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

Chapter 22

She told them on a wet Sunday afternoon, in the small west sitting room at Halstead Park, with the fire built high and Evelyn on one side of her and Sebastian on the other, and it took two hours.

“I want it written down,” she said at the start. “I want Mr. Finch in the room, and I want it taken down in longhand, and I want it read back to me, because I have said all of this aloud to six different people over fifteen years and not one of them ever wrote down a word of it.”

Mr. Finch came. He sat at a small table with his ink and his paper and he did not once look up.

“Eighteen twenty-eight,” said Lady Emmeline. “That was the year my husband brought the paper into the house.”

She had known, she said, within a month. She had grown up the daughter of a merchant in Bristol who had made his fortune in shipping and had taught his daughter to read a bill of lading before she could read a poem, and when Percival Ashby came home delighted with an investment that promised eight per cent on a railway to be built between two towns that did not yet have a survey between them, she had asked to see the deed, and he had laughed, and shown her, because he thought it was charming that she was interested.

“Four hundred and ten thousand pounds subscribed,” she said. “And no Act. And no engineer. And no company. And at the foot of the register, four names: a secretary I have never traced, Mr. Aldous Kerr, a Mr. Merton — the Honourable Gerald Merton, who is now Lord Merton and sits in the Upper House — and the eighth Duke of Halstead.”

Sebastian did not move.

“I copied it,” she said. “In the summer of eighteen twenty-eight I sat up four nights and copied the entire register by hand into a memorandum book, because I understood two things at once: that my husband had been given paper that did not exist, and that whoever had given it to him had also, in the same transaction, acquired a claim on Ashby Grange.”

“Why did you copy it?” asked Evelyn.

Lady Emmeline looked at her daughter with an expression of great and weary love.

“Because I was a woman, and I knew that if it ever came to a court, nobody would ever believe a woman’s word about a ledger,” she said. “And I knew that a piece of paper in my own handwriting, hidden in my own house, was the only diary I was ever permitted. I did not copy it for a magistrate, my darling. I copied it for you. In case they ruined your father and you were left with nothing and needed to know why.”

Evelyn had to look at the fire for a moment.

“What happened in eighteen thirty-one?” said Sebastian.

“In eighteen thirty-one I asked my husband to sell Ashby Grange and pay the money back.”

She said it quite calmly.

“I told him: leave England, take the children, go to Jersey, live quietly, and denounce them when we are safe. I told him they would call the loan in when they were ready to take the estate, and that the estate was the only thing of value he had, and that they did not want his money — they wanted his land, because the railway they were really building was going to run through the Ashby valley and he was sitting on the only four miles of it that could not be bought.”

Sebastian’s head came up.

“The Ashby valley,” he said. “Nine years later they built the Western Junction through Ashby Bottom.”

“They did,” said Lady Emmeline. “And they bought the four miles from my husband’s creditors for eleven thousand pounds in eighteen forty-four, which is what the entire fraud was always for.”

Silence. The rain on the window.

“On the fourth of November,” she said, “I was taken.”

She described it the way a woman describes something she has gone over ten thousand times. The carriage at four in the morning. The two men who came into her room without knocking. The physician she had never met standing in the hall with his hat on. Her husband in the library with the door closed and the sound of him not coming out. Her daughters — one seven and feverish, one three and asleep — and the fact that she was not permitted to go up the stairs to them, and the fact that she went anyway and got as far as the landing before they took her arms.

“I said goodbye to you,” she said to Evelyn. “You were asleep and I said goodbye, and I told you to be braver than they expect. I put it in your Bible. I wrote it in your Bible because I did not know if I would ever see you again and I had nothing else to write on.”

Evelyn covered her mouth with her hand.

“And then I was in Norfolk, and a man came twice a year, and asked me whether I heard voices, and wrote down whatever I said, and signed a paper, and the paper became the record of me.”

“Why did you never stop writing?” asked Sebastian quietly. “Fifteen years. Dozens of letters, and almost none of them answered.”

Lady Emmeline looked at him.

“Because,” she said, “I had to believe that one of my daughters would grow up clever enough to find me. It was the only thing I had.” She said it without self-pity, as a statement of method. “I did not know which one. Evelyn was always the one who asked questions, but she was the plain one, and I knew what happens to plain girls — I was one — and I did not think anyone would ever hand her the tools. Juliana was beautiful, and I thought, beautiful girls are watched, and being watched is a kind of power, and perhaps she would marry someone with a name.

“So I wrote to both of you whenever I could. Dozens of letters passed through Hannah’s hands, and I wrote to you both by name, and I never once wrote to my husband, because I wanted him to know that I had not written to him.”

Mr. Finch’s pen stopped.

“Say that again, my lady.”

“I never wrote to my husband,” said Lady Emmeline. “Not one letter, in fifteen years. He wrote to me four times in all that period, and I did not answer any of them, and in my fourth year I told Mrs. Grice to tell him that I was dead, because I thought it might make him careless.”

Sebastian turned to Mr. Finch.

“Then how,” he said, “did Percival Ashby know in August that she was still alive?”

The room went very quiet.

“Because Dr. Penn told him,” said Lady Emmeline. “He came in August and he told my husband that my daughter was asking questions at the sexton’s, and that the duke had bought the debts, and that the situation required tidying.” She looked at Sebastian. “I have read your face since the day you walked into that lodge, and I know what you are going to say, and I want you to hear me say first that you are right.”

“Say it anyway,” said Sebastian.

“They moved me in eighteen forty-three because they wanted the house inspected and the lodge unseen. They will not move me again.” Lady Emmeline folded her hands. “They will kill me instead, and they will call it a decline, and they will have a physician to sign it, because they always do.”

Evelyn stood up so fast her chair went over.

“Mother—”

“Sit down, my love.” Lady Emmeline smiled at her, and it was the first real smile Evelyn had seen on that face in fifteen years. “I have spent fifteen years being managed in small rooms by men with paper. I am not frightened of them now. I am only angry.” She looked at Sebastian. “You are going to do something in a ballroom.”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she said. “I should like to be there.”