Chapter Twenty
The resignation was on his study desk at seven, squared to the blotter’s edge, and it was weighted; he stood a long moment before he touched anything, with the little duodecimo from Widow Cole’s stall, plums and all corrected, returned.
The letter he read once. Three lines, no reasons, the hand perfectly steady.
Her notice, effective at once, with thanks for the household’s many kindnesses.
It told him nothing, because it was built to tell him nothing.
It was the book that talked. He picked it up, and it fell open where a pressed flower marked it, the garden poem, the true text, and Robert stood in his quiet study holding the whole message she had actually left him.
I am not keeping even this. I am severing the account entirely, down to tuppence, so that nothing can be repossessed.
A woman fleeing a scene ran with what she treasured.
A woman executing a judgement returned it.
“She went on the carrier’s cart, my lord.
” Travers, at the door, grey about the mouth.
“Before the kitchen was lit. Simms the carrier, bound past the vicarage, his usual road.” A hesitation, decades deep.
“Miss Charlotte is on the north landing, my lord. She won’t be moved.
I thought you would want to come yourself rather than have her lifted. ”
Charlotte sat against Jane’s shut door with her knees drawn up and the white ribbon off the nursery handle wound twice around her fist. She did not look at Robert when he sat down on the boards beside her, with his back to the same wall, the two of them at the foot of the same closed door like petitioners at a court that had risen.
Under her other hand, flat on the floor, lay the primer pages, the folded square Jane had left addressed to a man who did not exist yet, held the way drowning men hold spars.
“She tied it plain,” Robert said at last, to the passage in general, because the country’s language was the only one left and he would use it or say nothing.
“Plain means good morning. It doesn’t mean goodbye.
There is no knot for goodbye, I’ve learned the whole grammar, and it isn’t in there.
Whoever invented the code left the word out on purpose, I think.
She would never teach you a word she meant to use.
” The small fist tightened on the ribbon.
“I am going to bring her back, Charlotte. Today has business in it that cannot wait, one piece of business, one hour of it, and then I ride to the vicarage, and I do not come back alone. You have my word, and you keep the accounts of my word, and you know its balance.”
The blue eyes came round to him then, swollen, fierce, interrogating, and held his for a long, unbearable audit, and then Charlotte did the one thing in her whole silent arsenal he had no defence against. She took his hand, turned it palm up, laid the folded primer pages in it, and closed his fingers over them with both of hers.
Here is the evidence. Do the business. Then she went back to watching the door.
He was on the stairs, the pages in his breast pocket, when Mrs Brooks intercepted him, and her face brought him to a full stop.
“The maids did her room, my lord. I set them to it myself. I had not have strangers’ judgement loose in there twice.
” She held out her hand. In the palm lay a half-sheet, singed along one corner, smelling of snuffed flame.
“This was on the washstand marble. Burned at the edge like she’d started to do as it says and thought better.
My lord…” and Mrs Brooks, who had governed her voice through thirty years of family weather, did not quite govern it now, “I’ve read it.
I couldn’t help but read it. And I’ve carried your lordship’s notes about this house since you wrote with your fist round the quill. That is not your M.”
***
It was not his M.
Robert stood at the study window with the singed note flat on the sill in the morning light, and beside it, drawn from the drawer where he had dropped it two nights ago, the message that had fetched him to the library, R.M.
, come down at ten, I have the proof you wanted, H.W.
He perused the two side by side with eyes made clear by the spring, until at last the ink surrendered its secrets, sum by sum.
The hand was good. The hand was better than good, his own slant caught, his own abruptness caught, and the tail of the M taken at a single confident stroke.
But a forger, like an embezzler, is betrayed by perfection.
His own true M, dashed ten thousand times in ten thousand impatient signatures, collapsed at the tail, always, the stroke dying as his attention left it, and this M finished.
Completed itself, proud of its work, curled home like a signature practised.
And the H of Hamish’s supposed hand had the same proud finish, and Hamish looped no H, had never looped an H, and wrote a bare gallows-post of an H that his apothecary cursed weekly.
Two notes. One evening. One author, someone with his letters to copy from, and years of them.
Someone who could put a sheet under a door in the guest passage at half past nine unremarked, someone with the minute itself to time, and how she knew the very minute, and Robert stood unmoving while that last figure walked out of the dark and took its seat, because there was only one way to have known the minute of an assignation you had forged both halves of.
You set it yourself, both letters, both clocks, and then you had merely to be embraced and be found.
He did not send for her. He sent for his aunt, and told her one thing only: bring Lady Harrington to the morning room in a quarter of an hour, and say nothing of me, and Adelaide, reading his face, went white along the cheekbones and did as she was asked without one question, which in my one and seventy years she had possibly never done before.
They came in together. Diana was dressed for travelling, that was the first intelligence, and it said everything about the campaign’s schedule.
The stroke was delivered and the victory secured, with a retreat managed before the air had even cleared.
Though she paused half an instant upon discerning him by the window, she turned the hesitation at once into a smile of exquisitely measured regret.
“Robert. I hoped we might speak alone before I, this wretched, wretched night. You must let me say how I…”
“Put your writing-desk on the table.”
The travelling writing-desk was under her maid’s arm in the hall.
Travers had it in the room before the sentence found its answer.
Diana’s smile held. It was the holding that finished her, three seconds too long, lacquered, while the eyes behind it worked the new position, and Adelaide, watching, made a small sound like a beam taking weight.
“This is extraordinary,” Diana said, gently. “Am I to be searched, like the governess? How the house does repeat itself.”
“The house has been made to repeat itself. That was the whole design, and it was very good.” Robert laid the two notes on the table, side by side, singed and unsigned.
“One brought me to the library. One brought Miss Prescott. Neither was written by the men whose names they carry, and both were written by the same hand, a hand with my letters to learn from. I wrote you a great many times, and I dare say I signed every one of them, and you kept them, sentiment, you’d have called it, if anyone asked.
Open the desk, Diana. Or stand on your dignity, and I will open it, and we will both have to live with which of us I’ve become. ”
For a moment nobody moved. Then Diana Harrington did the most honest thing he had ever watched her do.
She looked at the desk, and at the notes, and at Adelaide, one flick, weighing whether that quarter still held, and, finding the position untenable, she surrendered it with the crisp economy of a general who does not waste men on lost ground.
She opened the desk herself. She even, with a kind of terrible good breeding, angled it towards the light.
His letters, ribboned, on top, she had not even hidden them.
Sentiment was, after all, her working capital.
And beneath, folded small. Three sheets of foolscap covered margin to margin in a hand becoming his hand, the M with its tail taken over and over down the page like a fencer’s drill, the slant rehearsed line by line, and at the bottom of the third sheet, tried twice and abandoned, a bare gallows-post H.
Adelaide picked up the drill-sheets. She read them for a long time, far longer than their content wanted, and Robert understood that she was not reading the forgery.
She was reading backwards through a month of her own certainties, watching each one come down.
Came to me before dinner… the betrothal settled…
fetched me to the library that the thing might be witnessed and made binding…
and I went. I carried the pity to that doorway myself.
She built it of my honesty. I was the material.
When she set the sheets down her hands were not steady, and her voice, when it came, was a stranger’s, old, and quiet, and stripped of every ornament of command.