THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF
Chapter 15
The application came back from the Court of Chancery eleven days later, sealed with a visiting order under the Act of 1830, and Mr. Finch brought it up the drive himself, holding it in both hands like something alive.
They left at dawn.
It was one hundred and ninety miles to Norfolk, and they did it in a day and a half, stopping once at an inn where the sheets smelled of woodsmoke and Evelyn slept four hours and dreamed of the fifth step of the attic stairs.
Sebastian spoke little. He read the file twice — the deed of the syndicate, Kerr’s interests, the 1828 returns — and he watched the country go by through the coach window, and once, in the last hour, he took Evelyn’s hand where it lay on the seat between them, and held it without saying anything, and did not let go until the carriage turned between the gates.
Marlbrook House stood behind high stone walls and iron gates in a flat, grey, enormous field with nothing else in it for a mile in any direction.
That was the first thing Evelyn noticed: not the house, but the emptiness. Whoever had built Marlbrook had chosen the site carefully. There were no lanes, no cottages, no church tower visible. There were no neighbours. A woman could scream here and the sound would reach the wall and stop.
The second thing she noticed was that the house was beautiful.
That was the horror of it. It had been built in the last century by somebody with money and taste: mellow red brick, sash windows, a portico with a fanlight above the door, a gravel sweep raked into neat semicircles. On the lawn there was a sundial.
It looked like the house of a prosperous country gentleman, exactly as the law required it to look.
“It is licensed for forty patients,” said Mr. Finch, from the other seat. “Fourteen are recorded. Twenty-six licences unfilled, and the returns for the last four years contradict the visitor’s book. I have never in my career seen a set of books that disagreed with itself so thoroughly and so confidently.”
The knocker rang out across the lawn like a shot.
They were received in a morning room by a woman of about fifty, in black, with grey hair scraped back under a cap, and hands folded at the waist that did not move once during the entire interview.
“I am Mrs. Grice. I am the matron of this house.”
“Sebastian Vane, Duke of Halstead. This is the Duchess.” He laid the sealed order on the table without ceremony. “You have a patient here. Lady Emmeline Ashby, wife of Sir Percival Ashby of Ashby Grange, admitted November eighteen thirty-two.”
Mrs. Grice looked at the order. She did not touch it.
“Lady Emmeline Ashby,” she said, “is not in this house.”
Evelyn’s heart staggered, and recovered, and kept going.
“Then she is dead,” she said. “And you will show me the record of her death.”
Mrs. Grice’s hands stayed folded.
“There is no record of her death in this house, my lady, because Lady Emmeline Ashby was not received into this house after eighteen thirty-two.” She said it smoothly, the way a person says a sentence they have rehearsed for twenty years, and then she paused, and looked at the order on the table, and looked at the Duke, and something in her face shifted very slightly. “I have been matron here for six years. I did not know her. But I have met her.”
“Explain yourself.”
“She is in the small house,” said Mrs. Grice. “Behind the wall. At the end of the orchard. It is not on the licence.”
Sebastian’s voice was very quiet. “And what is the small house used for?”
Mrs. Grice unfolded her hands for the first time.
“For the ones,” she said, “who pay.”