Chapter 3: No Women in This House

No Women in This House

The lanterns went up along the corridor one at a time, the far end first, and by the time the last boy had hooked his pole down again, the courtyard had gone from gray to gold. The tree in the middle of it stood in the light with the last of its blossoms still on it, all of them dead.

The body lay under the tree, on the flags, under a white sheet. Past it, at the far end of the yard, the pool was still half full. Two men had been drawing it with buckets since the afternoon and had stopped where they stood, and the rope was still tied off on the rim, and the wet flags ran from the pool’s edge all the way to the tree.

The sheet had come off a bed. It was not going back on one.

The house came out to look, in twos and threes, unhurried. Two soldiers off the wall. The steward at the top of the steps with his keys in his hand and his coat buttoned to the throat. A gardener with dirt still in the creases of his fingers. A boy with a lamp pole who stood at the edge of the light and watched, and yawned, and then thought better of the yawn. They looked at the sheet about as long as a man looks at a cart parked in the wrong place. Then they looked at one another. Then at nothing. Not one of them swore, or stepped back, or asked a question out loud.

Ambrose had stood in a great many rooms in the week after a death. He had never stood in one like this.

He crossed the yard. His left cuff was still dark and stiff with the mud of the street outside the Moray house, and he kept that arm turned in against his coat, out of the light. Then he bent and folded the sheet back, once, from the face.

A young woman, younger than he had prepared himself for, and better looking, which was a stupid thing for his mind to have done to him, and it did it anyway. Her hair had been done that morning by somebody’s hands and had come most of the way out of it since. Low on the left side of her neck, above the collarbone, there was a bruise the width of four fingers laid flat. Her dress was on her the way clothes are on a person who dressed herself and had not been undressed since. What was underneath it, he could not tell from here, and he was not going to find out in front of a courtyard.

The sheet was soaked through in a wide dark blot around her, and the flags around that were wet, and the smell coming off the cloth and the body together — cold linen, standing water, and something under both that he did not care to name — went up into the lamplight and stayed there.

He straightened. “Does anyone here know this woman?”

He said it in the voice he had, which was not the voice he had been born with. It carried fine. Four faces in the yard changed by nothing at all, the way a candle dips when a door shuts somewhere else, and then came back.

Nobody answered.

He waited. Waiting was most of what he did for a living, and he knew the shapes silence came in: the silence of men who don’t know, the silence of men who know and won’t, and the silence of men who have been told in some other room what to say.

“Not that I know of.”

Captain Voss came up from the side without hurrying and looked at her the way a man looks at a horse he is being offered. He crouched, took a corner of the sheet between two fingers, lifted it an inch, and set it down again. “She isn’t one of ours,” he said. “Your Grace.”

He said the last two words slightly louder than the rest of the sentence, aimed at the empty step, and the emptiness said nothing, which appeared to be the answer he was after.

Ambrose looked at him. “This house is large, Captain.”

“Yes.”

“You have been back in the capital eight days.”

“Yes.”

“There are doors in this house you have probably never opened.”

“There are.” Voss straightened and met his eye. There was no offense in it, and no hesitation either. “She isn’t one of ours.”

Ambrose believed him. That was part of the trouble.

Then something touched his cheek.

He never heard the duke come up behind him. He was aware of the yard changing in a way he could not have named — the light, or the level of the noise, or simply a large man in the space behind him — and then something brushed across his face, once, light, and it was hair.

Cassian Roan leaned down over his shoulder, close enough that the edge of his hair crossed Ambrose’s cheek, and said, at his ear, at a volume meant for nobody:

“Don’t.”

Then he straightened, stepped back, and stood beside him in the lamplight where everyone could see him, his face doing nothing at all. Ambrose stayed where he was a beat longer than he needed to, bent over a dead woman.

“Captain Voss is right.” The duke said it to the yard, flat, pitched to carry to the steps. “She is not one of mine.”

He looked down. Ambrose looked up. The duke regarded him the way a man regards a ledger whose total he already knows.

“Because there are no women in this house.”

The words went through Ambrose’s head and found nothing to catch on. He was still working at them when the duke said it again, slower, the way a man repeats himself to a clerk.

“There are no women in this house. There never have been.”

Ambrose stood up and turned around and looked.

The boy with the lamp pole, on his stool, mouth open. Two soldiers at the arch, one young, one with a bad shoulder — men. The steward on the steps with his ring of keys, fifty if he was a day. A younger man at the corridor door, hands behind his back, who might have been a second steward or a first groom, and either way was a man. The gardener, gloves off now, dirt on him. And past them the house itself, which went on much longer than it had any business going on: a lit corridor down one whole side of the yard, four closed doors facing west, windows above with a lamp behind them and nothing else. Forty rooms, in the dark, at the end of a day, in a city.

Not one woman in any of it.

And beyond the wall and the roofline, the street. And past the street, this same night, this same hour, the whole city laid out along the river and going about its evening, and inside an hour it would know. He knew precisely how it would travel and where it would stop, because his entire adult life had been spent standing in the path of exactly that kind of talk, and he had learned to hear it start.

The duke had not been answering him. The duke had been answering the street.

“How long has it been like this?” Ambrose said.

The duke looked at him for a moment and chose not to hear it, which answered the question as well as anything else would have.

“Go across to the Morays’.” He raised his voice, and a runner came out from under the arch — young, keyed up, pleased to have somewhere to go. “Winslow’s over there with his people. Bring him and his man back here, and tell him to bring a clerk, because I want all of it written down. All of it. Where she was found, who found her, what time.”

The runner went. Ambrose almost laughed, and let his face do it for a second. The yard had other things to look at.

Ambrose knelt. The stones came up through his trousers, cold and wet, and he looked at what there was to look at. The bruise low on her neck with its edges going yellow at one end and not at the other. The skin above it untouched. Both hands lying open, palms up, fingers loose, nails whole. A ring mark on the third finger of the left hand with no ring in it. The dress was cheap and good and had been mended at the wrist with small, even stitches. Somebody had loved her, or owed her, or both.

He did not know how a body came out of water, or how long she had been in it, or what the water did to a face. There were men paid to know, and one of them was coming across the street.

Fourteen cards in eight days. He had written every one of them in his own hand, because he had not got where he was by letting somebody else do the handwriting, and the reply to all fourteen had been the same as the reply to every question he had asked this evening: the reply a man gives when he does not intend to join the conversation at all.

There was one fact in the kingdom heavier than the others, and every man who walked into the Great Hall carried it around all day without ever saying it out loud. The king was ten years old. If the king died, the sentence did not need finishing, and nobody ever finished it. The Crown would not have far to look. There was one Roan left with a claim nobody was going to argue with out loud, and an army that took its orders from him and from nobody else, and he was standing four feet away, looking down at a dead woman in his own courtyard. What the duke wanted, nobody had yet been willing to say in writing. Everyone guessed. Nobody wrote it down.

The duke turned his head and looked at him, and the look had the temperature of the middle of January. Ambrose held it, did nothing with it, then turned his own head and let one corner of his mouth move. The duke breathed out through his nose — the shortest possible comment on the entire business — and looked away at his gate.

Ambrose put a hand on his knee and got up, and the yard tilted. He had not eaten since morning. He had walked most of the city twice, been dragged out of one doorway and into another, and had spent the last two hours standing in cold air over cold water, and he had known this was coming for a while and had been putting it off the way he put things off, by looking at them. His left foot found nothing where the ground was supposed to be, and he went back a step, and the ground came up.

A hand closed on his back, flat, at the waist, through the wool, and stopped him.

“Careful, Chancellor.” The duke’s voice was level. “This is my house. Not the Great Hall.”

Ambrose got his weight under himself and stood, and turned, and looked up at him. Then he moved his lips silently and distinctly, so there could be no mistake, and did not use his voice to do it.

Thank you.

The duke watched him mouth it, and did not trouble to hide that he found it funny.

The gate banged.

Winslow came in fast with his coat open, two of his men behind him, and a coroner with a bag and a lantern.

“Your Grace.” He took the yard in at one pass — the sheet, the men, the wet stones, the house — and didn’t like any of it. “That’s the one out of the water?”

“It is.”

“Who found her?”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then the steward said, from the top of the steps, “She came up when they were drawing the water. I’ll have the man here for you in the morning.”

“Which man?”

“The one who was drawing it,” the steward said, and did not name him, and Winslow looked at him for a moment and let it go the way a man lets go of something he intends to pick up later.

“Keep the yard as it is. Nobody draws anything else out of that water tonight.” He crossed to her and crouched, hands on his knees, and read her the way Ambrose had read her, and did not say what he thought about it. “Drain it at first light. I want the sediment, all of it, in buckets, and I want the buckets counted.”

Then he stood and saw Ambrose properly for the first time.

“Chancellor.” He came over. He looked at the cuff, and the coat, and the hour, in that order. “You’re a long way from your desk.”

“I’m often a long way from my desk.”

“You’re standing in a courtyard at night with mud on your sleeve, and the last I heard, you were across the street.” Winslow’s tone was light and his eyes were not. “Whose case are you on?”

Ambrose opened his mouth to say something that would have been very nearly true.

“Winslow.” The duke’s hand closed above Ambrose’s elbow and turned him. “He’s eating with me.”

Winslow looked at the hand, and at Ambrose, and did not ask.

The corridor ran the whole length of the house. Two lamps down it, then a door, then a room with a table in it and every lamp in the room already lit, which meant somebody had been in there lighting lamps while the body was still lying in the yard.

“Sit.”

Ambrose sat. There were fifteen dishes on the table. He counted them without meaning to, which was another thing he did without meaning to. A roast, jointed and fanned open on its platter. A bowl of something pale and jellied. Two kinds of bird. Dark greens under oil. A loaf already cut. Potatoes with their skins split. A tureen of broth still steaming at the far end, and beside it a small brass stand with a single candle burning in it, though there were eight lamps in the room.

“Nobody’s poisoned it,” the duke said, and sat down across from him and put both forearms on the table.

“Thank you,” Ambrose said, very quietly, because it was one word and he could afford one word.

He took the greens, and the broth, and a heel of the loaf. The broth was good. He ate the way he had been taught to eat in rooms where there had never been quite enough chairs, slowly, and did not look across the table, and it made no difference, because the man across the table was looking at him.

The duke let him get most of the way down the bowl before he said anything.

“You’re a rabbit.”

He said it looking at the plate of greens, which was the only plate Ambrose had touched.

Ambrose cut a piece of the meat and put it in his mouth and chewed it slowly.

Six years ago a physician had told him, in a small room with the window shut, that if he intended to keep working he would stop eating meat. He had mostly kept to it. There were two reasons he had just broken it, and only one of them was the man sitting opposite him. The other was that he had walked into the wrong door that morning, and there was no power on earth that was going to make him explain it.

The meat was very good. It was going to cost him somewhere around midnight.

The duke’s fingers tapped the cloth once, twice, and then he scraped his chair back and stood, and Ambrose looked up, and their eyes met, and the duke smiled. It was the first smile Ambrose had ever had off him, and it was not comforting.

“Finish it.” He was already moving down the room. “Every dish on that table was chosen with you in mind, Chancellor. A man of your age, with your responsibilities, carrying what you carry — I had my steward put together a menu for a man with a problem he doesn’t like to discuss in public. Don’t waste my good intentions.”

Ambrose put his fork down.

He had the explanation ready. He had had it ready since ten o’clock that morning: it was four sentences long, and every word of it was true, and each sentence would cost him more than this smile had. I went into the wrong door. That was the first one. The second was going to have to contain the address on the sign outside it.

He looked at the duke’s back going down the room, and then at the table, and said nothing at all, which was the fourth or fifth time that evening and was getting to be a habit.

The door shut. The duke’s voice in the corridor, low and short, saying something to somebody. Boots going away.

Ambrose sat alone with fifteen dishes and one candle, and let out a long breath at a table set for a man who could not have eaten a third of it.
Then he did the arithmetic he had actually come here to do.

Eight days of cards, and not one of them had bought him so much as a refusal on paper. One knock on one door had bought him a courtyard, a dead woman, a captain who did not lie, and a hand flat on his back in front of a houseful of witnesses. The way into this man was not through the Chancellery. He had known that before tonight; he had suspected it since the first card came back unopened. Tonight he had bought the confirmation, and he had paid for it out of his own pocket, and the price had been watching a man enjoy saying the word rabbit.

He finished the meat.

Then he stood to go, and his stomach took the payment out of him, and he had to stand there with one hand on the back of the chair until the room stopped moving.

In the corridor, a boy was going along putting out the lamps, one at a time, as he went.