Chapter 12
“One may tell the truth without telling all of it.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, reflecting on the discussion with the butler about the parentage of her eldest son.
* * *
Sleep had not been what it should have been.
Nicholas was involuntarily aware of this, his body having been keeping accounts he had not been attending to and now deciding the time for a reckoning had arrived.
He had lain in the dark of the Metcalfe house guest room with his leg subdued for once. It ought to have been a mercy. Without the familiar ache to occupy his attention, however, his mind had proceeded to fill the available space entirely with Millie.
Not the Millie of the forgery session, bent over the worktable with the bone folder and the lamplight and the beeswax on her thumb, though that had been sufficiently distracting.
Nay, it was the Millie of the doorway and the corridor and the curl he had tucked behind her ear. Her expression in that moment had lodged itself in his chest with the leisurely permanence of something that intended to stay.
He had awoken twice. Both times the room had been dark and quiet and the dreams had been of a variety he was not going to examine in daylight.
A considerable improvement over dreaming about his mother, he supposed as he pulled on his coat in the gray morning.
A different sort of torment, but decidedly more appealing.
Get on with it, then.
He was at the Bodleian entrance before eleven o’clock.
He signed the admissions book with the unhurried hand of a man returning for a second day’s scholarly work.
No unusual occurrence, and it provoked no comment.
He was shown through without the letter this time, the advantage of having established himself the previous day as a legitimate reader with a legitimate purpose.
He passed into the reading room and made his way to Duke Humfrey’s with a mild air of scholarly interest.
The room received him as it had the day before, without warmth or welcome, which was what he needed from it this morning. He took the same desk, set out his working papers, and two books he had picked up on his way in to the room, and submitted his request for the Malory manuscript.
The morning clerk retrieved it and set it at his desk.
Nicholas looked at it. He looked at the portfolio open on his lap beneath the desk’s edge, at the forgery Millie had produced in the lamplight of the study at midnight, with her sleeves turned back and her spectacles sideways and the bone folder moving in her steady, thorough hands.
He had been watching her for hours and had thought, at intervals, about what it was to watch a person apply the whole of their attention to something that required the whole of their attention.
He had been watching her do exactly this in one form or another since the bedchamber at Grimsfell the prior week and had not yet grown accustomed to it. He suspected he was not going to.
The forgery sat in the portfolio. The genuine manuscript sat on the desk.
This is, he thought, truly melodramatic. Lorenzo would enjoy it enormously.
The thought of Lorenzo at Grimsfell, with his centuries of ancestral suffering and his journals and his substitution alphabet, produced a complicated feeling that Nicholas examined briefly and then set aside for a more appropriate occasion.
He was maintaining a fiction because the fiction was necessary.
Because if he had not been Nick Scott, private secretary, he would not be sitting at this desk.
He would not have retrieved the journal from the Radcliffe Camera.
Lorenzo’s hopes would have remained exactly where they had been when Nicholas had left Grimsfell.
He was perfectly aware he was telling himself this.
He was also aware that the telling had become, over the past few days, considerably less convincing than it had been at the outset.
He pulled out his graphite pencil, opened the forgery at the inner leaf, and wrote the note in a careful, unidentifiable hand, having given the question of handwriting some prior thought.
Any scholar seeking this volume is respectfully requested to correspond with Lord Gabriel Strathmore, Viscount Trenwith, its lawful owner and lender, for information regarding its present whereabouts.
He can be reached through his London solicitors.
We apologize for any inconvenience to genuine researchers.
Gabriel had suggested this at Grimsfell with the foresight of years in intelligence work, understanding that the difference between a prank and a criminal matter was frequently a matter of documentation.
The genuine manuscript would be returned to the Bodleian by the end of the week through the solicitors, with an explanation sufficient to smooth the institution’s ruffled feathers without requiring Nicholas to be personally involved in the smoothing.
One of the genuine advantages, he reflected, of knowing a viscount who had spent years arranging matters that required careful arrangement.
He closed the forgery, then studied the portfolio and the desk and the genuine manuscript and the scholars at the other desks, bent over their work, oblivious.
He took his time, ensuring he knew what to expect, then he worked quickly.
The portfolio opened flat across his lap.
The genuine manuscript slid in. The forgery slid out.
The portfolio closed. He arranged his papers and continued writing, or appearing to write, for the next hours with a serene air that declared he had no specific reason to be anywhere other than where he was.
He had to wait for the shift change. He had known this from the previous day’s reconnaissance and had planned for it.
If there were any weight or visual inconsistency between the forgery and the original that the morning clerk might register from memory, the solution was to return it to a different clerk.
The afternoon assistant had checked spine and label the day before with the briskness of a man performing a standard procedure, and had not opened the volume.
Such was what the trust-based scholarly culture of the current year produced.
It was what Nicholas and Millie had been counting on.
At three o’clock the morning clerk handed over to the afternoon assistant with the orderly capability of an institution that had been performing this handover for centuries.
Nicholas waited another ten minutes. Then he rose, carried the forgery to the desk, and placed it before the afternoon assistant as the conclusion of a productive afternoon’s work.
The clerk accepted it. Checked the spine. Checked the label. Rose to reshelve it without opening it.
Nicholas returned to his desk. He sat. He wrote one more meaningless line in his notebook, gathered his papers, placed all of it in the folio portfolio, which was the weight and dimensions it had been when he arrived, and stood. Collected his cane. Nodded pleasantly to the clerk on his way out.
The door of Duke Humfrey’s Library closed behind him.
He descended the stairs into the Schools Quadrangle, and the gusts of cold air hit from different directions.
His heart was distinctly louder than the occasion warranted.
He was aware of this, and he did not do anything about it.
He walked across the quadrangle with satisfied assurance, a typical scholar who had spent a productive afternoon in one of Oxford’s finest libraries.
Someone is going to call me back.
It was not a rational fear, and he had it anyway. No one called him back. He walked through the gate and onto the street.
He was not, he reflected as he turned toward the corner where Millie was waiting, an innocent man in any meaningful definition of the word.
He had done things in his adult life that would not stand favorable comparison to this afternoon’s work, and had managed most of them with the comfortable numbness that a sufficient quantity of spirits provided.
He was sober now. The discomfort of over a week of sustained deception was fully available to him without any filtration whatsoever.
The disrespect of it sat uneasily, using an institution he had genuinely valued during his time at Oxford as the setting for what was, when reduced to its elements, a theft conducted in the service of a fiction.
The old Nicholas, the carousing foolish buck, would not have permitted himself to acknowledge any of it.
He had not yet decided whether this made sobriety an improvement.
The true stakes, he thought, turning onto the street that ran alongside the Bodleian wall, are not the institution.
The true stakes were Millie. In the moment when Nick Scott became the Honorable Nicholas Scott in front of her, and all that had been built over these past days came apart in the light of it.
He had been turning this problem over in his head persistently.
He had not yet found an approach to it that did not end with her furious and him without a defense she would accept.
Millie would not accept defenses that were self-serving, and every defense he had available was that.
He had done it because he wanted to, because he enjoyed her company and the way she spoke to him as if he were a man in his own right.
The more he turned it over, the more certain he was that there was no good way to tell her.
He had been through this enough times to be certain of it.
There was only a less bad way. A way that required honesty of a kind he had been postponing.
The postponing had accumulated into ten days of it, and ten days were not getting shorter.
I have to tell her.
He knew it was true. At some point he was going to have to tell her, and it was better to have it on his terms than on the terms of whoever in Oxford said something in front of her that outed him as a reprehensible liar.
He turned the last corner.