Seline Speaks
Witnesses are the architecture of justice.
Testimony || Truth || Courage || Friend
Seline Drath testified before the national investigative commission in November — six weeks after the story broke, three weeks after the second and third waves of coverage had expanded the narrative beyond Valdenmoor to the international client list, to the energy companies, to the four governments. She was composed in the manner of someone who has been composing herself for this moment for a long time. She wore dark clothes. She sat straight. She spoke clearly and without notes for two hours, because she remembered everything — not through any unusual gift of memory but through the particular dedication of someone who had understood, from the moment she became Aldric Vane’s archivist, that the things she was being told were things that would need to be told again someday, and that the telling might fall to her. She described Vane’s eleven years of work: the gathering of evidence, the developing understanding of what was beneath the Canal District, the careful and frightened and deeply courageous process of a man who knew he was alone and knew he was watched and knew that the people watching him had already demonstrated their willingness to make problems disappear, and who continued anyway. She described his last day. She described the punt, and the case, and his words — the three things he had told her that she hadn’t understood at the time. She described waiting, after his death, in the Canal District, on the punt, at 11 p.m. on Tuesday nights — the time she had observed, in her years with Vane, as his habitual working hour — hoping that whoever came across the file would come at night, come alone. She described Mara climbing down the ladder. She described the relief of it, which she had not, until this public moment, allowed herself to fully feel. When she finished, the commission room was very quiet. The commission chair thanked her. Seline nodded. She looked at her hands in her lap for a moment. Then she looked up, at the room, at the cameras, at the officials and journalists and observers. “Aldric Vane,” she said, in the pause before the next question, “was a very good man who did a very hard thing alone for a very long time. I would like that to be in the record.” The commission chair said that it would be. Mara, watching the transmission in her office, pressed her palms flat on the desk and breathed and did not look away.