From My Father’s Portfolio

Tuesday, August 6, 1816

“‘A contrivance,’” Gideon read, “‘entered into within a fortnight of the reference to the Master, for the sole purpose of deceiving this Honourable Court.’ He has it from Philippa, and he says so. ‘As the deponent heard from the lips of the infant herself.’”

He laid Quince’s copy beside the coffee pot. The breakfast room in Upper Brook Street looked north into a wet mews, and half its chairs were still under holland covers. They had come in late last night after two days on the road, and Linnea had slept badly in a strange bed.

“He does not name her,” she said.

“No. He is too kind an uncle for that.” His mouth was tight on the scarred side. “Pym has it before him at noon. Bellamy says that we answer it by being what we are, and that I am to keep my temper.”

“Can you?”

“I kept it in my own drawing room. I can keep it in a lawyer’s.” He looked at the flat parcel lying on the chair beside her, tied in brown paper and tape. “Paternoster Row is in the City. I will take you there. I have nothing to do before noon but walk this carpet.”

“Thank you. I had rather go alone.”

“Linnea, you have not been in London since you were a girl.”

“I was nineteen, and I found St. Paul’s without help. It is very large.” She tried to say it lightly. “It is my work, Gideon. I told you in your library that I would go on with it. Mr. Nettleship has dealt with a rector’s daughter for six years, and I should like him to deal with her once more before he has to deal with a duke.”

He considered that. She watched him want to argue and decide against it.

“Oakes goes on the box,” he said. “That is for my peace, and I ask it as a favour. He will wait in the street.”

“Oakes may go on the box.”

“Then I shall see you at Southampton Buildings at a quarter before twelve.” He stood when she did. “Is he an honest man, your publisher?”

“Perfectly. He pays to the day.”

She picked up the parcel and went out quickly. She had told one truth in that room to avoid telling another, and she did not want his eye on her while she thought about it.
***
The hackney smelled of damp straw. It took her down Holborn and Newgate Street in a thin rain, and Linnea sat with the parcel flat on her knees and let herself think the thing through from the beginning. She did not often allow it.

It had begun in the autumn of 1813. Her father had been at his bench with an Erica grandiflora, and she had been watering behind him. She had heard his pencil stop. When she came round, he was holding his right wrist in his left hand, and both hands were trembling like a leaf in a draught.

He had tried again the next day, and the day after. The line would not go where he sent it. Forty-four plates were out, a hundred and sixty subscribers had paid for a book of seventy-two, and Zachary Corfield could no longer draw a stem.

She had been five and twenty. She had ground his colours since she was nine and laid his flat washes since she was fifteen. She knew his hand as she knew his voice. On the fourth morning she had sat down on his stool and drawn the plant herself. She had lettered the foot of the sheet as he always did, in his own neat capitals. Z. Corfield del.

He had looked at it for a long time. “It is better than mine, my dear,” he had said. Then he had wept, which she had seen only once before, when her mother died. He had never asked her to keep quiet about it. She had seen what it would cost him to have it known, and she had kept quiet for him.

That had been plate forty-five. She had gone on to sixty-four. There were twenty plates in all, in five parts, issued over two years to people who believed that a learned old clergyman had drawn them. He had named each plant and written the notes, and he had sat beside her while she worked, with his shaking hands folded. They had been his plates in every way but one.

The four in the parcel made twenty-four. She had drawn them since the wedding, on his paper.

One of the twenty hung in a black frame over Gideon’s desk. He had told her why he chose it. He had said that whoever drew it had plainly liked the plant, and that a man who could be so patient with a flower was worth having on the wall.

She had liked the plant very much. She had been patient with it for nine days, and then she had signed her father’s name to it.

The hackney stopped. Oakes opened the door, and above the roofs the dome stood up grey in the rain.
***
Mr. Valentine Nettleship kept his counting room up one stair, over a shop that sold sermons. He was a neat, pale man of fifty with ink on his cuff and a habit of looking at things over the top of his spectacles. When the clerk announced her, he came round his desk and bowed lower than he ever had.

“Your Grace. I read it in the Morning Post in May and thought there must be two Miss Corfields in Shropshire. I wish you joy.” He set a chair. “I had feared the book was done for. One hears what becomes of a collection when a living changes hands.”

“The collection is at Brackenhope Castle, sir, under glass, every pot. I have brought you part seventeen.”

“From Shropshire, in person?”

“I had other business in town.” She untied the tape herself. “Sixty-five to sixty-eight. They are from my father’s portfolio.”

She had worked that sentence out on the Oxford road. The paper had come from his portfolio, every sheet, and the plants had been his. She had hoped it would feel less like a lie when she came to say it. It felt exactly like one.

Nettleship carried the four drawings to the window. He looked at each for some time and said nothing. Linnea folded her gloved hands and watched a pigeon on the opposite gutter.

“Erica retorta,” he said. “Massoni. Ampullacea. Aitonia. Dr. Yarrow will be pleased, he has been asking for the massoni these two years. Is the letterpress with them?”

“My father’s notes are in the parcel. Dr. Yarrow has leave to correct them.”

“He will take it, with or without leave.” Nettleship held the retorta to the light, as she herself held every sheet. “Mr. Greave, my engraver, has an eye like a hawk, and he said a curious thing when part sixteen came in. He said, ‘The old gentleman’s hand grew surer at the end.’ He meant it. He said that the early plates are a botanist’s and very correct, and that from about the middle of the book they are a painter’s as well. He never saw a man improve so much after sixty-five.”

“My father would have been glad to hear it.”

“I am sure he would.” He put the sheet down with the others and squared them. “It is a remarkable thing to have left four finished drawings behind him, so fresh. One would say that the colour was hardly a month dry.”

“The portfolio was kept from the light.”

“That would account for it.”

He went to his desk and unlocked a drawer. He counted out four five-pound notes of the Bank of England and wrote a receipt, and turned the paper toward her with the pen.

She had to take her glove off to sign. She had scrubbed her hands on Saturday, and again on Sunday at the inn at Oxford. There was still a line of carmine along the side of her forefinger, and a trace of green in the crease of the knuckle.

Nettleship looked at it over his spectacles. Then he looked at the pigeon.

She wrote Linnea Brackenhope under the words Twenty pounds, for four drawings. Her ears were hot.

“And the last part?” he asked. “Sixty-nine to seventy-two. Am I to hope that the portfolio holds those as well?”

“You shall have them before the spring, sir.”

He noticed that she had not said where they would come from. “Then the book will be complete, and a hundred and sixty people will have what they paid for. I have always thought that the first duty in my trade.” He folded the receipt. “The second is to print the truth on a title page. But I have never found that the second needed hurrying, when the first was in hand.”

It was said very mildly. He bowed her to the stair, and he did not ask her anything more.

She stood a moment on the wet pavement with twenty pounds in her reticule. She had four hundred a year now, paid quarterly, and she did not need it. It was the first money her own drawings had ever put into her own hand. She would have been proud of it if she could have told one living soul what it was for.

There was this to consider as well. A man had sworn to the Lord Chancellor that the Duchess of Brackenhope was a deceiver. She did not think this was the week to hand him a second proof, in her own handwriting, at the foot of twenty plates.

“Southampton Buildings, Your Grace?” said Oakes.

“Yes, if you please.”
***
The Master’s chambers were at the top of a dark stair off Chancery Lane. The room held a long table covered in green baize, a small fire, and more paper than she had ever seen in one place.

Mr. Horatio Pym sat at the head of the table in a rusty black gown. He was sixty-three, thin and grey, with a long upper lip and eyes the colour of weak tea. He rose half an inch for her and sat down again.

Gideon was there before her, with Quince. He was standing, in a black coat, and he was square to the room. The man beside him was introduced as Mr. Fabian Bellamy, his counsel. Bellamy was tall and lazy, with a handsome ruined face and very clean hands.

Rupert Pargeter sat on the far side. He got up and bowed to her with real warmth, as though they had met at a christening. His counsel, Mr. Jasper Skrine, was a small sharp man who did not smile at all.

“We are met upon the reference of the second of May,” said the Master. His voice was as dry as his papers. “I have Mr. Pargeter’s affidavit, sworn the twenty-third of July, and His Grace’s in answer. Mr. Skrine, I have read yours. You need not read it to me again.”

“I am obliged, Master. I would only press the one point. This marriage was arranged in under three weeks, between parties who had scarcely spoken. The lady was to quit her home at Midsummer with debts of three hundred and forty pounds. Those debts were paid, and a glasshouse was conveyed to trustees for her. A child of seven, in her own family’s drawing room, described the transaction in the plainest terms. I say that the court is being shown a household got up for the occasion, like a stage play, and that it will be struck when the audience goes home.”

“You say it at length,” said Pym. “Your Grace, I shall begin with you. Sit, if you please. I do not care to look up.”

Gideon sat. The grey light from the window was on his left side.

“You have not denied the child’s words.”

“No, sir. They were true.”

“You married to improve your case before me.”

“I married so that my brother’s children might stay in their father’s house. I saw no other way to it. I see none now.”

“The petition says that you transact no business of your estate. That was sworn in March. What business have you transacted since?”

“I have ridden forty-one of my forty-five farms and shall see the other four this month. I have four hundred quarters of old wheat in my granary, bought at seventy-six shillings, against a harvest that will not be cut before October. I have thirty men rebuilding Brackenhope Bridge at eighteen pence a day. My steward’s books are with Mr. Quince, and you may have them.”

“I have had them. Where do you dine?”

“In the schoolroom, at two, with the children. I have missed three days since the tenth of May, and I am missing two more to be here.”

Skrine made a note. Pargeter looked gently interested.

“Thank you,” said the Master. “Duchess.”

Linnea had kept her gloves on. She folded her hands on the baize.

“You were Miss Corfield, daughter of the late rector. You are eight and twenty. How long had you known His Grace when he made you his offer?”

“Three days, sir, to speak to. I had seen him in church when I was a girl.”

“And you accepted him on the fourth.”

“On the fifth. I asked for a day and went to see the children first.”

“Why?”

“I was being asked to be a mother to them. I thought that I ought to know whom I was promising.”

The weak-tea eyes rested on her. “Who orders the house they live in?”

“Mrs. Hobday, the housekeeper, who has done it for thirty years and does it better than I could. I see her books every Monday at nine. Since June we have had new blankets for the nursery, the east wing chimney swept, and the drawing-room curtains taken down. I shall not pretend to you that I know how to run a castle. I know what the nursery costs by the week, and I know what the children eat.”

“Tell me about them.”

She had expected to be asked for their names and ages. She saw that he wanted something else.

“Crispin is ten. He keeps a weather diary with three readings a day, and he will not write down a thing he has not measured. He was frightened by a newspaper in July, and he mended it himself, by watching a sunrise with a pencil in his hand. Philippa is seven. She is the angriest of them and the most honest, and she grinds colour for me better than a man I once paid for it. Tabitha is four. She was afraid of her uncle’s face in May. She goes to sleep on his shoulder now, on the left side.”

Across the table Pargeter’s smile grew a little fixed.

“Philippa is the child who spoke,” said Pym.

“Yes, sir. She had overheard the Duke’s offer to me, and she said what she heard. She was not punished for it. She was told that it was true.”

“Was it?”

“Every word.”

The Master put his fingertips together. The fire ticked. Linnea could hear a cart going by in the lane below, and Quince breathing through his nose.

“Then I shall ask you outright, Duchess, since nobody in this room has yet done so. Why did you marry the Duke of Brackenhope?”

She did not look at Gideon. She looked at the dry old man in the rusty gown, who had listened to liars for thirty years.

“For a glasshouse and three children, sir,” she said. “I have not found it a bad reason.”

Mr. Bellamy put up one clean hand and rubbed his mouth with it. When the hand came down, his face was grave again.

Pym did not smile. He looked at her a moment longer, and then he dipped his pen and wrote a line.

“Mr. Skrine. You told me that this lady would give me a romance and that I was to disbelieve it. She has given me your own client’s affidavit, in rather fewer words. What am I to disbelieve?”

“Master, the motive stands confessed—”

“The motive stood confessed before she sat down. I have been asking about the household.” He laid the pen in its tray. “I shall want the nurse’s affidavit, and the steward’s, and the rector’s as to the lady’s character. Mr. Quince, you will have them with me by the sixteenth. Mr. Pargeter, I have your account of your own house, and I shall give it the same attention. I shall report within the month. Good day to you all.”

It was over as suddenly as that. Pargeter bowed to her again at the door. “Your Grace was admirable,” he said, quite kindly. “Dorothea sends her love to the little ones.” He went down the stair before them, talking to Skrine about the price of oats.
***
Bellamy handed her into the hackney himself.

“I have had duchesses in the witness chair who took a quarter of an hour to say less,” he said. “Pym liked it. He will never say so, but he wrote it down, and he does not write down what he means to throw away.” He shut the door on them and lifted his hat. “I make no promises. I think you may sleep tonight.”

The coach lurched forward into Chancery Lane. It was narrow inside, and Gideon had to sit with his knees turned. Oakes was on the box again, and the rain had begun to run down the glass.

Gideon had said nothing since the Master’s table. He sat with his hat on his knee and looked at it.

“He means to report for you,” Linnea said. “I think he does. Did you see Mr. Skrine’s face?”

“I saw yours.”

“Was it wrong?”

“It was the best thing said in that room. You gave him the plain reason, as Quince always wanted. A glasshouse and three children.” He turned the hat round once by the brim. “I drew those terms myself. I have no right in the world to dislike hearing them.”

She looked at him. He had his left side to her in the dim coach. A muscle was working at the corner of his jaw, beside the scar.

He had asked her once, with his hand on a door latch, whether she was content. She had said so far. That had been six weeks ago. Since then she had stood on a bridge with him, and on the leads of his tower.

“Gideon.”

“One question,” he said. “You need not answer it. We agreed on plain dealing, and I find I cannot leave this one alone.” He lifted his head and turned to her fully, in that small rattling space. “What you told the Master. Was that all of the truth?”

Her heart was going hard. She had twenty pounds in her reticule, and it was the price of something she could not tell him. This at least she could say honestly.

“It was in May,” Linnea said.
***