, a hundred and forty years ago, and it had been taken in at the waist and let out at the hip by an unknown hand. It fitted her exactly. It was the dress she had worn on a night a year ago in a top room, forty feet of silk and lace, and it was not that dress at all, and she stood in the long glass with her arms held out from her sides, like a child being fitted for a funeral, and could not at first look at her own face.

Nell did the pins. She did them in silence, on her knees, with her tongue between her teeth, and when she was done she sat back on her heels and said, in a very small voice, "You look like a person in a painting."

"I look like a bride."

"Well. That, too." Nell's eyes were bright. "You look like a bride who has decided something."

Mrs. Venn had been busy with a needle of her own. On the Friday night she had come to the door of the little room with a square of gray cloth over her arm and said, without a word of preamble, that the family gown had never in a hundred and forty years had a pocket, and that she considered this a very serious flaw in its design. She had sewn one into the left sleeve herself, beneath the cuff, a flat narrow thing no bigger than a spectacle case, and had stood over Sienna while a single small sealed ampoule was slid into it, and had checked, with her broad forefinger, that it did not show.

"If I am to be a fool," said Mrs. Venn, "I shall be a prepared one."

On the Sunday morning, at ten, she ate a plain breakfast of eggs and toast, tested, and swallowed the first of the three small brown pills, in the presence of a doctor and a housekeeper. She did not taste it. She was watching, over the rim of her cup, the door of the kitchen, where a thin gray-faced man in a white shirt had come in with a tray. He sat down across from her at the pine table. He lifted a fork. And under the eyes of a stout woman in a lace cap who stood with her arms folded and her chin up, like a bailiff, Matteo Bellandi ate his entire breakfast, to the last crumb, slowly and without a word.

"Well," said Mrs. Venn, at the end. She had to clear her throat. "That is a start."

They took the second dose at three.

The Great Hall of Cypress Hill had not been used in nine years.

She had never seen it. In the other life she had been carried through the house in a blur and left at the top, and in this one nobody had ever opened the double doors. She stood on the threshold at five minutes to six with the seven feet of train held over her arm by a pair of small wooden-faced pages and her heart going very slowly, and looked up. It was a room made for a ritual. It was long and high and cold, with a floor of black and white marble and a timbered roof so lofty that the shadows hung in it like smoke. Down either side stood a double row of tall pointed windows, with the last of the day coming through the old glass in a slow spill of crimson and gold. Banners hung from the beams, a hundred and forty years of them, in a dark faded silk the color of dried blood, each with a B in a ring of rope. And in the center, set across the width of the hall on a raised dais of three shallow steps, stood a long table spread with white linen.

It was laid for twelve. At its head stood a great carved chair, empty. At its foot stood two.

The candles were lit. There were hundreds of them, in iron sconces along the walls and in great branched stands down the length of the room, the thick tall tapers of Saint Ilaria that had burned on that one night for a hundred and forty years. The air smelled of hot wax and old stone and a faint dry sweetness of cedar. And below the dais, in rows of carved benches that ran the length of the hall, sat the whole Bellandi circle, turning, one head after another, to look.

She knew them. She knew them from a hospital ballroom and a long white table and a ledger on a green leather desk. Cassius Hartigan in a white dinner jacket, enormous and pink, with a carnation in his lapel and a stout lady at his side. A small bent old man with a ribbon in his buttonhole who must be Abernathy, of the customs, retired. Dr. Pryce in a dinner jacket three sizes too large, in the second row, with an expression of a man at his own court-martial. Fenwick, dry and neat, with his briefcase on his knee, and beside him a younger man with a high forehead whose face she did not know. And next to Hartigan, in a pale gray overcoat with a velvet collar that he had not troubled to take off, comfortable and rosy and round, with a small paper bag on the bench beside him from which the sweet sharp smell of oranges rose through the incense, sat Vern Rusk.

He lifted his hat an inch to her. He smiled.

Somewhere to her left, in the third row from the back, a stout broad man in a brown suit that did not fit him sat rigidly with his bowler on his knee. He did not look up. She did not look at him. She saw only, at the very edge of her eye, a drooping sandy moustache and a pair of weary patient hands.

And in the front row, on the right, in his one good suit with a scrap of tissue on his jaw, sat Edmund Hale, with Nell on one side of him, in lemon-yellow silk, and on the other, upright in her black, Mrs. Venn.

She took one step. The page behind her shook out the train.

"My dear child."

He was at the foot of the dais steps, in a dove-gray morning coat with a white rose in the lapel, and his silver hair shone in the candlelight like a halo. He came forward with both hands held out, tall and slender and kind, and the whole warm weight of his regard fell on her as sunlight falls on a window. His pale eyes were wet. He took her hand, and bent over it, and she felt the dry light touch of his lips on her knuckles, and under it, very faintly, a long fine tremor, as of a man who has been waiting for the best moment of his life.

"Look at you," said Dario Vance, softly. "Oh, my dear. I do not think I have ever seen anything so lovely. You are the first Matteo's bride come back. I could weep." He pressed her hand. "I am a very sentimental old man. You will forgive me."

"There's nothing to forgive," said Sienna.

He led her up the steps.

The rite was a long one, and she remembered very little of it afterward, only a succession of small bright things, like beads on a string. There was the sound of a single bell. There was an old priest in a gold-edged cope who read from a great brown book in a thin high voice, in a language so old that it had gone half to Latin. There was a boy with a censer. There was a procession, slow and stately, of men in black carrying the banners down the length of the hall, one by one, and setting them in iron sockets round the dais, so that she stood at last inside a ring of dark red silk.

And there was Matteo.

He came in from the far end, alone, between the two long rows of benches, in a plain black coat with a white rose in the lapel. The whole hall rose. She had not known that she would not be able to look at him. She had thought that she would be ready. He came on with his head up and his hands at his sides, steady, very slowly, and the candlelight ran along the planes of his face, and as he climbed the three shallow steps of the dais, she saw his eyes come up and find hers across the table and the white linen and the hundred and forty watching faces.

He stopped before her.

"May I?" said Matteo. It was barely a breath. His hand had lifted a little from his side, palm up, an inch from her own.

"Yes," said Sienna.

His fingers closed on hers.

It went through her entire body. It was nothing. It was only a hand, warm and dry and a little rough, closing round her own as it had closed on a thousand evenings, and she felt the whole of the hall go out, as a lamp goes out, and the whole of the last two months with it. She heard his breath catch. She felt his thumb move, once, very lightly, across her knuckles, where there was a faint pale line on the third finger, and stop.

Neither of them looked away. Neither of them spoke. They stood side by side before the long table in the ring of dark banners with their hands joined, and the old priest's thin voice went on and on above them, and it was the first time in seven weeks that she had been able to breathe.

There was a supper. It lasted three hours.

It was served on the long table on silver, by men in white gloves, and she tested every dish. She did it openly, in front of the entire hall, with a strip drawn from her sleeve, and the circle watched her do it in a rustle of whispers. Hartigan roared with laughter. Dario smiled. Nobody stopped her. She ate a few mouthfuls of everything and tasted nothing, and beside her Matteo ate a whole plate of lamb, steadily and without looking up, with the air of a man performing a vow.

Once, between the fish and the lamb, Dario laid the pen beside her plate.

It was a heavy silver one, with a barrel worn smooth, and under it he slid a long folded sheet that she did not need to read. Schedule Four. The sole trustee. The clause about simultaneously. She raised her eyes. He was smiling at her gently, with his head a little on one side, like a grandfather at a child's recital.

"Not until after the cup," said Sienna.

"My dear?"

"It's the order of the day. I read it." She laid her hand over the paper. "The cup, and then the signing. I should like to do it properly."

A ripple of delighted approval ran down the table. Hartigan thumped the board. "She's read the book!" he bellowed. "She has read the book, by God, and she knows it better than the priest."

Dario laughed, softly. He lifted the pen. "A very proper instinct," he said. "I should be quite ashamed otherwise."

The hands of the great clock in the corner of the hall, a tall black thing with a brass face and a pendulum like a coffin plate, crept round. Eight. Nine. A quarter past. The candles had burned down by a third. The air was hot and sweet and thick, and a faint haze lay along the roof beams. At twenty to ten the priest rose. At a quarter to, the servers withdrew in a body, and a deep hush fell on the benches, and in the silence she heard her own heart, very slow and very hard, like a clock in an empty house.

The cup was brought.

It came on a small silver salver carried in two hands by an old man in a gray livery, who set it down on the white cloth in front of her with a bow. She had known what she would see. She was not ready for it. It was one of the two tall crystal flutes, slender and bright, with the spiral of diamond facets climbing the stem and the thin band of etched leaves at the rim, and in the candlelight it threw a dozen tiny rainbows across the linen. Beside it, on the salver, a second stood empty. And between them, in a niche, the little old heavy cruet with its thread of gilt.

"The cup of the first bride," said Dario. He had risen. He stood at her side with his hand resting lightly on the back of her chair, silver and gentle, a vision of benevolence in the light, and his voice carried clearly down the whole length of the hall. "The oldest thing in the house. It was a gift of the bride's own mother, who had not a penny, and who sold her last ring to buy it. It has been kept in the cedar room for a hundred and forty years. I cleaned it myself, last night, as the Order requires. I have never in my life been so afraid of dropping anything."

A murmur of laughter. He took up the cruet. He drew the stopper, and a thin sharp smell went up from it, and he tilted it very slowly over the crystal. The pale green liquid fell in a thin stream, glinting. It filled the bowl to a hand's breadth from the lip.

"It is bitter," said Dario, gravely. "It is meant to be. A bride is to know in a single draught what the house has cost, so that she may never say afterward that she was not told." He looked down at her with his kind pale eyes. "Will you test it, my dear? I should so much like you to."

She drew a strip from her sleeve.

She dipped it. The strip lay for a moment in the green. She drew it out, and held it up to the candles, in front of a hundred and forty faces, and it was a pale clean yellow.

"Clean," said Sienna.

The whole hall let out a breath. She heard, a long way off, in the fourth row, a small round man say something that sounded like a sob. She took the cup.

It was cold in her hand, and weighed almost nothing, and the stem was smooth under her glove. She lifted it. And across the table, over the rim of the crystal, her eyes found his.

He was looking at her. He stood at the other side of the white cloth with the second glass in his hand, and he did not smile, and he did not look away. He had gone very pale. A muscle moved at his jaw. But his eyes were fixed on hers, dark and level and open, and she saw all of it, as she had seen it once on a floor. The terror, and the tenderness, and under both, steady, like a hand held out across a gulf, the plain fact of his faith.

May I? he said, without a sound.

She nodded.

She drank.

It was very bitter. It caught at the back of her throat like a fist, sharp and green and old, and she swallowed it in three long mouthfuls and set down the cup. She felt it go down. She felt the hot tears spring to her eyes, and did not wipe them. At her side, a second glass tilted, and was lifted, and emptied. She did not look. She heard him swallow, and heard the faint chink of crystal laid on silver. And in the vast hush of the hall, for the space of one breath, nothing moved.

Then the great clock struck ten minutes before ten.

She felt it before she heard it. It began in the pads of her fingers, a thin small coolness, as of a hand dipped in a spring. It went no higher than the wrists. She flexed her fingers inside the glove. She felt a faint metallic brightness at the back of her tongue, as if she had touched a coin to it, and a tiny fizzing at her lips, and her heart gave one slow heavy beat, and another.

It had begun.

She lifted her eyes. Dario Vance was looking at her.

He had not moved. He stood beside her chair with his silver head a little bent and his white rose against the dove-gray cloth, and all the kindness had gone out of his face. What was left was very still and very clear, and infinitely sad, like a man at the bedside of someone he loves. A single tear ran down beside his nose. He raised his own glass, a small one, of plain red wine, in a thin steady hand. He bowed his head to her across the white cloth, courteously, and the candle flames bent and trembled all down the length of the hall.

"Forgive me," said Dario, very softly.