Chapter Three Evangeline’s Letter #3
Again, that unexpected answer. Again, Marianne felt her judgement forced to shift by a fraction she would rather have refused.
Helena left them after the first hour to see to Miss Harlowe and consult with Mrs Finch about the guards.
Propriety was preserved by the open study door and the near-constant movement of servants in the passage, but the air changed nonetheless when she departed.
Marianne became sharply aware of the Duke seated on the opposite side of the desk, of the breadth of his shoulders beneath his dark coat, of his hand moving steadily as he untied another packet, of the signet ring she could not stop seeing.
The rook.
Every time lamplight caught it, suspicion stirred.
Sebastian placed a legal copy before her. “This is the transfer.”
Marianne reached for it.
He did not release the paper at once.
Their fingers did not touch, but they came close enough for awareness to pass between them like a spark beneath a door.
“I have seen this document twice,” he said. “Once when my father placed it before me. Once after his death, when I searched the strongroom. Both times, I believed the signature was hers.”
“And now?”
His hand withdrew.
“Now I believe I do not know enough.”
It was the nearest thing to humility she had yet heard from him. Marianne accepted it with a nod and began to read.
The document was worse than the copy had suggested.
It was beautifully composed, its legal phrases precise, its structure proper enough to lull the inattentive.
There was no melodrama in it, no obvious wickedness.
It did what such documents often did: transformed a woman’s fortune into a matter of clauses, limitations, advances, obligations, satisfactions and receipts. It made dispossession sound tidy.
At the bottom was Lady Evangeline’s signature.
Marianne leaned closer.
Evangeline Maria Rookwood.
The name flowed elegantly, the letters curved and assured. A handsome signature. A convincing one.
Too convincing.
Marianne took Evangeline’s letter from the folder and laid the two side by side. For several moments she said nothing. Sebastian’s attention grew heavier across the desk, but to his credit he did not interrupt.
At last she said, “Look at the slope.”
He stood and came around the desk.
Marianne had expected him to remain opposite her out of pride, or propriety, or both. Instead he stood beside her, close enough that she caught the faint scent of cold air and leather gloves. Not cologne. Nothing ornamental. She disliked noticing.
“The slope?” he asked.
She pointed, careful not to touch the signature itself. “Here. In the letter, even when distressed, her writing moves upward. See the line? It rises as she writes, particularly when she is emotional. The words almost climb. In the transfer signature, the hand is flat. Controlled. Balanced.”
“People write differently when signing legal papers.”
“Yes. But look at the pressure. Her real hand presses harder on the first stroke and lightens toward the end of a word. The transfer does the opposite. It begins carefully, cautiously, then grows stronger once the form is established.”
Sebastian bent closer.
His shoulder nearly brushed hers.
Marianne remained very still.
She had been near gentlemen before in the ordinary ways one could not avoid: passing in halls, receiving papers, stepping aside in crowded rooms. But proximity to the Duke of Halgrave was not ordinary.
He occupied space intensely. He did not fidget, did not murmur, did not perfume the air with charm.
He simply stood there, severe and contained, and made the inches between them feel like an impropriety neither had committed.
“This proves imitation?” he asked.
“It suggests it.”
His mouth tightened. “Suggests.”
“Yes.”
“You are cautious now.”
“I am always cautious. You notice it only when caution fails to support your impatience.”
He looked down at her.
Marianne kept her eyes on the paper.
“If this is forgery,” he said, and the word sounded as though it had been dragged from him, “then it was done by someone skilled.”
“Or by someone who had practice.”
He was silent.
Marianne took a fresh sheet from the drawer and placed it before him. “Write your name.”
He stared. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your name. Naturally.”
“Why?”
“Because you distrust conclusions explained in words. I prefer demonstration.”
“I do not distrust—”
“Your Grace.”
He took the pen.
The irritation with which he did so ought to have been satisfying. It was, a little. He wrote swiftly, with a strong forward hand: Sebastian A. Rookwood. The signature was elegant but not decorative, disciplined without being fussy.
Marianne turned the page slightly. “Now copy it.”
“I have just written it.”
“Copy it slowly. As though you were attempting to reproduce your own signature for someone who would compare the two.”
His gaze sharpened. “That is absurd.”
“Then it will do no harm.”
For a moment she thought he would refuse. Then, with visible restraint, he wrote again.
This time his hand moved more slowly. The letters were correct. The line matched. The shape was almost exact.
Almost.
Marianne let the silence settle before she spoke.
“The second is more perfect,” she said.
Sebastian stared at the two signatures.
“It is also less alive.”
He did not answer.
She placed Evangeline’s letter, the transfer signature, and his two signatures in a row.
“Natural writing contains habits the writer does not think about. Imitation contains decisions. The forger thinks too much. Or, if copying his own hand, the writer becomes self-conscious and produces a version of himself that is technically correct and humanly false.”
Sebastian reached for the paper, then stopped short of touching Evangeline’s signature.
The gesture did something strange to Marianne’s anger.
He had not touched the name because, perhaps, he could not bear to.
“Correct but lifeless,” he said quietly.
“Yes.”
He looked at Evangeline’s letter for a long moment. Then his expression hardened, not against Marianne this time, but against whatever had begun to open within himself.
“She was always dramatic,” he said.
Marianne’s eyes lifted.
The words had come too quickly, with the defensive force of old habit.
“She was passionate,” he continued, as if compelled by something he did not wish to examine. “Extravagant in feeling. Certain she had been wronged if a ribbon was misplaced or a dance denied. She did not accept correction easily. My father said—”
“Your father said many convenient things, I expect.”
His gaze snapped to hers. “You know nothing of my father.”
“No. But I am learning a great deal from his vocabulary.”
He stepped back, the moment of reluctant intimacy breaking. “Evangeline was not easy.”
“Must a woman be easy before she is believed?”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is often what is meant.”
“You take every word and turn it into an indictment.”
“No, Your Grace. I listen for the indictment already hidden inside it.”
His face darkened. “She trusted Ashmont when everyone warned her. She delighted in opposition. If told a man was dangerous, she found him interesting. If advised caution, she mistook it for tyranny.”
“And therefore, when she said she had not signed away her fortune, the safest answer was to remember she once liked admiration too much?”
“That is unjust.”
“Is it?”
He turned away sharply, one hand braced upon the back of Lady Theodosia’s chair. For one instant, Marianne saw not coldness but conflict so fierce it nearly became pain.
“You think me eager to condemn her,” he said.
“I think you were trained to doubt her.”
He looked back. “And you were trained to doubt me.”
“Yes.”
The bluntness of it silenced them both.
She had not meant to say it so plainly. Or perhaps she had. The sleepless night had thinned the usual veils. Evangeline’s words lay between them still: He thinks me reckless, and perhaps I was once, but I am not mad.
Sebastian’s voice, when he spoke, was low.
“You know nothing of being responsible for a family name carried for centuries, for estates, dependants, servants, tenants, cousins with expectations, creditors waiting for weakness, political allies watching for scandal, and a sister determined to believe the worst man in any room so long as he flattered her better than those who loved her.”
The study went very still.
Marianne felt the blow of it. Not because he had raised his voice; he had not.
Because beneath the arrogance lay exhaustion, and beneath exhaustion, grief.
He was wrong in part, perhaps in much, but he was not empty.
He had not done nothing because nothing mattered.
He had failed inside a structure that had claimed failure was duty.
She ought to have softened.
Instead, because she was tired, because Evangeline had been tired, because Lantern House was full of women whose lives had been tidied away by men explaining responsibility, she said, “Perhaps I know a great deal about being responsible for other people while no one sees the cost.”
His expression changed.
The retort that would have come did not come.
Marianne lowered her eyes first, not in submission but because something too honest had passed between them and she did not know what to do with it.
In the silence, the clock ticked. The fire shifted. Somewhere in the passage, Mrs Finch instructed a maid to carry the good tray, not the chipped one, because danger was no excuse for poor presentation.
Sebastian exhaled. “I should not have spoken as though my burdens were singular.”
“No.”
A pause.
“Miss Vale.”
“Yes?”
“I am beginning to suspect you do not make apology easy.”
“I find difficult apologies are usually the only useful kind.”
He looked at her for a moment, and then, astonishingly, his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The ghost of one, severe and unwilling, but present.
Marianne found she disliked it less than she ought.
They returned to the papers.