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

Chapter 18

Hannah Pell had once been an attendant at Marlbrook House, and she lived now in two rooms above a chandler’s shop in Swaffham. Over the years she had helped send dozens of letters on Lady Emmeline’s behalf, posting some more than once when no answer came.

“It was the postmistress,” she told them. “Mrs. Deane. She was a widow and she had a brother who worked for Mr. Kerr in the City, and in eighteen thirty-four she told me plainly that I should stop putting the letters in, and when I did not stop, she stopped putting them out.” Hannah Pell’s hands were red and cracked, and she held her teacup with both of them. “I walked to Norwich once and posted one there. I walked fifteen miles. I had a half day and I walked there and back, and I do not know to this day whether that one reached anybody.”

“You wrote the seventh letter,” said Evelyn. “In the bundle. Cramped hand. You said Lady Emmeline was taken from her home on the fourth of November.”

“I did.”

“The fourth of November was in eighteen thirty-two.”

Hannah Pell looked at her for a long moment.

“My lady,” she said, “I wrote to anyone I thought might listen after the fourth of November eighteen thirty-two, and nobody ever asked me about it before.”

She said the sentences.

Lady Emmeline was removed from her home on the fourth of November by order of her husband and brought to this house. I am sorry. God forgive me.

“Whenever I wrote,” said Hannah Pell, “I used nearly the same words. They were the only words I knew for what had been done to her.”

They took the witnesses too, of course — Mrs. Grice and Hannah Pell, the woman from Swaffham who had once walked fifteen miles with a letter in her shoe — and Mr. Finch wrote down everything, and I do not think any of the three of them had ever been listened to for so long in their lives.

They reached Ashby Grange on the fourth day, with a warrant.

Sir Percival was not at home. He had gone to London, the housekeeper said, three days ago, and had not said when he would return, and had taken the plate.

They let themselves in with the warrant and Evelyn walked through her own childhood like a woman walking through a museum that had been looted, and she did not stop until she reached the library.

The library had been the finest room in the house — two walls of shelves, a chimney breast of local stone, a window seat big enough for a child to hide on for an entire afternoon. Her father had sold the books in eighteen forty-two. The shelves were bare and grey with shapes of absent spines.

Evelyn crossed to the chimney breast, and knelt, and put her cheek to the floorboards.

The gap was still there. The boards had shrunk, exactly as they had when she was nine years old, and the dark behind the hot-water pipes was exactly as wide as a girl who was hiding from a governess.

“There is a panel,” she said. “Behind the pipes. It is loose. It has been loose since before I was born, because my mother used to say there was a draught that came out of it in winter and she liked it.”

Sebastian brought the lamp down.

The panel came away with a soft scrape, and behind it, in a shallow cavity between the chimney back and the inner wall, there was a japanned deed box the size of a Bible.

The lock had been forced open a long time ago — or perhaps never properly closed.

Inside the box there was a wound skein of green embroidery silk, a baby’s tooth wrapped in paper, a pressed violet, and a small oilcloth package, tied and sealed and tied again.

Evelyn’s hands shook so hard she had to let her husband untie it.

Inside the oilcloth was a book. A memorandum book, four inches by six, marbled boards, three-quarters filled in a small, rapid, furious hand: her mother’s hand, but hurried, crammed, written in the dark and against the clock.

And folded into the back of it, in a sheet of paper that had been carried folded for so long that the creases had begun to split, was a single page torn from a larger ledger.

It was a shareholder’s register of the Great Eastern Junction Railway, dated March eighteen twenty-eight. Against each name there was a figure, and against each figure a date, and there was nothing whatsoever wrong with the arithmetic.

The wrongness was in the money.

Evelyn had grown up in a house with an empty cellar and a father in new boots, and she had learned early to read a household account. She read this one in silence for a full minute, and then she said, quietly:

“These shares were never issued.”

“Say that again.”

“Look at the columns. The calls are dated in sequence and paid in sequence and the totals balance exactly — and the total is four hundred and ten thousand pounds.” She looked up. “There was no such company. There was no Act of Parliament for a Great Eastern Junction in eighteen twenty-eight. My father was ruined buying paper in a railway that does not exist, and he was ruined by men who manufactured the paper themselves, and they called his loan in four years ago because he was becoming inconvenient and they wanted the estate.”

Sebastian was reading over her shoulder with his jaw set very hard.

“Count the signatures at the foot,” he said.

There were four. A secretary’s. Aldous Kerr’s. A second name she did not know.

And, first among them, in a broad, careless, arrogant hand that had been written with a pen that cost more than her father’s entire library—

Bartholomew Vane, Duke of Halstead.

Evelyn heard her husband stop breathing.

He held the page. He did not put it down. He looked at his father’s signature for what seemed an enormous length of time, and then he said, in a voice she had never heard from him before — flat and young and absolutely wrecked:

“Eighteen twenty-eight.”

“Yes.”

“He committed her in eighteen twenty-five.”

“Sebastian—”

“He committed her three years before.” He turned the page over, and looked at the back of it, and there was nothing there, and he looked at the front of it again. “Which means my mother was not silenced for this. She was silenced in advance. She was the first woman in England to be put in that house by those men, and she was put there as a precaution, and everything that has happened to your mother since is a machine that was built on her.”

Evelyn put her hand on his arm.

He did not shake it off. He stood in the stripped library of Ashby Grange with the lamp at his feet and his father’s name in his hand, and for a long moment he was a boy of twelve in a corridor, being told by a footman.

Then he folded the page along its old creases, very carefully, and put it into his coat pocket.

“Finch draws the case in the morning,” he said. “My father’s name goes in as a defendant. Posthumously. The estate will be named, and the estate is mine.”

“Everything you have.”

“Everything I have.”

“Sebastian.”

“Evelyn.” He looked at her, and his eyes in the lamplight were the exact grey of his mother’s portrait. “If I keep a fortune built on a lie, then I am my father, and your mother stays in a lodge behind a wall for the rest of her life, and I will have married you for nothing at all.”

She held his gaze.

“Then we will build it again,” she said.

Behind them, from the hall, a servant’s voice called out sharply — the housekeeper, half-running.

“My lady — my lady, there is a gentleman come to the door. He would not give his name. He says he has an appointment, but he has not.”

Evelyn and Sebastian looked at each other.

“Show him in,” said Sebastian.

The man who came into the library in a black coat, with a leather case under his arm and the mild, patient face of a country physician, took off his hat politely and smiled at them both.

“Your Grace,” said Dr. Elias Penn. “Your Grace.”