Chapter Fifteen
“Do you know the hour, Cole?” The old man’s nightshirt was buttoned askew beneath his dressing gown. “Do you know what you are asking me to sign with the candles guttering?”
“I know the hour precisely, Mr Fenwick. I have counted every minute since a child was taken this morning.” Cole laid the papers upon the writing table without waiting to be invited.
“And I know what I am asking: that you do tonight, at some cost to your sleep, what you would be ashamed to have refused by daylight.” He paused. “Besides, you owe me a debt.”
“You have reminded me of it often enough.”
“I have never called it in.”
“No.”
“I am calling it now.”
Fenwick looked from Cole to Victoria, who stood very straight beside the cold hearth, and then to Elias behind her. The earl had said nothing, but his silence filled the little study more completely than speech might have done.
The room smelled of cold ash and old law books. Fenwick’s dressing gown had been put on inside out in his haste, and Victoria fixed upon that small human wrongness because it was the only thing before her that was not the size of her whole life.
“The child has a testamentary guardian,” Fenwick said. “The will names him. A father’s appointment is not nothing in law, whatever a mother may feel.”
“I know what the will says,” Victoria replied.
“I have lived beneath it since my husband died. I am not asking you to pretend Roland Hemsworth was never named. I am asking you to examine how he obtained the order under which he took her, and whether a man who swore a falsehood to secure possession of a child ought to retain her for another night.”
“You speak of a lie sworn. That is a grave charge, madam, gravely made.”
“It is gravely meant.”
“Have you proof of it, or merely a mother’s certainty? For I have heard many certainties at midnight that did not survive the morning.”
“I have both.” Victoria placed Crayle’s statement upon the table, then the two drafts beside it. “You believe in paper, Mr Fenwick. So does the man who took my daughter. Read what his paper has concealed.”
Fenwick opened the statement.
Victoria remained standing while he read. His pace slowed as he went. Once he looked towards her, once towards Elias, and by the end, the hand holding his nightcap had pushed it back from his forehead.
“This man will swear to it?” he asked. “In a court, on the book?”
“He will,” Cole said. “He has signed the statement, surrendered the drafts, and agreed to repeat the substance under examination. The banking house may be compelled to confirm the transactions. One of the drafts bears an endorsement in Hemsworth’s hand.”
Fenwick read the line again.
“‘The remainder upon completion.’”
“Yes.”
“And the order was obtained upon an allegation that the child was endangered in Harwood’s household?”
“That Lady Harwood intended to remove the child beyond the court’s reach, and that the present household was unfit,” Cole said.
“The court heard only Hemsworth’s account because he represented the matter as urgent.
Crayle’s evidence suggests that Hemsworth himself contrived the scandal and the supposed evidence of violence upon which that urgency depended. ”
Fenwick set down the paper.
“If this is borne out, the order was obtained upon a false representation to the court.”
“That is our position.”
“And you ask me to suspend it tonight and direct the child’s immediate return pending a full hearing.”
“I do.”
Fenwick looked at Victoria.
“You understand that my signature does not place the child in your arms. The order will have to be served and enforced. Hemsworth may refuse admittance until the local authorities attend. He may challenge its reach. He may delay.”
“Then sign it,” Victoria said. “Give us the authority to answer him. We shall manage the delay when we meet it.”
“Madam, Hertfordshire is forty miles away. The local justice is Sir Giles Marret, who has dined at the Hemsworth table these thirty years and may be reluctant to move against them upon a stranger’s midnight order.”
“Then he may read the evidence before he decides how much his friendship is worth.”
Fenwick’s brows lifted.
“I have stood upon the wrong side of every door in this affair,” Victoria continued. “I know what awaits us at the next one. Sign the order. I do not require you to promise that it will open the gate. I require the lawful means to demand that it should.”
The old man studied her across the guttering candles.
“I have signed papers at night that I regretted by morning,” he said at last. “I do not believe this will be one of them.”
He drew the document towards him.
The pen scratched across the page.
***
They took the north road as the last of the darkness began to thin.
Four of them travelled in the coach. Pruett held a basket of Sophy’s things upon her knees.
Cole kept the papers secured in his case.
Victoria and Elias sat side by side, saying little because there was nothing left to plan and too much left to fear.
The country rose grey out of the night: hedgerows, sleeping farms, and mist gathered in the low fields.
Victoria knew the road.
She had travelled it years before, a young bride in a finer coach with a worse man, going north to be shown the house in which she would spend the first fortnight of her marriage.
“I remember this turn,” she said quietly to Elias.
Elias looked at her.
“That is the part I had not expected. He has taken her to the one house I feared most, and to him it is merely the family seat.” She watched the road through the glass.
“I was kept there for a fortnight after the wedding. I counted the days upon the window frame with my thumbnail where the paint had softened.”
She had never said it aloud.
“Tell me,” Elias said. “The whole of it.”
“Why?”
“Because it is forty miles, and you have carried the memory alone for nine years. There is no reason to carry it alone for the next forty.”
So she told him.
There was no single great cruelty at the heart of it, nothing that would have made a room fall silent in the telling.
That had been part of its power. The misery had been made of smaller things, repeated until they became the shape of her days: locked doors, cold courtesies, meals at which she was spoken around, and rules revealed only after she had broken them.
No one moment had seemed large enough to justify protest. Taken together, they had taught her to diminish herself inside a house designed to make her feel misplaced.
Elias listened without trying to mend the past or contradict the truth of it.
When she had finished, he took her hand.
Pruett turned towards the window with the dignity of a woman pretending not to hear. Cole studied the papers in his case with equal determination.
Victoria looked at the three of them and understood that, for once, an entire household had arranged itself around helping her recover what had been taken rather than persuading her to endure the loss.
“When we arrive,” Cole said at last, “I speak first. The lodge will expect an angry family demanding entrance. Instead, it will receive an officer of the law and an order discharging the one upon which Hemsworth relies.”
“And if they refuse?”
“We record the refusal. Then we produce Crayle’s statement and the drafts to Sir Giles. Hemsworth knows nothing of either. Surprise is the only advantage a slower force enjoys over a faster one, and we must not waste it.”
Victoria looked again towards the road. “She is inside that house now.”
“And we are going to bring her out,” Elias said.
His voice held no empty certainty, only intention.
“She will not count days upon a window frame. She will not learn what you learnt there. We shall reach her before the house has time to teach her anything.”
The wall appeared first, long and grey through the mist. Then came the iron gates and the avenue beyond them, running beneath bare lime trees towards the pale, symmetrical house.
It was as Victoria remembered it. That was worse than change would have been.
The house stood at the end of the avenue with its rows of blind windows, handsome and self-contained, a place accustomed to taking people in and expecting the world to leave them there.
Behind one of those windows was Sophy.
For one moment, the knowledge threatened to unmake everything Victoria had carried through the night.
Then the lodge door opened.
A man came out without haste and made no move towards the gate.
“His lordship is not receiving today,” he said.
Cole lowered the glass. “I carry an order of the King’s court directing that the child within be restored to her mother at once. Obstruct its execution, and I shall be pleased to explain the consequences in the terms the law provides. Open the gate.”
“I’ve my instruction,” the lodge-keeper said, “and my instruction says a paper’s only a paper till Sir Giles Marret says otherwise. Sir Giles was sent for as soon as your coach was sighted. Until he comes, no one passes.”
“This order remains in force whether Sir Giles has read it or not.”
The man shifted his weight but did not approach the lock.
“His lordship said you might come with another paper. He said the matter was to wait upon Sir Giles.”
“And did his lordship also explain,” Cole asked, “that knowingly obstructing the service of an order may place the person who bars the gate in contempt of the court?”
“I know only what I was told.”
“Then you have now been told something further. I suggest you remember both accounts carefully.”
The keeper’s expression tightened, but he remained where he was.
“Sir Giles is on his way.”
He returned to the lodge and closed the door.
For several moments, no one in the coach spoke.
Beyond the bars, the avenue ran pale through the mist towards the house. The authority for which they had laboured through the night had carried them forty miles and stopped at an iron gate, while somewhere beyond it Sophy waited.
Victoria pressed one hand against her mouth, then lowered it.
“He expected the order,” she said.
“Yes,” Cole replied. “Or expected that we would obtain one.”
“He means Sir Giles to delay us until Roland has decided what terms to offer.”
Elias looked towards the house. “Or until he has moved her elsewhere.”
The possibility entered the coach and seemed to take up all the remaining air.
“He will not move her yet,” Victoria said after a moment. “Not while he believes the order can be delayed here. Moving her would admit that the paper frightens him.”
“We cannot be certain,” Elias said.
“No. But Roland has always mistaken delay for advantage. He will prefer us waiting at his gate, helpless and visible, while he decides what our desperation may be made to purchase.”
Her eyes went to Cole’s case.
“The writ is not the only paper we brought.”
Cole followed her gaze.
“No.”
“Roland does not know that Crayle has spoken. He does not know we possess the drafts.”
“He will soon enough,” Elias said.
“Yes. But he should learn it before Sir Giles arrives, and privately enough that he cannot pretend ignorance before his own household.”
Cole considered her. “What do you propose?”
“A copy of the endorsement and one page of Crayle’s statement. Enough to show him what we hold, but not enough to surrender the evidence itself.”
“And a message?” Elias asked.
Victoria looked again towards the blind windows.
“Yes.”
Cole opened the case upon his knees. He selected a copy of the draft and the portion of Crayle’s statement describing the purchase of his debts and the instructions given at Ashcombe. Victoria took a clean sheet from him.
She wrote briefly.