Chapter One #2
“Then you have employed the wrong people, as this room had already confessed to me.” She closed the folio with the care she would give a sleeping child. “Why does a man keep an altered deed instead of burning the proof of his own forgery?”
“Who told you the forgery was mine?”
“You did. Just now. An innocent man asks who forged it. A careful one asks who told me.” She slid the folio back across the table. “You ask the careful question, but I find I rather wish you had asked the innocent one.”
“Where does a woman learn to read a forger’s pen?”
“In the libraries of men rich enough to keep a forger. The honest poor own nothing worth altering.” She did not look up. “You learn a liar’s hand by handling a great quantity of his work. I have handled a great quantity.”
“Whose?”
“That is my catalogue, Your Grace, and not yours. You bought the use of my eyes for three months. My history was never any part of the price.”
“A woman with a history she will not name, found reading court seals in my library inside an afternoon.” He looked at her with new attention. “The room grows more interesting than its shelves.”
“The room grows nothing at all. You have merely arrived at it late, which is a habit of dukes and not a virtue of rooms.”
“You are a dangerous person to leave alone in a library.”
“I am the least dangerous person in this library, and you have not yet understood that, which is itself a danger to you and none at all to me.” She picked the pen back up. “Go and let me work. Or stay and be useful. I will not do both halves of a conversation, and you are presently doing neither.”
He stayed and reached past her for a ledger on the upper part of the table, and his arm came close along her shoulder. His warmth reached her through the sleeve before the limb did, and the scarred hand closed over the spine a finger’s breadth from her own.
She did not draw back. Flinching only ever taught a man he had been right to come close. So, she held still and took her own inventory instead.
“You hold a deed,” he said, near enough that the words moved the air by her ear, “as though it might wake.”
“It might tear. A different risk, the same care.” She turned her face up to his on purpose, to see what he would make of it. “You are reading me the way I read the deed.”
“I am. Most people who scold me look away when I look back. You do not.”
“Why should I? A woman who looks away has already conceded the room, and I concede nothing I have not been paid to concede.” She did not lower her chin. “You have paid me only to the end of the quarter, Your Grace, and never for my retreat.”
“I have nothing in this room worth more than your good opinion, and a great deal worth more than your bad one. Looking away would cost me both.” A single drop of ink fell to the blotter between them.
“Step back, Your Grace. You stand too near for a man I have known not even an hour, and I have ink on my hands and no objection at all to your linen.”
“That is a threat.”
“It is a courtesy. The threat would have been quieter.” She held his gaze without blinking until he chose to move.
He stepped back, one pace, and the room was larger for it and oddly colder.
She returned to her method, century by century, shelf by shelf, and the close of the afternoon carried her to the deepest corner, where a panel of shelving stood a little proud of the wall as though built to be moved.
Behind a row of bound parliamentary records, her fingers met lacquer.
She drew it into the light. A box, black-lacquered and cold, the size to hold letters laid flat, its lid worked with a crest in worn gilt, a chevron rising beneath three small stars.
Around the rim, in letters nearly smoothed by handling, ran a Latin motto she did not need to read, because she had traced its twin against her own breastbone on a pendant since she was old enough to ask whose it had been.
Her hand went to her collar before she had decided to move it.
“Put that down.”
She had not heard him cross the room.
“It sat behind the parliamentary records,” she said. “Uncatalogued. In no order at all. It has been hidden, Your Grace, and you have paid me precisely to find what has been hidden.”
“You were paid to catalogue a library. That is not the library.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
“Something you will set down.” He did not take it from her, which she marked. His hands stayed at his sides, as though he did not trust them to be gentle if he reached. “Leave the box. I will not ask a second time, and you will find me a great deal less charming when I stop asking.”
“I have not yet found you charming, so you risk very little.” She set it on the table between them and did not lift her fingers from the lid. “Whose crest is this?”
“Take your hand from the box.”
“You have answered every question I put to you this afternoon with a question of your own, and I have indulged it, because you pay me.” Her voice stayed level, and the levelness cost her more than it showed.
“I will not be paid to ignore this one. Whose crest, and where did you come by it, and why is it walled up in a room you hired a stranger to set in order?”
“Because I did not expect the stranger to reach this wall in an afternoon.” He said it before he could stop it, and the saying of it dropped between them like a key on stone. “You work too quickly, Miss Linfield. It is the first careless thing I have known you to do.”
“And you answer too slowly, which is the second thing I have learned about you and by far the most useful. A man who guards a name this hard has already told me the name is worth guarding.”
“Careless.” Her hand stayed where it was on the lid. “I have been called a great many things in a great many libraries, Your Grace. Careless has never once been among them, and I will not take it from a man who walls treason up behind his Acts of Parliament and calls it shelving.”
“It is not treason.”
“Then it is something worse, or you would have let me read it and laughed at me for the trouble.” She kept her eyes fixed on his over the box. “Whose was it?”
He looked at her hand on the lid, then at her face, and whatever he found there changed his own in a way she could not read, and that frightened her past the box, past the crest and straight to the worn weight beneath her bodice.
“Take your hand from the box,” he said, quiet and careful now. “And do not ask me that again today. For your sake, not for mine.”
“You have known me an afternoon, Your Grace. You cannot have acquired a care for my sake between the door and this wall.”
“I have a care for the crest, and today the crest and your sake are the very same thing.” His voice did not rise, which was worse than if it had. “I would rather you did not learn why until I have decided what is to be done with you.”
She lifted her hand from the lid and stepped back.
Her ink-stained fingers pressed flat to her collarbone, to the small worn medallion she had carried every day of her remembered life, and traced the letters there that she had traced ten thousand times.
The same chevron beneath the same three stars, the worn motto smoothed almost to nothing under her own thumb.
“Veritas non sepelitur,” she whispered, to the box, to the crest, to no one, the way she had whispered it as a child without once being told the name it belonged to.