Chapter Eight
“Good morning, Your Grace. You are in my chair.”
Royce looked up from the chair in question, which he had drawn to the long table and filled with the whole untidy breadth of himself, a cup of something at his elbow and the year-nine ledger open before him as though he meant to learn cataloguing by sitting where the cataloguer sat.
“I am in the duke’s chair, in the duke’s library, in the duke’s house. ”
“You are in the duchess’s chair, which she claimed as hers on the first morning by sitting in it.
” She set down the keys Mrs Marlowe had surrendered to her over breakfast with a great deal of ceremony.
“You may get up. You may have the one by the window. It has the worst light and the better view of the door, which I understand you prefer.”
“I do prefer it.” He rose and moved, and the moving cost him less than it had three days ago. “You slept.”
“I locked the door, as instructed, and slept behind it.” She did not look at him while she said it, because the dream was hers and she had no intention of filing it where he could read it. “You will be relieved to learn your honour survived the night untested.”
“My honour spent the night in a cold room being extremely proud of itself. Do not trouble yourself over my honour. It is insufferable, and it can fend for itself.” He settled by the window. “And yours?”
“My honour and I are not on speaking terms this morning, Your Grace. We had words in the dark. I shall not trouble you with the substance.” She set the keys squarely on the blotter.
“You have appointed me a duchess at great speed, and I mean to have the full value of the office. You married a woman with no possessions at all, so you can hardly be astonished that she has begun by acquiring rooms.”
“You have the keys.”
“I have the keys, and I have a term that says I may open the locked things in this house with you in the room, and you are in the room.” She crossed to the deep corner, to the panel that stood proud of the wall, and drew out the black-lacquered box she had not been permitted to touch since the first afternoon.
“So, you can stand next to me, or watch from your inferior chair. I am opening it either way.”
He came and stood at her shoulder as he had the first day, the warmth of him at her back. She lifted the lid on the thing he had forbidden her, and the smell of old paper and cold metal came up out of it like a held breath let go.
“Letters,” she said. “A great many letters and numbers were where the words should be.” She lifted the topmost and tilted it to the light.
“It is a cypher. A simple one, a running substitution, the sort a clever person uses who does not expect a cleverer person to be paid to read it. Give me an hour, and I will give you the key.”
“We do not have an hour, and when you have it, you will burn it. Keep the key only in your head.”
“You think like a man who has had a blade at him over a sheet of paper.”
“I think like a man who has buried people who kept their keys in drawers. Go on. Give me the names first. The ciphered ones will keep. What is written plain?”
She turned the pages with the edge of one finger, scanning, and her own pulse answered before her eyes had finished.
“Helena. Helena Linfield, written plain, here, and here, and underlined the second time the way my mother underlined things she did not trust herself to forget.” Her voice was held by an effort that scraped.
“And a date. And a place I do not know. And then the cypher swallows the rest of the sentence as though whoever wrote it lost their nerve halfway through telling the truth.”
“Or someone had it taken from them before the sentence was finished.”
“Yes. Or that.” She steadied the page against the urge to crush it. “It is her hand, Your Grace. I have copied this hand for comfort since I was a child, and I would know it on the far side of a burned page in the dark. My mother wrote these to someone. About herself.”
“Then read me what she said, once you have the key. I have waited seventeen years to be told one true thing in that hand, and I would rather hear it in yours. Keep going.”
Beneath the letters, wrapped in oiled silk gone brittle with age, lay a single larger sheet, folded once and burned along one whole edge so that a third of it had gone to a brown crumbling lace.
She drew it out as she did with everything that might tear, both hands, no haste, and laid it flat.
The surviving half showed a hand far older and more formal than the letters, with a seal pressed deep into the wax at the foot.
Above the seal, a finely engraved coat of arms adorned the page, stopping her breath in her chest.
A chevron rose beneath three stars, and around the device, in letters the fire had spared, ran the same Latin motto she had been tracing against her own breastbone since before she had the words to ask whose it was.
“It is a settlement,” she said, in a voice she did not recognise.
“A marriage settlement. The top is burned away, the names with it, but this is the Westmere arms, and this...” Her hand went to her collar, drew the pendant out into the light at last, and laid the small worn medallion beside the great burned seal so that the two devices lay side by side.
“This is the same crest. My mother carried it on a settlement, and I have carried it on my throat my whole life and never once known they were the same hand of the same family.”
For a moment, she could only look at the two of them lying together, the great burned seal and the small worn medallion, the public record and the private one finally laid in the same light.
The pendant had been a riddle her whole life, a thing she had clung to precisely because it answered nothing and so could not be taken from her.
Now it answered, and the answer made her a person with a family, an inheritance and an enemy, and turned the one riddle that had been hers alone into evidence belonging to lawyers, dukes and dead people.
She had wanted to know who she was since she was old enough to want anything at all.
No one had warned her that the knowing would arrive so much like a robbery.
“Read the motto,” Royce said very low. “Aloud. I have wondered for seventeen years what you would sound like saying it.”
“Veritas non sepelitur.” She said it to both the burned seal and the pendant, and this time the meaning of that sentence came from within that box.
“Truth is not buried. That is the Westmere motto, Your Grace. Truth is not buried. They put it on their arms, and then they spent twenty years burying mine.”
“That is why I would not let you open it alone on the first day. Not to keep the secret from you. To keep you from meeting it with no hand on your shoulder when it landed.” He had not put the hand there, but he stood close enough that he might have.
“I have watched that crest land on a person before. It does not land gently.”
“Whose shoulder did you steady the first time?”
“No one’s. There was no one to steady, and no one to do the steadying. That is rather the whole of me, Giselle, and you may file it where you like.”
He was quiet for a moment behind her, and then he said the thing she had been waiting four days to make him say.
“You suspected who I might be related to by my surname,” she said before he could.
“You told me so in the dark, half of it. Tell me the rest now, in daylight, with the proof lying on the table between us. You did not hire an archivist. You hired Helena Linfield’s daughter, and you knew her by her eyes across this table before she had read you a single document. ”
“I suspected. I did not know, which is a true distinction and a cowardly one, and I hid behind it.” He did not touch the documents or her.
“The Strattons sent me a scholar with the right surname and the right age, and I told myself a hundred women are called Linfield. I engaged you to read the box because I could not read it and could not bear to ask anyone I trusted, because the last people I trusted with this are dead. Then you walked in and scolded my filing with Helena’s exact contempt for a careless man, and I knew inside a quarter hour, and I said nothing, because saying it made you real and a real claimant is a dead one. ”
“You let me walk this house for four days believing I catalogued a stranger’s library, when you had already decided I was the stranger’s heir.”
“I let you walk this house four days alive. That is the whole of my defence, and the only part of it that signifies. The morning I told you would have been the morning my bought servant carried the news over the wall. I assure you that you would not have seen a fifth.”
“That is the most you have given me at once.”
“It is not the most. There is one more, and I will give it to you now, because you have a settlement under your hand and you have earned the whole of it.” He drew a slow breath and gave it to her.
“The night I was shot, after you bound me, I did not leave the originals where you might find them. I salted the restricted shelves with decoys, Giselle. Convincing ones, in period hands, on aged paper, copied by a man I paid well and will never name. The true originals I moved. What you have been cataloguing these four days, on the restricted shelves, are mostly forgeries I made myself, and you have been working from transcripts of the rest, so that the real papers are never in your hands at all. If they come again, and they will come again, I want them to steal a lie and believe it the truth.”
“How many of the papers I have catalogued these four days are real?”
“Of the restricted shelves, perhaps one in five, and I will not tell you which. A woman who does not know which papers are true cannot be made to give them up, and I would rather you be safe than thorough.”
“That is a plain breach of my second term. You are deciding again what truth my neck can carry.”
“It is the one breach I will defend to your face. Report to Beatrice. She will take my side, which will enrage you, and you will forgive the pair of us by dinner.”
She sat back on her heels and looked at him, and the scholar in her was, despite everything, a little awed. “You forged your own archive to protect me.”
“I forged my own archive before I had decided you were worth protecting, which is the only part of it I am proud of, since it means I did it on principle and not on feeling.” He let the breath go before the rest. “The box you have just opened is the exception. That one is real. I could not bring myself to copy your mother’s hand, since the copying would have been a second burial, and I have presided over one of those already. ”
He almost smiled, and this time he let it arrive. “Take the cypher and the settlement. Build me the truth out of what the fire left, and we will decide together what to do with it, which is the second clause of your third term, and which I am keeping.”
She had the topmost ciphered letter in her hand, and the substitution half worked in her head when Crispin came in with the salver, and on it lay a card thick enough to stand on edge, gilt-bordered, the hand on it copperplate and confident.
“From Lady Amabel, Your Grace. For the duke and the new duchess both. She requests the honour, three days hence, at an after-dinner musicale with informal dancing.” Crispin’s face declined to have an opinion.
“She has written the words new duchess in larger letters than the rest, Your Grace, if that signifies anything.”
“It signifies that Amabel has discovered that her pen has a carrying voice and means the whole town to hear it,” Royce said.
“It signifies everything.” Giselle set down the letter, took the card, read the oversized words, and understood the shape of the thing at once.
“She means to put me in a room full of people who have read the sheet, and watch me fail to be a duchess in front of all of them, and write the failure down. It is the trap with my name in larger letters so that I cannot pretend it is meant for someone else.”
“You will refuse it,” Royce said. “I can have us in the country by Thursday.”
“I will not refuse it.” She set the card flat beside the burned settlement.
“A woman who hides from a drawing room teaches every drawing room that she can be hidden. I have spent my life being unremarkable so that no one would trouble to look. That woman is dead, Your Grace. You named her dead in a chapel yesterday and called her a duchess. I had rather walk into Amabel’s room and be looked at than spend the rest of my life being safely unseen. ”
“They will not fight you with fists. They will fight you with chairs and introductions in which people are presented, and a hundred small cruelties you will never see coming, because you were raised to read paper and not rooms.”
“Then teach me to read the room. I learned about four men’s libraries in a decade. I can learn one vicious drawing room in three days.”
He studied her for a long moment across the table.
“Then we accept,” he said, “and we have three days, and you cannot fight a room like that with an honest face and a sharp tongue, because they are armed and you are not. You will need to be taught, and I am the only one in this house who learned in that school and lived.” He rose, and the dryness left him, and what stood in its place was something closer to relish.
“So, we begin your education in warfare.”