THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 17

They brought her out of the house that afternoon, and Mrs. Grice, who had been matron of Marlbrook for six years and had written twice to the Commission and been answered twice with silence, came with her.

But before they left, Sebastian asked to see the register.

Mrs. Grice took him to the office on the ground floor — a room with a good desk and a good fire and a portrait of the late Mr. Grice over the mantel — and set the book on the desk and opened it, and stood back with her arms folded and let the Duke of Halstead read.

Evelyn stood at his shoulder.

The register ran from eighteen seventeen to the present, in three hands, and it was, as Mr. Finch had said, a thing that disagreed with itself: forty licensed beds, sixty-one recorded admissions, four recorded removals, nine recorded deaths, and no arithmetic whatsoever in common between them. It had been kept by someone who assumed no one would ever read it carefully, and who was, on the evidence, almost correct.

Sebastian turned the pages slowly, one hand flat on the paper, and Evelyn watched him and understood that he was doing the same thing she had done in the attic: looking for one name, and dreading it, and looking anyway.

He found it on the recto page of eighteen twenty-five.

Vane, Marguerite, Lady. Admitted 14th March 1825. Age 29. Husband, Bartholomew Vane, 8th Duke of Halstead. Nature of disorder: acute melancholy. Certificate: E. Penn, M.D.

And then, on the very next line, in a different ink:

Died 2nd May 1826. Cause: exhaustion.

Fourteen months. Exactly as he had said.

Evelyn put her hand flat against his back, between the shoulder blades, and left it there.

Sebastian did not move. He read the line four times, the way he read everything, and then he turned the page without comment, which she understood to be the only way he could be allowed to continue, and she did not say a word about it.

Twenty pages further on, in the same hand, she found her mother’s entry.

Ashby, Emmeline, Lady. Admitted 8th November 1832. Age 34. Husband, Sir Percival Ashby, Bt. Nature of disorder: religious melancholy. Certificate: E. Penn, M.D.

And beneath it, in a third hand — newer, neater, the hand of the last six years — a line of ink that had been written across the page, and then, unmistakably, written again more heavily, as though someone had tried to make it permanent.

Removed 3rd September 1843. To the lodge. By order of A. Kerr, on behalf of the proprietors.

Evelyn stared at it.

“Four years ago,” she said. “September eighteen forty-three.”

“Yes.”

“Sebastian.” Her voice had gone very strange. “September eighteen forty-three was the month my father’s railway paper was called in. The month he was ruined. He has been ruined for four years.”

Sebastian turned his head toward her.

“Somebody moved your mother out of the licensed house the month they moved against your father,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Because a licensed house is inspected.”

“Yes.”

“And a lodge behind a wall, with one window, that appears in no return and no register—”

“—is the safest place in England to put a woman you never intend to be found,” said Evelyn.

Mrs. Grice, standing by the door, said, quietly, “September is when Dr. Penn stopped coming.”

Both of them looked at her.

“He came twice a year, every year, for eleven years, and then he stopped.” The matron’s face did not change. “The last visit he made was the third of September, eighteen forty-three. I remember it exactly, because he stood in my office and told me that Lady Emmeline Ashby had been removed to another establishment, and that the removal had been ordered by the proprietors, and that if I entered it in the register at all, I should enter it in pencil.”

Sebastian closed the register.

“Mrs. Grice,” he said, “you will come with us to Devonshire, and you will bring that book, and you will be paid whatever you were paid here, twice over, for as long as you wish to be employed.”

“And my other thirteen?”

“They come too,” said Evelyn.

Sebastian looked at her. It was a long look, and in it, she would think later, something in the architecture of the man settled into place — the last beam going in, the roof closed.

“Fourteen,” he said. “Mr. Finch will see to the orders.”

They rode away at four in the afternoon with a second carriage behind them and the register wrapped in oiled cloth on the seat beside the Duke of Halstead, and Lady Emmeline Ashby slept for the first hour with her head on her daughter’s shoulder, and Evelyn did not move her arm once, not once, for one hundred and ninety miles.

It was past midnight when the lights of Halstead Park came up at the end of the valley.

And there, in the lantern-glare at the gates, stood a horse with its head down and a man beside it — a stranger in a soaked coat, holding an envelope sealed with black wax.

He handed it up to the carriage window.

“Urgent, my lady,” he said. “From London. The gentleman said you would want it tonight.”

Evelyn broke the seal.

The note inside was four lines long, in a hand she did not know, on paper that smelled faintly of coal smoke and lavender — which was impossible, because the only person in England who had smelled of those two things was asleep on her shoulder.

Your mother’s letters were never the important papers.

The ledger she copied is in the wall.

Ask your father about the third signature.

— A friend in Swaffham