Chapter 24
Jonathan arrived within the hour.
Edmund had sent for him earlier that evening. Jonathan, who had said nothing about going home to sleep but had in fact gone home to change into clothes more suitable for an all-night sitting, returned at twenty minutes past midnight in clean linen.
He found Edmund and Sophia at the desk, with the ledgers open and a fresh pot of tea on the small table near the fire, and he did not, upon entering, comment on the fact that Sophia was at the desk beside Edmund at that hour.
“I have it,” Edmund said.
“What do you have?”
“Haddon’s name. Mrs. Holt’s account. The marginal notes in Lord Graystone’s social correspondence. The blackmail entries. I have the whole of it.”
Jonathan sat down. He listened to Edmund go through Sophia’s meeting with Mrs. Holt, and then to Sophia going through it again with the precise additions Edmund had not been able to deliver.
When they had finished, he laid his hand on the open ledger.
“Margaret’s letters alone will not do it.”
“No.”
“He has friends in three magistracies. He has Bryant filing at nine in the morning. Letters from a dead woman, however damning, will be set aside in any court he is able to direct.”
“Then what.”
“Three things. We need Thomas Haddon on record. We need Mrs. Holt’s testimony formally taken, before a magistrate, with a clerk, and witnessed.
And we need Lord Graystone in a place where he says it himself.
He will not speak under examination. He must be brought into a situation where his own words, before reliable witnesses, become the evidence. ”
“How?”
“I do not yet know how. I know we have perhaps, thirty hours before Lord Graystone learns his own man has turned on him. After that, the originals vanish and the witnesses go silent.”
They worked through it steadily and without pause.
The candles burned down by half an inch.
At the small hours Edmund stood up to stretch his back and registered that Sophia had been steady for three hours, and that he could not remember the moment she had stopped being a woman who required protecting and had become a woman conducting the work.
Arabella was in the doorway.
Edmund did not see her at first. When he looked up, a quarter of a minute later, he understood that Jonathan had. Jonathan had said nothing, had not drawn attention to her, he had only turned a page of the ledger and let the room come to her in its own time.
She was in her wrap. Her hair was unpinned. She had been crying. She had been crying for some time, by the look of her, and the small bundle of papers she was holding against her chest was held with both hands.
“Arabella.”
“I have been listening.”
“I know.”
“I have not been listening for long.” Her voice was unsteady. “I came down for water. I heard Jonathan’s voice. I stopped at the bottom of the stairs and I listened, and what I have heard is not what I should have liked to hear, and the part of it that requires saying is something I want to say.”
She crossed the study. She had been told for nineteen years how to carry herself across a room, and she carried herself across that one, stopping in front of the desk and set the bundle of papers down on the surface of it.
“These are his letters.”
Edmund did not answer.
“There are fourteen. I have been counting them. I have kept them in the false bottom of my writing desk that he asked me to have made the second week he was writing to me, on a pretext I did not, at the time, examine.
He paid for the alteration. He sent me the carpenter. I had not, until this evening, registered that he had paid the carpenter himself, and what that fact would mean to a man with your kind of mind. I am telling you now.”
She paused. Her hands were shaking.
“I did not know what he was, Edmund. I will say so to a magistrate, if it is required. I will say it to anyone you require me to say it to. I did not know. But I do now. And I have these. And I am giving them to you because they were never mine.”
Edmund rose.
He crossed the small distance between the desk and his sister. He took her by both shoulders and looked at her face. She was tearful and unguarded and much younger than she had appeared for two months. He pulled her against him without hesitation, and he held her there.
She made a small sound. It was a controlled sob. She let him hold her.
He could not see his sister’s face, it was turned against his shoulder. But across the room Sophia had looked up, past him, to where Arabella’s eyes must have found her, and Edmund watched his wife hold that look and, after a moment, nod.
It was a small nod, and he understood it.
Not forgiveness, but the promise of it. He felt Arabella go still against him.
Edmund tightened his arms around her. Jonathan, at the desk, did not turn his head.
Sophia opened the bundle of letters in front of her with hands that were entirely steady, and she began, in the soft yellow light of the candle, to read.