CHAPTER THIRTY
Cassius
Number four Marlowe Terrace is a five-storey Edwardian villa behind a hedge, east-facing, with a garden.
I get there at four minutes past three and I cannot go in, and I stand at the gate exactly the way I stood at a gate in Rimebrook, and for the second time in a week I understand what it is to be on the wrong side of one of these.
She is forty feet away and eleven metres up and she is bleeding, and I know that the way you know your own hand is bleeding, and there is a rule about doors that has held since before physics.
At twenty past three something starts happening up there that I have felt exactly once before, in a dairy in Rimebrook, and I go down on one knee in a hedge.
She's cutting.
Eleven times, over about eight minutes, and each one goes through me like a struck bell — and I am kneeling in a hedge on Marlowe Terrace with my hands in the dirt, laughing, actually laughing, because there is a woman on the top floor of a hundred-and-four-year-old man's house taking his bathroom apart with something and building a room he cannot enter.
Vespera arrives at three twenty in a taxi.
"Well," she says.
"He hasn't invited anyone into that house since 1991."
"No." She looks up at it. "Cassius, listen to me, because we have three hours and we are going to spend at least one of them being sensible.
There is no version of tonight where we cross that threshold.
Not with numbers, not with fire, not with the eleven of us and a battering ram.
It's a rule. It's the only rule we've got. "
"Then—"
"So we do the other thing." She turns. "We wait for him to come out."
"He won't come out. He's got what he wants inside."
"He will come out," Vespera says, "because he is a hundred and four years old and very badly frightened, and he is now the only person in this city holding a thing that everyone wants, and men in that position always, always come out.
They come out to negotiate." She adjusts her gloves.
"Which is why you are going to stand at that gate and be the most reasonable man in Ashmoor, and I am going to go and stand in his garden and be extremely old at him. "
She's right.
That's the appalling thing. She's right about all of it, and at four in the morning Lucien Ivo opens a first-floor window and shouts down into the hedge:
"She's warded my bathroom!"
There's a silence in Marlowe Terrace.
"I beg your pardon," says Vespera.
"She's — Matriarch, she's taken a razor to my joists, she's cut something into the frame of my bath and I can't get through the door—" He's actually laughing; it's climbing out of him in bursts.
"She's on the floor in there and she's bleeding and she won't come out and I can't go in, and if she keeps that up until six she'll be too weak to walk and if she stops she has to come out through me! "
"Lucien."
"Do you know what she is?" he shouts. "Do you know what she actually—"
"I know exactly what she is," Vespera says. "Come down."
"I'm not coming down!"
"Come down, Lucien Ivo, or I will stand in this garden until dawn and then I will have this house purchased and demolished with you asleep in the basement.
" Her voice hasn't risen once. "You've had your night.
You've had the best night any of us has had since 1811, and I am not going to pretend I don't envy you, and now you are going to come downstairs and let three people into your house and we are going to have an extremely unpleasant conversation about how you live through Friday. "
And he does.
That's what nobody believes afterwards. He comes down. He opens the front door at twenty past four in the morning, in a shirt with blood on the cuff, with his eyes red and the whole world in his face for the first time in seventy years, and he says, exhausted:
"Come in, then."
◆ ◆ ◆
The bathroom door opens at twenty-five past four and I am standing in it and I cannot come in, because she has made a very good job of the joists.
"Wren."
"I know." She's on the floor with her back to the bath and she can't feel her hands properly. "I know. Give me a minute, I've got to take one out and I've got to do it with a razor and my grip's gone."
"Don't."
"What?"
"Don't take it out." I crouch down in the doorway so my eyes are level with hers. "There are four of us on this landing and one of them is Vespera Thorne. That room is the safest place you have ever been in your life. Stay in it."
"Cassius—"
"I have spent two hours knowing exactly where you were and exactly how frightened you were and being unable to do one single thing about it," I say, "and the only reason you are alive is that you took a bath panel off, and you are not undoing that for me."
So we do it like that.
Her on the floor of a marble bathroom and me sitting on the carpet in the doorway with my back against the frame, four feet apart, unable to touch, while the sky over Marlowe Terrace goes from black to the colour of dishwater.
She tells me about the transfer. Four thousand dollars into an account eleven people know about. She will be at Fennick Lane at eleven on Thursday and I would rather it was you than me.
"He gave you to Lucien," I say.
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Because Lucien's the obvious suspect and everyone in that court would have believed it." Her head's back against the bath. "Cassius, whoever it is knew I'd been to the club. He knew Lucien would take it. He's been watching both of us."
And that's when Lucien starts screaming downstairs.
◆ ◆ ◆
It's the worst sound I have ever heard, and I have four hundred years of the worst sounds anybody hears.
He's in his own drawing room on his knees on the rug in front of eleven feet of glass doors that give onto a garden, and Vespera Thorne is standing over him with her hand on his head like a woman at a christening.
"It's gone," Lucien says.
He looks up. He is a hundred and four years old and his face has fallen in like a house.
"It came back and it was — I stood in the rain for an hour — and then about ten minutes ago it started going out, like a fuse, like a—" He drags in a breath.
"Roses. There are roses in that garden, there have been roses in that garden since 1991 and I have never once, and at half three I could smell them, and now I can't."
Wren has come down. She's holding the banister with both hands.
"Miss Kelleher," Lucien says. "You knew."
"Yes."
"You knew when you were sitting on my floor."
"Yes."
"Tell me."
So she tells him. Standing in a drawing room at ten to five in the morning, holding on to the back of a chair because her legs won't do it on their own, she tells Lucien Ivo what a woman wrote in 1861: given freely, it gives them the world back.
Taken by force, it turns. He will have his hour.
He will have his day. And then it curdles in him, and it takes what he had and it takes the rest as well.
Halfway through, Vespera Thorne makes a small noise and sits down.
Because she's a hundred and ninety and she was in Baltimore in 1811, and she is doing the arithmetic about seventeen men in a cellar, and about nine hundred vampires in a hemisphere, and about two centuries of a grey world that everyone she has ever known has believed was simply the nature of the thing.
"We did it to ourselves," she says.
"Aurek did it to you," Wren says. "You all just stood in the room."
"Yes," says Vespera. "That is what I said."
Lucien is looking at his own hands.
"So it's permanent," he says.
"Yes."
"And if I'd asked."
Nobody says anything, because the answer is yes and he knows the answer is yes and there is nothing in the world any of us can do about it.
Lucien Ivo starts to laugh.
It goes on for a long time. He sits back on his heels on a very good rug in a very good house with the sky going pale behind eleven feet of east-facing glass, and he laughs until it isn't laughing, and I say, quietly, "Lucien," and he says:
"Do you know what I've decided? I've decided that seventy years of not knowing was survivable."
"Lucien—"
"And I don't think four hundred is."
"Lucien."
He stands up.
I move — and Vespera puts her hand on my arm, and she does it hard, and she is five foot nothing and a hundred and ninety and I stop like I've hit a wall.
"He's asked," she says. "Let him."
Lucien Ivo opens the garden doors at fourteen minutes past five in the morning and walks out onto the wet grass among his roses, and turns round, and looks back at us in the dark of the room.
"It was a very good night," he says.
◆ ◆ ◆
Sunrise is at six-eleven. He waits fifty-seven minutes for it.
We watch from four metres inside a dark drawing room, and Wren tries to go out to him twice, and both times I hold her with my arms around her from behind while she fights me.
"He kidnapped me," she says, into my sleeve, furious, sobbing. "He put a towel under my head—"
"I know."
"I'm not — I'm not sad for him—"
"I know," I say. "Neither am I. It's not sadness. It's the other thing."
At six-eleven the light comes over the wall at the end of the garden and finds him standing in the roses with his hands in his pockets, and there is a great deal that could be said about it and I am not going to say any of it. It takes about ninety seconds.
Vespera turns away at forty.
When it's done she straightens her gloves and says, in an absolutely level voice: "Emergency court.
Tonight, nine o'clock, all eleven — all ten.
I want the vault swept before then and I want Halloway found, and Cassius, I want you to understand that I have just watched a member of my own house choose that, and that I have been Matriarch for a hundred and ninety years, and that I am now extremely angry. "
"Understood."
◆ ◆ ◆
The Greyhound station on Corvin Street has forty-eight lockers and number 114 is on the bottom row, and Perce Hallwood makes his drop at ten in the morning exactly as he has for nineteen months.
Ravensdale sits on it from ten. I take over at four.
Nobody comes.
At six, with forty minutes of usable dark, I get a set of bolt-cutters from the maintenance office and open locker 114 myself.
The list is gone.
And in its place, folded, with my name on the front in a copperplate hand I have seen on four hundred court minutes since 1953, there's a note.
Cassius,
You never once asked me anything. Not in seventy years. I sat in that vault at the back with the minute book while you came and went and killed things for her, and I do not believe you have ever spoken forty words to me.
I was in the cellar. You held her hand and I held the lamp.
I have been taking his floor apart for eleven years, three boards at a time, and it is all in the back of a van, and by the time you read this it will be south of Providence. There are eleven hundred marks on that timber and I have counted every one of them, and there are two hundred and six left.
I would have liked to take her myself. I want you to know that I stood on Fennick Lane on Thursday with a drop cloth down and eleven minutes, and then I thought better of it, because I have watched her work for a year and I did not want the first thing she knew of me to be that.
So I gave her to Ivo. I am not proud of it. He was going to be blamed for all of it in any case and I thought he might enjoy an evening.
It doesn't matter now. He knows about her.
He has known since the eleventh of last month, which is the night she stood up in that vault and told eight people what we are.
I wrote it down. I write everything down.
That is the whole of what I have ever been for, and I carried the minute book to Salem and I read it out loud through a hole in a floor.
He is very much looking forward to it.
— T. Halloway