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

Chapter 24

Aldous Kerr looked at the woman in the doorway for a long moment, and Evelyn watched him decide — she saw the exact instant of it — that this could still be managed.

“My lady,” he said, and he actually bowed. “You have my profound sympathy. You have been the victim of a physician’s error, and there is not a man in this room who does not feel for you. But you are not well. Your presence here tonight, brought out of a licensed house against medical advice, on the very day before your case comes before the Vice-Chancellor, will do nothing but harm to your own interests and to the interests of your family.”

“I was never in a licensed house,” said Lady Emmeline. “I was in a lodge behind a wall at the end of an orchard, and it does not appear in the register, and it does not appear in the returns, and there is not a magistrate in Norfolk who has ever heard of it, and you ordered me moved there in September of eighteen forty-three, in the same month that you called in my husband’s loan, and you did it under your own hand, and I have seen the entry.”

Kerr’s face did not change.

“You have seen an entry in a book,” he said. “Written by a matron.”

“Written by a matron,” Lady Emmeline agreed. “And counter-signed by a physician. And entered in a register that the law requires, in a house that the law inspects, which is the only reason it exists at all — because men like you need the paperwork to look correct while the woman behind the wall does not exist.” She took one step into the room. “You have spent years relying on a single idea, Mr. Kerr, and that idea is that nobody will ever add up the columns. And I have added up the columns. I did it in eighteen twenty-eight, by candlelight, in four nights, and I have had fifteen years in confinement to check my arithmetic.”

Sebastian laid a document on the baize beside the certificates.

“An application to the Court of Chancery,” he said, “filed this morning, naming Aldous Kerr, the Honourable Gerald Merton, the estate of the eighth Duke of Halstead, and Dr. Elias Penn, in the matter of a fraud of four hundred and ten thousand pounds, and in the matter of forty-one women committed to unlawful confinement between eighteen twenty-four and eighteen forty-three.” He looked up. “And Mr. Finch of Lincoln’s Inn has laid the papers in the hands of four newspaper offices this evening, so that whatever else happens tonight, this will be printed in four editions before the Vice-Chancellor sits at eleven tomorrow morning, which means it will not be adjourned, and it will not be settled quietly, and nobody in this room will be able to forget it.”

Lord Merton had got as far as the door.

Two men in dark coats were standing in it.

“You cannot do this,” said Lord Merton. He had a large, handsome, crimson face and the voice of a man who had never been contradicted in public in his life. “You cannot arrest a peer of the realm in a private house on the word of a lunatic and a quack. This is not law, Halstead. This is a scene.”

“It is a scene,” said Sebastian, “and you are in it, and tomorrow morning you will be in the newspapers, and by Friday you will be in the House, and by the spring you will be in a courtroom, and the only question you have any control over is whether you go into that courtroom as a man who fought or as a man who ran.” He turned to the constables at the door. “Take him.”

The room did not move.

That was the thing Evelyn would remember afterward more than anything else about that night: nine hundred people, and not one of them lifted a hand or said a word as the constables came through the crowd and took the arm of a peer of the realm and walked him out through the doors of Lady Selby’s ballroom. There was no protest. There was no defence. There was only the enormous, attentive, ruthless silence of a room full of people who had spent their whole lives pretending to be decent, and who had just been given the opportunity, at no cost whatsoever, to be decent.

Aldous Kerr went without being touched. He walked to the doors himself with his chin up and his hands at his sides, and at the threshold he turned round and looked at Sebastian Vane.

“Your father signed first,” he said. “You will lose everything.”

“I know,” said Sebastian.

Evelyn found her father by the fire in the second room.

Sir Percival had not moved in ten minutes. His glass was empty and his hand was still around it, and he was watching the doors through which two men had just been taken, and he was grey — the exact colour of the paper on her mother’s letters.

“Papa,” she said.

He looked at her.

There would be a great many words said between them in the years afterward — in the small house at Ottery St. Mary where he would live out the rest of his life on two hundred pounds a year, paid quarterly by his daughter, on the condition that he never set foot in Devonshire; in the six letters a year he would write and she would answer in three lines; in the single hour, four years later, when he would finally tell her what it had been like to sign the paper and she would sit and listen without forgiving him. There would be a great deal of time.

But there was only one sentence, that night, in Lady Selby’s ballroom.

“I never hated you,” said Evelyn.

Her father’s mouth opened.

“I wanted to. I tried, for years, and I studied it the way you study a language, and I could not do it, and for a long time I thought that meant I was weak.” She looked at him. “Then I understood that it meant I was not you.”

“That is worse,” said Sir Percival Ashby. “You know that, don’t you? That is worse than hatred.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn. “I know.”

The constables came for him. He did not resist. As they led him past her, he looked back once at his daughter, and there was no remorse in his face — there was confusion, the genuine confusion of a man who has spent forty years following every rule he was ever told and cannot understand how he came to be standing here.

He was taken out through the hall.

The doors closed behind him.

For a moment the ballroom simply stood there, nine hundred people in gold and diamonds, looking at nothing, the snow whispering against the tall windows.

Then the orchestra, which had been sitting frozen with its bows in the air, did what orchestras do when nobody instructs them: it began to play, very softly, something slow and old.

Sebastian Vane crossed the floor to his wife and held out his hand.

“Dance with me,” he said.

He had not danced publicly in ten years.