Chapter Fifteen
“Three days, and this page still will not speak to me.”
Giselle had not left the library since the candles were lit the evening before, and the second hand of her mother’s cypher sat under the lamp exactly as stubbornly as it had sat at midnight.
The cant broke clean for the first third and then, at the fold, turned into a wall of letters that obeyed no key she had tried against it.
She had reached the stage of tiredness where the letters swam and rearranged into words that were not there.
Long ago, she had learned to stop when that began, but she had not stopped.
“You have tried her cant, her husband’s hand, the court substitutions, and the family alphabet Royce gave you,” Beatrice said from the chair by the cold hearth, where she had installed herself at dawn and refused to be sent home. “You are running out of keys, child, and you have three days.”
“I am running out of the obvious keys. The obvious keys were never going to work because she changed to this hand at the exact moment she stopped trusting the obvious. A woman who burns a settlement does not lock the rest of it with a key her enemy already owns.”
“Then think like her, and not like a cryptographer,” Beatrice said.
“You keep reaching for systems. She was not a clerk. She was a frightened woman with a child, a secret and an hour to write the most important thing she would ever write, and people in that hour do not invent systems. They reach for the one word they cannot forget and cannot bear to lose.”
“That is either very wise or entirely useless, and I cannot yet tell which.”
“It is both, which is the nature of advice from old women. Drink the tea, and stop glaring at the page as though it owed you money.” She set the page down and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Tell me again what you brought from Veyr. All of it. I think better when you talk.”
“The commission sits in three days, at Vale’s chambers, not in any court.
Three men. A physician named Sotheby, whom Veyr has used to find unsound minds in inconvenient widows for twenty years.
A clerk that Veyr trusts. And Veyr himself, sitting as an interested party, which is irregular and which no one will object to, because the irregular thing about Veyr is that no one ever objects to him.
” Beatrice recited it without inflection; the report of a woman who had carried such reports for forty years.
“And I gave him, in return, exactly the sentence the three of you wrote for me to give him: that you were frightened, that you had quarrelled with your husband over the shame of it and that you were spending your days weeping and your nights asleep on laudanum, and that the examination would find a hysteric, as he hopes.”
“And he did not wonder why you, of all his old instruments, had grown so forthcoming.”
“He wondered. Veyr wonders at everything, it is his only form of prayer. So, I gave him a reason he could respect. I told him I thought the marriage a ruinous folly, that I would sooner see the Westmere brought to a quiet end than watch my godson squander a dukedom over a foundling. He believed it because it is what he believes of everyone: that underneath the loyalty there is always a ledger and the ledger always wins.” Her mouth thinned to a line.
“I let him think I was his again by playing the worst version of myself. It was not difficult. The worst version of me wrote your name eleven days ago. I only had to introduce them.”
“And he believed you.”
“He believed me because I have never once lied to him in forty years, which is the most expensive truth I ever told, and which I am now spending all at once.” Something near a smile touched her mouth.
“He was pleased. A pleased Veyr is careless by his own standards, which is to say still more careful than any other man in London. But he let one thing fall. He said the examination was a formality, and that the matter would be settled before it, one way or the other. Before it, Giselle. He does not mean to wait three days for the commission. He means to have the thing finished sooner.”
Royce came in on the end of it, in his shirtsleeves, with two more boxes from the muniment room and the look of a man who had been searching the wrong places on purpose to be sure they were wrong.
“Finished sooner means he expects you to move first. He has given Beatrice the information so that when you do move, the moving itself proves you are neither sedated nor weeping, and proves you were lying to him through her, which costs us Beatrice, the moment it happens.” He set the boxes down.
“Whatever we do, we do it understanding that the first bold thing you do spends her. So, it had better be the right bold thing.”
“How long before moving spends her,” Giselle said. “Be precise. I will not waste her on a guess.”
“The instant you do anything a sedated weeping woman would not, he revisits every word she has carried him, and the revisiting ends with her. So, we have one move. After it, she is burned, and we will have spent the most patient asset either of us will ever hold, and we had better have bought something with her that cannot be taken back.”
“Then the one move is the proof,” Giselle said. “Nothing smaller is worth her.”
“Nothing smaller is worth her,” he agreed.
“Then I had better read this page first, so that the bold thing has somewhere to go.” Giselle pulled the lamp closer. “Say the motto, Royce. The one on the pendant. Out loud, in Latin.”
“Veritas non sepelitur.” He said it as he said all her mother’s things, carefully, as though they might still be warm. “The truth is not buried. Why?”
“Because I have been trying every key my mother might have shared with someone, and the someone is the error. She did not write this to anyone. She wrote it to me, and the only thing she could be certain her daughter would carry, through a foundling house and twenty years and whatever came after, was the one thing she hung round my neck before she gave me away.” Her free hand had gone to the pendant at her throat without her telling it to, the small, worn weight she had been handed in a basket and had never once removed.
Her hands had begun to move while she spoke, counting the Latin letters against the wall of cypher.
The third letter answered, and then the eighth, and then the whole stubborn paragraph cracked open under her fingers the way a seal gives all at once.
“It is the motto. The key is the motto. She locked the truth with the words that say the truth cannot be locked.”
“Giselle.” Royce had come to her shoulder. “Slowly. If you are right, you are about to read the last thing your mother ever wrote to you, and you only read a thing for the first time once. Do not rush past it to the proof. The proof will keep for three minutes.”
“The proof will keep. I am less certain that I will.” She slowed her hand all the same, and let the words rise out of the cypher at the pace he had given her, and was grateful for it in a way she could not have said aloud.
The room went very quiet while she wrote it out, letter under letter, her mother’s voice arriving across the distance one word at a time.
When it was whole, she did not trust herself to summarise it.
She read it to them instead, in a voice she kept level by an effort that cost her the whole of the morning’s composure.
“If you have these words from my throat, you have the pendant, and if you have the pendant, you are mine. If you are reading this, then I did not come back for you, which I swear to you now, I always meant to do. The truth is not buried. I would not let them bury it. What he wants is at Westmere, in the room where your grandmother kept her sewing, behind the second board from the window, where no man troubles to look because no man sews. Take it to no court he can reach. Trust the law least of all. And forgive me the foundling house, my heart. It was the only grave he would believe.’”
No one spoke for a long moment. Beatrice had turned her face to the cold hearth. Royce had gone still in the flat stillness he kept for the worst documents, and then he came round the table and stood near her, not touching, a restraint he had learned.
“She hid you in plain sight,” he said at last, low.
“She gave you to the one place a man like Veyr would never search, because a baron’s lost heir is not raised scrubbing grates, and the impossibility of it was the whole of your safety.
She did not abandon you. She buried you the only way that would keep you breathing, and she left you the map to dig yourself back up when it was safe. ”
“That is why the boxes in this house held nothing worth burning,” he went on.
“The archive here was always a decoy. Your mother built one, and then I built another over the top of it without knowing hers lay beneath, two of us hiding the same girl behind the same dead paper for twenty years. The thing that matters was never in London at all. He has had men turning over a false library while the true one sat in a sewing room in the country, guarded by nothing but the fact that no one thought a baron’s daughter could come from there. ”
“She wrote forgive me the foundling house as though I would be angry about the grates,” Giselle said.
“I scrubbed grates for nine years and hated her every morning for leaving me to them. She was the one who put me there, on purpose, so that I would live, and the hating kept me warm, and now I cannot even keep the hating, because she earned it doing the only thing that saved me.” “I am going to need to be angry at someone today, and the list has just lost its first name.”
“Put Veyr at the top of it,” Royce said. “He has earned the whole of the list, and he is still alive to receive it, which your mother is not.”
She put Veyr at the top of the list and her mother’s name nowhere on it, and the rearrangement settled something in her chest that had sat crooked since she was old enough to know she had been left.
“It was never going to be safe,” Giselle said. “That is the part she got wrong. She thought there would be an afterwards. There was only ever this.”
“You do not know that,” Beatrice said quietly, still facing the hearth.
“That there was no afterwards. You know only that she did not reach it, and those are not the same, and a woman who reads documents for a living should not confuse a missing page with a page that was never written.” She made herself look around, and her eyes were wet, which Giselle had not once seen in her.
“She gave you to the dark to keep you. I gave my own girl to the dark to keep myself. Do not mistake me for your mother because we used the same hiding place. She buried you and left you a map. I buried mine and threw the map in the fire. That is the whole distance between a good woman and the thing I am, and you should keep it in front of you when you decide how far to trust me.” She folded the decoded page and did not let her hands shake.
“The proof is at Westmere. Behind a board in a sewing room, in a house I have never seen, that belongs by right to a woman, the law is three days from declaring does not soundly exist. We have to go and get it before the commission sits, because a proof I cannot produce is the same as no proof at all, and a madwoman who claims there is a document behind a board is exactly the madwoman Veyr has ordered.”
“Westmere is half a day’s ride,” Royce said. “We could be there by dark and back before the commission, if nothing waits for us on the road.”
“Then we go tonight, in the dark, the way she did everything,” Giselle said. “If something waits on the road, it will be looking for a frightened woman in a crested carriage, not two people on hired horses who keep to the back lanes.”
“You do not know the back lanes to Westmere.”
“No. But you spent ten years learning the quiet ways into and out of other men’s houses, for men who paid you to be unseen. I married a burglar, Royce. It is past time the trade worked for a house instead of against one.”
“It is the first honest use the skill has ever been put to, and I find I do not mind it.” Something close to a smile crossed his face. “Pack nothing you cannot carry at a run.”
“And the house?” Giselle asked.
“We tell the house you are abed with a megrim and not to be disturbed, and Crispin keeps the curtains drawn and the tray going up. For as long as the household believes it, so will the man Veyr has set to watch the household. We have until someone thinks to count the horses.”
“You have arranged all this in four minutes.”
“I have arranged little else since I was nineteen. Vanishing two people out of a watched house is the one thing I was ever truly good at. I never once imagined doing it to keep someone rather than to leave them.”
“You keep handing me the worst of yourself,” she said, “as though it will frighten me off, and it has stopped working. I have read the whole file, Royce. I married the file. Tonight I would rather have you, your back lanes and your seventeen bad years than any honest man in England who could not get me out of a watched house alive.”
“That is the most romantic thing anyone has said to me, and it is entirely about housebreaking, which tells us both everything about the marriage we have made.”
Below the library, the house performed its ordinary evening, indifferent, and somewhere in the street, a man Veyr paid was counting the windows that stayed lit.
Beatrice spoke without turning from the hearth, and her voice had the flatness Giselle had learned to read as the worst kind of news delivered kindly.
“Something waits for you on the road. I am sorry, I should have said it sooner, and I did not, because I wanted one hour of being useful before I was the bearer of it again.” She made herself turn from the hearth.
“Veyr asked me, in the last note, whether the Duchess of Calder had any country attachment. Any place she might run to, were she frightened enough to run. I told him no because I did not know there was one. But the question means he is already wondering where your mother would have hidden a thing, and Westmere is the first place a clever man would set a watch. You will not be riding to a forgotten house, Giselle. You will be riding to the one place he is most certainly already standing, and he will be very glad to see you arrive carrying the only proof he has not yet been able to find and burn.”