It was twenty minutes past midnight before Helena would let her stand.

She had been lying for two hours on the long sofa in the small drawing room, under a gray blanket, with a line taped into her arm and her left hand wrapped round a cup of salted tea that someone had put there. The ivory gown had been cut off her at some point in the confusion and lay in a heap of ruined silk on the hearthrug, like the shed skin of something. She did not remember that. She remembered only the ceiling of the hall, very high and full of smoke, and the voice of a stout old woman in black saying over and over, quite fiercely, drink it, child, drink it, and then nothing, and then the little pine boat on the mantelpiece with its patched brown sail riding at anchor in the firelight.

On the other sofa, a yard away, Matteo slept.

He lay on his back with one arm flung out and the line running into the crook of it, gray-faced and slack-mouthed, and the green square of the monitor on the stool beside him drew its thin bright thread across the dark. Fifty-eight, said the thread. Sixty. Sixty-four. She had lain and watched it for an hour, as she had once watched a number come up on a mass spectrometer, and at some time after midnight it had stopped climbing and begun, very gently, to hold.

"Sixty-six," said Helena. She was sitting on a stool between them with a cold cup of tea on her knee and her sleek hair come down in a rope over one shoulder. Her white blouse was spotted with blood and wine. "I think that is where he lives. I think, God help us, that you were both right."

"May I get up?"

"No." A pause. "You may sit. I shall take out the line in ten minutes, and if your pulse is above fifty-five at that time, I shall not say a word when you put your feet on the floor." The gray eyes came round. They were red-rimmed and extraordinarily tired. "I should like to say that I do not expect to be obeyed."

"Where's Marco?"

"In the east wing, with Gavin and two of the Inspector's men, turning over a very small suite of rooms for the third time." Helena's mouth thinned. "They found a ladder and an open window and a pen that was still wet. They have found nothing since."

"The ladder."

She had not known she was going to say it. It had been turning over in her mind for two hours like a stone in a stream, smoothed by the current, and now it came to the top.

"What about it?"

"Marco said the prints went into the study. Into the little room. Gavin's lamp showed them on the flags, wide apart, hurrying, going away from the hall. And the window was open, and the ladder was against the wall." She sat up. The room swung, and steadied. "Did anyone put the lamp on the sill?"

Helena stared at her.

"The violet one. On the sill of the window, and the rungs of the ladder. He walked through the powder, Helena. It was on his shoes. It was on his hands, on the panel, on the wall of the passage. If he went out of that window, there'd be a glowing shoe-mark on the stone and a glowing palm on every rung."

"I do not know."

"I do." She was already pulling the blanket off. "Nobody looked. Because they were told that he'd gone, and everyone loves a ladder." She swung her feet to the carpet. The floor was cold and solid under her soles, and the cold that had gone up her arms was gone. She felt faintly sick and entirely clear. "Where's the key?"

"Sienna."

"The brass one. On the ribbon. It's in my bag. It's got to be."

Helena looked at her for a long moment. Then, with the tired courtly gesture of someone yielding a move at chess, she put out her hand and took the little brass key out of the pocket of her own blouse.

"I have been carrying it for six weeks," she said. "I thought that I should give it to you again. I did not like to say."

They went down the passage with the line still taped to her arm, a thin bright thread, trailing a bag of clear fluid on a stand that Helena wheeled behind her with a wry set mouth. Nobody stopped them. A constable in a dark coat on the second landing took one look at the white-faced woman in a blanket, and the tall one in the bloodstained blouse, and turned his head to study a banister.

The east wing was dark and cool and smelled of cold wax. They came to the end of the long corridor, past the portraits and the gilt-framed maps of the harbor, to a pair of high doors with a brass plate. Two men of the Port stood outside it, big and patient and visibly baffled. Behind them the doors stood open on a low dark-paneled study, lit by a single green-shaded lamp, and Marco was standing in the middle of the room with his hat in his fist and a face like carved oak.

"Miss," he said. "You ought to be lying down."

"So I'm told." She went past him. "Gavin. The lamp."

He was kneeling at the window. He had turned the little violet lens on the sill, and a pale light fell across the stone and the dark of the garden beyond, and she saw at once what he had seen, and what he had not liked to say. The stone was bare. It was dull and gray and dusted with the ordinary soot of a hundred years. Beyond it, in the wet dark, the ladder stood against the wall like a thing set up for a play, and as the beam crept down the rungs, one after another, they shone with nothing. There was no blue. There was no hand. There was only a ladder, clean, that had been carried to the wall by a man who had taken care not to touch it.

"He never went out," said Gavin, very low. "Mother of God. We've been looking for him on the roof."

"Is there another room?" said Sienna.

"There's the writing room. We've been through it."

"Past that."

"There is no past that, miss."

She turned. She stood in the middle of the green lamplight with her bare feet on the carpet and her hair coming out of its pins, and looked at the wall behind the desk. It was the long wall, hung with a vast faded map. She had seen it once in the dark, by candle, on a night in July, with a heavy black pen in her fist, and thought of nothing but a drawer. It was a chart of the harbor in the days of the first Matteo. The piers were drawn in brown ink, and the slips, and the old sea wall, and in the lower corner, small and neat, a coat of arms: a B in a ring of rope.

The rope was a little too thick.

She put up her hand. She drew the chart to one side, lightly, on its brass rail, and behind it the paneling was the same dark old oak, close-grained, polished by a century of housemaids. She laid her fingers on the ring of rope in the carved crest, where it was cut deepest into the wood. There was a hole in the middle of the B. A very small one, round and black, no bigger than a pea.

"Helena," she said.

The tall woman put the key into her palm.

It went in like a word into a sentence. She turned it. There was a small oiled click, and then, very softly, as of a long-held breath, a section of the paneling a yard wide swung back on a hinge she could not see, and a thin gold light fell out across the carpet from a narrow door.

Nobody spoke. She heard Marco draw a great slow breath through his nose.

She went in.

It was a very small room. It had no window. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with cedar, pale and fragrant and polished like the inside of a jewel box, and the air was warm and sweet and faintly dry. Along one side ran a shelf of ledgers bound in gray cloth, hundreds of them, each labeled on the spine in a small flowing upright hand. Opposite stood a little walnut writing table with a green leather top and a single chair. A candle burned on it, in a silver stick. Beside the candle a small copper kettle simmered over a spirit lamp, and on a tray lay two cups, with their saucers, a bowl of sugar, and a plain white dish with a little heap of coarse gray salt.

Dario Vance sat in the chair, in his shirtsleeves, with his silver head bent and his long hands folded in his lap.

He had taken off the dove-gray coat. It hung over the back of the chair, with the crushed white rose still in its lapel. His collar was open, and his spectacles lay on the green leather beside the candle, and without them his face looked suddenly small and very old. He lifted his eyes as the door opened. They were pale, and dry, and calm.

"My dear," he said. "I wondered which of you it would be."

Sienna stood in the door with a line in her arm.

"Do sit down. Both of you, if you wish. I have put out a second cup." He indicated it with a small courteous gesture. "I did not know who should come. I thought, whoever is clever enough to find the door ought to be given tea." A faint smile. "You may test it. I should be a little hurt if you did not."

She drew a strip from the pocket of her blanket. She dipped it in the spout of the kettle, and in the cup, and in the salt, and held it up to the candle. It was a pale clean yellow.

"Thank you," said Dario. "I find that I wished to do one thing tonight that was only kind."

He poured. His hand was steady. He set a cup on the table before the empty chair, and then, with great care, as one lays a flower on a grave, he moved the dish of salt six inches nearer to it.

"Mrs. Venn told me, you know," he said. "It was the first thing I ever learned about you. I thought, a girl who puts salt in her coffee has been taught by someone who loved her." He folded his hands again. "I am so very sorry that you were obliged to learn the rest from me."

Helena had come in behind her. She stood very straight in the narrow doorway with her stand and her bag of fluid and her stained blouse, and she did not say anything. Her face was the face of a woman at an operation.

"Helena," said Dario, gently. "My dear. You look exhausted."

"Don't," said Helena.

"No. I won't." He bowed his head. "I ought not to have said it."

The candle flame trembled. A faint dry sweetness of cedar rose from the walls. On the shelf, between two gray ledgers, stood a small flat object wrapped in black oilcloth and tied with a bit of sailor's twine, and beside it a single sheet of cream paper lying face down. There was a large old fountain pen on the blotter with a barrel worn smooth, and under the pen, in a neat stack, a score of sheets covered on both sides in a long slanting upright hand. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.

"You've been practicing," said Sienna.

"For a very long while." He did not look at the sheets. "It was a game once. I was nineteen, and I had a gift, and no one to show it to. I copied his hand across a dining table in Carrow for a whole summer, with a bill of lading and a stub of pencil. He caught me at it. I expected to be beaten." A small dry breath that was almost a laugh. "He looked at the page for a long time. Then he said, you have my capital A, and I have never been able to make it so well. And he went out of the room. It was the only compliment I ever had from him."

"The green notebook," said Sienna. "At the gala."

"Ah." He smiled, a little ruefully. "An old man's trick. I thought, a young woman who writes things down at two in the morning might, one day, write the very thing I should require. In her own hand, with a lock on it that I could open." He turned his spectacles over. "You never did. I confess that I was rather proud."

"Who was he?" said Sienna.

She knew. She wanted it said.

"My brother." He said it simply. "Half. By his father, and not by mine. My mother was a girl in the kitchen of the old house on the hill, sixty-odd years ago, and the old man was very fond of her for one winter." He picked up his spectacles, and turned them over, and put them down. "They gave me a name that was not his, and a room at the back, and a place at the foot of the table. I was never once told that I was to be ashamed. It was understood."

"Tin," said Helena.

"Tin." He smiled. It was a very beautiful, very tender smile, without self-pity. "He called me that from the day I came. Not unkindly. He thought it was affectionate. A cheap bright thing, you understand, that does very well to line a can, and no one remarks that it is not silver." He lifted his head. "I was a good little boy. I was a great deal of use. I did all his letters, in the end. I wrote nine-tenths of what Aurelio Bellandi ever signed."

He was silent. A coal shifted in the grate beyond the wall, and a faint thin sound of voices drifted down the passage, hurrying.

"And the book," said Sienna. "The page."

He put out a long finger and turned over the cream sheet.

It was a leaf from a small ruled book, brown at the edges, in a black ink she had seen on a card under a white ribbon. It had been cut from its binding with a razor, cleanly, and at the head, in the same thin upright hand, stood a number.

113.

She read it. It was very short.

T.P. Final. I have kept a book of what I am owed all my life, and never one of what I owe. This is the only entry in it that I cannot enter. Dario, my father's son, who has written my letters for thirty years and never once been asked to dine at my table. I have wronged him past mending. I could give him my name, and it would not give back a day. Let it be paid by my son, if he is a better man than I. He is not yet. A. B.

It was dated the night he died.

"I took it out of the book at four in the morning," said Dario. "While the doctor slept. I stood over him with the razor, and he was breathing very slowly, and I said to him, you might have told me. In nine years you might have said it aloud." His voice was steady. "I cut it away because I could not bear that Rusk should have it. Or the boy. Or any living soul. It was the only piece of paper in the world that had my name beside his, and a word of kindness, and I would not give it to a harbor to read."

"You could have shown Matteo."

"And have him pay me?" A faint flinch. "Out of pity? From the little tin box of a debt? I have been paid enough of that kind of coin." He closed his eyes. "I waited, my dear. I waited nine years. I thought, he is a better man than his father, he will come to me of his own accord, he will say, Dario, I have understood something. And he did not. He sat in the study and signed ledgers and never once looked up. And then he married, and a clever girl was made sole trustee by a clause that I myself had drafted in an idle hour, to see whether anyone would notice. And it came to me that if two people died on the one night, in a single hall, in the sight of the whole house, there would not be anyone left to ask me what I was owed."

He opened his eyes. They were wet.

"I did not intend it as a murder," said Dario. "I intended it as a bill."

There was a sound at the door.

It was a slow, uneven tread on the carpet outside, and a heavy breath, and the dry creak of a man leaning on a larger man's arm. Sienna did not turn. She felt it in her spine. The narrow doorway filled with a gray shape, and Helena stepped back against the cedar to let it through, and a thin pale man in a creased white shirt came into the little warm room with his hand on Marco's shoulder and the mark of a taped needle on the back of the other.

He had been sleeping. She could see it in the crease on his cheek. He had got up without being told, and put on his shoes, and come down the whole length of a dark passage on his own feet, and he stood in the doorway of the little room swaying very slightly, with his eyes fixed on the man in the chair.

"Dario," said Matteo.

It was barely a voice. But the old man's face changed, the whole old face opening, softening, going helplessly tender. He half rose.

"My boy," he said. "Oh, my boy. You ought not to be on your feet."

"Don't."

He stopped.

"You are not to call me that," said Matteo. He said it quietly, with his hand tight on Marco's shoulder. "Not any longer. I should like to ask you something, and I should like you to answer it with your own mouth, and not with a kind one."

"Anything."

"The doorway."

The candle flame stood straight. Nobody breathed.

"A man stood in it," said Matteo. "In another life. On a night that has not happened. I lay on a rug beside a woman who was dying, and a shape came between me and the light. It said two words. I have carried them for two years, alone, and I told one person." He drew breath. "Was it you?"

Dario was quiet for a long time.

"I do not know," he said at last.

It was very low. He was looking at his hands, folded in his lap, long and fine and a little spotted with age.

"I want you to believe that. I do not know what the pair of you are. I stopped asking in the winter, when the girl on the fires came to me weeping and said that she had heard you tell Sienna a story by the library hearth about a dead man in a corridor. A thing that could not have happened. I thought, the boy has had a dream. I thought it was a dreadful, tender, pitiful dream." His voice thickened. "And I thought, if a man in a doorway whispered forgive me to a dying child, then it was a very fitting thing for him to have said. And I put it in my pocket. I used it on the twenty-sixth of July at a deal table in a hospital. And again on the fourteenth."

"You used it."

"I am a man who uses what he is given." He lifted his head. The pale eyes were enormous and clear. "But I will tell you what I think. If a dying man's mind put me in that door, then it saw truly. I think if I had stood in it, I should have said it. I think I should have said it with all my heart."

"And gone away."

"And shut the door," said Dario, "as one does on a sleeping child."

Matteo did not answer. He stood in the cedar-scented dark with his gray face lit from below by a single candle, and Sienna, a yard from his elbow, saw him close his eyes. He did not weep. He did something much more difficult. He stood where he was and let it be true, the whole length of it, from his shoulders to his boots.

She did not touch him. She had wanted to with a violence that frightened her. Her hand had half risen. But it was his, this moment. It was a thing that belonged to a man and a door, and she had learned from him what it was to be given the room to bear a thing on one's own. She stood close enough that her sleeve brushed his, and she did not move, and she felt him know it.

"I carried that for two years," said Matteo.

"I know." The old voice cracked. "I am sorrier for that than for any of it. You must believe it."

"You are not to be sorry in my hearing."

"No."

"I shall not have it. I find that I cannot take it from you." He opened his eyes. They were wet and steady and very tired. "The lemonade," he said. "The glasses on the twenty-first of June."

"I did them myself, the night before, in the cedar room. Alone." Dario did not look up. "I should like it understood that the boy Tomas knew nothing. I took his tray at the pantry door and carried it myself to the table. He will blame himself for it for a year, and he must not." A pause. "Please tell him so."

"I will," said Matteo.

He was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Aurelio."

Dario flinched. It was the first real movement he had made.

"The night he died," said Matteo. "Helena was asleep. You sat with him. She has never known, in nine years, whether the last syringe was hers. She has lived in that room as in a locked house." His voice dropped. "I think that you owe her an answer. I think that you owe it before anyone takes you out of here."

Helena, by the door, made a small sound.

The old man turned his head. He looked at her across the narrow cedar room, at the tall stained figure with its stand and its bag of clear fluid, and his face went through a long slow change. It was not remorse. It looked like something older and sadder. It was the face of a man who has set down a very heavy load and does not yet know how to stand without it.

"He asked me," said Dario.

She did not move.

"At two in the morning. You had gone to lie down. He was in such pain, my dear. You cannot imagine. He opened his eyes and looked at me, and said, Tin, I cannot bear it. It was the only time he ever called me by the name as if he loved it." The thin voice broke. "I took the syringe from the tray. It was the one you had left, and it was a larger dose than yours, because I had drawn it myself from the bottle. He watched me. He said, thank you. It was the only thing he ever thanked me for."

The cedar walls seemed to lean inward. Somewhere a long way off, in the great house, a clock struck one.

"I did it for love," said Dario Vance. "And afterward I understood that I had also, coldly, in the same hour, made a thing I could use. I wrote a prescription in your hand while you slept. I have never forgiven myself that, and I have never ceased to use it." He looked at her. "You did not kill him, Helena. You never did. You gave a proper dose, and left a syringe on a table, and slept. It was mine, from the first to the last. I told you otherwise because I needed you frightened. It is the worst thing that I have done."

Helena put her hand over her mouth.

She stood with it there for a long time, upright, with her gray eyes wide open and the tears running down her face and falling on her stained blouse. She did not make a sound. And then, slowly, as if a great weight had been lifted off her shoulders and she was not sure whether she would fall or rise, she bent her head, and her whole body began to shake.

"Nine years," she whispered.

"I know."

"Nine years, and a locked drawer, and a green book."

"I know, my dear. I am so very sorry."

She lifted her face. It was wet, and naked, and terrible, and oddly, for the first time since a white room in October, at rest.

"Thank you," said Helena Roux, quietly, "for that one thing."

There were steps in the passage.

They were heavy, and slow, and unhurried, and a breath wheezed in front of them like a pair of bellows. A large soft man in a bad brown coat came into the doorway behind Marco's shoulder, with a bowler hat in his fist and his drooping moustache wet with the dew of the cliff road. Behind him, between two constables, in a pale gray overcoat with a velvet collar that was now torn at the shoulder, came a rosy round man with his hat gone and his small bright blue eyes darting.

"Mr. Rusk," said Inspector Hollis, "has been kind enough to join us."

"I was only going for a drive," said Rusk, breathlessly. "It is a very fine night. I had no idea that there was to be any unpleasantness." He had a paper bag clutched to his chest. A broken orange rolled out of it, and across the cedar floor, and came to rest against Dario's shoe. "I was stopped at the bend, by a cart across the road, and a perfect army of constables. It is an outrage. I have friends in the council."

"You had a black book in your car," said the Inspector, mildly. "In a biscuit tin."

"A keepsake."

"It is now in the custody of the Port." Hollis turned the bowler in his hands. "I am told, Mr. Rusk, that you have a great deal to say. I should like you to say it in the order that suits you best. It is a thing I have learned in twenty-six years, that a man who offers his story before it is asked of him does a great deal better than one who is made to produce it."

Rusk looked at him. The small blue eyes went to the old man in the chair, silver and quiet in the candlelight, with a score of sheets under his hand, and then to the faces in the doorway. Something went across the pink round countenance that was neither fear nor anger, but a kind of rapid, sly, practical arithmetic.

"Tinplate," said Rusk. He gave it a little wheezing flourish, like a man handing in a ticket. "I never knew his name, Inspector. I swear it on my mother. A letter came, in a good hand. A cheque, after, for a small service. Mr. Vance is a very old friend of the house, and I was very fond of him. But I know nothing. I was only ever a banker."

"Vern," said Dario.

He said it gently. He had not raised his voice. But the round man stopped, and the paper bag crackled in his arms.

"You are very tired," said Dario, "and you are about to sell me for the price of a pension. I do not blame you. It is the oldest transaction in the world." He smiled. "Only do try, my dear fellow, to get the date of the cheque right. It was a Tuesday."

Rusk's mouth fell open.

Hollis nodded once to the constables, and they took the round man out, sputtering, protesting his mother's grave, and a thin trail of orange peel lay across the cedar floor like a bright thread. The Inspector lingered a moment in the door, turning his bowler in his hands.

"A small matter, madam, since you will want it for the record," he said. "We found a blank pass-card in the old gentleman's writing table, from the porters' office at Marenna General. Mr. Fenwick's partner had it copied in the spring, at Mr. Vance's request, with a very good excuse about fire regulations. I do not think that Dr. Pryce will ever forgive himself." He cleared his throat. "I should tell him that nobody ever noticed. Which is the whole of the art."

He added, as an afterthought, "And the letter that Mr. Marco burned in July, from the county beyond Carrow, saying nothing whatever. That was Mr. Rusk's, to see whether you would answer. He wished to know which of you opened the post."

"Thank you, Inspector," said Sienna.

He crossed the little room in two slow strides and stood beside the writing table, a large sad mild man with a drooping moustache, and he looked down at the old man in the chair with an expression of such deep and weary civility that Sienna's throat closed.

"Mr. Vance," he said. "I have a warrant that I should be sorry to have to read. It runs to a great many lines. I should much prefer to say only that I am obliged to ask you to come with me."

"I am quite ready."

He rose.

He did it easily, with a hand on the table, a tall slender silver figure in his shirtsleeves with the last of the candlelight on his hair. He took his dove-gray coat from the back of the chair and folded it over his arm. He put on his spectacles. He looked round the little cedar room, slowly, from the shelves of gray ledgers to the copper kettle, with an air of gentle and affectionate farewell, as a man looks at a house in which he was happy.

"I shall not be needing the tea," he said.

Then he held out his hands, wrists together, palms up, in a gesture so graceful and so free of defiance that nobody in the room could look at them.

"I only wanted," said Dario Vance, in a voice that was hardly a breath, "to be in the book."

Hollis put the cuffs on him. He did it as gently as a man buttons the coat of a child. Marco, in the doorway, had taken off his hat. He held it against his chest in both hands and looked at the floor.

They led him out through the cedar door, between two constables, past the gray ledgers and the green lamp and the great faded chart of the harbor. At the threshold he stopped. He turned his silver head, and his pale eyes came to rest, for a moment, on the cream sheet lying face down on the green leather, and on the woman at the table beside it.

"That is yours," he said. "Page one hundred and thirteen. It was always going to be someone's. I find that I should rather it were hers." A small bow. "Good night, my dear. Do eat something. I am told you have been neglecting yourself."

He went out.

The footsteps faded. A door shut a long way off, and an engine started, and went away down the hill. The little room was quiet. The candle burned straight up in its silver stick.

Sienna looked at the page.

It lay on the walnut table beside the cooling tea, a small brown leaf in a dead man's hand. She did not pick it up. She stood with her fingers resting on the edge of the table, and she felt the man beside her not move. He had come a step nearer. She could feel the warmth of him at her shoulder, through the thin blanket, the faint tremor of a body that had been given the last of its strength an hour ago and was spending it on standing.

"Let it be paid by my son," said Matteo, very softly. He had read it over her shoulder. "If he is a better man than I."

"Matteo."

"I did not know." His voice shook. "I did not know that he had said it. Nine years. If I had been told, I should have gone to him on my knees." He drew a breath. "I think it is the only thing in all this that I cannot bear."

She did not say that it was not his fault. She did not say that it was. They stood side by side in the warm cedar dark, a hand's breadth apart, not touching, with a score of sheets covered in a dead man's handwriting between them and the candle going down. She felt the inch of air between them. It had a shape. It was as definite as a wall, and as thin as a hair, and it was the only thing in the world that she was certain of.

His hand lay on the table, a few inches from hers, open, palm down.

He did not ask. She did not move. In the passage, a long way off, Mrs. Venn's voice rose and was hushed, and the great clock in the hall struck the half hour, and neither of them reached across the little distance.