Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Second, the witness who could not attend.” She read her mother’s sworn account aloud, all of it, in the level voice she had read it in at their own table, and the room stopped rustling somewhere in the second sentence and did not start again.
“And third, the correspondence that the account refers to. Three letters. I will read only the close of the third.” She read it, and at Veyr’s words, Royce watched the Lord Chancellor’s man stop writing for the first time, look up, find Veyr by the window, and begin writing again, considerably faster.
“The hand?” Croft asked, very quietly.
“The commission has samples on its own files with which to satisfy itself. I make no accusation the paper does not make first.”
“That is the most dangerous courtesy I have heard in forty years at the bar,” Croft said. “Proceed to your settlement, Your Grace, and let us all be courteous together.”
Veyr did not move from the window, his gloves folded on the cane head. He watched Giselle with the expression of a man at a long opera, politely attending the inevitable.
“And now,” Giselle said, “we arrive at the settlement, which I am given to understand this commission expects me to produce as the foundation of my claim. Here it is.” She laid the forged settlement on the long table, squarely, in front of Vale.
“And before any man weighs it, I make one request, and I make it of the finest eye for a forgery in England. Mr Vale. Examine it. I insist.”
The room turned to Vale all at once, a field bending to the wind. Veyr’s gloves went still on the cane head.
Vale drew the document to him and took up his own glass, and the silence ran a long minute.
Royce, with the verdict bought, paid for, and rehearsed, still passed it barely breathing, because the grey man’s face was a clerk’s face, and there was one heartbeat in which thirty years of habit might have won.
“This settlement is a forgery,” Vale said.
The chamber made the sound a chamber makes.
“It is modern work upon aged parchment. The ink rides the surface. The seal is cold-pressed from a casting. The commission may verify each point under glass, and will.”
“You are very swift, Mr Vale,” Croft said. “The eminent are usually slower, for the fee.”
“I am swift, Sergeant, because no examination was required, which is the next thing I must say to this commission, and the last easy sentence I shall speak in this life.” He set the document down, and then, while the room was still swallowing, he kept speaking, in the dry, exact voice of a man reading his own sentence aloud because no one else could be trusted to read it correctly.
“And the commission will wish to know how I recognise the work so quickly. I recognise it because the hand is mine. I cut this forgery eleven months ago, on commission. I cut the will of the late Lord Westmere thirty years ago, and the Harwood will, and the Crane conveyance, each on the instruction and at the price of the same patron. To that patron, before the Lord Chancellor’s observer, under the protections I have this night accepted from the Crown, I tender my complete accounting. ”
“The protections are confirmed,” the Lord Chancellor’s man said from the door, the first words he had spoken all morning, and they fell into the room like a seal into wax. “Mr Vale speaks under the Crown’s instrument, executed last night. Continue.”
Vale folded his hands on the table before him. “The patron is Lord Veyr.”
“The commission will come to order.” Croft was on his feet, and the idle comfort had burned off him entirely, leaving something older and harder underneath, the sergeant he had presumably once been.
“Mr Vale’s statement is minuted in full.
The documents upon this table are sealed as of this moment into the custody of the Lord Chancellor’s observer, every page, the false with the true.
This examination of Her Grace is concluded, and the question of her soundness is discharged with no stain, which the record will state in those words.
What convenes next convenes elsewhere, with different chairs, and a great deal less comfortable ones. ”
Every face in the room had already gone to the window. Veyr rose, unhurried, drawing on his gloves finger by finger, a man leaving an opera a scene early to beat the crowd to the carriages.
“This commission has been suborned,” he said mildly, to no one in it. “I shall not dignify a conspiracy of forgers, foundlings, and frightened old women by remaining in the room with it. The Crown will hear a fuller account than this.”
“The Crown is in the room, my lord,” the Lord Chancellor’s man said, “and is hearing one.”
“Then the Crown will forgive me for declining to compete with rehearsed theatre.” Veyr gathered his cane.
“Good morning, gentlemen. Sergeant. You sat a tidy commission, for a man who will spend next season explaining it.” He moved towards the door with his unhurried walk, and his path took him, as it was always going to, past the chair in the centre.
He paused there and looked down at Giselle and smiled with all his old courtly warmth.
He pitched his voice for her alone, so low that Royce, three steps away and already moving, barely caught it.
“Magnificently done, Duchess. Your mother would be proud. Do give her my regards. Or I shall give them myself. I am told the lace in that part of the country is very fine.”