Epilogue
“They buried him on Tuesday. Six mourners, and four of those were lawyers.”
Giselle looked up from the long table at Westmere, where the morning light came through windows her grandmother had once counted boards by, and watched her husband come up the gallery with the newspaper in one hand and his riding gloves in the other.
Spring had taken the house the way armies take a city, all at once and through every door, and the smell of cut grass and beeswax stood in the rooms that her mother had run from twenty years before.
“You went to the funeral,” she said. “You told me you had not decided.”
“I decided in the saddle. Habit of the trade. Never announce the route. I did not go in. I stood at the gate of it, and I wanted even that much witnessed.” He set the paper down beside her catalogue.
“Attainted in January, convicted in March, dead of his shoulder and his heart in April, in a comfortable room, with a fire he did not pay for and not one soul in attendance who was not billing the estate by the hour. The great filer of men, Giselle. He spent his whole life making certain he would matter, and the law took the name, and the trial took the reach, and at the end the only people in the room were paid to be there.” He drew off his gloves.
“I keep waiting to feel something larger about it. Triumph. Pity. It will not come. There is only the feeling of a drawer sliding shut.”
“Then let it shut. He had the whole of England’s attention for thirty years by arrangement, and the one thing he could not arrange was being mourned.
The record is exact for once. Let him keep it.
That is the correct feeling. I had it in February, the day my mother’s record was amended.
” She turned the catalogue towards him. “Sign here, by the by. The trust deed wants both our hands.”
“The trust deed.” He read the heading aloud, and his voice changed as it went, the dryness giving way. “The Westmere Trust for the Examination of Disputed Instruments. You did it, then. Vale’s list.”
“Every name on it. Forty-one families beggared on forged paper across thirty years, and a trust funded out of the estate Veyr tried to steal, to put archivists and honest solicitors at the service of people who can afford neither. The Harwood heirs are first. Mama insisted, and Vale concurred from whatever penitential cupboard the Crown is keeping him in. Beatrice has volunteered to terrify the trustees, which I consider the soundest use of her remaining years.”
“Forty-one families.” He turned the pages of the deed slowly. “I carried some of this paper, Giselle. In the bad years. Two of these names I carried personally.”
“I know. Your name is on the deed as founder beside mine, which is not absolution, because absolution is not in my gift. It is restitution, which is in yours, and you have been making it since before I met you, one locked room at a time. Sign.” She watched him sign, the strong, plain signature with no flourish in it, a man who had spent too long among forgeries to decorate his own name.
“There. The file is closed, my lord. The whole war, signed off.”
“Not quite the whole war.” He nodded through the window, down at the kitchen garden, where two figures moved along the rows in the sun, one straight-backed with a basket, one stout and gloved and gesturing with a trowel the way a marshal gestures with a baton.
“Those two have been out there an hour. What are they plotting? They plot now. I have learned the set of their shoulders.”
“Mama is teaching Beatrice to grow things, and Beatrice is teaching Mama to be visited. They are very bad at both and entirely happy.” Giselle came to stand beside him at the glass.
Below, her mother straightened, said something with the dry delivery that carried even through a window, and Beatrice laughed.
“She sleeps with her door open now. Mama. Crispin told me. Twenty years of sleeping behind a bar, and one night this winter, she stopped. He noticed because he notices everything, and he had the hinges oiled and never said a word to her.”
“I doubled his wages at Christmas, and he looked at me as though I had insulted the profession.” Royce was quiet for a moment, watching the garden.
“She has taken to calling me son. Have you marked it? Not son-in-law. She drops the law off it, deliberately, the way she drops every word she has no use for, and every time she does it, something in my chest moves furniture. I find the word has been waiting the whole time.”
“She does nothing by accident. You know that by now. She vetted you for a while before the wedding.”
“She what?”
“The lacemaker, Royce.” Giselle laughed at his face.
“Who do you imagine bought lace through an agent for the housekeeper at Calder House every quarter? Who knew about the side door, the one Vale’s man was told of?
She watched this house the way she watched everything, from the dark, through trade.
She told me at Christmas. She had a report on your character before I had finished my first week in your library, and her report said, and I quote her: damaged, honest underneath, watch and see.
She was watching us the whole time, my love.
We were never once alone in this. I have decided to find it comforting, and I recommend you do the same. ”
“Watch and see.” He shook his head slowly. “I spent ten years as the best-informed man in London, and the whole while there was a baroness in a cottage outrunning me with bobbins. It is the great humility of my life, and I am strangely glad of it.”
He turned from the window, and his arms came around her from behind, his chin settling at her temple, the two of them looking out at the garden and the green country beyond it, Westmere whole, the watchers all gone, no coach in any lane that did not belong there.
“And you,” he said, against her hair. “The last entry in the file. The archivist herself. You have restored everyone’s name in England, but I notice you have not told me how it sits, being home. This was the house you were stolen from. You walk these rooms like a woman still cataloguing them.”
“I am still cataloguing them, and I will be cataloguing them for years. It is how I love things; you knew the method when you married it.” She was quiet for a moment, her hands over his arms. “It sits strangely and well at once. The strangeness is the point, I think. I was owed a whole childhood here, but the debt cannot be paid, and Mama and I have agreed to stop presenting it for payment. We start the account from now. New ledger. The old one is closed and not balanced. Some files close unbalanced, and the closing is still the victory.”
“New ledger.” His arms tightened around her. “I can contribute to a new ledger.”
“Yes. About that...” She turned in his arms then, because some entries must be made face to face.
She took his hand in both of hers and brought it down, and laid it flat and deliberate over the front of her morning gown, low.
The knowledge arrived in his face the way the cypher had broken, all at once, every line of him rearranging around a single fact.
“I have a new acquisition to report, Your Grace. Very early. Crispin does not know; Mama certainly knows because she knows everything, and you are the last to be informed, which Beatrice assures me is traditional for fathers.” Her voice did not stay level, and she let it go.
“Come February, the catalogue requires a nursery.”
He did not say anything for a long moment. His hand moved once, carefully, over the place where the future was filed, and when he finally spoke, his voice had gone somewhere it had never been in all the registers she had mapped of him.
“A nursery,” he said. “In this family. Heaven, help the child. Our baby will be inventoried by three generations of formidable women before he or she can walk.”
“I intend to teach our baby the trade early. Veritas non sepelitur, my love. We are going to need a larger shelf.”
The End
I hope you had a fantastic time reading “Provoking the Scarred Duke”!