Chapter Twenty-Two
“State your name for the commission, Your Grace.”
“Giselle, Duchess of Calder.” She sat alone in the chair they had set in the middle of Vale’s long chamber, hands loose and open in her lap exactly as she had been taught, and Royce, placed with the observers against the wall, watched his wife decline to be small in the doorway of the most dangerous room in England.
“Born Giselle Westmere, of Westmere. I am told that is the question under examination. I am happy to assist the commission in answering it.”
“The commission notes Her Grace’s attendance is voluntary,” Croft said, without opening his eyes entirely. “It further notes the attendance of an observer from the Lord Chancellor’s office, at the request of the Duke of Calder, which is irregular.”
“The whole morning is irregular,” Giselle said. “An examination convened in private chambers, a physician retained by an interested party, and the interested party seated at the window. I thought we might at least be irregular evenly.”
A cough from the observers’ wall died young. Croft’s mouth moved a quarter inch. “Evenly it is, Your Grace. Mr Sotheby, your witness.”
Three men sat behind the long table, Vale at one end with his portfolio squared, Sergeant Croft in the centre, half-asleep and owned by no one, Sotheby at the other with his physician’s bag and his kind face.
Behind them, in the good chair by the window that no one had assigned him and no one dared unassigned him, sat Lord Veyr, gloves folded over the head of his cane.
By the door, in plain black, stood the man whose presence had cost Royce a letter and twenty years of unspent credit, the Lord Chancellor’s own observer, taking notes in a small book.
“Quite so.” Sotheby smiled the bedside smile that had buried better women. “Your Grace will forgive the indelicacy of the questions. They are asked in a spirit of care.”
“All the worst things have been,” she said pleasantly. “My mother was cared for in exactly this spirit, I am told. Proceed.”
Royce kept his face at parade rest and his heart somewhere up near his collar.
He had sat in rooms like this a dozen times in the bad years, on the long table’s side, watching the chair isolate its occupant and turn every answer to testimony and every silence to symptom.
He had explained the machine to her at Foxhollow, and now he watched her sit in it as though she had had it built to her measurements.
“You were raised, I understand, in the Marsh Lane foundling house,” Sotheby began. “A hard beginning.”
“A thorough one. I can lay a fire, read four languages, and tell a forged seal from a poured one by touch. The commission may decide which of those skills this morning requires.”
“And yet you have told persons of quality that you are the daughter of a baron. When did you first begin to believe this about yourself?”
“I never began to believe it. I began to read it.” She let the answer sit for half a second.
“Belief is your trade, Mr Sotheby. Mine is evidence. I was handed a pendant at the foundling door and a name on a slip of paper, and twenty years later I was handed my mother’s sworn account and her marriage lines, and between the one and the other I believed nothing at all.
I catalogued. The commission may have the catalogue. It is why I am here.”
“You will admit the story has a romantic shape. The orphan who is secretly a lady. It is the commonest delusion in the literature, if Your Grace will forgive me.”
“I forgive you freely, Mr Sotheby. Forgiveness is also the most common thing in my literature. It is also the most common plot in the circulating libraries, and yet the libraries are not examined for lunacy. Half this room has wept over an orphan restored by the third volume. Shall I have the observers minuted as susceptible?” A ripple went along the observers’ wall, quickly suppressed.
“But you raise the right question. The shape of a story proves nothing, in either direction. Paper proves. Shall we proceed to the paper, or are there more questions about my feelings? I warn you, I keep those catalogued as well.”
“As Your Grace wishes. It is reported to this commission that in recent weeks you kept your bed, took laudanum against weeping fits, and quarrelled gravely with His Grace over the shame of these proceedings. Does Your Grace deny the report?”
“I deny none of it, and I commend its author. The report was manufactured in my own house and fed to its buyer through a channel he trusted, to learn whether he would act on it, and he did. You hold the proof in your bag, Mr Sotheby. A certificate of committal, signed by you, for a weeping bedridden woman you had never examined, on the strength of gossip you never tested. Produce it or do not. The Lord Chancellor’s observer may note either way that I have described its contents without ever having seen it, which I could only do if the gossip and the certificate had the same author’s fingerprints upon them. ”
Sergeant Croft sat fully upright for the first time in what appeared to be years. “Is there such a certificate, Mr Sotheby?”
“There was a precautionary instrument drawn in the ordinary course of...”
“A precautionary instrument,” Croft repeated it the way one holds up a bad coin. “For a duchess. We will return to the ordinary course of things, Mr Sotheby, depend upon it.”
“In time, Your Grace. You are composed this morning. Remarkably composed, some might say, for a woman in your situation.” Sotheby’s voice gentled, the trap arriving wrapped in wool.
“The late Lady Westmere, whom you claim as your mother, was noted in her final years for a brittle and unnatural composure. The physicians of the day judged it a mask over a disordered mind. You will understand why the resemblance gives this commission pause.”
The room leaned in around the question, and Royce’s hands wanted Sotheby’s throat but stayed folded. This was the gate they had drilled for, the room built so that either calm or weeping was a symptom, and the door out had been painted on the wall.
“I understand it perfectly, Mr Sotheby. You have described an examination in which composure indicates madness and distress indicates madness.” Giselle tipped her head, scholarly.
“Tell the commission: what conduct would indicate sanity? Take your time. I am told the question has waited twenty years.”
Sergeant Croft opened both eyes.
“That is not... The framing is uncharitable,” Sotheby said. “Diagnosis is a matter of the whole picture.”
“Then I shall sit for the whole picture as long as the commission requires. I only ask that the picture be painted in questions I am permitted to answer, since I have noticed that the ones offered so far are doors that lock from your side.” She turned slightly towards the table.
“Sergeant, you have been very patient. Does the commission wish to examine my mind further, or may we examine my paper? One of the two of us has brought evidence this morning.”
“Then let us complete the picture. You judged my mother’s composure a mask, you said. You examined her, then. Personally. For the record of this commission, Mr Sotheby, when did you first attend the late Lady Westmere?”
“I attended her in her final illness.”
“If I may assist the commission.” Veyr’s voice arrived from the window, unhurried and warm.
“The late Lady Westmere’s sufferings are a matter of sorrowful record, and dragging the good physician through that long-closed grief serves nobody present.
The question before us is the daughter, not the mother. ”
“The question before us was framed by the man at the window,” Giselle said, without turning her head, “which the minutes may also note. I withdraw nothing. Mr Sotheby, her final illness. You attended.” She said it gently, and Royce watched her lay the trap exactly where the man’s own foot was already falling.
“And it was you who signed the attendance at her death?”
“It was. A fever. I attended through the last night. The record is in order, Your Grace, no matter what you wish to imply.”
“One refinement, and the physician may step out of the light. You certified the death. Would you stake your licence here, minuted, before the Lord Chancellor’s man, that the woman you attended that night is dead?”
“That is an absurd question.”
“It is the easiest question ever put to a physician of your eminence. A yes costs you nothing if it is true.” She let the silence run one beat past comfortable.
“Minute that Mr Sotheby declined to answer. We will come back for it, gentlemen, I promise you. Let the answer stand,” she said, and turned to the table.
“Gentlemen, the physician has now testified, before the Lord Chancellor’s observer, that he attended the late Lady Westmere through her final night and certified her death with his own hand.
I should like that minuted exactly, and then I should like to present my documents in an order that will require the commission’s patience.
The order matters. Orders generally do.”
Croft, who had begun to enjoy himself in the way of an idle man scenting an extraordinary morning, waved her on.
“First, the marriage.” She laid the certified extract on the long table.
“A certified extract of the register of St Anselm’s, obtained two days ago, the church’s seal upon it.
The eleventh of June. Westmere, by licence.
The lady signs Helena Linfield. Two witnesses.
The commission will observe that my parents’ marriage is proved out of a parish book that has sat in a vestry for thirty years, and requires no settlement, no account, and no daughter’s word to stand. ”
Croft drew it to him and read it through his glasses, twice. “Mr Vale. Is this extract in proper form?”
“It is in perfect form, Sergeant.”
“Then whatever else this morning produces, the commission notes that the marriage is regular on its face. Proceed, Your Grace. You have the room’s attention, which I do not say often or lightly.”