Office Copies

Tuesday, November 12, 1816

“I asked for a table and a good light the last time I came to this house,” said Mr. Quince. “Today I shall ask for the door shut as well.”

Gideon shut it himself. Linnea had been fetched from her bench and had come as she was, with lake on two fingers. She stood by the long library table and watched the solicitor take two folded papers from his bag. He laid them side by side and squared them to the edge.

It was four o’clock and nearly dark. He had left London on Monday morning and slept at Oxford, and he had not stopped to change his neckcloth.

She knew what one of the papers was before he touched it. She had known for six weeks.

The wheat had been carried by the thirtieth of October. There had been a Sunday after that with nobody wanted in any field. She had walked to church on Gideon’s arm and walked home again, and she had said nothing. Each day it had been a little easier to say that she would do it tomorrow.

“I have discovered the fourth exception,” Quince said. “Mr. Skrine filed his affidavits on Thursday, and I bespoke office copies the same hour. There are two. I shall take them in the order he does.” He put on his spectacles. “The first is sworn by Valentine Nettleship, of Paternoster Row, bookseller and publisher.”

Gideon looked at her. “Your publisher?”

“Yes,” Linnea said.

Quince read in his level voice. Mr. Nettleship swore that he had published a work called Corfield’s Heaths in parts since the year 1810, to one hundred and sixty subscribers. Each plate bore at its foot the words Z. Corfield del., and was sold as the work of the Reverend Zachary Corfield. He swore that from the twelfth part, beginning at plate forty-five, the drawings sent to him were in a manner different from those before. He swore that the Reverend gentleman had died on the twenty-eighth of January last.

“‘And this deponent further saith that on the sixth day of August last the said Linnea, Duchess of Brackenhope, attended at his counting room and delivered four drawings, numbered sixty-five to sixty-eight, which she stated to be ”from my father’s portfolio“; that the colour upon them appeared to this deponent to be newly laid; that he paid her twenty pounds, for which he holds her receipt; and that to the best of his knowledge and belief the said four drawings, and the twenty drawings numbered forty-five to sixty-four, are by the hand of the said Duchess and not of her late father.’”

He laid the paper down.

“Mr. Skrine’s exception puts it more shortly. He says that Her Grace has for three years set a dead man’s name to her own work, and taken money for it of a hundred and sixty people. He says that a lady who would do that for five pounds a drawing would do a great deal more for a coronet.”

“It is a lie,” Gideon said.

He had not sat down. He stood at the head of the table with one hand flat on it, and his voice was quite calm.

“The man is mistaken, or he has been bought. Her father drew those plates. One of them hangs through that door, over my desk, and I have looked at it every night for six months. Quince, you will write to Mr. Bellamy tonight. I want this Nettleship examined, and I want to know what Pargeter paid him.”

“Gideon.”

“I will not have it said of you. He may say what he pleases of me.”

“Gideon, it is true.”

He turned his head. She made herself keep her eyes on his face.

“Mr. Nettleship has sworn to nothing but the truth, and nobody has paid him. I drew them. I drew all twenty-four, from plate forty-five onward. I signed my father’s name to every one.”

Nobody spoke. The fire shifted in the grate. Quince had taken out his pencil.

“I am going to give you all of it,” she said. “I should have done so long ago, so I will leave nothing out now.”

She told them. She began with a morning in the autumn of 1813, and an Erica grandiflora on the bench, and the sound of a pencil stopping. She told them how her father had held his right wrist in his left hand, and how he had tried for three days and could not put a line where he wanted it. Forty-four plates were out, and a hundred and sixty people had paid for seventy-two.

“I had ground his colours since I was nine. I knew his hand as well as I knew his voice. On the fourth morning I sat down on his stool and drew the plant, and I lettered the foot as he did. He looked at it, and he said it was better than his. Then he cried.”

Her own voice was steady. She was surprised at that.

“He never asked me to keep silent. I want that understood, Mr. Quince, and written down. He was a proud man. He had been thirty years rector of this parish and twenty a botanist. He had one piece of work that he meant to leave behind him. I saw what it would do to him to have it known that he could not finish it. I chose to keep silent, and he let me. He named every plant and wrote every note, and he sat at my elbow the whole time. But the drawing was mine.”

“And the money?” Quince said.

“Five pounds a plate. It went to the coal merchant, for the most part. We had forty pounds a year of my mother’s and the living, and the living went on glass. There were winters when Mr. Nettleship’s five pounds was all that kept the stove alight.” She drew a breath. “I do not offer that as an excuse. People paid for Zachary Corfield’s drawings, and they got mine.”

“And the four in August?”

“I drew them here, since the wedding. I drew them on his paper, and I told Mr. Nettleship that they came from his portfolio. It was a lie as I said it, and I knew it.”

Gideon had not moved. The candles lit the patch and the pale line under it. She could read nothing in his face.

“The one over my desk,” he said at last.

“Plate fifty-two. Yes.”

“I told you why I chose it.”

“You told me that whoever drew it had liked the plant, and that a man so patient with a flower was worth having on the wall. I came very near to telling you then. I opened my mouth to do it.”

“You spoke of the top lights.”

“I did.”

“And at the furnace.” He said it slowly. “On the night of the stack. You began something about the Heaths.”

“That was the third time. The second was in your study, on the morning of the frost. You said that my father never drew better than in his last years.” She had to stop a moment. “I promised myself that I would tell you when the harvest was in. It has been in a fortnight, Gideon. I have no reason to give you for the fortnight. I was afraid, and I put it off.”

Quince’s pencil had been moving. It stopped now.

“Your Grace will recall my letter of the twenty-seventh of September. I asked whether there was any circumstance, however slight, which had not been laid before me.”

“I read that sentence twice, Mr. Quince. I knew what it meant.”

“I do not say it to reproach you. I say it because Mr. Skrine will.” He turned a page of his pocket-book. “I must tell you how it stands. I spoke with Mr. Nettleship on Friday. He did not go to Mr. Skrine. Mr. Skrine went to him, with a statement from an engraver named Greave, and required him to say on oath whether he believed it. He told me that he would never have volunteered it and that he could not deny it. He desired me to say that he is sorry.”

“He has nothing to be sorry for.”

“No. That is our difficulty. I cannot attack an honest man who says what is so.” Quince folded his hands. “Lord Eldon is a scrupulous judge and a slow one. He will not care about heaths. He will care that a witness upon whom the Master relied has put a false name to a paper for money, twenty-four times, and once since she became a duchess. Mr. Skrine told the Master in August that this household was a stage play. He will now tell the Chancellor that he has found the playwright. Your Grace must answer on oath, in full, and you must be in Lincoln’s Inn Hall when it is read.”

“I will swear to every word I have said in this room.”

“I shall draw it tonight.” He hesitated. “There is one thing more on this head. A paragraph appeared in the Morning Chronicle on Saturday. It names no names. It speaks of a duchess lately a clergyman’s daughter, and of some botanical drawings. The country papers will copy it.”

Gideon’s hand closed on the table edge.

He had still not looked away from her. He did not look angry. She had seen him angry once, at Pargeter, in the drawing room, and it had been cold and quick. He looked as he had on the bridge in June, when the feeling had not yet reached him.

“There is a second paper,” Quince said. “I had rather have read it to Your Grace alone.”

“We do not do things so in this house,” Gideon said. “I think that has just been shown. Read it.”

Quince took up the other sheet.

“It is exhibited to an affidavit of Mr. Pargeter himself. He swears that it came to him by post in November of last year, that he laid it by in his grief and forgot it, and that he found it again in September in a drawer of his writing desk. It purports to be a letter from Lady Edmund Kynaston to her brother. I was shown the original for five minutes in Mr. Skrine’s chambers, and it is held there until the hearing. I compared the hand as well as I could. I cannot tell you that it is not hers.”

“Read it.”

“‘Brackenhope Castle, 2nd November, 1815. My dear Rupert, I write what I cannot say to Edmund, who will hear nothing against his brother. I have been uneasy these three months. If I should die, and Edmund not be living, I beg that you and Dorothea will take my children. Do not let them be left here. I say it with sorrow, for I know what he has suffered, but the Duke is not fit; he frightens them. Tabitha screams if he comes into a room, and he will see nobody and shuts himself up for days together. Promise me this, and burn my letter if it is never wanted. Your affectionate sister, Arabella Kynaston.’”

The clock on the mantel went on ticking.

Linnea watched the colour leave Gideon’s face. It went slowly, from the forehead down, until the skin was grey and the scar was the palest thing in it. He put out his hand for the paper. Quince gave it to him.

He read it through. He was a long while over those few lines, as he had been long over a notice pasted to a glass door, and she saw him go back to the top.

“The second of November,” he said. “Twelve days.”

“Your Grace, I must point out that it has no force in law. A mother cannot appoint a guardian. It is evidence of her opinion and no more, and it appears very conveniently, ten months late, from a drawer.”

“It is evidence of what she saw.” His voice had no tone in it at all. “Tabitha did scream. I heard her on the stairs, the week I came home. I never went up again.” He folded the sheet once along its crease. “She came down to breakfast with me every morning of that autumn. She asked whether I had slept. She said that the children would soon grow used to me.”

“Gideon,” Linnea said.

He did not seem to hear. He put the paper in the breast of his coat.

“You will excuse me, Mr. Quince. Mrs. Hobday has a room ready for you.”

He went to the door and opened it and went out. He did not hurry. They heard his boots cross the hall, and the great door open and close.

Quince took off his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He looked older than he had in May.

“I have known him since he was a boy of twelve,” he said. “I never saw him take a blow like that. I would have given a good deal to spare him.”

“Which is the worse for the case? His paper or mine?”

“In court, yours. A dead lady’s letter is an opinion, and Mr. Pym’s report answers it. Yours goes to the credit of a living witness.” He looked at her directly. “To the man himself, I should say that his is the worse by a long way, and that yours has not made it lighter.”

“No,” Linnea said. “I know it has not.”

She thought of the word in the letter. He frightens them. Rupert Pargeter had laid his kind hand on Crispin’s shoulder in July and asked the boy that very thing, in very nearly those words. She supposed that he had had it from his sister. She found that it made her dislike him more, and she had no attention to spare for why.
***
He was gone three hours.

She did not send after him. She sat through the nursery supper and heard Crispin’s evening reading, and told Pip, who looked at her narrowly, that Mr. Quince had brought law papers and that they were dull. She saw Quince fed. Then she took a candle and sat on the oak settle in the hall, under the old Duke’s portrait, and waited.

He came in at seven. He had no hat. His hair was flat with rain and his coat was black with it, and there was mud to his knees. She thought he had been up on the Edge.

She stood. He stopped a yard from her, and he faced her square. He had kept to that, even now.

“I am not going to ask you to forgive it tonight,” she said. “I only want you to know that I shall do whatever Mr. Quince says is needed. I will swear it, and stand up in the hall, and be called whatever Mr. Skrine likes. It was my doing, and I shall answer for it.”

He looked at her. His eye was quite clear, and it was a long way off. She had the feeling of calling across the leat in flood to a man on the far bank.

“You should have told me in May,” he said.

“Yes.”

She waited for the rest. She would have welcomed anything he chose to say. He might have reminded her of his one clause, or of her own fourth term. He might have asked what else she had kept back.

He said nothing more. He nodded once, as he might to a subaltern who had made a correct report of a lost gun, and went past her up the stair to change his coat.

She would have been glad of anger. She could have stood up to it, and it would have meant that he was still in the room with her.

He did not come to dinner. Oakes carried a tray to the study and brought it out again an hour later, hardly touched, and would not meet her eye in the passage.

She went up at ten. The white door stood open, as it had since August. She lay in the wide bed on her own side and listened, and no board spoke in the dressing room, because nobody was in it.

At midnight she put on her wrapper and went down.

There was a light under the library door. She did not knock this time. She opened it softly and stood on the threshold with her hand on the frame.

The library itself was dark. The light came from the far end, through the door of the study, which stood ajar. She could see a strip of the room beyond, the edge of the desk and the ledgers on their shelves.

He was sitting at the desk in his shirtsleeves, with one candle. The clerk’s copy of the letter lay open on the rent book in front of him. He was not reading it now. He sat with his forearms on either side of it and his head a little bent, as still as he had sat at the first schoolroom dinners.

On the wall over his head the scarlet heath hung in its black frame. The candle lit the hanging flowers and the small neat lettering at the foot.

She could have crossed the library. It was thirty feet of carpet, and she had crossed it in May in a wrapper with her hair in a plait, and nearly made him laugh over a map of meadows.

She knew that if she went in now he would stand up, and face her, and be civil. She did not think she could bear to be treated civilly by him tonight.

Linnea stayed where she was in the dark. Gideon sat on under a picture that she had signed with another man’s name. In front of him lay a dead woman’s opinion of him, and he was alone with it.
***