“He’s scared as it is,” Mr. Clark told her curtly. “Frankly, I doubt he’s got the strength of mind to tell lies at the moment.”
She breathed out. “Maybe we need to jostle his memory. Isn’t there something you can do?”
“I don’t know nothing,” the arsonist put in, his voice a whine. “I’ve said it all, told all the details. It was a man from London who hired me, a big man. Bald head.”
She felt sick.
She couldn’t see much of Mr. Clark. But his silhouette straightened and he turned toward her. “You don’t know what you’re suggesting,” he said. “You can’t even say the word aloud. You want me to torture him.”
Said out loud, that ugly word—torture—seemed to fill the room. She didn’t want it. Every part of her rebelled at it. But there was that small corner of her that wondered. He’d burned down her house. He might know more. Wouldn’t it be only fair if…?
Mr. Clark made a rude noise. “God. I forget, sometimes, how naïve you really are.”
It felt like a slap in the face.
“I’m not naïve. Just because I can’t say the word.”
“Oh, you’re naïve to even think of it.” She’d heard him angry before, had heard him amused. She didn’t know what this emotion he expressed now was. Something darker, something more real than she’d ever heard from him before. “You don’t torture a man to get the truth, Miss Marshall. Didn’t you read your history of the Spanish Inquisition?”
Free took a step back from that intensity. Her back met the wall of the room. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course you don’t understand. You’ve read a story, no doubt, where a man had information. Someone wielded a well-placed knife to make him divulge his secret in time. Good prevailed, and they all lived happily ever after.”
She felt sick.
“That was a tepid piece of fiction written by some man who sat at a comfortable fire, inventing a barely plausible tale for a gullible audience. You don’t torture a man to find out the truth, Miss Marshall, no matter how the stories sound. Any real scoundrel will tell you as much. You torture a man to make him into someone else. True pain is like black ink. Enough of it can blot out a man’s soul. If you’re willing to use it, you can write whatever you wish in its place. Want him to swear to Catholicism? Hand him off to the inquisitors. Want him to believe the sun sets in the east, and the moon is made of green cheese? Ready the hot knives. But once you spill that ink on his soul, you’ll never get it out. He’ll say anything, be anything, believe anything—just so that you’ll stop. You’ll ask him about Delacey, and he’ll invent any story you wish to hear, just to spare himself the pain. But it won’t hold up under observation, because it won’t be true.”
She swallowed.
“So no, Miss Marshall. I won’t give you your easy answer. It doesn’t exist. Go write the messy, difficult story. Write the tale without a happy ending. We’ll not get any other sort tonight.”
It was a good thing it was dark; she didn’t think she could look him in the eye.
She turned on her heel and stalked out of the room. The light in the main pressroom was blinding after the darkness of the archive room. The women—her women, women whose children she knew, whose hopes she’d listened to—were bustling about. Spreading sand to soak up the oil, shoveling that into buckets, and then scrubbing tables with soap and washing away the last of the residue with vinegar. Already the smell was beginning to dissipate.
Her hands were shaking. She’d never heard Mr. Clark talk like this before. That had been something close to a black rage—and over torture, of all things.
What kind of scoundrel was he?
She took a deep breath. He was the kind of scoundrel that was right.
She had to hone her anger to a fine edge. That poor, miserable creature in her back room was only a tool.
She needed a plan.
And for tonight, she needed a story. Maybe it would be an ugly, bare story, one with no simple endings or clear explanations. But it would be a story nonetheless.
BY THE TIME THE CONSTABLES ARRIVED, solemn in their blue uniforms, and took Mr. Bartlett into custody, Free’s press was running, spitting out pages.
She’d stuck to the bare basics: that denial that she’d crafted before Amanda left, and then the story of the fire and the man captured.
Around midnight, Alice delivered an armload of blankets. Free busied herself setting up a pallet in her office. She was arranging the makeshift bedding when Mr. Clark came in.
“What are you doing?” he shouted over the sound of the press.
She hadn’t been able to look at him since the archive room. She still couldn’t do it now. She stared at the gray wool blankets in her hands instead. “I’m preparing to sleep here.”
He folded his arms and glared at her.