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

Chapter 19

He was smaller than Evelyn remembered from the hall at Ashby Grange. Small, neat, grey about the temples, with clean fingernails and a decent watch-chain and the sort of gentle, deferential manner that had probably been very comforting in a hundred sickrooms in Devonshire.

He looked around the emptied library without any particular interest and settled himself in the only chair.

“I will not waste your time,” he said. “I know where you have been and I know what you have taken, because I have paid Hannah Pell’s rent for years as a courtesy and I heard about your visit within four hours.” He turned his mild eyes on Sebastian. “You have the register, the deed box, and the old woman. That is a great deal. It is also, in law, worth precisely nothing.”

“Explain.”

“Gladly.” Dr. Penn crossed one leg over the other. “First: the register. A patient’s removal does not require the certificate to be valid. A patient’s committal requires the certificate to be valid, and every certificate I ever signed was valid, because I am a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and I examined every woman who was brought before me.”

“You never examined mine.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Lady Emmeline Ashby.” Evelyn’s voice was level. “You visited that house twice a year for eleven years, and my mother wrote that you sat across a table and asked her nothing and wrote everything. You did not examine her once, and she wrote it down, and the letters are dated and signed and I have eight of them.”

Dr. Penn looked at her for a moment. Then he smiled.

“Written by a declared lunatic,” he said. “Letters from a madhouse, my lady, carry the weight of letters from a madhouse. That is the entire genius of the thing, and I will tell you so frankly, because I have found that frankness is more frightening than a threat and I have never had to use a threat in my life.”

Sebastian moved then, and Evelyn put a hand flat on his chest without looking at him. He stopped.

“Why have you come?” she asked.

“To sell you something.”

Silence.

“You want Aldous Kerr,” said Dr. Penn. “I want to live to be sixty-five in a house at Exmouth with my books, and I have no particular loyalty to Mr. Kerr, who has never once in twenty years offered me anything but money.” He reached into the leather case and set a small bundle of papers on his knee, tied in tape. “Forty-one certificates. Copy and counter-copy. Names, dates, subscribing witnesses, and — this is the valuable part — the fee paid, by whom, and on whose account. Three of the women in that bundle were transferred on the instruction of Mr. Kerr at the request of men who wanted their wives’ property. Nine of them were religious enthusiasts whose husbands wanted the quiet. Four of them were not mad at all in any sense that any honest physician would recognise, and I shall leave you to identify which four.”

Evelyn’s hands had gone to fists at her sides.

“You kept a receipt,” said Sebastian.

“I kept a ledger,” said Dr. Penn patiently. “I am a businessman, Your Grace, and I have been in business for thirty-one years, and in all that time the only people who have ever been destroyed by an enterprise of this kind are the ones who did not keep their receipts.” He tapped the bundle. “Six hundred pounds, and the protection of my person until the trial concludes, and I will give evidence to every name in it.”

“To incriminate yourself.”

“To incriminate myself,” Dr. Penn agreed, “which is precisely why my evidence will be believed. No one invents an accusation against themselves to settle a grudge. I shall plead guilty to signing false certificates and throw myself on the mercy of the court as a witness for the Crown, and I shall be fined, and I shall not be hanged, and Aldous Kerr will be.”

He held the bundle out.

Sebastian did not take it.

Instead he said, very coldly, “My mother is on that list.”

Dr. Penn’s expression did not change, but his hand paused in the air.

“Lady Marguerite Vane,” he said. “Eighteen twenty-five. Yes.”

“Who paid you.”

“I did not come here to be tried, Your Grace. I came here to sell.”

“Who paid you.”

Dr. Penn studied him for a moment, and then something in the small neat face shifted, and he seemed to decide — the way such men decide — that the truth was a commodity too, and that it might as well be spent.

“The Duke, her husband,” he said. “And the instruction was not his own. He was told to do it.”

“By whom?”

“By his partner in the Great Eastern Junction,” said Dr. Penn, “which was four years before there was a Great Eastern Junction, because a fraud requires a great deal of quiet work in advance. Aldous Kerr told the eighth Duke of Halstead to silence his wife, and the eighth Duke of Halstead did as he was told, and I signed the paper.” He inclined his head toward Sebastian. “You have your father’s eyes, Your Grace. I have noticed it every time I have seen you at the county meetings. It has always made me uneasy.”

Sebastian’s hand closed on the bundle and took it.

“Your protection is granted,” he said. “Your payment is not. You will give evidence as a prisoner.”

“I thought you might say that.”

“You may stay in this house, under guard, until the trial.”

“I thought you might say that as well.” Dr. Penn rose and brushed his coat, entirely unbothered. “You will want to send for your solicitor tonight, then, because I am not the only visitor to this county this week, and the other one is not here to sell. Mr. Kerr’s man arrived in Exeter this morning.”

“To do what?”

Dr. Penn paused at the door.

“To lay a fresh certificate,” he said.