Chapter Twenty #3
“A month ago, nearly. A lady came. Tall, older, very grey eyes, a way of standing very still. She read the page for a long time, and then she paid the verger a year’s wages to keep a private watch on this book, and she left a letter in my keeping.
” The curate’s pen paused. “For the daughter, she said, when she comes. I asked how I should know her.” The pen stopped its travelling.
“She said the daughter would have her eyes and would wear the words around her neck.”
The churchyard was very loud with sparrows and very silent in every way that mattered.
“Describe her hands,” Royce said. “Her right hand. Was anything wrong with it?”
“The two last fingers did not bend, sir. She wrote with the quill pen held strangely. You know the lady?”
“What else. Anything. Her voice, her dress, what she paid with.”
“Plain dress, good cloth, no rings. She paid in old coin. And her voice was a lady’s voice that had been somewhere it was not made for, if that has a meaning, sir.
The verger said afterwards that she stood at the south wall a long while before she went.
There is a stone in the south wall for a Westmere.
” The curate looked up from his copying at last. “She stood at it like a woman reading her own name.”
“There is no Helena on that wall,” Royce said. The vestry list of memorials had been in the box of papers Vale never thought anyone would consult. “Only the old lord and his lady.”
“No, sir. The stone is to the late Lord Westmere. The lady stood at her husband’s name, I should have said.
” The curate sanded the extract and folded it with care.
“She left no name of her own, and I did not press for one. A woman who pays a year’s wages for the safety of a page has bought herself a little privacy with it, to my mind. ”
“You are a good man, and your church is about to be famous. Spend the fame carefully.”
“I am married to her eyes.” Royce put out his hand and kept it steady by main force.
“The letter. I am the husband, and the daughter is watched by men who must not learn this letter exists, and I will carry it to her tonight. The verger may send to Calder House to confirm me, but I am asking you to read my face instead, because the post is faster than the verger and tomorrow is not a day that waits.”
The curate read his face, and went to the vestry, and came back with a letter sealed in plain wax, no crest, and the direction on it said only, in a hand Royce had spent weeks learning from cypher pages: For my daughter.
He rode back to Foxhollow through the failing light with the extract in his breast pocket and the letter against his heart like a live coal.
Giselle met him at the door with the carbine in her hand and her question already half asked.
He gave her the letter before the question could finish, because some things must not arrive wrapped in a husband’s careful preamble.
“The curate at St Anselm’s held it. For the daughter, when she came.
” He watched her read the direction, watched her go white and then very calm, the cataloguer taking the case because the daughter could not yet.
“Giselle. The lady who left it had grey eyes and a stiff right hand, and she left it a month ago.”
“A month?” Her voice came from a long way off. “Twenty years dead, and writing letters a month ago?”
“Giselle. Look at me first.” He put his hands over hers on the unbroken seal, one steadying moment. “Whatever is in it, the woman who wrote it guarded that register page for you, which means whatever is in it is on your side. And I am on your side. Open it on those terms or wait until you can.”
“I have waited twenty years on other people’s terms. These will do.”
She broke the plain seal at the table, by the fire, standing, and read it aloud, because the rule of the house held even now, even for this, her voice level and white as the page.
My heart. If this reaches you, then you have found the church, which means you have found the rest, which means he is hunting you in earnest, and there is no more time for graves.
Know it quickly and plainly. The fever was bought.
The coffin was weighted. The physician who signed for my death is the same who will sit across from you and call you mad, and he was paid both times by the same hand.
I have been alive every day of your life, and away from you every day of it, because my return while V.
lived was your death warrant, and my watching from the dark was your shield.
I chose your breathing over your knowing me, and I will answer to you for that choice with whatever years remain.
Do not look for me before Thursday. After Thursday, if you have won, go to the sexton’s cottage and ask for the lacemaker.
If you have lost, run to the place your husband keeps that no paper knows, and I will find you, for I have found harder things.
Forgive me, or do not; only live. The truth is not buried, my heart. Neither am I.