Chapter 14
“These were not destroyed, Your Grace. They were never delivered.”
Mr Crewe set the file on the desk and laid his hand flat across it, holding down a thing he would rather have brought another day.
He was the senior of the Greenstone solicitors, a slender, silver-haired gentleman of some three-score years who had managed three dukes’ affairs without ever once volunteering a sentence not asked of him, and Cole, watching him now, understood that the sentence he had just uttered had cost him to volunteer.
“Sit down, Mr Crewe. Tell me what you have.”
Crewe sat down and arranged the file, which contained perhaps a dozen sheets, and the sheets had been kept in order, which told its own story. A clerk somewhere had been told to keep them. Someone, at some point, had thought it might matter.
“It is not the full account, Your Grace. I have not found the letters themselves. What I have is the bones of where they went. Or rather, where they did not go.”
“Show me.”
“There appear to have been four routes by which the post failed of its purpose, all running during the years ’12 to ’14, and one extending into the early months after His late Grace your brother’s demise.
” Crewe touched the top sheet. “First. A quantity of correspondence was sent to an old Carrow direction at Bath, where the family had taken a small house for one season some years before the war. The direction was crossed off the Greenstone book in ’09 but reinstated, in a hand I do not recognise, in ’12.
Letters were forwarded there. The house at Bath had been let to strangers for three years by then. The strangers did not redirect.”
Cole sat very still as he absorbed it.
“Second. After His late Grace your brother passed on a portion of the household post was routed through Greenstone House in town, as Hewitt has already informed you. Letters of yours arriving there were sorted by a clerk in that household. Some were forwarded to the Abbey for keeping. Some were not.”
“Some were not,” Cole repeated.
“Some were not, Your Grace. I have not yet found those. I am told they were laid aside as not requiring immediate attention, and the clerk concerned has since taken a place in another household and cannot be traced this week.”
“Not requiring immediate attention.” Cole heard his own voice flatten.
“That is the phrase used in the household book, Your Grace. It is not my phrase.”
“No. It is not yours. I begin to recognise the hand it is in. Continue.”
“Cannot be traced.”
“I am pursuing it.” Crewe did not look up from the file.
“Third. A quantity went back through military channels marked addressee not at receiving address, and was held at the Horse Guards office in Whitehall under a clerical assumption that you were no longer at the receiving address indicated. I believe the receiving address indicated was the one I have just described, at Bath.”
“And the fourth.”
“Some were held during the household transition. Marked for review by Her Grace your mother’s secretary, awaiting instruction.
I have not been able to find any instruction issued.
I have not been able to find the letters either, Your Grace.
I tell you what the books tell me. They tell me a great many letters of yours did not arrive where they were sent.
They do not tell me, yet, where those letters are. ”
Cole looked at the file but did not pick it up.
He was sitting at his own desk in his own study in his own house, and the late October light was coming in through the long windows the way it had come in all month.
A steward and a clerk had been doing their work for him through several offices, and what they had brought him was the shape of what had been done to her.
“Who decided they were no longer worth pursuing?”
“I cannot answer that as plainly as I should like,” Crewe said.
“Then answer it as plainly as you can.”
“The household was under Her Grace’s direction at the time, Your Grace.
The clerks and the secretaries took their instructions from her or from those who acted in her name.
I am not able to say which decisions came from her personally and which were made by men who had learned what would please her without being told.
I have served this house too long to make accusations I cannot prove. ”
“My mother’s direction.”
Crewe inclined his head and did not answer.
Cole sat with the silence. He had been a soldier for four years and had been told all manner of things by men who did not wish to tell them, and he had become, against his will, a fair reader of what a careful silence contained.
Crewe was telling him exactly what could be told without the speaker becoming the man who had told it.
The accusation was correct, even if the proof was not yet on the paper, and Cole was being given the truth on a saucer, with instructions to drink it standing up.
“Thank you, Mr Crewe. You have done me a kindness today that I shall remember.”
“It is my duty, Your Grace. I should not have come without it.”
“It was not your duty to come before you had the full account. You came because you judged it would matter to me to know the shape of it now rather than the whole of it later. I am entirely in your debt.”
Crewe rose to take his leave, a careful man, and he hesitated at the door in a way Cole had never seen him hesitate.
“I have known Her Grace your mother a long time, Your Grace. She has not been an easy woman to serve. She has not always been an unjust one. I should not like you to settle the question with her in a temper. She will not yield to a temper, and you will lose the chance to learn from her what she has chosen not to tell anyone else.”
“You think she will tell me.”
“I think she will tell whomever she believes she cannot avoid telling. A temper is the one thing she has always known how to outwait.”
The door closed behind him.
Cole did not rise at once. He set his hand on the file the way Crewe had set his and left it there for the length of time it took to count, and not count, to twelve.
The trick was one he had taught a frightened lieutenant outside Salamanca and had used himself a dozen times since, and it had never once failed to give him back enough of his own surface to function.
After that he pushed the file to the corner of the desk and stood and walked to the window, and looked at the park where Henry had liked to walk, and did not see it.
She had read nothing of him at all, and that was the part that wanted carrying out into the cold and laid down where he could look at it.
Empty, and never merely uncertain, with not one line of his hand in four years and more.
He had imagined her angry at his silence, then teaching herself out of the anger.
He had not imagined the silence had been administered.
***
He found his mother in the small drawing room with a book on her lap, sitting in the chair she always sat in.
She looked up when he came in and put the book aside without marking the page, which told him she had been expecting him.
She had been doing what she did when she expected him, which was to arrange the room so that it favoured her.
“You are the very picture of gravity, Cole.”
“I have been with Crewe.”
“Ah.”
She made no pretense of misunderstanding Crewe’s errand. For his part, he allowed her the knowledge, and she returned the favour by forbearing to ask what Crewe had reported.
They had, between them, in a sennight or two, developed a kind of poor truce of plain statements, and the truce extended this far and no further, and they were both about to test the limits of it.
“Did you know,” he said, “that letters of mine were not delivered to Miss Carrow during the war?”
“I knew there was uncertainty in the post. I have told you as such.”
“Crewe has found four separate routes by which the post was failed of its purpose. Four, madam. The post was not uncertain. It was managed. Letters of mine were sent to a Bath direction that had been struck off our books and reinstated by a hand he does not recognise. Letters from Greenstone House were laid aside by a clerk who has since lost himself. Letters were marked for review by your secretary and never reviewed. Letters were returned through Whitehall on the basis of a wrong direction someone had restored to the Greenstone book. These are four separate misfortunes, madam. Four. The improbability of their all having happened by accident is not a number I am willing to calculate in this room. Did you know?”
“I knew there was uncertainty.”
“That is not an answer to my question,” he said.
“It is the answer I am willing to give to it, Cole.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“No.” She did not flinch. He was bound to allow her that much.
She had not quailed once since she had taken her widow’s weeds, and she did not quail now.
“It is not the same thing. I am aware. I am also aware that uncertainty was enough for you when it served you. You went off to your war and you wrote your letters and you assumed they would do their work, and you came home four years later and you assumed she would be where you had left her, and the assuming was enough for you for a great deal of that time. You may not take refuge in your own uncertainty for four years and then ask me to account for mine in an hour.”
“Uncertainty was enough for me because I was four hundred miles away under fire. What was your distance, madam?”
“My distance was a household in mourning. My distance was a son in the ground and another son in another country and a great house to keep running while every clerk in town had a finger in our business. I am not going to be lectured by you about my distance. I had quite enough of mine.”
He set both hands flat on the desk. “You let her believe I had forgotten her.”
“I let her believe what the post left her to believe. I did not write to her. I did not need to. The world wrote to her on my behalf. I have not the least intention of pretending to you that I was sorry, Cole. I thought the match unsuitable. I thought your attachment a young man’s folly.
I thought the war and the title would mend it without anyone’s having to be the villain of the piece.
That I was mistaken, I am ready to concede.
But that my conduct was criminal, I will never admit. ”
“You will not call it what it was,” he said.
“What would you have me call it? I did not steal a letter. I did not burn a letter. I did not, with my own hand, address one of them to Bath. I had a household of two dozen clerks and secretaries doing what they understood me to wish, and I am not going to apologise for what I did not, in the strict sense of the word, do.”
“The strict sense of the word is what cowards take refuge in, madam. You wished it. The household did it. The thing is the same thing whether you wrote the direction or not, and you and I both know it.”
“I shall not be called a coward in this house, Cole.”
“Then do not behave like one. Tell me plainly. Did you give the order? Or did you merely fail to give the order that would have stopped the thing happening? There is a difference. I would like to know which it was.”
She was silent for some seconds. Her hand on the arm of the chair did not move.
“I did not give an order to lose them. I gave an order to be careful with them. A clerk who knew what I would prefer made a number of decisions in my favour, and I did not look into how he had reached them, because I did not wish to know, and the not-wishing-to-know was its own decision, and you may make of it what you can bear to make of it. I shall not gild it for you. I am too tired.”
“You cannot build a matrimony out of old paper Cole.”
“No. But one may bury a woman beneath it. That is what was done to her, madam, by you or by men acting in your name, which the law does not always distinguish and I do not always distinguish either. I am not asking you to repent. I do not expect repentance from you. I am asking you to know what you did.”
She was silent a long time. The fire in the small drawing room burned down a notch, and the clock on the mantel struck the half-hour, and she did not look away from him.
“I shall not say more on the subject today.”
“Very well,” Cole said.
“I will say this much. London is decided. The Carrows are to be in Brook Street by the second week of November. Lady Linwood has written and the Carrows have accepted, so I am told. I shall not press my own preferences upon you in town. You will conduct yourself as you think best. I shall conduct myself as a duchess in mourning is required to conduct herself, which is to say in the corner of the room where I shall give you the least possible offence.”
“Thank you.”
“Do not thank me. I have run out of weapons, Cole. That is not the same as agreeing with you. I would as soon you remembered the difference.”
He left her with that. He went back to the study and sat at the desk and drew paper towards him and wrote a note without trimming a fresh quill.
I cannot ask you to enter a room that once would have closed against you. I can only promise not to let you stand in it alone.
He sealed it with his own ring. He took it to Finch and told him the post would do, in this case, that the morning was time enough.
Then he went up to dress for a dinner he had no appetite for, steady in the way of one who has spent an afternoon being given the thing he asked for, and has now to learn the weight of it.