Chapter 30
“You were followed. Of course you were followed. A duke’s carriage, in these lanes.” The voice came through the door before it opened, thin and shaking, pitched low. “Everyone is followed. That is the first thing you learn, and the last.”
The door gave inward six inches, and a single eye found them in the murk of the stair. The gaze moved over Magnus, over Leo, and stopped on Rosaline with a flare of something close to panic.
“You brought a woman. Why would you bring a woman to a thing like this?”
“Because the woman insisted,” Rosaline said, before either man could answer for her, “and because she is a great deal harder to lie to than her husband. Mr. Deane, is it? We have not come to harm you. We have come to listen. May we?”
Something in the plain sense of it reached him where the men had not. The door opened, and they went in.
The room beyond was the meanest Rosaline had ever stood in. It was a single cramped chamber under the eaves with a low, guttering fire, a pallet, a chair, and a smell of damp, gin, and long unwashed fear.
Deane himself was worse; he had probably once been a respectable man.
There was the ghost of a good coat about him still.
There was a clerkish neatness fighting a losing war with ruin.
But one side of his face was pulled and shining with an old burn scar that dragged the corner of his eye, and he walked with a lurch, one leg gone wrong at the hip and never set right, and his hands would not be still.
She cataloged it all in a breath, the way she read a ballroom, and did not like the total she arrived at.
“Sit, then. Sit, sit.” He did not sit himself.
He went to the window and looked down at the lane, and came back, and went again, a circuit he had plainly walked ten thousand times.
“You want to know about the McCormack business. Rivercourt’s man said as much.
” A sound that was almost a laugh. “No one has wanted to know about the McCormack business in years. I have been trying to make someone want to know for years, and the only thanks it ever bought me was this.”
He gestured at his own ruined face, his dragging leg, with a terrible carelessness.
“I was clerk to the commission.” He said it to the fire.
“The private one. The one that heard the evidence against your father, and was dissolved the moment it had done its work, and burned its papers, or so the record says. I kept the books. I carried the letters. I stood in the room when the man they hired brought in the forged correspondence, still smelling of the ink, and I watched three lords of the realm nod it through as though it were a bill for candles.”
Rosaline saw Magnus’s fists clench.
“Your father’s own hand, they said. It was no such thing,” Deane went on.
“I had seen your father’s true hand on a dozen honest letters.
This was a lie made by a craftsman and paid for like a suit of clothes.
” His eyes flicked to Magnus, and away. “I have that on my conscience, McCormack. I filed the lie that killed your father. I was young. I was frightened, and I told myself it was not my place to question lords. I have had sixteen years to learn precisely whose place it was.”
“Who paid for it?” Magnus’s voice was very low. “The forgery. Who commissioned it?”
“Names. You want names.” Deane’s hands twisted.
“There were four of them at the head of it. One is dead of gout, and good riddance. One drank himself into the grave. But the one who moved the others, the one who thought of it, who chose your father precisely because he was too honest to be bought and so had to be broken instead—” He stopped, and glanced at the window again, as though the name itself might be listening in the lane.
“You know his name. I can see that you know it. I will not be the one to say it aloud in a room with a window in it. I have said it aloud once, and this is what it cost me.”
“The accident,” Leo said quietly.
“There are no accidents.” Deane’s voice cracked.
“Two years ago, I grew loud in my cups, and careless, and let it be known I still had a tongue in my head. A week later, a dray came round a blind corner in the Borough where I have walked every day for a decade. It did not so much as slow, and if a pieman had not caught my collar, I would have gone under its wheels and been mourned as an accident, and no one the wiser. The next month, a fire, in the night, in a locked room. I got out through a window I had learned to keep unbarred precisely because I am not a fool.”
He turned from the window and looked at them, at all three of them, and for the first time the shaking in him went still, and what was underneath was worse.
“They do not shout. They do not threaten. That is what you must understand, whatever you mean to do. They are quiet and patient, and when they decide a man has become inconvenient, he simply has an accident. That is what these men are. I am the warning they left standing, because a living ruined wretch frightens the others quieter than a dead one.”
The little room was silent but for the hiss of the fire.
“The commission’s papers were not all burned,” Deane said at last, lower.
“The sworn depositions went north, to a strongroom in Edinburgh, filed and forgotten. I know because I filed them. Everything you would need is sitting in that room, if a man had the standing to command the door open and the nerve to go and stand in front of it.” His ruined mouth twisted.
“You have the standing, Your Grace. Whether you have the nerve, and what it will cost you, is not my affair. I have paid my share. I only wanted someone who could do something about it to know finally.”
Magnus was already reaching for his purse. Deane’s hand came up sharply.
“No. Not your money. Money is how they mark a man.” He shrank back toward his window. “Go now. Do not come again. And whatever you decide, Your Grace, decide it knowing what I have shown you. They will let you get very close. They let your father get close. That is when it happens.”
Out in the lane, in the gray afternoon light, Rosaline stood by the carriage and found that her hands were not steady, and that she could not make them be.
She had come to this because she had told Magnus, by a fire, that they would find these men together, and she had meant it.
She had thought of it, until this hour, as a thing of drawing rooms, of clever letters and careful reading, the work she was made for.
She had not understood, until she stood in a reeking garret and looked at what one spoken name had left of the man who spoke it, that the road her husband was set upon did not end in a courtroom.
It ended, if these men chose, in a blind corner and a dray that did not slow.
She looked at Magnus across the roof of the carriage. He was gazing back toward the dark doorway they had left. There was no fear in his face at all, only a terrible, settled purpose, the look of a man handed the last piece of a thing he had wanted his whole life.
And the cold went through her, and it would not leave her for a long time after.