The eastern mountains received Aldric Voss with the same suspicion they had offered Lord Julian Harte six months earlier. The same narrow roads wound through the same dark pines, and the same innkeeper with the mutton arms greeted him at the Hunter's Rest with the same carefully blank expression. But Aldric was not Harte. He did not arrive in a dove-grey motorcar or carry a revolver in his coat pocket or speak with the easy authority of the gentry. He arrived on foot, his boots worn thin from days of walking, his face hollowed by a grief that had been compounding for nearly a year. He looked like what he was: a waiter who had loved a chambermaid and had not been able to save her.
"He is still there," the innkeeper said, before Aldric could speak. "The forester's hut. Two miles up the valley. He has been waiting for someone. I did not know it would be you."
Aldric thanked her and continued up the track. The summer heat had not reached this high into the mountains; the air was cool and damp, and the pines dripped with the remnants of a recent rain. The forester's hut appeared at the end of the path, its stone walls dark with moisture, its single window glowing with the faint light of a candle or a fire. The door was open.
Sauvage was sitting at the rough-hewn table, the same table where he had laid out his patience game during Harte's visit. The cards were still there, arranged in a pattern that had grown more elaborate over the months, a labyrinth of red and black that spread across the wood like a map of a country that did not exist. He looked up when Aldric entered, and his face was the face of a man who had been expecting a visitor for a very long time.
"You received my letter," Sauvage said. It was not a question.
"I received it." Aldric remained standing, his hands at his sides, his eyes fixed on the groundsman's face. "You wrote that you let her go. You wrote that you had her by the wrist, and you let her go, and she fell into the lake, and you watched her drown."
"Yes."
"I want to know why."
Sauvage was silent for a long moment. The candle on the table flickered, and the cards seemed to shift in the uncertain light. Outside, a night bird called out, and the sound was like a question that no one had ever answered.
"I have been asking myself that question for a year," Sauvage said at last. "I have asked it in the forester's hut and in the mountains and in the dreams that come to me every night. And the answer is not simple. The answer is not a single thing but a lifetime of things, a chain of choices that began long before Silvana Dene ever came to the Grand Sylvan."
"Tell me."
"I was twenty years old when Otto Corvath hired me. I had just left the army, and the army had taught me skills that had no place in civilian life. I could follow orders. I could solve problems. I could do things that other men would not do, and I could do them without flinching. Otto Corvath valued those skills. He employed me to solve problems for the family—problems that could not be solved by solicitors or settlements or the ordinary machinery of the law."
"What kind of problems?"
"The kind that arise when a business rival refuses to sell his mine. The kind that arise when a journalist begins to ask questions about the conditions in the textile mills. The kind that arise when a chambermaid threatens to expose the appetites of the proprietor's son." Sauvage's voice was very quiet, and there was something in it that might have been shame or might have been resignation. "I never killed anyone. I want you to understand that. I never killed anyone before Silvana Dene. I threatened, I intimidated, I made people understand that their lives would be easier if they stopped asking questions. But I never killed anyone. I told myself that was the line, and I believed that I had never crossed it."
"But you did cross it."
"Yes. I crossed it at the edge of the lake, on the second of September, when I caught Silvana Dene by the wrist and held her above the water and then let her go." Sauvage looked down at his hands, which were broad and scarred and capable of things that Aldric did not want to imagine. "She was struggling. She was screaming. She was going to tell everyone what had happened—the boathouse, the threats, the chase. She was going to bring down the Corvath family, and the Corvath family was going to fall, and I was going to fall with them. Everything I had done for twenty years, every problem I had solved, every secret I had kept—it would all come out. And I would not be the loyal servant who had protected his employers. I would be the criminal who had done their dirty work. So I let her go."
The confession hung in the air between them like smoke. Aldric did not move. His face was pale, and his hands were clenched at his sides, but his voice was steady when he spoke.
"You murdered her."
"I let her die. The law may call it murder. I do not know. I have spent months trying to find the right word for what I did, and I have not found it. The word does not matter. What matters is that she is dead, and I am responsible, and I have been a coward about it ever since."
"You told Harte it was an accident. You told him she tripped on a root."
"I told him what I wanted to believe. I told him the story I had been telling myself since the night she died. But the dreams would not let me keep the story. Every night, I dreamed of the lake. Every night, I felt her wrist slip out of my hand. Every night, I woke with the knowledge that I had killed her, and the knowledge was a weight that would not let me rest."
Aldric took a step closer. The candle flickered. The cards on the table seemed to tremble in the draught. "You will come with me to the capital. You will tell the authorities what you have told me. You will confess to the murder of Silvana Dene, and you will face the consequences of what you have done."
Sauvage looked up at him, and for the first time since Aldric had entered the hut, there was something in his eyes that was not resignation. It was relief.
"Yes," he said. "I will come."
They left the forester's hut at dawn, walking down the mountain track together, the former groundsman and the waiter who had loved me. The innkeeper watched them go from the window of the Hunter's Rest, and her face was the face of a woman who had seen many things in her fifty years and had learned not to be surprised by any of them.
The journey to the capital took three days. They walked most of the way, because Aldric had no money for a motorcar and Sauvage had spent the last of his satchel of banknotes on food and candles and the cards for his patience game. They slept in barns and under the shelter of pines, and they spoke little, because there was little left to say. The confession had been made. The truth had been spoken. What remained was the machinery of the law, and the law would take its course.
I followed them, of course. I could not have stayed behind if I had wanted to. The confession had bound me to Sauvage in a way that I did not fully understand, as if the act of speaking the truth had created a thread between the living and the dead, and the thread was pulling me toward the capital and the courtroom and the final act of the story that had begun on the shore of Lake Avenor.
The authorities received Sauvage's confession with a mixture of shock and skepticism. The trial of Raphael Corvath had been concluded, and the Silvana Law had been passed, and the republic had moved on to other scandals and other tragedies. The sudden appearance of a groundsman who claimed to have murdered the chambermaid whose death had reshaped the nation's laws was an inconvenience, a complication, a thread that, if pulled, might unravel the entire tapestry.
But the confession could not be ignored. Sauvage was taken into custody, and Aldric gave his statement to the police, and the newspapers, which had been starved of sensational stories since the publication of The Glass Saint, seized on the new development with an appetite that bordered on ecstasy. CORVATH GROUNDSMAN CONFESSES TO DENE MURDER, the Chronicle reported, beneath a headline that was even larger than the one that had announced the verdict. JUSTICE UNDONE: NEW EVIDENCE IN LAKE AVENOR TRAGEDY, the coastal papers blared. The League of Decent Citizens, which had been steadily losing members since the publication of Harte's manuscript, issued a statement calling for a full investigation and a retrial. My mother, when asked for comment, said only that she had no words for the man who had taken her daughter from her.
But the confession did more than revive the scandal. It forced the republic to confront a question that it had been avoiding since the trial: if Sauvage had murdered me, then what was Raphael Corvath guilty of? He had chased me, yes. He had threatened me. He had stood on the shore while I drowned. But he had not let go of my wrist. He had not made the choice that sent me into the water. He was guilty of cowardice and complicity and a dozen other sins, but was he guilty of murder? And if he was not guilty of murder, then had the trial been a miscarriage of justice? Had the Silvana Law been built on a foundation of error? Had the entire machinery of my sainthood been a mistake?
The questions multiplied, and the answers were not forthcoming. The republic, which had been so certain of its moral clarity in the months after my death, was now mired in a fog of uncertainty. The monument that had been built over my grave was cracking, and the cracks were spreading, and the truth was seeping through like water through a dam.
Aldric returned to the Grand Sylvan after the confession was made. He did not speak to the journalists who gathered at the gates, and he did not respond to the letters that arrived from the League and the newspapers and the curious citizens who wanted to know what it felt like to be the man who had brought a murderer to justice. He went back to the kitchen, back to the silverware and the trays and the hundred small tasks that filled his days, and he did his work with the same quiet diligence he had always shown. But his eyes were different now. They were the eyes of a man who had done what he had set out to do and was no longer certain what he had accomplished.
I watched him from the corner of the scullery, a ghost who could not speak, could not touch, could not offer the comfort that he so desperately needed. He had loved me. He had avenged me. And now he was alone, and the vengeance had brought him no peace.
The summer ended. The first leaves fell from the larches. And the republic prepared itself for the second trial, the trial of Sauvage, the trial that would determine the final shape of the truth.
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