She had expected to be afraid, and she was not.

That was the strangest thing about it, and she would turn it over for a long time afterward. The cold climbed from her fingertips to her wrists in the same small thin tide that she remembered, and the metal bloomed on her tongue, and the great hall with its hundred and forty faces seemed to draw back from her to a very great distance, as though she were looking at it through the wrong end of a glass. But she had been here before. She knew this room. She knew the exact shape of the cold. And it was moving so slowly that she could count it.

One. It had reached the base of her palm.

Two. A faint tingling stood at the corner of her mouth.

In the other life she had been on her knees by now. She was standing. She was standing upright at the head of a white table in a ring of dark banners with the weight of a hundred-and-forty-year-old gown dragging at her shoulders, and the man at the other side of the cloth was swaying very slightly on his feet.

She saw it before anyone. She saw his hand go out and grip the edge of the linen. She saw the color leave his face, from the brow downward, in a long slow wave, and his eyes come up to hers with a quick bewildered look, as of a man who has been called by name in a crowd. His lips parted.

"Sienna," said Matteo. It was hardly a sound. "It tastes of a coin."

He had not eaten properly in seven weeks. It came to her whole and cold, with all the clarity of a result. He had eaten one breakfast. One plate of lamb. The little brown pills were a hand that held a bird, but they needed something to hold it with, and the thing that a body makes them out of is food. Mrs. Venn had said it. He has not had a proper meal since Thursday. She had heard it in a kitchen in July, and had thought that it was a figure of speech.

There was one word in the world that she had agreed on, with six people, in a dim library, on a Friday night. She had not meant to say it so. It came out of her in a clear carrying voice, with her eyes on his gray face.

"Pears."

She saw Helena Roux rise.

She was in the front row, in a dark dress, and she did not hurry. She stood up out of her seat calmly, with her leather bag in her fist, as if she had been told that the next patient was ready. Her gray eyes met Sienna's across the length of the dais. And then Matteo's knees went from under him, all at once, like a man whose strings have been cut, and he went down on the black and white marble among the folds of the white cloth with a crash that rang to the rafters.

The hall screamed.

It was a sound that Sienna would never afterward be able to describe. It was a hundred and forty voices at once, rising together in one wild ragged cry. Benches went over. A woman shrieked. Somewhere in the middle of it a man bellowed, and a great dark shape in a white dinner jacket was on its feet with a roar like an ox, and in the middle of the uproar, high and clear and ringing, a dry beautiful old voice rose above it all.

"A doctor! For God's sake, a doctor! Helena, my dear, quickly, the boy has been taken ill!"

It was beautifully done. She heard it with a sort of cold wonder, even as she was dropping to her knees. There was not a flaw in it. It had the exact note of horror and love and helpless terror that a good old man should have at the sight of his godson on the floor, and it rose over the din, and a hundred and forty people turned their faces to him in a blind tide of gratitude. He had come round the end of the table with both hands outstretched. He was weeping. The tears ran openly down the fine silver face. He stood over the fallen man with his white rose crushed in his fist, and she had never in her life seen anything so appalling as that grief, and she knew that every drop of it was real.

"Marco!" Her own voice came out of her harsh and steady. She was kneeling in the gown, in a drift of ivory silk, with Matteo's head on her arm. "The doors! Nobody out. Nobody in. Gavin, the lamp!"

He was already there. He had been at the window all evening, in a footman's livery two sizes too big for him, with a long narrow case between his feet, and now he had it open. Marco had gone across the hall in four strides. She saw him put his great back against the double doors and fold his arms, and the gray mass of him seemed to grow into a wall. Someone tried to push past him. He did not move.

"Madam," said a man's voice, close above her, a plain tired heavy voice in a brown coat. "I am an officer of the Port. I'll ask everyone to stay exactly where they are."

Helena was on her knees on the other side.

She had thrown open the leather bag on the marble. She did not look up. Her long hands moved over Matteo's wrist, his throat, the lids of his eyes, with the swift sure touch of a woman who has done this a hundred times in a bad light, and her face was a white mask. "Pulse sixty and falling," she said, in the dry crisp voice of the white room. "Peripheral cold. Metallic taste, pupils reactive. It's the same. Sienna, it's the same."

"I know."

"How long?"

"Ninety seconds since the first swallow." She heard herself say it. She saw the pale face of the great clock over Helena's shoulder, and it said eleven minutes to ten. "The protection's taken. He's had half of it. Not more. He didn't have the food."

"Then we have the better part of an hour," said Helena, "and no more."

She did not say, if we are lucky. She drew from the bag a small bright thing in a paper sleeve, and tore it open with her teeth.

Sienna did not wait. Her left hand, which was growing numb, went to her right sleeve, to the narrow flat pocket that a stout old woman had sewn under the cuff with her own square forefinger. She found the little glass ampoule. She felt it slide into her palm, cold and smooth. She had practiced it forty times in the lab with a saline vial, and she did it now without thought, with her teeth and her thumb and the plain blind skill of a woman who has been trained since eleven years old to do the next thing. The needle went in at the outside of her own thigh, through the heavy silk, through the linen beneath. She felt the small hard pinch.

"Sienna!" It was Nell, from somewhere very far off, in a high cracked wail. "Hale, what are you doing?"

"My part," said Sienna.

She did not know how long it took. She would remember it afterward in fragments, as one remembers a fever. There was Helena's voice, cool and urgent and level, saying numbers. There was the stout old woman in black who had come across the hall like a battleship with a stone crock in her arms and set it down on the marble at Sienna's elbow without a word, and the salt water that went down Matteo's throat in three slow gulps, held by Sienna's own hands. There was the line that Helena slid into the crook of his arm. There was Marco's voice at the door, rolling and calm and without pity, telling a hundred and forty frightened people in turn that nobody was to leave until the Inspector said. There was the great hall, with its crushed benches and its overturned candles and its banners hanging in the heat, and in the middle of it, like the still center of a storm, a small bright circle on the marble where a woman in an ivory gown knelt with a man's head on her arm.

"Seventy," said Helena. "Fifty-eight. Fifty-four."

The cold had reached Sienna's elbows. She felt it climb. It was slow, and thin, and almost patient, like a tide on a flat shore, but it was coming. She felt her lips begin to buzz. Her tongue had thickened. She heard her own voice, very far off, say, "Helena, the second ampoule," and heard how strange it was, slurred and soft, like a voice underwater.

"You'll take it yourself?"

"Yes."

"I shall do it."

"No. You've got him." She drew a long slow breath. "Give me the line. I'll do my own. It's what I'm for."

Helena's eyes flashed up to hers across the body of the man between them, gray, wide, wet. Then, without a word, she tossed across a small coiled thing, and Sienna caught it in the numb hand, and laid it along her own arm with fingers she could scarcely feel.

She did not know how she did it. She would never be able to say. She sat on the marble with the bag at her side and a hundred and forty people yelling at her back and found the vein by touch, as she had found it on the first morning of her second life, with a needle and a tube and her own hands shaking, and drove it home on the first stroke. She taped it down. She watched a thin clear thread begin to run. And the hall was a roaring dark, and the candles swam, and a line of sweat ran down her face and fell on the white silk.

She took his hand.

It lay on the marble beside her, long and brown, with the signet ring turned round to the inside of the finger where he had put it in the church. It was cold. It was so cold that it seemed to burn her. And she took it in both of hers, the two numb gloves, and she tried to close her fingers.

They would not obey her.

She stared at them. She felt it go through her like a blow. She had known, she had been told, she had read it in the chart, in plain figures, that she would lose some feeling at the ends of the limbs, that the shield would not hold everything. But it was not that. It was the dream. It was a girl on a Persian rug with a man's hand in hers, and her own fingers like lead, and the long slow slide of the other palm out of her grip, a quarter of an inch at a time, like a rope through wet hands. She was going to lose it. She was going to feel him go.

"No," said Sienna.

She said it aloud. She said it through her teeth, in a voice she did not know.

"No. I am holding. I am holding on."

She bent her whole will to it. She pressed with the heel of her hand and the force of her shoulder, and set her teeth, and thought of nothing, of nothing at all, but a single small act. A hand. A hand, closing. She felt the muscles at the back of her knuckles draw, thin and hard as wire. She felt the tendons stand out in her wrist. Slowly, one finger at a time, like a very old woman, they began to curl. They came down over the back of his. They met. And she felt, through the dead white leather, through the numb heavy cold of her own flesh, the unmistakable hard small pressure of a living palm.

She held.

"I have you," said Sienna. Her voice broke. "I have you. Do you hear? I can feel every finger. It closes. It closes now."

He did not answer. His head lay back on her arm, and his lids were drawn half down, and the line on the little green screen that Helena had clipped to his finger crept across it, slow and shallow, like a thread across a window.

"Forty-six," said Helena.

"It's the floor."

"How do you know?"

"I don't," said Sienna. She was crying, quietly, and her tears were falling on his face. "It's what I've hoped."

She talked. She told him the herring song, all eleven verses, in a cracked flat voice that wavered and failed on the high notes, in the middle of a hall in which a hundred and forty people stood frozen along the walls and a large soft man in a brown coat had taken out a whistle and put it back in his pocket. She sang it to the vast cold ceiling, and the banners, and the old black clock whose hands crept toward ten. And somewhere about the fourth verse, a very long way off, she heard a second voice, a thin dry bashful thread of sound, beginning to hum. It did not match. It never had.

"Matteo," said Sienna.

His eyes had opened.

They were dark, and glassy, and very far away. They moved across the roof beams, the flickering banners, the candles in their iron sockets, and came slowly down to rest on her face. He did not seem to know where he was. A faint, bewildered, tender frown came into his brow, and he looked at her as a man looks at something he has seen in a dream and has never expected to see awake.

"Your hand," he said, in a thread of a whisper.

"Yes."

"It is closed."

"It's closed."

He looked at it. He looked at the two hands, the numb white glove and the brown cold palm, laced together on the black and white marble, and she saw something go through his face, slow and radiant and almost too great to be borne. His own fingers moved. They tightened on hers, a very little. It was the weakest pressure in the world.

"You held on," said Matteo.

"Always," said Sienna.

"May I," he whispered, and stopped, and tried again. "May I stay?"

"You stay."

He closed his eyes. He did it peacefully, like a child, with a faint smile at the corner of his mouth. The line on the green screen climbed, a point, and another, and then, steadily, began to rise.

"Fifty-two," said Helena.

Nobody had touched the cup.

It was Gavin who thought of it. He had not moved from the wall, in his ridiculous borrowed coat, with the long black case open at his feet, and he had been watching the table over the heads of the crowd with the dry sharp look of a man who is used to counting things from a height. At ten to ten, with the hall in an uproar and a stout old woman on her knees beside a dying man, he had drawn a squat violet lamp out of the case and looked at the table. At five to, in the lull, when the last guest had stopped screaming, he had stepped quietly up onto the dais with the thing in his hands.

He turned the little lens on the white cloth.

The linen blazed.

It was a soft cold blue, brilliant as a gas flame, and it lit the dais like a ghost. There were prints on the cloth. A palm, a thumb, four long slender fingers laid on the edge of the table in a fan, distinct, glowing along every whorl. There was a smear on the silver salver, and a clean bright thumb on the neck of the cruet, and a long shining ribbon of it down the stem of the cup that had stood in front of Sienna, from the foot to the bowl, and a second down its fellow. They shone out of the dark like the track of a snail. They shone out of the stem of the glass, and out of the lip of the cruet, and from the crushed white rose that lay in the folds of the cloth. They were the prints of a left hand and a right. They were long and fine and narrow, with a faint tremor in the stroke of the thumb. They belonged to a man who handled a thing with enormous care.

"Inspector," said Gavin. His voice was flat. "Perhaps you had better look at this."

The hall had gone silent.

It was not the silence of the first shock. It was a deeper, stranger thing. It crept down the long benches from the dais to the doors, a row at a time, as people turned their heads and saw the table burning blue. Hartigan had stopped with his mouth open. In the fourth row an old bent gentleman in a ribboned coat put his handkerchief to his lips. A large plain man in a bad brown coat had come slowly up the steps with a bowler hat in his hand, and he stood looking at the fingerprints for a very long time.

"Mr. Vance," said Inspector Hollis, very mildly. "Would you be so good as to hold out your hands?"

Nobody answered.

He turned his heavy head. The ring of banners stood round the dais, dark and motionless in the heat. The candles guttered. At the head of the table the great carved chair stood empty. And at the end of the row of benches, where an old man in a dove-gray morning coat had stood beside the table a minute before with a crushed white rose in his hand and a tear on his cheek, there was no one at all.

"Marco," said the Inspector.

"He did not pass me, sir." The big voice was flat. "I swear it. Not one person has gone through these doors."

"Then where..."

"The hall has a second door." It was Mrs. Venn.

She had risen from beside the stone crock. She stood on the marble in her stained black with her lace cap crooked and her broad weathered face the color of tallow, and she was pointing with a shaking square finger to the left of the dais, behind the empty carved chair, where a tall panel of old oak stood in the wall between two of the banners.

"The servants' way," she said. "To the cedar room, and the east stair. It has not been used in forty years. I should not have thought a living soul remembered." Her voice cracked. "I let him in, God forgive me. I took him round it myself when he was a boy."

Gavin turned the violet lamp on the panel.

It shone out of the dark like a signpost. On the dark old wood, at the height of a man's shoulder, clear and bright, sharp as a stamp, was a hand. And beyond it, on the stone floor of the narrow passage behind, as the blue beam crept along the flags, there lay a trail. It was a line of faint cold footprints, wide apart, hurrying, each with a little drag at the toe, going away into the dark toward the east wing. And on the wall beside them, at every few steps, where a hand had steadied itself, a ghostly glowing palm.

"He walked through the powder," said Gavin, in an awed voice. "He's got it on his shoes."

"Marco," said Hollis. "Take two men."

He was already gone.

Sienna did not see him go. She knelt on the marble with the line running into her arm and a hand in both of hers and a gray face on her sleeve, and she heard it, as one hears the sea. The hall had broken again, into an uproar that was not terror now but fury and amazement and a hundred shouting tongues. Hartigan was bellowing. Somebody was weeping. A thin high voice cried out that it was a dreadful lie, a dreadful lie, that Dario Vance would not hurt a fly. And above it all, steady and clear, she heard Nell's voice saying, "Shut up. Shut up, all of you. Can't you see she is trying to listen to his heart?"

She was. She had her ear against his chest. It was strong. It was slow, and a little irregular, but it was strong, and it was going on, one beat and then another, like a clock in a house where someone is living.

"Fifty-eight," said Helena, very low.

Someone touched her shoulder. It was Edmund. He had come up the steps in his one good suit with the tissue still stuck to his jaw and his glasses on the end of his nose, and he was kneeling beside her on the marble, and he did not say anything at all. He put a big scarred hand over hers, and over the pair of them, joined, and held it there. He was weeping openly. He did not seem to notice.

"Is he going to be all right, love?" he said.

"I think so, Dad." She heard her voice break. "I think we're both going to be."

At twelve minutes past ten Matteo opened his eyes again, and looked at her, and smiled.

It was a small, tired, dreadfully ordinary smile, the one he had worn in a kitchen over a bowl of pears. His lips were gray, but there was blood in them. His hand was warm in hers. He said, in a thread of a voice, that he thought he should like some tea, and Helena laughed, a high cracked incredulous bark, and put her arm across her face.

It was Marco who came back.

He came in at the servants' panel at twenty minutes to eleven with his coat torn and a long scratch on his cheek, and his big chest heaved. He was alone. Gavin stood behind him, with the violet lamp hanging from his hand, white to the lips. They crossed the dais and stopped. Marco's eyes went to the man on the floor, and the woman holding him, and he drew a great shuddering breath that seemed to come up from his boots.

Then he said, in a voice so low that only the people on the dais could hear it, "He is not in the east wing, sir."

Matteo's head turned slowly on Sienna's arm.

"The footprints led to the study," said Marco. "To the little room beyond. The door was standing open, and the lamp lit, and a candle burning on the table. There is a chair pushed back. A pen, still wet." His jaw worked. "And the window is open. It gives on the roof of the kitchen wing, and the garden wall. There is a ladder against the wall that was not there this afternoon."

"Rusk," said Matteo.

"Was on the bench beside Mr. Hartigan, sir, with his bag of oranges, at five minutes to ten." Marco's voice cracked. "He is not there now. I have looked. And Gavin's cousin, who has the lane, sent a boy running up from the gate not three minutes since. He says a long gray car with no lamps lit came down the drive like a thing out of hell, and went through the gates at a gallop, and turned north along the cliff road."

Nobody spoke.

Sienna felt the silence settle round them, vast and cold and full of the guttering of candles. She looked down at the tired gray face on her arm. She looked at the clock, whose black hands stood at a quarter to eleven. She looked at the blue-lit table, glittering with the prints of an old man's long fine fingers, and the two tall crystal flutes with their spiral of diamond facets. One of them lay on its side in a pool of pale green liquid. The other stood upright and empty, and, in the candlelight, clean.