Chapter 33
“You’ve not touched the cake, you haven’t insulted my new curtains, and you have agreed with everything I have said for a full half hour, which I know for a fact that you have never done during our entire acquaintance.
” Abigail set down the teapot and looked at her friend across the little table.
“So you will forgive me, Rosaline, but something is very wrong, and I have been waiting most patiently for you to tell me what.”
“Nothing is wrong.” Rosaline made herself lift the teacup and keep her hand steady on the way to her mouth. “I am only tired. His Grace keeps late hours over his correspondence, and I keep them with him. It has simply caught up with me. Your curtains are lovely. I should have said so.”
“My curtains are a crime, and you know it.” But Abigail did not smile, and her eyes did not leave Rosaline’s face.
On the mantel behind her, gleaming in the pale afternoon light, the little golden fox sat in pride of place among the good porcelain, exactly where a person would set a thing they treasured.
Rosaline had to look away from it, because the sight of it undid something in her she was holding together with both hands.
She had chosen this. That was the part she could not say aloud, not even here, to the one friend who might have understood. She had walked out of that room. She had lifted her chin and said, I’ll leave you to your purpose, and walked out with the last of her pride intact.
She would not, could not, be the one to unbend.
She had spent her whole life bending. She had bent to a father who closed like a fist and a brother who owned her by the hour, and she had promised herself, standing in the warm light on the steps of Greythorne Hall, that she would never make herself small for anyone again.
She was keeping that promise. It was costing her everything she had, and she was keeping it anyway.
“Rosaline.” Abigail’s voice had softened.
“You gave me the golden fox because I laughed at you in a maze. You are the least tired person I’ve ever known.
You could sew a hem in the middle of a house fire and apologize for the stitches.
” She reached across the table and placed her hand over Rosaline’s, and the kindness of it was nearly unbearable.
“Whatever it is, you do not have to say it prettily. You do not have to say it at all. But you do not have to sit there being brave for me either. Not with me.”
For one terrible moment, all of it rose in Rosaline’s throat—the fight, the four cold days, the horse in the drive, and the awful careful bow he had given her in the hall like a stranger.
She felt how easy it would be to set it down here, in this warm room, with Abigail’s kind, warm hand over her own.
She swallowed it back.
“He is going away,” she said instead. It was as near the truth as she could come. “For his work. It may be dangerous, and it may be long. I did not want him to go, and we quarreled about it. That is all. Married couples quarrel. I am being foolish.”
“Are you frightened for him or angry with him?”
“Yes,” Rosaline said, and the small broken honesty of it was the closest she came to weeping during the whole visit.
Mercifully, Abigail did not press her on it.
She refilled the cups that did not need refilling, talked about small nothings like her dreadful curtains, her aunt’s gout, a scandal involving a curate and a pineapple, and let Rosaline sit in the warmth and be quiet.
She asked nothing more of her than to stay awhile.
Rosaline stayed and was grateful. She understood, while sitting there safe in her friend’s bright drawing room, that this was precisely the thing she wanted her whole life and never had.
A friend who saw her. A door she had walked through of her own accord. An afternoon that belonged to no one but herself, with no brother’s hand on her elbow and no one’s future to guard but her own.
She was free. She was, for the first time in her life, entirely free.
And it was ashes. Every bright safe hour of it was ashes because Magnus was not in it. She was only now beginning to understand that a life she had won at such cost could be handed to her whole and still mean nothing, with the most important person carved out of its center.
She did not stay for supper. She went back to the great warm house that had gone cold and did not weep in the carriage, and counted that a victory too.
The direction had come from Deane, in the end, in a second note passed through Rivercourt, as though the man in the Southwark garret had decided that if he was to be a source at all he might as well spend himself completely.
There is one more you will want, it read, in a cramped, careful hand.
I only filed the papers. He made them. He kept back proof of his own work, against the day the men who hired him found it convenient to see him dead.
One of the things he kept is the letter itself, in your father’s forged hand.
He will not give you a name, and you must not ask for one.
Go alone. Go armed. Go with a heavy purse.
And when it is done, forget you ever heard of me.
Magnus went.
He had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the investigation since the door closed on the warmth of his marriage. He worked the way other men drank because at least work did not stop when he closed his eyes and the cold half of his bed reminded him of Rosaline.
He rose before dawn, rode out after dark, and filled every hour in between with the patient, grim work of the case. And if he was hollowed out to a husk of a man doing it, at least the husk had somewhere to be.
The warehouse stood among the rotting wharves east of the Tower of London. It was a gaunt ruin of a building, with the river slapping back at its pilings and half of its roof open to the sky.
He arrived at the appointed time alone, with a pistol—a cold weight against his ribs—and a heavy purse on his belt. He stood in the vast, dripping darkness until a lantern uncovered itself twenty feet away and a voice spoke.
“Close enough. You’ll be the Scottish duke.” The man did not step into the light. “Show me the money before we waste one another’s evening.”
Magnus set the purse on an upturned crate between them and stepped back. The man, still shrouded in shadows, detached from the dark, weighed the purse, counted it by feel with quick fingers, and grunted.
“You’re here about your father’s business.
” His voice was flat, almost bored, as if he were discussing an everyday transaction.
“There was a letter that damned him, or near enough. It was correspondence with the King’s enemies, bearing Laird McCormack’s signature and written in a hand no court would have thought to question. ”
A dry sound followed, not quite a laugh.
“But here’s the thing. Your father never wrote it.
Someone paid to have it forged by a man who could imitate any hand in England and had been doing so for the right price for twenty years.
” The lantern shifted. “When the commission destroyed its records, I kept that letter. Men in my trade learn early that what everyone believes is gone can be worth far more than what they know still exists.” Another pause. “And now it’s yours. You paid for it.”
A packet skidded across the crate. Magnus picked it up and unfolded it under the lantern with hands he struggled to keep steady.
There it was. The neat treasonous hand that was not his father’s, and his father’s seal. It was the lie that had killed a good man.
Sixteen years. He had waited out most of them in the north and crossed a country only when the title finally gave him a door into these people’s houses, and here it was in his hands at last, cold and light as any other paper.
“The man who forged it.” He kept his voice steady. “I’ll have his name.”
Silence followed, the silence of a man deciding whether one more betrayal would cost him anything.
“Weems,” the informant revealed. “Ambrose Weems. He’s an engraver by trade.
He’s old now and frightened. He lives quietly on the money he was paid to forget he ever held a pen.
Oldbrook gave him the task. But you’ll not have that from me.
Or Weems, I think, unless you frighten him worse than his old taskmasters do. And they frighten him a good deal.”
The lantern withdrew.
“That’s all you bought, Scotsman. Don’t come looking for me again.
” A final pause in the dark. “They killed your father over that paper. Those men carried on with their lives without another thought. And now you’ll be carrying that same paper about London.
I would be careful about who you tell you have it and who might want it back. ”
The lantern went out, and the footsteps faded away in the dark.
Magnus stood alone with the proof of his father’s demise in his hand.
He ought to have experienced something immense.
He had imagined this moment for years. He had imagined the moment the lie came apart in his fingers and the truth of his father’s death stood clear at last. He had always thought it would come like weather, like a storm breaking over the land, like the thing inside of him finally, finally set down.
Instead, he felt only the cold, the river, and the silence of the empty warehouse. He suddenly felt, with unbearable clarity, the truth he had been outrunning for a fortnight.
There was no one to bring this to.
He had the letter that would clear his father’s name. After years of searching in the dark, he finally held the proof in his hands. And the only person in the world he wanted to show it to was three miles west of him, behind a door he shut with his own hands.
Rosaline would know immediately what it meant and what to do with it. She would know how much it had cost him to find it.
He tucked the letter into his coat, over his heart, where it would be safe.
It was only one piece of the puzzle: the forger’s own hand, and the name to go with it.
But a single letter a hired man could always swear was itself a fake.
It was Edinburgh that would make it unanswerable.
He would have the sworn depositions to stand behind this, the whole rotten circle in their own signatures, and this to name the craftsman who served them.
He needed both. He had always needed both.
He headed for the horses in the fog. Passage north was booked for the morning. He did not let himself think about the long, cold ride to Edinburgh, or the empty bed he was leaving behind him.