Widow's Welcome

by D. K. Fields

  The Widow’s doors were bare apart from a single design: a sickle moon, hanging low, close to the hummocky line that was the earth. A moon for winter. A moon that marked the beginning of a new phase, after an ending.

  Cora made her way down to the carved figure of the Widow at the far end of the Seat, passing one or two other people murmuring their own stories, eyes closed, attention fixed on their tales. She sat on a bench and tilted her head back to take in the full figure of the Widow. She was huge here – at least three times Cora’s height – and carved of an appropriately pale stone. Cora had come to tell the Widow about the coach, about the cord, about Ento – a story in need of an ending. But instead she was thinking of a tale that was over long, long ago. It was all because of the Seeder story, and the boy Ghen who left his family. He hadn’t had a choice, but Ruth had, and she’d chosen to go. Did she ever regret what she’d done?

  ‘Ruth was always making trouble,’ Cora told the Widow. ‘Soon as she could talk she was telling everyone that they were wrong. I got a lot of it at home, but it was worse at the Seminary. She would argue with the teachers about anything. Even you.

  ‘For some classes the whole Seminary came to the main hall. In one of those classes, Madam Vendler told us that people who live on the Northern Steppes are known for their devotion to you. That they visit your Seat three times a day, and in telling you their stories they find a kind of peace. But Ruth, sitting two rows back from me, she couldn’t let that pass without comment. She stood up and asked just who Madam Vendler was talking about – the nomadic Wayward, or the poor Union prisoners unjustly sent to the Steppes, sent there to live and die in camps.

  ‘Everyone turned to look at Ruth when she said that. I wanted a second Tear to open in the floor and swallow me. Why did Ruth always have to do that, make things difficult? And she didn’t stop there. She went on and on about the way the prisoners were kept, how few of them had any way to return once they’d served their time. What finally got Ruth sent out was the question she asked not just of Madam Vendler, but of the whole Seminary. She stood there, in the main hall, and said, “How can this be a just system of government?”

  ‘I couldn’t have been more than twelve, which meant Ruth was seventeen. A bad age. Old enough for dissatisfaction but still too young to know what to do with it.

  ‘I had no answer to her question, of course. No one did. I just wanted to go home and pretend I didn’t have an older sister. Selfish, difficult, unreasonable. Those were the words our parents used to describe Ruth and, right then, when Madam Vendler looked as if her heart might stop with rage, I agreed with them.’

  How did that particular day end? Sitting in the Seat of the Pale Widow, Cora couldn’t remember. It was only a little while later that Ruth stole the papers from their parents’ study and then disappeared. That event loomed so large in Cora’s memory that it eclipsed much else from that time.

  ‘Nothing was ever the same again,’ Cora said. ‘The papers Ruth took made it clear our parents had been misusing funds in the Commission trading hall where they worked. Embezzlement, that was the word people used. “Thieving” was the better one.

  ‘For years my parents had been at it. Where the money had gone, no one was sure. Some pennysheets claimed it was used to prop up farms in the Lowlands hit by blight. Others said it was chequer debts, or bribing Perlish tax inspectors to leave wagons unchecked. Nothing was ever proved, apart from the theft itself, but that was enough.

  ‘My father didn’t last a week after the story became public. My mother claimed his heart gave out from the stress, but it was more likely helped along by the tincture he bought in Murbick. I found the bottle under his bed, weeks after. The Coward’s Cordial, the ’sheets called it. I called it Ruth’s Revenge.

  ‘My mother tried to find Ruth, but not because she wanted her daughter back, and not because she feared for Ruth’s safety. She wanted to limit the damage Ruth could do, because she wasn’t sure what else Ruth knew.

  ‘I remember a man coming to the house. It was after dark, and he used the back door. He and my mother sat in the parlour and talked in low voices. I didn’t know who he was but he smelled of horses, and of the night, somehow. Later, much later, I learned he was a searcher. My mother had paid him to find Ruth, but he never did. The only lead they ever had was that she’d been seen going north in a Wayward caravan to the Steppes.’ Cora laughed at this memory – it was still so foolish, please the Drunkard. ‘If my mother had listened to Ruth at all during that time, really listened to her, she would have known that Ruth would never go to the Steppes. Not by choice. Ruth argued for the rights of prisoners, for shutting down the camps, but she would never have gone to the Steppes to help them. Everything was a cause for her back then. I would have told my mother that.

  ‘But no one was listening then. Least of all to me.’

  Cora closed her eyes, the gaze of the Widow too much to bear in that moment. When she opened them again, she kept her own gaze on her boots.

  ‘Some in Fenest wondered if my mother should have been sent to the Steppes herself. But of course it never came to that, which only proved Ruth right. This whole place is rotten to the core.’

  Cora stood, and felt the twinge in her foot. She deliberately put her weight on it, pushed down so the pain worsened. Her vision frayed at the edges. The Widow seemed to grow taller.

  ‘Much good knowing that did any of us, in the end.’

  She limped out of the Seat, back into the spring sunlight, and back to a case that lacked its own ending.

  Twenty-One

  ‘You wanted to see me, Chief?’ Cora said, walking between the stone examining tables.

  Chief Inspector Sillian was standing at the far end of the cold room, in full uniform and looking immaculate. She stared down at one of the empty tables. Though they were all bare it wasn’t hard to guess why she’d summoned Cora down here.

  ‘Strangled, according to your report,’ Sillian said.

  The slabs of stone were clean and had been recently polished by the looks of it. Cora so rarely saw them that way; it was the bodies she came to see. Somehow this was worse.

  ‘With something thin, like a cord, your report says.’

  ‘Pruett thought so.’ Cora looked about the room, but the examiner and his assistant were nowhere to be seen. That didn’t seem like a coincidence.

  ‘Where is it, Detective?’

  ‘Where’s wha—’

  Sillian held up a hand, cutting her question short.

  ‘Behind Tithe Hall,’ Cora said.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I don’t have the murder weapon, but I’m confident it was a curtain cord of an old Commission coach. The kind they leave to rot behind Tithe Hall.’

  ‘I see. I suppose that is progress, of a sort. But who put that cord around the storyteller’s neck?’ Sillian said.

  Cora didn’t answer, didn’t think she had to: it was obvious she hadn’t found who had killed the Wayward yet. But as the silence stretched between them, she realised Sillian was going to make her say it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t know. Perhaps it would be useful to tell you something that I know.’ Sillian finally turned to face her. ‘With every day that passes we come closer to the Wayward story. Every day we haven’t arrested the murderer we come closer to the Wayward Chambers razing the entire Bernswick division to the ground. And if it comes to that, Detective, I will do everything in my power to make sure you are inside Bernswick when they do.’

  ‘Chief, I—’

  ‘You have made a start,’ Sillian said. ‘But time is running out, Detective. Bring me the ending.’

  Cora was dismissed. She spared one last glance at empty stone slabs and then left, her boots loud on the flagstone floor.

  This story was a bigger disaster than that of the Caskers, and a more personal tragedy than the Seeders’. She was getting somewhere, it was starting to make sense, but time had always been against her. She wanted to br
eak something, but there was nothing to hand, nothing nearby, only the two most permanent things under the Audience: stone and death.

  *

  ‘You’ve been staring at that most of the morning,’ Hearst said.

  ‘That’s not tr—’ Cora caught sight of a pair of constables behind him, going into the briefing room with plates of lunch in hand, and realised the sergeant was right. She had been staring at the jar of dirt for more hours than she cared to admit, but her mind had been roaming. Back to the alleyway where Ento was found. Back to the Hook barge. Thinking about a different kind of dirt there. One that made her eyes sting and her body itch. Made her impulsive.

  ‘Gorderheim?’

  ‘Sir?’

  Hearst stepped forward, into her office proper. ‘I said, what’s the progress? On the Wayward murder. Remember that? The case you’re meant to be solving?’

  ‘’Sheets aren’t likely to let me forget it.’

  ‘And neither is Sillian. What have you got that I can give her?’

  ‘You ever done something sooner than you’d wanted to, Sergeant? Too soon, and then it was ruined?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘Neither do I.’ She opened a drawer of her desk and went to drop the jar in it.

  ‘Nor do I understand why you’re treasuring bird droppings,’ Hearst said.

  Cora’s hand froze. ‘I don’t…’

  ‘Why, in the name of the Audience, have you got that?’ He gestured for her to pass him the jar.

  ‘I found it in the alleyway next to Ento,’ Cora said. ‘Bird shit?’

  Hearst held the jar up to the light. ‘Far as I can tell.’ He unscrewed it, sniffed it and grimaced, then quickly put the lid back on. ‘Definitely. Dried, old droppings.’

  It was so obvious now. So obvious that no one had said anything, not Jenkins nor Pruett or anyone – that, or they hadn’t realised either. She’d been carrying around evidence of one thing only: birds defecated. And they did it on the walls of alleyways sometimes.

  ‘Don’t often see it with the red like this, though,’ Hearst said, handing it back to her. ‘Not in this part of the city, anyway.’

  ‘Blood, I thought. Ento’s.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  ‘Oh?’ Cora said.

  ‘You might not see it up on the roof, with my lot, but I’ve seen this before. That bird,’ he pointed at the jar, ‘was poisoned.’

  ‘But who poisons a bird?’ she said.

  Hearst gave a grim laugh. ‘We all do, Gorderheim. It’s across the city. But if I liked a wager, like you, I’d put my marks on tornstone.’

  There were more than a few marks riding on this case – had been, right from the start. ‘Tornstone,’ she said.

  ‘Could be any kind of heated stone or metal work, mind, but that’s where I’d start.’

  ‘Anywhere in particular?’

  ‘There’s a place in Tonbury,’ Hearst said. ‘Had a few run-ins with the owner, years back now. But she might be amenable to some gentle questioning, just to keep on the right side of things. You know the sort.’

  ‘Only too well.’ Cora stood and shoved her chair under her desk.

  While Hearst scribbled down the address, Cora yelled for Jenkins.

  ‘When you get there, you’ll see it,’ Hearst said, handing Cora the note. ‘The birds will be painting the walls red for you, Widow help ’em.’

  ‘Blood and shit, and Fenest blending the two.’ Cora paused in the doorway and turned back to Hearst. ‘That’s what you can give Sillian by way of a report: blood and shit.’

  *

  Hearst had told Cora to start in Tonbury. She didn’t know it – didn’t know where the rings were, didn’t know the whorehouses from the boarding, or in which alleys trouble waited. Jenkins, likewise, was unfamiliar with their destination. And disgusted too, by the change in the city that met them as they crossed into Tonbury. The hacking and spluttering of those on the pavements drowned out even the carts and gigs that rolled past them. Plumes of smoke rose above the crooked roofs and straining gables.

  ‘So this is where clouds are made,’ Cora muttered. Her breath felt hot in her chest.

  Jenkins was coughing, but managed to say, ‘That people live in these conditions.’

  ‘I doubt they have much choice,’ Cora said, looking at the cracked window panes and sheet-roofs.

  ‘Detective – over there.’ Jenkins pointed to a warehouse door as they passed.

  White dirt, flecked with red, all over the wood. Hearst was right.

  ‘It’s everywhere,’ Jenkins said, twisting in the gig. ‘Front doors, street lamps, roofs.’

  ‘And coaches?’ Cora took a deep breath and felt her lungs burn. It was like she was smoking a whole tin of bindleleaf at once. ‘The dirt was on the wall of the alley where Ento was found, at just the right height for a door opening and catching on the stone.’

  ‘The door of a coach too wide for such a new, narrow street,’ Jenkins said.

  ‘An old coach, taken out of service. It could well have set off from this part of the city to collect Ento on the night he died. And it could have returned here too, once the deed was done. If we can find the coach, we can find the driver.’

  Jenkins could only nod, her eyes streaming.

  Their driver set them down in the street behind the one Hearst had suggested and said he wouldn’t go any closer, ‘What with the fumes.’ Cora paid the man and didn’t bother arguing. What more could you expect with Garnuck’s? And they were close enough. The worsening air confirmed it.

  Cora headed down the street, Jenkins just behind her. Her eyes started to sting – worse than from mostin fint – so she almost missed the shop Hearst had told her about. At the door she told Jenkins to wait outside.

  ‘Let’s see how we get on before we wave a uniform in front of anyone. I’ll call you if I need you.’

  Jenkins nodded once more. If she could talk in the foul air, she seemed to decide it wasn’t worth the effort. Cora wondered about leaving the constable on the street, until she got inside and found it to be worse.

  The heat hit her first, then a strange smell, as if the air was honey and someone was doing their best to burn the lot of it. It wasn’t much of a shop at all. There was a sad set of shelves, mostly bare, and a counter with a few glass bowls and vases but really it was a workshop. A woman waved for Cora to wait. She pulled a poker from a furnace, bringing a piece of the sun with it. She turned it this way and that and then put it back, thank the Audience.

  The glassblower was sweaty and dirt-streaked in her heavy leather apron, and she had a look about her that made it clear she suffered no fools.

  She took Cora in, and said, ‘You lost?’

  ‘Could say that.’

  ‘Well, you are or you aren’t. Which is it to be?’

  ‘That depends,’ Cora said. ‘I’m looking for somewhere that works with tornstone.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘It is.’

  The woman licked her lips, then glanced at the door where Jenkins’ shadow was just visible: a darker cloud in a storm of them.

  ‘I might know a place like that, I might not. Would you know the right word—’

  This was getting her nowhere – Cora needed answers, not questions. She pulled out her badge.

  ‘Hey, now,’ the woman said, ‘I didn’t know nothing about it.’

  ‘Constable,’ Cora called.

  Jenkins slipped inside and had the sense to stand against the door. Her height, and her barring the way out, were enough to set the glassblower talking.

  ‘Thought they was using it safe, like they’re meant to. I only bought a few ounces at a time, for the fancier pieces, taxes paid and all.’

  Cora had no idea what she was talking about but had played enough hands to know when a bluff was called for. ‘We just want to speak to some of the customers.’

  ‘What’s the Commission going to do, close us all down because White Rock couldn’t keep the ba
d air inside? How’s that fair?’

  ‘Fairness? Now that’s a more difficult one. Above our station in life, wouldn’t you say, Constable?’

  ‘I would, Ma’am,’ Jenkins said.

  ‘But what is more our station is your supply of tornstone.’

  ‘It’s not people like me you ought to be bothering,’ the woman said.

  ‘Oh? And who should we be bothering?’

  The glassblower’s eyes narrowed. ‘Them at White Rock. They got coaches coming and going all hours.’

  ‘Coaches?’ Cora said. But the woman was in her stride.

  ‘Who knows what they’re up to? It’ll be some Perlish doing – you mark my words. That’s where you should be, Detective.’

  ‘That’s for me to worry about, but you—’

  ‘Making a racket when decent people are trying to sleep. I got to get up in the morning – I got orders!’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ Cora said loudly, to stop the woman’s noise. ‘I’ll need to see your supply.’

  The woman hesitated, then turned and led Cora past the furnace into a small stockroom. Chests and straw were scattered everywhere. The glassblower used a ladder to reach the highest shelf, which held an assortment of metal pails. From behind these she produced a small box. She eyed Cora warily as she stepped down, but handed her the box.

  It was heavy. Cora brushed the dust from the lid, revealing the inked words White Rock of Fenest. Inside were pouches of dark powder.

  Tornstone. The same that burned as lumps in the glass boxes strapped to the faces of the Torn, and the fiery pebbles the Tear itself sent high into the air, only to rain down on the people of that place and burn them. It was burning Fenestirans too – its people and its birds – but from the inside.

  ‘I got it from White Rock once a year,’ the woman said. ‘Sometimes not even that.’

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘Just a little cut-glass work. For the Perlish.’