Chapter Seven
Crispin came in with the salver, and on the salver lay a single folded note, heavy paper, a seal Royce had spent seventeen years learning to dread on sight, and it was not addressed to the Duke of Calder.
“For Miss Linfield,” Crispin said. “By a clerk, Your Grace, who waited for no answer. The seal is the Crown Solicitor’s. The note is from Mr Vale, and he asks to call upon the lady alone, before the wedding, on a matter he describes as entirely to her advantage.”
“Do not meet him alone.”
Royce had the Vale note in his hand, and the smooth blankness had come down over his face, and the words landed flat and hard across the library table between them.
“You will not see Vale without me in the house. You will not see him at all, if I have any say in it, and I find I would very much like to have a say in it.”
“You have agreed to a clause that says you do not get a say in it.” She kept her voice even because the calm cost him more than heat would have.
“You signed my third term. No removal from the investigation, by you or anyone in your pay, on the grounds of my safety. You signed it, and the ink is still drying, Your Grace, but you are already trying to wash it off.”
“Clauses are written for ordinary dangers. This man is not one.”
“Then amend the clause in front of Beatrice, as you made it in front of Beatrice, and I will weigh the amendment. You will not simply talk over it the first morning it inconveniences you. If you do, it was never worth the paper, and your word was worth a good deal less.”
His jaw worked once, and he set the note down flat and pressed his palm to it as though to keep it from rising.
“I am asking you to read the situation. He is the Crown’s man.
He does not call on archivists. He calls on people he means to frighten into signing things, and he has asked to do it to you alone, before the wedding, which is the one window in which you are still legally no one. ”
“Then I am glad you have told me what he is, instead of forbidding me and telling me nothing, which was your first instinct, and which you corrected.” She let the words stand a moment between them. “Do it again, then. The corrected version. Ask me.”
The breath he drew was the breath of a man relearning a skill late. “Will you let me be in the house while you see him? Not in the room. In the house. With Beatrice at the door and the door not quite closed.”
“Yes.” She picked up the note and read it once more, the dry copperplate, the matter described as entirely to her advantage, which was the phrase that had decided her.
“A man only writes to my advantage when he means to take something from me. I would rather watch his face while he tries than wonder afterwards what he came for. Beatrice will be at the door, and you will be within call. I will sign nothing.”
“You will sign nothing.”
“I have signed exactly one thing this week, Your Grace, and I read every word of it twice. I am not about to spoil my record for a Crown clerk with good paper.”
“You are enjoying this.”
“I am enjoying being right about a man before I have met him. It is a rare pleasure, and I intend to have the whole of it.”
“And if you are right, and he frightens you?”
“Then I shall be frightened with Beatrice at the door and you within call, which is a great improvement on every other fright of my life. I had all of those alone.”
***
Mr Vale came the next morning, and he was nothing like Veyr, which was its own kind of warning, because Veyr had at least troubled to be charming.
Vale was a man assembled out of his own documents, and he sat with a leather case on his knees and looked at nothing in the room, not the door, not the windows, only her, the way a clerk looks at a figure he means to enter in a ledger.
“Miss Linfield. You are to be married on Thursday, I understand. I shall be brief, since brevity is a courtesy and your time is shortly to become a duke’s.” He did not open the case.
“You are well informed about my time.”
“It is my business to be well informed about inconvenient persons before they have the chance to become convenient ones. You were, until this week, very difficult to locate. You hid yourself well, Miss Linfield, though I doubt you knew that you were hiding.”
“I was not hiding. I was working.”
“To the Crown, those have often proven to be the same activity.”
“I represent certain interests of the Crown in the matter of old settlements. Now and again a name surfaces that the Crown would prefer to see settled quietly, with goodwill on both sides and a small consideration for the trouble. Yours is such a name.”
“Which name, Mr Vale. I have only the one, and it has never troubled the Crown before.”
“Linfield. The maternal line.” He let it lie there a moment. “May I be plain?”
“You have been nothing else since you sat down.”
“Then plainer. There exists, or there does not exist, a paper that would make your late mother a wife and you a person of some consequence. The Crown has no wish to spend ten years discovering which it is. It wishes the question closed, and a closed question is worth a great deal to people who dislike open ones.” He folded his hands on the closed case.
“There are women, Miss Linfield, who learn late in life that they are tied to a great affair, and who mistake the connection for a fortune. They begin to ask questions in parish registers. They draw the interest of men far more dangerous than I am. It seldom ends as they imagine. The Crown is prepared to be generous to a young woman willing to sign a simple statement renouncing any claim arising from her mother’s history, in exchange for a sum that would make a duke unnecessary. ”
“You have named no figure.”
“I am instructed to name it only over your signature, which is the first thing you should mistrust about it, and very nearly the only candid thing I shall say all morning.”
“Then tell me of my mother instead. You keep saying her history. What history. What did Helena Linfield do that the Crown should pay a stranger to renounce on her behalf?”
“I am not authorised to tell you what you would be renouncing. Only that you would be paid for it, and would be safe after it, and forgotten, which is rather more than your mother contrived for herself.”
“You speak as though you knew her.”
“I have read her file. It is not the same as knowing her, Miss Linfield. It is merely the nearest thing the Crown troubles to keep.”
“You are offering me money to disappear before I have even appeared.”
“I am offering you safety, which the duke’s name will not buy you, whatever he has promised. A title is a wall. Walls can be gone around.” He still had not opened the case.
“Lord Veyr and you keep the same phrase, Mr Vale. He told me, in this very house three days past, that a title was a wall. Do you share an employer, or only a turn of speech?”
“I serve the Crown and Lord Veyr serves the Crown. A great many men serve the Crown, Miss Linfield, and they are not all of them friends, and some would be astonished to hear themselves called colleagues.” Something dry and tired crossed the grey face.
“I would not put that comparison to him, were I you. He is a great deal less fond than I am of being likened to a solicitor.”
“Old scandals do not punish the guilty, Miss Linfield. The guilty are long dead. They punish the innocent who insist on standing where the dead once stood. You are innocent. I should hate to see you punished for a marriage of your mother’s that you cannot even prove took place.”
“Then I have nothing to renounce, by your own account, and no reason to sign anything.” She rose because rising ended interviews, and she had learned that from watching Royce end Veyr’s.
“You may tell whoever sent you that I read documents for my living, Mr Vale, and that I have never yet signed one I did not understand, and I do not understand this one at all, which makes me disinclined to put my name to it. Beatrice will see you out.”
He gathered his unopened case and stood, but at the door, he turned and lowered his voice.
“I came in good faith, whatever you believe of me. The next man they send will not come in good faith at all. Sign nothing for him either, but understand that with him the asking will be a formality, and the refusing will cost you more than a morning.” He inclined his head a precise degree.
“Good day to you. My felicitations on the wedding, Miss Linfield. I do hope you are given a long time to enjoy it.”
***
The wedding was small, as Royce had promised, held by special licence in a side chapel with grey morning light and a clergyman Royce trusted. Beatrice wept without apology.
Lady Amabel, a matron known for her malicious gossip, came uninvited, which surprised no one, in a gown chosen to be remarked upon, and she offered Giselle her hand.
“The scholarly bride. How brave of Calder. One does so admire a man who marries beneath the notice of the heralds entirely for love.” She did not wait for an answer, which spared Giselle the trouble of declining to give one, and turned the cut into the room so that the draught of it reached the whole company.
“My wife,” Royce said loudly, and he said it with a plain, open pride that startled the chapel into silence. He set Giselle’s hand on his arm and did not lower his voice for anyone. “The Duchess of Calder. You will all learn the name. I find I enjoy saying it.”
Beatrice, at her elbow, murmured into her glove, “He has never enjoyed saying a single thing in the whole of his life. Remember the date, child. You will want it later.”
Amabel’s smile did not survive the sentence intact, and Giselle, who had braced for the cut and not at all for the pride, found her own composure the hardest thing to keep.
***