Chapter Seven #2
“There was a moment to ask, and I let it go by. I did ask, once, in a carriage, and she came within a word of telling me, but I let my pride close the subject because I did not care to be measured for another man’s coat.
” He turned the glass on the desk a quarter turn and left it.
“Every kindness I have offered her since the wedding, she has taken as the next clause, and she has been right to take it so, because the paper in her hand swore to her that was exactly what they were.”
“Your Grace, there is a margin.” Teague hesitated over it. “I think you had better see the margin, though I would spare it for you if the choice were mine.”
“Read it.”
“These are not clauses at all, in my view. They are notes to himself, in a third hand.” Teague turned the sheet toward the candle.
“Against the first, he has written, He will not query these. Men of his rank never read past the settlement. And against the colour clause: Say it was his particular wish. She will believe any unkindness of a man before a kindness.”
“That is Sir Alistair’s hand,” Rowan said. “There was a note about a horse at the first dinner. He writes with his whole arm. I would know it in the dark.”
“On the face of it I should agree with you, Your Grace, though I would not swear to a hand in a court of law. As to the rest, I am prepared to swear.” Teague laid the two sheets edge to edge.
“The body of this is a clerk’s fair copy, paid to imitate an instrument rather than to draw one.
There are three usages in it that no attorney of my acquaintance would set his name beside.
And the paper is not mine. My stock carries a watermark.
This carries none. Whoever built the thing wanted it to survive a glance and never a comparison. ”
“Then it has had one.”
“Precisely so, and in my judgment, it will not stand up to one. That much I am able to prove today, before any court you care to name. That two documents exist, that mine is the executed settlement, and that this is a fabrication purporting to bind Her Grace to terms you never sought.” Teague’s mouth thinned.
“What I cannot prove, as matters stand, is the hand that made it. For that a man would want the clerk, or a confession, or the original draft in the forger’s own writing. ”
“And men who forge are not careless enough to keep the draft.”
“As a rule, no. Though a man of that particular vanity is not altogether a man of business, Your Grace, and I have known workings to outlive their makers.” Teague squared the two sheets.
“If a draft of this exists anywhere in the world, I should expect it to lie in a locked drawer at Loxton Hall. A thing of this cunning is not composed at a single sitting. It is worked at, and the workings are kept, because the man cannot bear to burn his own cleverness.” He met Rowan’s eye.
“A working paper in Sir Alistair’s own hand would be the one object on earth he can afford neither of you to find. ”
Rowan sat with that a long moment, and Teague, who had drawn instruments for hard men for thirty years, made himself a piece of the furniture and said nothing at all.
He was not angry. The anger did not arrive, and its absence was worse, because anger was a clean feeling but there was nothing clean in this.
Every insult she had ever handed him turned over in his hand and showed its other face, and each one was correct.
Respect written by the man who holds every choice reads as charity.
She could not tell his walls from her cage.
Across three weeks of dinners, she had not been sparring with him at all.
She had been reading him the document, night after night, in the only tongue left to a person forbidden the plain one, and he had heard vanity, because vanity was the reading he had been handed in advance and had been too incurious to check.
“He studied us both,” Rowan said at last. “He measured what each of us could be relied on to assume of the other, and he built the thing to fit the join. She would believe any cruelty of me. I would believe any vanity of her. He put the marriage on the hinge between the two, and I signed my name to the wall and called it honest.”
“What will you do, Your Grace?”
“Tonight, nothing. I have no right to carry my shock to her door and ask her to admire it, when she has held the same paper a month with no one on earth to show it to.” Rowan folded the forgery closed.
“Leave both papers with me, Teague. And do not destroy your original, whatever anyone asks of you. You told me once that paper outlives memory. I am about to need everything you have kept.”
“I take it you will not go to Sir Alistair with this,” Teague said. It was not quite a question.
“It is too early. The hour I move against him, he moves against her, and every lever he used to make her sign this is still live. Her sister is settled and still under his roof. The tenants are safe on paper, and paper at forty miles is slow.” Rowan rose from the desk.
“So, he waits, and while he waits, I will take his document apart in the one way he cannot repair from Loxton.”
“How, Your Grace?”
“Clause by clause, by act rather than by argument, until his paper describes a house that has ceased to exist.” He set the folded forgery down.
“Her correspondence goes back to her. The money goes into her own name. A door that locks from within, and I never once try it from the outside. She may keep whatever a friend has given her, and read till dawn, and wear what colour she pleases. Every week there will be less of his six left standing anywhere in this county.”
“That would be the work of months, Your Grace, if it can be done at all.”
“Then it is the work of months. I have paid more for less.” He looked at the two papers a while longer without touching either.
“As to what I say to her, and when, I have not settled it. I do not know how a man tells a woman that the walls she has lived inside were painted on, and I would rather come to it late than badly. I shall know when I am standing in front of her, and not one hour before.”
***
He saw her the next morning at breakfast, across the length of the table, buttering dry toast she did not want, because eating was one of the few acts left to her that required no one’s leave.
She looked up and caught him watching; her chin came up, and the contempt arrived on time, the armour she fastened before her feet found the floor.
He had now read the document, and on the second look he found what lay beneath the contempt, plain as a figure in a column once somebody had troubled to add it up.
Fear was holding the disdain in place. She was not looking at him with scorn at all.
She was looking at the man believed to hold the only key to a door she had been told was locked from the outside, and had never once been permitted to try.
“Good morning, Your Grace,” she said, in the voice that dared him to make anything of it.
Then, to the second footman standing at her elbow with the post bag open, she held out a sealed letter and kept two fingers on it.
“This is to my sister. His Grace will wish to see it before it goes. Take it down to him first, and if there is anything in it he does not care for, I will write it again.”
The footman’s eyes went to Rowan and away again.
Rowan took the letter and turned it over twice without opening it, and found no sentence anywhere in him that would undo what she had just said in front of a servant.
She had asked leave for her own hand and her own seal, out loud, at his table, without heat of any kind, because she believed it was owed.
Down the length of the table, she had already gone back to her toast. She did not look up again, and so she missed that the letter remained unread beside his plate.
The second footman, though, marked exactly where it went.