Chapter Twenty #2
“Your Grace.” Sir Alistair did the one thing nobody in the room expected of him.
He came a step nearer, and his face opened, and he looked, of all things, relieved.
“Then we are both of us robbed, and I am glad to hear it, if an old man may say so in front of his friends. I have carried that paper about with me, and it has made me sick to look at. Some enemy has practised upon us both.”
He turned upon the room the whole warmth he had been building all evening, and spread his hands, and became, in an instant, entirely reasonable.
“Consider it as friends, all of you. A paper comes into my house purporting to be His Grace’s.
A paper is laid before my daughter purporting to be His Grace’s.
His Grace tells you tonight that he never wrote it, and I believe him.
I believe him absolutely, and I will ask you to notice that I am the first man in this room to say so aloud.
” He let that settle. “Who has done it, then? His Grace tells us there is proof and will not show it, and I do not reproach him for that. I only observe that a proof kept in somebody’s pocket has never yet convicted a living soul.
” He let that settle too. “Somebody has been very busy in my family this autumn. I should dearly love to be told who.”
It worked, and Rowan stood in the light and watched it work.
A man by the card-tables said hear him, quite audibly, and was not hushed.
Two of the women whose fans had been so absorbing put them down and turned their chairs a little, and the turn was toward Sir Alistair.
The margin of emptiness that had travelled about Theodora all evening did not close.
It widened by a step, and there was sympathy in the widening now, and the sympathy was worse than the cutting had been.
“It is very beautiful of him.” Lady Iris Danforth had arrived at Sir Alistair’s shoulder without anybody seeing her move, and her voice went out over the room, soft and troubled but perfectly audible.
“And I do so hope, Sir Alistair, that you will not be too gentle about it, for all our sakes. We have been so worried, for so long. One does not care to say such a thing of a young woman one has scarcely met, and I shall not say it, and I hope nobody will make me. I have only wondered, this month past, where the poor Duchess came by her papers, and whether anybody has ever once thought to ask her.”
Rowan’s hand had closed. He got as far as a single step, with a sentence ready in his mouth about what he would do to the man in front of him and to the woman at his shoulder, and it would have been the most satisfying sentence of his life, but it would have handed Sir Alistair the room.
He stopped with his weight already forward and put the step back where he had taken it from.
Across the floor his wife had not moved and was not looking at him.
She had told him in the dark exactly what his temper would cost her.
“Then let us have it out,” said a dry old voice from beside the fire.
Lady Ferrers was on her feet, the same Lady Ferrers whose card-afternoon had begun the whole campaign.
She was looking at Sir Alistair, and she was doing sums. Thirty years she had stood on his side of every room, and she was pricing, in front of everybody, what it would cost her to stand on the other, and she was old enough not to trouble herself about hiding the arithmetic.
“You have shown us one paper very freely tonight, Sir Alistair, and His Grace tells us there is another sort of paper in the building. I am too old to be kept standing while two gentlemen are delicate at one another.” She turned her lorgnette upon him.
“I have known you thirty years. I have taken a great many things on your word, and never once been able to check one of them.” She did not lower the lorgnette. “I find I should care to.”
“Lady Ferrers, we need surely not turn a ballroom into an assize.” Danforth had lost the pitch to the room and found the smaller register of a woman speaking now only to save herself. “Sir Alistair is our guest. It is very poor of us to bait him so.”
“He is your guest, Lady Danforth. He was never mine.” Lady Ferrers kept the lorgnette up. “Sit down, Iris. You have presided over this evening quite long enough.”
Sir Alistair let the old woman have her sentence, and then made one more statement warmly, to the room, to Danforth and to the friends he had come armoured in.
“I ask nothing that any of you would not ask in my place. Let the papers be produced, whoever holds them, and if they show me a villain I will stand where I am and be shown it.” He put the folded forgery back inside his coat with great care, and the care was for the room to watch.
“But I will not be tried upon a rumour of evidence.”
A murmur went round the room, but it had changed direction without any single person appearing to move.
Nobody answered him. The orchestra leader laid his bow down across his knee.
A woman near the card-tables stopped fanning herself and forgot to begin again.
The aim of the room, fixed upon Theodora since the door, had swung to the centre of the floor and split there, half of it upon the Duke and half upon the old man with the paper in his coat, and neither half had anywhere to put itself next.
Rowan did not look at his wife. He kept his eyes upon Sir Alistair and let the room look where it chose, aware at the edge of his vision of Theodora standing exactly where she had stood since the door.
She had not been rescued. Nothing whatsoever had been done for her beyond the plain fact of the forgery, and the plain fact was all he had promised.
Then he turned to her, because Sir Alistair had just demanded in front of the county that somebody should produce something, and the only person in the building who could was standing at the edge of the light in a green gown with a leather case on the chair beside her.
“My wife has kept a record of all of it,” he said, still to the room, “for a great many years, alone, because nobody would let her keep it aloud. She is the person here who can tell you what was done, and by whom, and she has the papers to match every word of it.” He stepped back then, one deliberate pace, out of the centre of the light, and left it empty, because it was hers.
“I have said the part that was mine to say. The rest is hers. Duchess. The room is listening, and it has run out at last of ways not to.”