Chapter 15 #2
Now there was no choice. Megan would be required to tell her story. Publicly. In detail. Before men who would weigh her word against Penharrow’s documents, a peer, and find it…
“Which court?” he asked.
“Court of Chancery. The petition was filed on the grounds of concern for the welfare of the ward, who has been separated from her guardian’s protection. Guardianship cases of this nature are typically resolved in a matter of weeks. He’s claiming you kidnapped her.”
“Weeks.”
“Three to six, depending on the court’s calendar.
” Carmichael’s voice had not changed. It never changed.
“My lord, I want to be direct with you. The petition is, on its face, legitimate. The court will look at the documents, and they will appear to be in order. Unless you can present evidence that contradicts Penharrow’s account—evidence of a documentary nature, not simply testimony from a young lady—then the court is likely to find in his favor and order the return of his ward. ”
“Megan’s testimony isn’t evidence?”
Carmichael was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of a man who had no answer, but the silence of a man deciding how honest to be.
“A woman with no established name, no family, no position, whose history prior to Penharrow’s custody she cannot document,” he said finally, “against a peer of the realm with a signed letter from a dead man and a household accounts ledger. In Chancery.” He looked at Oliver steadily.
“Her testimony would be heard. I do not want to mislead you about whether it would be believed.”
Oliver stood.
He did it because sitting still was no longer something his body was prepared to do. He moved to the window and stood there looking out at the gray London street, the carriages and the mud and the thin winter light, and he put his hands behind his back because they wanted to be fists.
Penharrow had thought of everything. Of course he had.
A man who had kept a woman imprisoned for fourteen years and made it look like nothing had thought of everything.
He would have had these papers prepared the moment he realized Megan was gone.
Perhaps before. Perhaps he’d had the contingency ready for years, for the theoretical occasion when someone finally came looking.
“There’s no proof of Bryce’s daughter,” Oliver said, without turning from the window. “The real Thomas Bryce—if there was a Thomas Bryce—may never have had a daughter. It would be worth looking.”
“I have already instructed a clerk to begin enquiries.” Carmichael’s voice was precisely the same.
“It will take time. Welsh parish records are not uniformly maintained, and if Bryce is a common enough name in the relevant county, the search will be extensive. We are looking for a record of a daughter’s birth that either exists and conflicts with Penharrow’s narrative or does not exist at all. Either would serve us.”
“How much time?”
“Weeks. Possibly months.”
Oliver turned. “The court moves in three to six.”
“Yes.”
He looked at Carmichael for a long moment, and Carmichael looked back at him with the expression of a man who understood the problem perfectly and had already been sitting with it for three days.
“There’s something else,” Oliver said. It was not a question.
“There is.” Carmichael turned a page in the folder.
“The petition requests a court injunction preventing the ward from being removed from the jurisdiction while the matter is heard. If granted—which is likely, given that she is already demonstrably absent from her guardian’s household—it would mean that if Penharrow’s men locate her, they would have a legal basis to detain her pending resolution of the case. ”
The words landed in the quiet room like stones dropped into still water.
A legal basis to detain her.
“He’s not trying to win in court,” Oliver said. “He doesn’t need to win in court. He only needs to get her back.”
Carmichael said nothing, which was answer enough.
Oliver retrieved his hat from the chair where he’d set it.
His mind was already moving through what came next.
The things he needed to do, the people he needed to speak to, the particular problem of explaining to Megan that the man who had owned her for fourteen years had found a way to reach her through the law itself.
That was the conversation he was not, even slightly, looking forward to.
“Find Bryce’s records,” he said. “As quickly as you can. And find me a Chancery barrister who owes someone a favor, or who dislikes Penharrow, or both. There must be someone.”
“I will make enquiries.”
“Good.” He moved toward the door, then stopped. “Carmichael. The injunction. When would it be granted?”
“If he applies formally.” Carmichael checked the folder. “This week, if he acts quickly. Possibly by Friday.”
Today was Tuesday.
“Then we have three days,” Oliver said, and walked out into the cold.
Dorothea was alone when he arrived in her apartments, which was almost worse.
He’d wanted Megan not to be there. He’d counted on it during the carriage ride home, rehearsing what he needed to say to his grandmother before he said any of it to Megan, but the emptiness of the chair beside the fire landed in his chest like a stone all the same.
“She went for a walk in the garden,” Dorothea said, without looking up from her book. “The south terrace. Annie is with her. She is perfectly fine.”
“You knew I was coming.”
“I heard your boots on the stairs.” She set the book down and looked at him properly, and whatever she read in his face made her straighten almost imperceptibly in her chair.
The particular sharpening of an old woman who has spent eighty-one years reading the faces of the people she loves and has become very good at knowing when it matters. “Sit down, Oliver. You look terrible.”
He sat. He did not take off his coat or his gloves. He pressed his hat between his palms and looked at the fire and thought, not for the first time in the last hour, that he was going to be sick.
“Tell me,” she said.
So he did. All of it. Carmichael’s careful voice, the open folder on the desk, the language of the petition that made fourteen years of captivity sound like an act of charity.
The injunction. The three days. He told her in the same clipped, factual way he’d learned to report in the army, because if he kept to the facts he didn’t have to feel them, and if he didn’t feel them, he could keep his voice level and his hands still.
When he finished, the room was quiet.
Dorothea looked at the fire.
“Charitable protection,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That man.” Her voice was not raised. It was very quiet, which was considerably more frightening. “That filthy, contemptible man.”
Oliver said nothing. He’d thought worse on the carriage ride home and none of it had helped.
“The injunction,” she said. “By Friday.”
“If he moves quickly. Carmichael believes he will.”
She was quiet again, the thinking kind of quiet, the kind she went into when she was doing something with a problem that he couldn’t follow. He had spent his childhood watching that particular quality of silence and learning to wait it out.
“She can’t find out,” he said, and then stopped, because he was not actually sure that was what he meant.
He tried again. “She will find out. She has to find out. But I don’t…
” He pressed his thumb against the brim of his hat, hard, until the pressure was something he could concentrate on.
“She spent fourteen years with that man holding every door. Every choice. Every moment of her life in his hands. She got free. She fought her way free and she…”
He stopped.
“And now he’s reached through the law itself,” Dorothea said quietly.
“He doesn’t need to win. That’s the thing.
Carmichael said it and he’s right. Penharrow doesn’t need the court to rule in his favor.
He just needs the injunction. He just needs a legal basis to detain her long enough to get her back under his roof and after that it won’t matter what the courts say because there won’t be anything left to fight for. ”
The words sat in the room. Oliver felt them in his throat. He’d thought them a dozen times in the last hour and they hadn’t gotten any easier to say.
“I promised her,” he said. “In Wales. I told her that she was safe. I told her she could trust me.” He exhaled. “I promised to keep her safe.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know how to tell her that the man she spent fourteen years running from has found a mechanism through the English legal system to drag her back.
I don’t know how she’ll take it or what she’ll do.
I think she’d rather die than go back.” He stopped again.
Looked at the fire. “She’ll try to run. She’ll decide that she has to go, that staying here puts everyone at risk, that the only solution is to disappear somewhere he can’t reach her, and she’ll do it quietly and without telling anyone because that’s what she does when she’s frightened.
She removes herself. She’s done it her entire life. ”
“Yes,” Dorothea said. “She has.” A pause. “She’s also done something else her entire life, which you might consider before you decide you know what she’ll do.”
He looked at her.
“She’s been surviving.” His grandmother’s voice was dry and absolutely certain. “Often with nothing. Often alone. You might give her the information before you decide what she’ll do with it.”
“I’m not…” He stopped. He was, a little. “I don’t want her to run.”
“No,” said Dorothea. “You don’t want to lose her.”
The fire breathed and settled. Oliver said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would make that statement less true or less exposed.
“Now,” his grandmother said, and she picked up her spectacles from the table beside her with the air of a woman settling in to address a practical problem. “Tell me something. How old is Megan?”
He blinked. “Twenty-one.”