Chapter Nineteen #2
“There were two copies entered in law, my lord, exactly as Mr. Sowerby says.” Thornbrook turned to the room rather than to Declan, because the room was the jury that mattered tonight.
“Lady Renae has recovered the original. The filed copy Mr. Trelawney removed from the strongbox with his own hand. I will put it to you plainly, since the hour is late and I am muddy. A man does not steal the document that proves him right. He steals the one that proves him a thief, and then he swears to a county that it was never written at all, and he counts on the county being too well bred to ask a frightened clerk what he saw. The county has asked. The clerk has answered.”
“This is a grave business, Trelawney.” A stout magistrate had gone the colour of his own wine.
“You stood in my parlour not three days since and told me a wholly different tale. I do not care to be told tales in my own parlour. I find I care for it a great deal less when the tale has a sworn clerk standing against it in a ballroom.”
It ended in that same hour, in a room that had come for a charity raffle and got a reckoning instead.
The original lay safe at Carrington, the theft of the copy stood witnessed in a clerk’s black coat, and the magistrates Lucien had flattered all week recalculated their acquaintance in silence.
His edifice came down between one breath and the next.
Lucien made no fight of it. Declan crossed to him at the edge of the room, where Thornbrook had quietly placed himself between the man and the door.
“You would set a clerk’s word and a deceased man’s box against the name of a gentleman,” Lucien said, very low, for Declan alone.
“I would set them against the name of a man who has stopped being one, and the room has already done the sum, cousin, so you may spare us both the working of it. Withdraw the challenge. Sign the trust open in the morning, before witnesses. Do that and you walk out tonight a free man rather than an arrested one, which is a good deal more than a year of this has earned you.”
A muscle moved once in Lucien’s cheek. “And if I refuse you?”
“Then Mr. Sowerby gives his account to a magistrate instead of a ballroom, and you learn at last what the inside of your own machinery feels like. Decide quickly. The room is watching, and it has stopped finding you good company, and that was the one currency you ever truly had.”
Whatever ran behind the smooth face arrived, by the look of it, at the single sum that still mattered to a man of his make, that a public record would cost more than a private surrender, and he agreed to all of it in a murmur, for the absence of a constable at the door.
“You will sign in the morning, cousin, and then you will go.” Renae had come up at Declan’s shoulder, and her voice was quiet and entirely final.
“Not because I have beaten you, though I have. Because you have become tedious, and a tedious enemy is the one luxury I have decided I can no longer afford to keep. Go and be some other family’s concern.
I am finished being yours, and I find the finishing weighs a great deal less than I had feared it would.
***
Finch broke before midnight, a small justice in itself. The clerk’s account had named the paid errands and his own letters the rest, and when Declan set the two side by side in the cold passage the man folded as fast as his master had.
“He paid me, my lord. From the first month. To watch her, and carry word, and let the odd thing go missing to make her look careless with the keys.” Finch would not lift his eyes.
“The silver. The letter from her solicitor. I carried that one to him with my own two hands, and I am sorry for it. Paid I was, and frightened of him besides, and I know that neither of those is an excuse a decent man would offer.”
“Why tell me now?”
“Because the clerk has told it already, my lord, and a thing is easier to confess when the confessing has stopped being a choice. And because she was kind to me, the mistress, when she had every cause not to be, and I have had to watch her be kind to me for four months knowing what I was, and a man can only carry that so far before it breaks his back or his silence.”
“No. Neither is.” Declan found he had no heat for it, only a great cold tiredness and the satisfaction, narrow and clean, of a thing at last accounted for.
“You will be gone by morning, and you will carry no character out of this house, and you may thank my wife that you carry your liberty out with you, for it was her counsel and not my inclination, which ran a good deal nearer the magistrate.”
“I will, my lord. I do.” He swallowed hard before he could get the rest of it out. “Will you tell her? That I was sorry. She will not want to hear it from me, and I have no right to ask it carried, but I should like her to know it was said.”
“I will tell her you said it. I will not tell her it mended anything, because it did not, and she has had a lifetime of men deciding their sorrow ought to be enough. Go and pack.”
***
It was her counsel, given later in the carriage home, when he laid before her the further ruin he could still bring down on her cousin, the debtor’s court and the disgrace entire.
“I do not want him ruined.” There was no heat in it, only the flat voice she kept for the things she had thought all the way to the bottom.
“A ruined man stays at the centre of one’s life for years.
Such a man writes letters, nurse’s grievances, becomes a project for one’s pity and a fixture in one’s conversation, and I have had quite enough fixtures to last me.
I want him at the edge of my life, and then off it altogether, and a man with his power gone and his liberty kept has no reason ever to come back to me.
Take his power, my lord. Leave him his liberty.
Then he has nothing left worth the bringing back. ”
“You are far more merciful than I am inclined to be on your behalf.”
“It is not mercy. Mercy would be for his sake, and I have none to spare him. It is housekeeping. I am clearing a room I intend to live in, and one does not leave a broken thing in the middle of the floor out of spite. One puts it out, and one shuts the door, and one does not think of it again. I have spent ten years being thought of by that family, and managed by them, and frozen and thawed at their convenience. I should like, very much, to stop being a room they feel entitled to walk into without knocking. Take the key from him, my lord. That is all I want. Take the key, and let him keep the empty hand.”
His wife sat across from him in the carriage dark, his solid ground, the woman who had walked into a bright roomful of people sharpening their knives for her and walked out with the county at her shoulder.
Nothing stood between Declan and the plainest sentence in the language now but the one obstacle that had always stood there. Himself.