XLV The Mural Chamber
XLV
The Mural Chamber
The mural chamber was cold and dark, and his clothes were on her floor.
He had gone out in nothing but the sheet. The cold did not yet have a real claim on him; the wine was standing between him and it. He stood in the centre of the chamber with the linen around him and the slow, steady tilt of the room refusing to come to rest under his feet.
The candle he had not lit. The fire he had not made. He was standing because he had not yet decided to sit.
His pulse was in his ears. He was aware of it with a clarity he had not had in years — the slow, loud climb of it under his jaw, the matching beat behind his eyes, the wine still moving through him like a tide that had not turned.
He had drunk more of it than he had known he was drinking.
He had been allowed to. He had been encouraged to.
He had been managed.
He pressed his fingers to his eyes. The pressure of them was its own small mercy.
He could not find it in him to be angry. Then he was angry. The room kept tilting slightly under his feet, and would not lie down.
The wine in him was beginning to tilt the other way. A small early tightening in his temples meant the morning was coming, and the morning was going to have something to say.
He sat down at last on the edge of the cot, the sheet bunched around him, and put his head in his hands, and the wine in his temples beat through his fingers, and the cold of Aberdeenshire stone came up through the soles of his feet, and he waited for the night to do its worst.
She picked his clothes up off the floor before the candle went out.
She did not know exactly when she decided to do it. At some point in the grey before dawn, she had been lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, and she had moved her head too quickly, and the room had moved with it. The wine had decided to make her pay for her cleverness this morning.
She had pushed herself up slowly. Her temples were hammering. Her mouth was sour. The coat was on the floor by the dresser. She did not so much decide to gather his things as find herself doing it.
She had been listening to him use the hidden stair for four months.
She knew the sound of it — which step creaked and how long it took him to reach the top and the silence after the door that meant he was back in the mural chamber and she was alone for the night.
She had lain in the dark and counted those sounds more times than she had ever told him.
She went up the stair. The door at the top was closed. She knocked, and the small dull sound of her own knuckles on the wood made her wince.
Nothing happened. Then his step, and the door opened, and he was standing in the passage with his eyes red and his hair disordered and the cold of several hours plain on him. He looked like he had not slept either, and the wine was now coming due in him as well.
She held out his clothes.
His eyes went to the bundle. Then to hers. His face did something she was not going to try to read.
“You had better let me in. You have nothing left to hide.”
He stepped back from the door.
The mural chamber was cold and dark — no candle, no fire, nothing — and she set his clothes on the table and turned to face him.
The grey pre-dawn light from the ventilation slit was thin and unkind, and they stood in it and held each other’s eye for the first time in daylight.
They both looked, she thought, exactly as terrible as they felt.
“Fitzwilliam.”
She had not meant to begin with his real name. That name had never meant him to her in any history she could call upon, and she was not sure how it came to her lips now. She had not planned anything about this conversation.
He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, he just sighed wearily.
“Why George?”
He had to swallow before he answered. “My father’s name.
I could answer to it without thinking.” He paused.
He was arranging the words behind a wall of pain, and she could see him do it.
“The first time you called me that — the night I got up and closed the door on you — I had not expected it to do what it did. My father has been dead five years. I had not heard his name from someone who—” He stopped.
“I had not expected to hear it that way.”
She kept watching him, but he would not meet her eyes.
“I am sorry,” she said.
“You had no reason to know.”
“No. But I am sorry, nonetheless.”
Neither of them spoke. The dark outside the slit was beginning to grey. Her head gave a slow, heavy throb behind her eyes, and she closed them briefly and waited for it to pass.
“You should have told me. I know why you did not. I know the reasons were real. But you should have told me.”
“I wanted to. Every time I came to you. You have no idea how many times I almost struck that cursed flint myself.”
She crossed her arms. “You let me fall in love with a man who does not exist.”
His face came up. “You…? No. Do not tease me. Last night was a… an act. You played me, and I deserved—”
“Last night, I told my husband that I loved him. I still do.”
His eyes widened. “Still? You… you meant it?”
“With all my heart, I love the man I called my husband. But this morning, I do not know if he was ever real.”
Air filled his lungs, and he stood a fraction taller. “George Carlisle is just a name. I exist. I am real. You fell in love with me. I was there every night, Elizabeth. That was not a fiction.”
“It was not entirely the truth, either.”
“No.” His eyes did not leave hers. “It was not entirely the truth.”
She turned to the window. Outside, the late November light was coming up very slowly over the grey sea. The snow had stopped in the night, and the headland was white and entirely still, and the brightness of it through the slit made her press the heel of her hand briefly against her eye.
“When you said — last night — the warrant, the man who constructed it — I want the whole of it now. Not last night’s summary. All of it.”
His eyes went to the window. Then he pulled out the chair and held it for her without speaking. She sat — slowly, because moving had become something she did in stages now — and he leaned back against the table, hands braced on the edge behind him, in a way that told her this would take some time.
“There is a man named Sterling,” he said.
“A business associate — or so I believed, for the better part of three years.
I was the silent investor; he ran operations, with access to my shipping interests that I had extended in good faith.
He used it to funnel money through France, profiteering at the expense of his own countrymen and supplying the enemy.
“And because such activity is not overlooked forever, he spent those same years building a case that would leave him the innocent partner. Forged manifests, correspondence in my name, three years of paper placing me at the centre of a scheme to move gold to France through my own vessels.” He kept his eyes on the floor.
“When the Home Office moved, I had perhaps four days’ warning — a man I retain privately had a contact inside the department.
“You were in Kent when it happened. I had the express in the middle of the night and left before dawn. There was no other course — Sterling’s evidence was thorough and he was already cooperating; a trial would have closed before any defence could be drawn.
So I rode for London in secret, and Webb had five days to make an alternative. ”
“So, you faked your death?”
“While I sailed for Aberdeen, Webb sent my carriage south on the Dover road — the coachman paid to vanish afterward, my signet ring inside it, and a body obtained by means I did not ask him to specify. The carriage was overturned, a fire staged, the body identified as mine by the ring.” He drew a slow breath.
“Colonel Fitzwilliam identified it at the inquest. He was the one they sent for.”
She had risen from the chair and pressed herself back against the wall of the mural chamber without knowing when she had done it. Outside the ventilation slit, the grey was coming up over the sea.
“This Sterling. He is still… he is not in custody?”
“He is entirely at liberty, and cooperative — he built the evidence, so he knows exactly what they will find and what they will not. A grieved associate whose business was exploited by a disgraced traitor; that is his account, and his own forgeries support it. One man could contradict it. He has been moved three times and is beyond reach.”
She straightened. “A witness?”
“A clerk of Sterling’s who prepared the forged manifests and vanished before the warrant was drawn.
He is alive, and we know where — but we have every reason to think he will not talk, and we cannot go near him without a lever.
If Sterling learns we have looked, he moves the man again, or worse.
” He turned his head and met her eye properly for the first time since they had entered the room.
“My cousin Richard is working on it through army channels, and Webb does what he can from London. It is — not moving as quickly as any of us would wish.”
“Your cousin… he knows you are alive?”
“Since October. He had already begun to reconstruct what had happened — he went to Webb, told Webb he knew where I was and would come alone if Webb would not help, and I authorised Webb to bring him in.” Something nearly dry entered his voice. “Richard is not easily managed.”
“How did he find out you were alive? What made him suspect, and how did he know where to look?”
He paused, and a faint smile touched his lips. “It was because of you.”
She stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”
“When you encountered Richard in Cheapside in July, he had been wandering, tracing any connexion back to me that his grief could find. You were one of them.” He kept his eyes on the floor.