Chapter 18
“These are the last of them, Your Grace.”
Mr Crewe set the second box on the desk beside the first and stepped well back from it, washing his hands of a thing he wished no further charge of. He had aged in the fortnight since he had last sat in this office, or Cole had, and Cole was no longer certain which of them was the worse changed.
“How many?”
“Thirty-eight, Your Grace. Counting the half-drafts that were never sent. The full sent letters number twenty-six.”
“And the routes.”
“Eleven returned through Whitehall, marked addressee not at receiving address. Nine held at Greenstone House under the heading not requiring immediate attention. Four redirected to the Bath direction and gone astray in the strangers’ hands.
Two further found in your mother’s secretary’s papers, marked for review and never reviewed.
The remainder you may sort as you read. They will speak for themselves. ”
Cole did not open either box. He looked at Crewe instead, because the man had earned the looking.
“You found them in a sennight.”
Crewe inclined his head. “I found them by knowing where to ask, Your Grace. They were not hidden. They had only been laid quietly down in places no one was being asked to look. That is not the same as being hidden, and I should not let any blame for the difference fall on a clerk who was kept in ignorance of the consequence of his sorting.”
“It will not fall on the clerks.”
“Thank you, Your Grace. I was concerned for two of them. They are good men who were given indifferent instructions.”
“Then they were given indifferent instructions by someone who is not a clerk.”
Crewe did not answer at once. He had a long thin face that had spent forty years not answering questions of the kind, and he looked at the carpet between his shoes and waited, in no hurry, for someone else to fill the silence.
“Thank you, Mr Crewe. Leave them with me. I shall send word when I have read what I need to read.”
Crewe inclined his head and went out.
The boxes sat on the desk. Cole did not open them at once.
He stood and went to the window of the small library that served him as a study at Greenstone House, and looked at the November garden and the bare plane trees and a maid carrying a bucket across the cobbles in the next house, and he gave himself the count to twenty before he turned back.
The first letter on the top of the first box was dated March 1811. He recognised his own hand at five and twenty before he opened the seal. It had been a younger hand. The loops were larger and the slope had been less practised.