2. The Amateur of Sorrows

The morning after the first vigil, the Grand Sylvan Hotel woke to a new kind of silence. It was not the quiet of emptiness—the hotel remained full of guests who had decided, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, that remaining at the scene of a tragedy conferred a certain cosmopolitan gravitas—but a silence of held breath, of words swallowed and glances averted. The chambermaids went about their duties with downcast eyes. The porters polished brass that was already gleaming. The kitchen staff spoke in murmurs, as if the dead might be eavesdropping.

I was eavesdropping, of course, but I had no interest in the kitchen.

Lord Julian Harte had commandeered the morning room for his interviews. It was a small, sunlit space at the rear of the hotel, furnished with chintz armchairs and watercolours of mountain vistas that no one had ever looked at closely. He had arranged two chairs facing one another, a small table bearing a carafe of water and a single glass, and his leather-bound notebook, which lay open to a fresh page. The stage was set with the deliberate simplicity of a man who understood that interrogation is a form of theatre.

I positioned myself near the window, where the morning light passed through me without casting a shadow. I was learning the physics of my condition: light ignored me, sound passed through me, but I could still perceive the world with a clarity that was almost painful. The dust motes dancing in the sunbeams were more beautiful than anything I had noticed while alive. The grain of the wooden floorboards held entire landscapes. The scent of old paper and beeswax reached me not through any nose I possessed but through a kind of atmospheric memory, a ghost-sense that was sharper than the original had ever been.

Harte's first witness was the head housekeeper, a woman named Frau Keller who had ruled the servants' floor for thirty years with a tongue like a whip and a heart that I had never been able to decide was kind or merely disciplined. She entered the morning room with the rigid posture of a soldier reporting for inspection, her grey hair pulled so tightly into its bun that the skin at her temples looked stretched.

"Please, sit," Harte said, gesturing to the empty chair. "I appreciate your willingness to speak with me. This must be a difficult time for the household."

Frau Keller sat without relaxing. "The household endures, my lord. It is the Dene family that suffers."

"Quite so. You were Silvana's direct superior, I understand. How long had she been in your employ?"

"Seventeen months. She came to us from a village in the lower valley—Bregen, I believe. Her references were adequate. She was neither the best chambermaid I have supervised nor the worst. She was punctual, clean in her habits, and did not gossip." Frau Keller paused, and something flickered in her eyes that might have been regret. "That last quality was rare. I valued it."

Harte made a note. "Did she form any particular friendships among the staff? Any animosities?"

"She kept to herself. There was some coolness between her and the other girls, but nothing out of the ordinary for young women who share close quarters." Frau Keller's mouth tightened. "If you are asking whether she had enemies, my lord, the answer is no. She was invisible to most of the guests, and to those of us who saw her, she was unremarkable. That is the tragedy of it. A girl who attracted no attention in life has become the centre of the nation's attention in death, and I cannot decide whether that is justice or farce."

I felt a sting at her words. Unremarkable. Invisible. I had spent my living years resenting those very qualities, and now, hearing them spoken aloud by a woman who had known me, I found that I resented them still. Death had not cured me of vanity. It had merely given me an audience.

Harte leaned back in his chair. "On the night of the second of September, did you observe anything unusual? Any breach of routine?"

Frau Keller hesitated for the first time. Her hands, which had been folded primly in her lap, tightened around one another. "There was a disturbance in the east corridor. I heard raised voices—a man and a woman. By the time I reached the stairwell, the corridor was empty. I assumed it was a domestic quarrel among the guests. Such things happen, even in the best hotels."

"Did you recognize either voice?"

"No." The word came too quickly, and I saw Harte's pen pause above the page. He did not press the point, but I knew he had marked it. The amateur of sorrows had the instincts of a predator, and he had just scented blood.

The interview continued for another quarter of an hour, yielding little of substance. Frau Keller described the routine of the chambermaids, the layout of the servants' quarters, the protocol for reporting irregularities. She spoke of me as if I were a piece of inventory, and I listened with a detachment that was beginning to feel like a form of self-anaesthesia. When she rose to leave, Harte thanked her with an old-fashioned courtesy that seemed to unsettle her more than any direct accusation could have done.

The second witness was Thalia, the youngest of the chambermaids and the one who had always reminded me of a sparrow—small, quick, and perpetually alarmed. She had been assigned to the room next to mine, and we had shared the thin wall that separated our beds. I had heard her crying at night more than once, though I had never asked why. The dead are not the only ones who carry secrets.

Thalia entered the morning room as if she expected to be struck. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her hands trembling at her sides, and she looked at Harte with the desperate intensity of a creature that has learned to fear all men and has not yet learned to distinguish between them.

"I didn't see anything," she said before he could speak. "I told the police already. I was asleep. I didn't hear anything."

Harte regarded her with a gentleness that I suspected was entirely tactical. "I am not the police, Fraulein Thalia. I am merely a visitor who wishes to understand what happened to your colleague. Please, sit. Would you like some water?"

She shook her head but sat, perching on the edge of the chair like a bird poised for flight. Her gaze darted around the room, passing over me without registering my presence, and came to rest on the carafe of water as if it might at any moment transform into something dangerous.

"Tell me about Silvana," Harte said. "Not about the night she died. Tell me what she was like."

Thalia blinked. The question seemed to confuse her. "She was... she was quiet. She did her work. She didn't make trouble."

"That is what Frau Keller told me. I am asking you, Thalia. You shared a wall with her. You must have known her better than the housekeeper did."

A long pause. Thalia's fingers twisted in the fabric of her apron. "She was proud," she said at last, and the word fell into the silence like a stone into still water. "She thought she was better than the rest of us. She read books—French novels with cracked spines that she kept under her mattress. She practiced her vowels in front of the mirror so she could sound like the guests. She said she was going to leave this place and find work in a grand hotel in the capital, where chambermaids wore silk uniforms and earned tips from aristocrats."

I felt something twist within me—shame, perhaps, or the ghost of embarrassment. Thalia had seen me more clearly than I had ever realized. My secret aspirations, my pathetic little rebellions, my conviction that I was destined for something finer than the Grand Sylvan: she had catalogued them all, and she was now presenting them to a stranger as evidence of my character. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to tell her that she was right about everything except the part that mattered.

"And on the night she died?" Harte prompted, his voice very soft.

Thalia's face closed like a shutter. "I was asleep."

"Thalia."

"I was asleep!" Her voice rose, cracking on the last word. "I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anyone. Please, my lord, I have told the police everything I know. I don't want to lose my position. My mother depends on my wages. Please."

Harte studied her for a long moment. Then he closed his notebook, rose, and opened the door for her with his own hand—a gesture that was either profound respect or profound manipulation, and I could not tell which. "Thank you for your honesty, Fraulein Thalia. If you remember anything else, anything at all, you may reach me here."

She fled without looking back.

I remained at the window, watching the dust dance. Thalia had been lying, of course. Not about my French novels—those had been real, a guilty pleasure I had never confessed to anyone—but about the night of my death. She had heard something. I was almost certain of it. The wall between our rooms had been thin enough to transmit the cadence of breathing, and on a night when raised voices had echoed through the east corridor, a girl who slept as lightly as Thalia could not have heard nothing.

But I was learning something else as well, something that unsettled me more than Thalia's evasion. The pride she had described—the ambition, the pretense, the quiet snobbery of a chambermaid who dreamed of silk—was true. All of it was true. And yet it was already vanishing from the public narrative, smoothed away by the relentless pressure of pity. The Silvana Dene who was being mourned in cathedrals was humble and pure and without aspiration beyond her station. She was a saint of the serving class, content with her lot until a man's cruelty had stolen her future. The real Silvana Dene—the one who had resented her apron and practiced elocution in the dark—was an inconvenience to the legend.

I was being erased by my own canonization.

The third interview of the morning was conducted not in the morning room but in the private parlour of Raphael Corvath, the proprietor's son. Harte had requested the meeting through Ostheim, who had relayed the request with a nervousness that suggested he was caught between his deference to rank and his fear of his employer's heir. The reply had been gracious but unsettling: Raphael would receive Lord Harte in his own quarters, at an hour of his choosing.

I followed Harte up the grand staircase, past the portraits of Corvath ancestors who had built the hotel from the bones of a medieval monastery, and into the west wing, where the family's private apartments occupied an entire floor. The corridor here was wider than the servants' passages, the carpets thicker, the light from the windows tinted by stained glass that depicted scenes of Montara's founding. The contrast was deliberate. The Grand Sylvan was a monument to the art of making servants feel grateful for their proximity to wealth, and I had never felt that gratitude. I had felt only hunger.

Raphael Corvath opened the door himself. He was younger than I had expected—perhaps twenty-five, with the kind of dark, languid beauty that certain women find irresistible and certain other women recognize as a warning. His hair was too long, his shirt collar too open, his smile too ready. He looked like a man who had never been denied anything and had therefore never learned to value what he possessed.

"Lord Harte," he said, extending a hand. "An honour. I have read your monograph on the Bellini affair. A triumph of deductive reasoning. Please, come in."

The parlour was decorated in a style that I can only describe as decadent comfort: velvet drapes, a fire burning despite the mildness of the day, shelves lined with leather-bound books that I suspected had never been opened. A gramophone in the corner was playing a scratchy recording of a Verdi aria, the sound thin and melancholy through the horn. Raphael gestured Harte to a chair and poured two glasses of brandy from a crystal decanter, though it was not yet noon.

"I understand you are investigating the death of our chambermaid," Raphael said, settling into the opposite chair with the boneless ease of a cat. "A tragic business. The family is devastated, of course. We have offered to cover the funeral expenses."

"That is generous of you," Harte said, accepting the brandy but not drinking. "I am hoping you can help me clarify certain details of the evening in question. I understand you were present at the hotel on the night of the second."

"I am always present at the hotel," Raphael said, with a slight smile. "It is my father's establishment. I manage the operations—such as they are—while he attends to his political interests in the capital. I dine here, I sleep here, I entertain guests here. The Grand Sylvan is my gilded cage." He took a sip of his own brandy. "Yes, I was here on the night in question. I dined with several guests in the main hall. After dinner, I retired to these rooms to read. I went to bed at midnight and slept until my valet woke me at eight."

"Did you see Silvana Dene that evening?"

Raphael's expression did not change, but I saw his fingers tighten on the stem of his glass. "I see all the chambermaids in the course of a day. They move through the corridors like shadows. I do not recall any particular encounter with the Dene girl on that evening. If she brought fresh towels to my room, I did not notice. One does not notice chambermaids, as a rule."

"One does not," Harte agreed. "And yet, several of the staff have reported that you and the deceased were observed in conversation on the afternoon before her death. A heated conversation, according to one account."

The fire crackled in the silence that followed. Raphael's smile had faded, replaced by an expression that was not quite anger and not quite fear but something in between—the look of a man who has just realized that the ground beneath his feet is less solid than he assumed.

"Gossip," he said, setting down his glass with a sharp click. "The servants gossip. It is the only entertainment they have. If I spoke to the girl, it was to reprimand her for some infraction—a stain on a guest's sheet, a forgotten flower arrangement. These things happen in the running of a hotel. I reprimand a dozen employees a day. I do not remember the specifics."

"Then perhaps you can explain why a torn fragment of her scarf was found near the lake, along with a set of footprints that match a pair of boots you are known to own."

The accusation landed like a slap. Raphael's composure shattered; his face went pale, then flushed, and he rose from his chair with a suddenness that sent his brandy sloshing over the rim of the glass. "What are you implying, my lord? That I—that I had something to do with her death? I have never harmed a woman in my life. The girl drowned. It was an accident. The police have said so."

"The police," Harte said, still seated, still calm, "have said very little. They have been remarkably reluctant to pursue lines of inquiry that might embarrass a family of your standing. I, however, am not beholden to your father's political influence. I am here to find the truth, and I will find it, with or without your cooperation."

Raphael stared at him, breathing hard. The Verdi aria had ended, and the gramophone needle was scratching against the record's centre with a sound like fingernails on glass. Then, with an effort that was visible in every line of his body, Raphael regained his composure. He smoothed his hair, straightened his collar, and sat down again.

"I apologize for my outburst," he said, his voice now very controlled. "The accusation is distressing. I understand that you must investigate every possibility, but I assure you, I had no reason to wish the girl harm. She was a satisfactory employee. Nothing more."

"Was she?" Harte asked, and there was something in his tone that I could not read. "I have heard otherwise. I have heard that she was offered certain... inducements... to provide services beyond her duties as a chambermaid. And that she refused."

I felt the world tilt around me. The memory rose up like a wave—a memory I had not known I possessed until that moment, as if Harte's words had unlocked a door that I had sealed shut myself. Hands on my shoulders. A voice murmuring in my ear, offering money, offering promotion, offering escape from the drudgery of the servants' quarters. And my own voice, sharp as a blade, refusing. The Corvath name had been mentioned. It had always been mentioned. The proprietor's son, the one with the beautiful face and the empty eyes, who believed that everything in the hotel was his to enjoy.

I had said no. I had said it loudly, angrily, in the east corridor on the afternoon of the second of September. And Raphael Corvath had looked at me with an expression that I now, in the terrible clarity of memory, recognized as pure, undiluted rage.

Raphael did not answer Harte's question. He rose again, slowly this time, and walked to the window. His back was to the room, his shoulders rigid. "I think you should leave now, Lord Harte. If you wish to speak with me again, you may do so through my family's solicitor."

Harte rose without protest, placed his untouched brandy on the table, and walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the handle. "One more question, Herr Corvath. The boots I mentioned—the ones that match the footprints by the lake. I did not actually find any footprints. I invented them, just now, to see how you would react. Your reaction has been most instructive."

He left, closing the door softly behind him. I remained in the parlour, watching Raphael Corvath stand motionless at the window for a very long time. When he finally moved, it was to pour himself another brandy with a hand that trembled so badly that the decanter chattered against the glass.

That night, I tried to appear to Harte directly. I had been practising—I do not know how else to describe it—the art of making myself felt. It was like learning to shout without lungs, to strike without hands. I stood at the foot of his bed while he slept and concentrated every fragment of my will on the glass of water on his bedside table. I wanted it to move. I wanted it to tip over, to shatter, to announce my presence in a language he could not ignore.

The glass trembled. A ripple crossed the surface of the water, as if a single tear had fallen into it. Harte's eyes opened, and for one suspended instant, he looked directly at me. Not through me. At me.

"Silvana?" he whispered.

I tried to speak, but the words would not come. I tried to hold his gaze, but my concentration was already slipping, my form dissolving back into the darkness. The glass stilled. The room grew cold. And I was alone again, a ghost who could not speak, a victim who could not testify, a saint who was being built from the ashes of a truth that I was only beginning to remember.

Somewhere in the hotel, a telephone rang. Somewhere in the night, a typewriter was clattering out tomorrow's headline. And somewhere in the hollow space where my heart had once been, a question was forming, cold and sharp as the blade of a guillotine: if I had refused Raphael Corvath, and if he had been as angry as I now remembered, then what had happened on the path to the lake?

The answer was there, just beyond the edge of my memory, and I was terrified of what I would find when I finally reached it.