Chapter Nineteen
“You have laid them out in the wrong order, Mr Teague, which I forgive you, because you have at least laid them, and no man before you ever once troubled to do that.”
The documents were spread the length of the long library table, arranged by date, tidy and useless, the arrangement of a lawyer. Theodora came down the room and began to reorder them into the arrangement of an argument, the only shape that would serve her.
“By date tells a magistrate what happened when,” she said.
“It does not tell a ballroom what was done to whom. A ballroom does not want a chronicle. It wants a wound and the hand that made it, laid side by side, so that even the most foolish person present can hold up the one against the other and see that they match. Here.” She set two sheets together at the top.
“The settlement you drew, that my husband signed, and the settlement I signed at my father’s desk.
Together, touching, and never four inches apart in a folder.
” She set the two sheets so their edges met.
“Any fool can read the first line of yours, which gives me my own money, against the first line of mine, which forbids me a penny in my own name, and understand in one glance that they cannot both have come from the same man.”
“That is a persuasive arrangement, Your Grace. I should say also a dangerous one.” Teague did not sit.
He had taken to standing in her presence, and appeared to find nothing in it either strange or disagreeable.
“It establishes the fact of the forgery beyond argument, in my view. Two instruments exist. Mine is the executed one. The other is a fabrication, and I would stake my practice on that in any court in England, and say so aloud in any room you asked me to.”
“There is a but coming. I can hear it gathering.”
“It is coming, and I am sorry to bring it. On the face of it we establish the fabrication and nothing further. Strictly, a forged document tells you very little about the person who made it.” He set the two settlements gently apart.
“And in a ballroom, unlike a court, the accused may stand up and say, with great feeling, that he is as horrified as anybody, and that an enemy has done this to him. Your father may grieve, aloud, to see his daughter so imposed upon. He may weep, if he is the weeping sort, and I regret to tell you I would not put it higher than a certainty that he is, when weeping will serve him. What is wanted is his own hand caught in the making of it, and a man who sets out to forge takes care to leave none.”
“Caution is for people who expect to be asked. My father has never once imagined a room in which he would be asked to answer for anything.” Theodora looked at the two settlements touching on the table, and the cold clear thing that had been settling in her by stages since the card-afternoon came the rest of the way down and sat still.
“He composed that forgery over weeks. You told my husband as much, and you were right.” She smoothed the forged copy flat.
“A man does not build a thing so exact at one sitting. There was a first attempt, a second after it, and the colour clause tried three ways before he chose the cruelest of the three.”
“You believe the drafts exist.”
“I know the drawer they are in. I have known that drawer since I was nine years old and taught myself to read the books he had locked away from me.” She squared the two settlements.
“He kept every version he tried, Mr Teague. Burning his own cleverness has never once occurred to him, and all these years he has never met a person who could make the keeping cost him a shilling. What else do you have to set beside the two settlements? Lay it all out. I want to see the whole hand before I decide which cards to turn face up.”
“The Sowerby paper.” Teague drew it forward.
“His written admission of the phantom arrears, taken down before your husband’s solicitor and signed by him.
It says nothing directly about your father.
What it does, in my view, is establish a pattern, and I would sooner put a pattern before a room than any single sheet.
” He straightened its edge against the table.
“And I should say one thing plainly, since you have asked for the whole hand. That admission goes into the ballroom with you. I would not have you leave it in the case for tidiness, because it is the paper that shows the practice did not begin with your marriage, and it is the first thing I should ask for if I were the man arguing against you.” He set a second bundle down.
“There are besides the Loxton figures, recovered. The doubled rents, the write-offs, the fund that never existed. Twenty years of it, in the steward’s writing and corrected throughout in your father’s. ”
“It goes down first, before anything of mine, so that the room has learnt the shape of the thing before it learns whose family it is in.” Theodora touched the marked margins of the ledger.
“Twenty years of correction in his own pen, and nobody has ever laid the pages side by side, because no person was ever at once able to read them and permitted to keep them.” She met Teague’s eye.
“I am the first who was both. That has been the case my whole life. What is new tonight is only that I shall be believed while I am it.”
The door opened before Teague could answer, on Cecily, still in her travelling-cloak, mud to the hem and a leather case clutched to her chest with both arms. She had travelled to her father’s house the previous day and had just come.
She had done a frightening thing, and nobody had yet told her whether it had been worth the fear.
“I have it. Theo, I have got it, and I am shaking, but please do not ask me about the road, because I shall cry, and I would rather not do that first.”
Theodora crossed the room and did not take the case. Cecily was holding it in both arms, the one object that had justified a whole terrible journey, and to take it too soon would have robbed her of the setting-down.
“Tell me what you did.”
“I told them at the house I had come for Mother’s music, the songs in her own hand, because I wanted them before the ball to feel her near, and that part is even true, I did want them, only it was not why I went.
” Cecily pushed the hair off her face with the back of her wrist. “And Papa was not there. Papa has not been at Loxton since before I came. He has been in town, at the Danforths’ and at every house that would have him, getting the story into the county’s mouth before the ball.
The servants say he has not been in the house this month, so nobody has opened that drawer, nobody has so much as been into the study, but I did.
I used a pin because I could not open the drawer at first, so I tried many times.
And then it turned. It turned quite easily in the end.
That is the part I cannot get over. It was easy. ”
“Was anyone in the house?”
“Beddoes came in while I had the pin in the lock,” Cecily said, and her breath went out of her on the name.
“And I thought I should faint, but he looked at me, and he looked at the drawer, and he did not say one word about either of us. He only said, the master keeps his good pens in the second drawer, Miss Cecily, if it is pens you are looking for, and then he went out and shut the door behind him, but I heard him stop outside it a moment before he went away.” She pressed her hand over her mouth.
“He has known for years what is in that drawer. Years, Theo. He has held that door for Papa the better part of forty years and tonight he held it for you, and I was still on my knees when I worked out what he had done.” Her eyes filled.
“You are not walking into that ballroom for yourself alone. There is a whole house of people standing behind you who watched him rob you and were never once allowed the word for it.”
“And what did you find?”
“It is all there. Every last thing you said would be.” Cecily set the case on the table at last, and opened it, and drew out a sheaf of paper covered in a hand Theodora would have known in the dark, in her sleep, at the bottom of a well.
“Four drafts. The colour clause written three different ways down the margin, with the cruelest of them ringed round twice, and a note beside it. And the fair copy that was made for you, with his corrections in his own hand. And this.”
She laid the top sheet where the light fell, and the three of them looked at the thing that would end a man.
It was a line in Sir Alistair’s confident, unmistakable hand, in the margin of the clause forbidding his daughter to keep a friend’s gift, and it read: Calder will not read past the settlement.
She will believe any cruelty of him before a kindness. Sign her before Michaelmas.
Nobody spoke. Teague put down the pen he had been holding since Cecily came in and did not pick it up again.
“That is the hand,” Teague said at last, so quietly that the words barely carried the length of the table.
He read it again, and then a third time, and his own fingers were not entirely steady on the edge of the sheet.
“The hand, the intent, the date, and the name, in one line, in his own ink. I have practised thirty years, Your Grace. I have never had such a thing put in front of me, and I had begun to suppose it did not happen outside of novels.” He set the page down and moved his hand off it.
“Miss Loxton, you have carried into this house, in a travelling-case, the single object your father could not afford either of you to find, and you have carried it in with days yet to spare before the one evening it can be used. I do not think you know what you have done.”