The E-Rank Husband

Chapter Five: The Servant's Stairs

The servants' door at Whitcombe House had never been locked in Verity's lifetime, because nobody who mattered ever used it.

She slipped through it a little after ten with her hood up and climbed the back stairs in her socks. Wyatt couldn't come. The guards had orders to call the police the moment they saw him, and the Assessor's people were still in and out of the library. But he had told her about the teacup, the one that had been on her grandmother's bedside table and then simply wasn't, and Verity hadn't slept properly since.

Her grandmother's room smelled of antiseptic and lilies. Winifred lay very small in the middle of the bed, wired to a monitor that beeped softly and steadily, a clear drip bag hanging on a stand beside her. Her hand was cool and papery when Verity took it.

"I left, Gran," she whispered. "I climbed the garden wall like I used to when I was twelve. You'd have been furious." She swallowed. "You told me to marry him, and I didn't speak to you properly for a year. I never told you that you were right."

The monitor beeped. Winifred didn't move.

Verity sat with her for ten minutes, the longest ten minutes of her life. Then she stood, took a fresh bag of saline from the cabinet in the corner and swapped it for the one on the stand, the way she had watched the night nurse do it. She rolled the old bag into the lining of her coat. On her way out, the night nurse caught her on the landing, surprised and kind, and mentioned in passing that she wasn't allowed to touch the drip anymore. Dr. Ashe changed it himself, every evening, and nobody else was permitted near it.

Wyatt was waiting in the dark lane behind the kitchen garden, watching every car that passed. None of them were black. Verity put the bag in his hands without a word, and by midnight it was with Odessa Rhodes.

Odessa's lab had an answer by morning. Wyatt read the message twice, then handed the phone to Verity so he wouldn't have to say it out loud. The bag held a compound in doses small enough to pass for nothing, enough to keep Winifred under and, given time, enough to stop her heart. Someone wasn't waiting for the old woman to die. Someone was making sure of it, one bag at a time.

"If she stays in that house," Verity said, "she never wakes up."

"Then she doesn't stay."

"How? My father won't let her go anywhere, and Dr. Ashe..." She stopped and looked at him. "How do you get a Rank Office ambulance to the door?"

"Someone at the Rank Office owes your grandmother a great deal."

She studied his face for a long moment. He could see the next question forming. Then she let it go, because her grandmother mattered more than the answer.

The ambulance came up the drive at half past one the following night, white with the Rank Office crest on its doors. The papers on the clipboard carried a black seal, an emergency medical transfer under the authority of Rank Zero. Wyatt knew exactly how many eyes would be on that seal by morning. He had sent the order anyway.

Verity met the crew on the front steps in her own coat with her chin up, every inch the daughter of the house. The night porter knew her face better than he knew her new rank, and when she told him the transfer was authorized, he stepped back. She walked the crew past him, past the sleepy footman at the foot of the main stairs, and along the upper corridor to her grandmother's door, talking the whole way so that nobody looked too closely at the last man in the line, the one in a Rank Office jacket with his cap pulled low.

Inside, Wyatt unhooked the drip and dropped the bag into his pocket. Then he slid his arms under Winifred and lifted her. She weighed almost nothing.

The crew took the stretcher down the main stairs, empty and loud, as a decoy. Wyatt took the servants' stairs. He had climbed them every day for ten years with coal scuttles and breakfast trays and clean linen, with Humphrey's boots to polish and Humphrey's insults ringing in his ears. He knew which step creaked and which rail was loose. He had never once carried anything down them that mattered as much as this. He went slowly, feeling for each stair with his foot, keeping her head against his shoulder.

At the bottom, Dr. Ashe was standing in the doorway.

He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie loosened, as though he had been about to leave. His eyes went from Wyatt's face to the old woman in his arms, and then to the empty space where the drip line should have been. He didn't shout. He reached into his pocket for his phone.

"She is my patient," he said. "You can't..."

Wyatt shifted Winifred's weight onto one arm, took the phone out of the doctor's fingers and put it in his own pocket. Then he moved Dr. Ashe aside, firmly, the way he might move a chair, and walked out past him into the night. He never said a word.

By dawn, Winifred lay in a private clinic on the far side of the river, in a quiet room with no name on the door. It appeared on no register in Highmoor. Only Zero knew it existed. The clinic's doctor flushed her system and started her on clean fluids, and by the time the sun came up the color had started to creep back into her lips. She was breathing more easily than she had in a week. Verity fell asleep in the chair beside her, still holding her hand.

At Whitcombe House, Humphrey found his mother's bed empty at seven.

The sheets were thrown back and the drip stand stood bare, its line hanging loose. He stood in the doorway for a full minute without moving. Then he took out his phone and called the police, and his voice was perfectly calm when he told them that the Whitcombes' E-rank servant had kidnapped Winifred Whitcombe from her sickbed.

Within the hour, the Assessor was standing in her room.

He didn't touch the sheets or the drawers or the bare drip stand. He walked once around the bed, slowly, his cane tapping on the floorboards, while Humphrey hovered in the doorway and the police waited in the hall. Then he leaned over and touched the shallow indent in the pillow, where the old woman's head had rested for a week, with the silver head of his cane.

He straightened, and the tinted glasses tu

rned toward the door.

"Find the servant," he said.