Chapter Twenty-One #2
“Everything my father has just said to you could be true,” Theodora said.
“It would only be extraordinarily expensive. An enemy who forged my settlement, and then forged four drafts of it in my father’s hand, and then broke into my father’s house to lay them in a drawer nobody had opened, has gone to a great deal of trouble over one country marriage.
” She laid the drafts down, squared, touching the two settlements.
“So let us leave the hand alone, since a hand can be argued about, and do instead what I said I would do at the beginning: look at figures.”
“Mr Sowerby is my father’s land agent at Loxton.
A good many of you have dealt with him.” She drew out a single sheet and laid it flat where the nearest chairs could see it.
“This is his own written admission, signed by him, taken down in front of my husband’s solicitor a good while before ever I came into this room.
He states in it that the arrears he demanded of three cottage tenants at Loxton were never owing.
There is a further statement in it, that he was told what sums to enter and did not choose the figures himself.
He does not name the man who told him, and I shall not ask you to guess at it.
” She set it down beside the drafts. “I ask only that you hold it in your minds for the next two minutes. Whatever enemy my father has invented for you tonight, that enemy did not sit at Mr Sowerby’s elbow for twenty years telling him what to put in the rent-book. ”
“This is a ledger,” she said, and it was the only time all evening she used the word.
She drew out the last bundle and laid it upon the others.
“Twenty years of one, kept in my father’s steward’s writing and corrected throughout in my father’s own.
Doubled rents on the Loxton tenants. Repairs charged twice over and done once.
A fund raised by public subscription to drain fields that were never touched, and the subscriptions kept. ”
“You slander a whole estate now,” her father tried.
“I am not asking you to take my word for any part of it. Half of you hold leases through this land.” She rested two fingers flat upon the bundle.
“You may check my figures against your own rent-books in the morning. You will find, and I am sorry to tell some of you so, that you have been paying entries in this book for years without knowing the book existed.”
A different sound went round the room, lower and more personal, the sound a great many people make on discovering at once that a story they had thought was about another house has their own names in it.
“I paid that drain money twice.” The voice came from the back. “I paid it twice, I did. Michaelmas before last, and then again come the spring, and I have the two receipts at home, and they are written in the same hand.”
He stopped, looked about him, and went on.
“And I never see a spade go in that low meadow. There was no spade in it, no man neither, no barrow, and I walk that ground every week of the year and I know a drained field when I am standing in one.”
“Mr Cobbold, if you would sit down,” somebody said from the chairs.
“I will not, begging your pardon. That is the very thing of it, I said so at the time. I said it at the audit, and they laughed at me, and I said it to my wife, and my wife believed that I have got it muddled.” He put his hand up over his face and took it down again. “That is the part I cannot get past.”
“The sum is four pounds and eleven shillings,” Theodora said, and she did not open the ledger to say it. “Your name is on the second page, Mr Cobbold. It is entered twice, six months apart, in a hand you have nodded to across the churchyard for twenty years.”
Cobbold sat down all at once and stayed there, and his hands hung between his knees.
A sharper murmur ran along the back of the room where the leaseholders stood. Two of them had their heads together, and one was already counting on his fingers.
“That is one farmer and one muddle.” Sir Alistair said it, and the warmth had gone out of the voice and nothing had come in to replace it. Nobody near him took it up. The place beside Lady Danforth’s chair that had been kept empty for him all evening had somebody else’s wrap laid across it now.
“Lady Danforth.” Theodora turned, unhurried, to the gilt chair. “You feared so tenderly for my health. You told this county a month together that I was mad. For weeks I could not make out why a woman I had never wronged should take such trouble to ruin me.”
“I am sure I do not know what you mean.” Danforth’s voice had lost its carry.
“Then I shall show you, since I promised this room that I would show it everything.” She took one more sheet from the case and did not hold it up, but turned it toward the nearest chairs, so that four or five people could read it and the rest could watch them reading.
“This is an assignment of the mortgage upon the Danforth estate, made over in the year after your husband died. It is drawn in favour of a Mr Rideout of Chancery Lane, and Mr Rideout has never in his life held a mortgage in his own right. He holds them for other men. The other man is named on the back of it, in the endorsement, in the writing this room has spent the last quarter of an hour learning to recognise.”
One of the men who read it looked up, looked at Sir Alistair, and did not look away again.
“You have not been mourning my marriage, Lady Danforth. You have been paying interest, in the only coin he would take, and the coin was my reputation.” Theodora inclined her head a precise inch.
“I do not blame you as much as you might expect. I know what it is to do a cruel thing because a man holds a paper over you. It is nearly the entire subject of my evening.”
Danforth’s mouth opened but produced nothing, and her court, arranged all season about her chair, discovered a sudden and unanimous interest in the floor.
“I said I would not weep, and I have not,” Theodora said, to the room again. “I said I would not plead, and I will not, because I have nothing to ask of you.”
“Then what do you want?” a voice said, and it was not cruel, only bewildered.
“For years I was hurt where nobody could see it, in a house where the man hurting me was the only witness.” She closed the case.
“So that afterwards I could never be certain I had not imagined it, exaggerated it, or been difficult, as he always said. Tonight I was permitted, at last, to be hurt where you could see, and to answer where you could hear.”
She lifted her chin, and it was not defiance; it was a quieter and more finished thing than defiance.
“You may make of it what you will. The figures do not need your belief in order to be true any more than a flooded field needs your leave to be wet.” She rested her palm on the closed case.
“But you have looked, now, all of you, and you cannot pretend you haven’t.
That is the only verdict I ever wanted from this room.
Not that you should think me good. Only that you should have been made, once, to see. ”
For a long moment nobody moved. Then Lady Ferrers rose again from beside the fire, slowly, on the arm of a footman, the same old woman who had begun the whole campaign with a cruelty in her own drawing-room not many weeks since.
She had got up an hour ago, meaning to change sides at the lowest price the evening would let her pay, and she had known perfectly well that was what she was doing.
She crossed the cleared floor slowly enough for everybody to see her, and stopped in front of Theodora.
She did not offer her hand because a handshake can be argued about too.
“In my own house, a few weeks ago, I said you were seldom let out.” Lady Ferrers’s dry old voice carried to every corner of the room.
“I have been ashamed of the sentence since. I got up tonight meaning to be on the right side of this at no cost whatever to myself, and I have spent the last quarter of an hour finding out what it ought to cost. I will not go to my grave with that sentence as the last thing I said to you in public.”
“You need not say anything at all, Lady Ferrers.”
“I need to say it exactly here.” She turned, deliberately, to face the room rather than Theodora.
“The Duchess of Calder has laid figures before us that any of us may verify. I mean to verify them, and I do not expect to enjoy what I find, because I have believed a great many things this month that I was told and never once shown.”
“That is more than I asked for.”
“It is less than you are owed.” Lady Ferrers looked back at her. “You will forgive an old woman a late correction, Your Grace. It is the only kind I have left to offer.”
“It is the only kind worth having.” Theodora inclined her head. “A correction made when it costs nothing is only good manners. One made in front of everybody, at the exact moment it is most expensive, is another thing entirely. I will take it, and I will remember which it was.”
And the room, which had come to watch a woman confirm everything it had been told, began, one turned head, one lowered eye, and one whispered reconsideration at a time, to do the slow work of admitting that it had been wrong.
Theodora stood in the middle of it with her hand on a closed case and watched them look, and marked, as she had marked everything all these years.