Thirteen Stitches

Chapter Seven: The Room Stood Up

The Draycott Exchange had been built a century ago to make ordinary men feel small, and it still worked. Its marble steps rose out of the harbor fog like the front of a temple, and tonight every one was lit with lanterns for the Tidewater Ball.

Ezra climbed them with the gray coat folded over his arm.

He wore the charcoal suit he had cut for himself three winters ago, the only good one he owned. The ball was held every year on the anniversary of the Black Tide, the night the founding families nearly went under and somehow didn't. Six hundred guests came, and all thirteen families. Nobody from Harrowgate ever had.

At the top of the steps, a doorman in white gloves took one look at him and pointed down the side of the building.

"Staff entrance is around the back, sir."

Ezra held up the black card. "I have an invitation."

The doorman barely glanced at it. "Around the back."

"Ezra?"

The voice came from just inside the doors, bright and carrying. Danny stood there with a tablet under his arm, at Lucian Draycott's elbow, in a midnight-blue dinner jacket with that same soft Ferrante shoulder. Several young heirs in black tie turned to look.

Danny's eyes dropped to the coat on Ezra's arm, and something nervous flickered in them. Then he laughed, loud enough for everyone to hear.

"What are you doing here? Here to take measurements?"

The heirs laughed with him. Lucian smiled pleasantly and said nothing.

Ezra didn't answer. He walked down the side of the building and in through the service entrance, past steaming kitchens and waiters loading silver trays, along a narrow corridor that smelled of polish and roast meat. At the end, a swinging door opened onto the ballroom.

Three chandeliers the size of carriages blazed above a sea of marble. Tables for the thirteen families ringed the floor, each marked with a small silk banner bearing its crest. At the Varne table, beneath the pair of scales, Isolde sat very straight beside a heavy, silver-haired man who could only be Rupert. At the long bar, Detective Brannigan leaned on one elbow with a whiskey and watched Ezra come in through the servants' door. He didn't look surprised.

Ezra walked out onto the open floor. Conversations dipped as he passed. He kept going until he stood beneath the center chandelier, alone in a circle of marble, with six hundred people pretending not to stare.

He shook out the gray coat and put it on.

For a moment, nothing happened. The young heirs exchanged puzzled looks. Someone muttered that the help had lost its mind.

But the old ones knew.

At the head table, beneath the ship's wheel of the Draycotts, an old man set down his glass very carefully. Augustin Draycott was eighty-four, white-haired and stooped, and half the city owed money to the bank he had built. He stared at the coat for a long moment. Then he put both hands on the table and pushed himself to his feet.

Across the room, a frail man rose at the Castellane table. Then another, by the Halloran banner, gripping a cane. One by one, old men stood all around the ballroom, seven of them at seven different tables, slow and stiff and unable to stop themselves. It was a forty-year-old reflex, the way debtors stand when the creditor walks in.

The music faltered and died. Six hundred people fell silent.

Lucian's smile froze on his face. Beside him, Danny's champagne glass slipped from his fingers and shattered on the marble, ringing through the hall like a bell.

Then a chair scraped back at the Varne table.

"Look at yourselves," Rupert Varne said, red-faced, his voice booming. "Standing for a tailor's boy." He flung a hand toward Ezra. "Whatever that debt is, it was owed to Abel Lockwood, and Abel Lockwood is lying in a hospital bed unable to speak. This young man was arrested for nearly killing him. For all any of us know, he stole that coat off the old man's back."

A murmur rolled through the room, and Ezra felt the change. Heads turned toward one another, and faces went calculating. These people weren't fools. If the families declared the debt void tonight, in front of everyone, every one of them walked free.

At the Castellane table, the frail old man slowly sat back down.

The room was turning. Ezra knew that if he argued or raised his voice, it would turn completely. So he looked past Rupert, past all of them, to the old man still standing at the head table.

"Mr. Draycott," he said, and his voice carried in the silence. "There's a pocket inside your left breast for your nitroglycerin tin. My grandfather sewed it in 1991. I relined it myself last March, in your study, while you complained about the rain."

Augustin's hand drifted to his chest, to the place over his heart where the tin had always rested. He studied Ezra's face for a long time, as if fitting it against a memory.

Then he turned toward the Varne table.

"He fitted me," he said. "Sit down, Rupert."

The silence was crushing. Rupert stood a moment longer, mouth working, his face darkening to a blotchy crimson. Then, in front of every family that mattered in Calder Bay, he sat.

Isolde didn't look at her uncle. She looked at Ezra, and for one moment he thought she almost smiled.

Augustin came around the head table on Lucian's arm, then shook it off once he reached the floor. He stopped in front of Ezra and looked him over, from the gray coat to his scuffed shoes.

"You have his hands," the old man said quietly. "Walk with me, Mr. Lockwood. Privately. There's something your grandfather should have told you long ago."

He turned toward a side door near the head table, and Ezra followed with six hundred pairs of eyes on his back. They had taken a dozen steps across the marble when the chandeliers went out.

Darkness swallowed the hall, total and instant. Someone screamed.

Then a gunshot cracked across the marble.