Chapter Twenty-One
“Do not fetch me a chair, Lady Ferrers. I have been offered a great many chairs this evening, most of them withdrawn again the instant I came near, and I would rather stand for what comes next.”
She spoke quietly, because the room had gone quiet enough and anything above it would have been a kind of shouting, and shouting was the thing they had all been promised.
Her place was the space her husband had cleared and left empty, and she took it, with the leather case she had carried in on her own arm.
She looked once round the whole circle of faces that had come to watch her break.
A third of them would not meet her eye at all.
Another third were still turned toward her father with sympathy sitting plainly on them. She counted both, and did not break.
“You were told a story about me,” she said. “You were told this a month ago, and some of you very much longer. I do not blame you for believing it. It was told by a man who is very good at telling it, and it is the kind of story this room would always rather be true.”
“That is a serious thing to say of your own father,” a woman murmured, from the safety of the middle chairs.
“It is. So is everything else I am about to say, and I have brought the papers for all of it.” Theodora rested her hand on the case.
“A clever woman is a great deal easier to bear if she is also a mad one. It saves you the trouble of wondering whether she was right. My father has just asked you to believe that some enemy has practised upon us both, and he asked you to notice that a proof kept in somebody’s pocket has never yet convicted a living soul.
On that one point he and I are in perfect agreement.
So, I shall take mine out of my pocket.”
“Your Grace.” Sir Alistair had his voice back and used it warmly. “This is neither the place nor the occasion for a family quarrel. Theodora, we can do this at home, quietly, tomorrow, with a solicitor of your own choosing, and I will meet you there gladly and answer everything.”
“You chose the place yourself, Papa.” She did not look at him yet. “The invitations went out over Lady Danforth’s name and at your asking. You dressed the room. You set the chairs. This evening has been in rehearsal for a month, and I would not dream of moving it now that everybody has come.”
“I have done no such thing.”
“You built the largest room of the season into a courtroom and cast me as the defendant.” Now she looked at him. “I only mean to point out, now that we are all assembled, what a defendant can do with a room full of witnesses, if she happens for once to have brought the evidence.”
She opened the case.
“You will hear no speech from me about my father being cruel. Cruelty is a thing people argue about, and a room can always find somebody willing to say a firm hand was needed.” She drew out the first two sheets and held them up, one in each hand.
“So, I will give you nothing to argue. I will give you figures. Figures do not care whose feelings they injure, and I am going to lay them side by side and ask you to do nothing harder than look.”
“We can hardly read a document across a ballroom, Duchess,” said a man near the card-tables.
“You will not have to. I have read them so many times I could recite them asleep, and tonight I am finally permitted to recite them awake.” She turned the left-hand sheet a fraction toward the room.
“This is the settlement my husband signed before our marriage. Mr Teague drew it. Mr Teague is standing at that door, and he will confirm every word, because he drew it and he has kept it.”
“I will,” said Teague from the door, and he said nothing further. He went into the quiet and stayed there.
“Its first clause gives me a fortune in my own name, to keep, spend or leave as I choose, and requires of me precisely nothing.” She raised the right-hand sheet level with the first. “This is the settlement I signed, at my father’s desk, three days before the wedding, believing it to be the same document.
Its first clause forbids me a penny in my own name.
Its later clauses govern what I may wear, whom I may write to, and whether I may keep a gift from a friend. ”
She let the two papers hang there, side by side, in the light.
“You will notice, if you are following, that these cannot both have come from the same man on the same errand. One is a marriage settlement. The other is a set of prison rules got up to resemble one, and I was made to sign it by being told my husband had written it.”
A stir went through the room, small and involuntary, the sound a crowd makes when a thing it had filed under one heading changes shelves.
“He did not write it,” Theodora said. “My father wrote it, over several weeks, in a hand got up to resemble my husband’s.”
“This is slander,” Sir Alistair said.
“He showed it to me across his own desk and watched me sign my freedom away in the belief that the man I was to marry had demanded it.” She went on over him without lifting her voice.
“And the cleverest part, the part I want you to sit with, is that it worked. I married a man I believed had bought me on those terms, and for a season I behaved exactly as a woman does who thinks her husband holds her leash.”
“Theodora, have a care what you say.”
“I was difficult. I was sharp. Every ugly thing my father spent twenty years promising you I was, I was, and I was those things because he had arranged for me to be.” Her voice stayed level.
“So that when I finally stood in a room such as this one and objected, you would already have been trained to hear it as madness.”
“You cannot prove a word of it.” Sir Alistair’s voice had gone up half a register. “A woman with a grievance and two pieces of paper. Any clerk in England could have forged the second and laid it at my door. Where is your proof it came from my hand?”
“I wondered when you would ask.” Theodora looked at him then, full in the face, across the cleared floor.
“You have always been careful, Papa. You forged that paper in a copied hand and kept your own hand off it. Had that been the whole of it, you would be perfectly safe tonight, and that is why you are able to sound so brave.”
“Because I have nothing to fear from lies.”
“You were careful about the fair copy, and not at all careful about the drafts.” She reached into the case again, and the old man went very still.
“You composed that forgery as you compose everything. Slowly. Trying the wording three ways over before you settled on the cruelest of the three, because you cannot bear to do a clever thing badly.”
“Hold your tongue.”
“And every draft you tried, you kept, in the locked drawer of your study, the second on the left, the one you have opened in front of me a thousand times.” She drew out the sheaf.
“It never once occurred to you that I could read. There are four of them, Papa, in your own hand, undisguised, with your corrections in your own ink. A man does not trouble to disguise his writing from himself.”
“You are bluffing.” But he had stepped back, one small involuntary step, and half the room saw him do it.
“I am reading.” She held the top draft to the light, and her voice held, because she had promised herself in the dark that it would.
“In the margin, beside the clause forbidding me to keep a friend’s gift, you left yourself a note.
Calder will not read past the settlement.
She will believe any cruelty of him before a kindness. Sign her before Michaelmas.”
She lowered the page.
“That is your hand. That is your ink. It is your own plan, written to yourself, in a drawer you never once dreamed would be opened, because all these years nobody has ever been at the same time able to read you and permitted to keep the page.”
Nobody in the room was being entertained any longer.
A woman in the second row of chairs put her hand over her mouth and left it there.
The men by the card-tables had come forward without appearing to know they had come.
The aim of the room had swung off Theodora altogether and settled on the old man, who had taken the folded paper out of his coat again and stood holding it without seeming aware of it.
“Then somebody has been into my study.” He said it quite calmly to the room but not to her, and the warmth came back into him from somewhere.
“Look at what you are being asked to swallow, all of you. A locked drawer in my own house, miles away from this floor, and my daughter stands here with what was in it. Either she has had a man in at my window, or those four sheets were written by whoever wrote the other one and put there for her to find, which is a great deal the likelier of the two.” He turned his hands out, open, injured, reasonable.
“I told you an enemy had practised upon us both, and I say it again now, and I say it louder. Give me a week and a magistrate, and I will show you where those came from. I have been robbed and slandered in one night. My dear, I do not even blame you for it. You have been used, and you are too clever by half to see it.”
And it landed. A man near the door remarked, half to himself, that such things had been done before now.
Lady Iris’s fan began to move again. Two of the turned chairs turned back, and along the wall by the supper-room a woman said, audibly, that it was all very well but nobody had seen those papers before tonight either.