Held to the Light

Tuesday, December 3, 1816

“Life Guards at the Holborn end, Your Grace,” Pugh said through the trap. “And a picket of foot across Chancery Lane. They’re turning carts back.”

“Will they turn us back?”

“Not with the arms on the door. I’ll speak to the sergeant.”

Linnea wiped the glass. Shutters were up on half the shops, though it was past nine. A gunsmith’s window had been boarded over with new deal. Troopers sat their black horses at the corner in long cloaks, with their breath smoking. Yesterday a crowd from Spa Fields had broken into the gun shops and marched on the Tower. Mrs. Jessop had brought the news up with the supper, in tears, and Gideon had gone round the house himself and seen to every bolt.

He had not put one bar across a shutter.

He sat opposite her now with Tabitha on his knee. He had been shaved at seven and wore the blue coat. Pip had her nose to the other window and was counting soldiers. Crispin sat very upright beside Mercy, with the ledger on his knees. He had asked last night whether he might bring it, and Gideon had said that he would be sorry to see him without it.

“Mr. Bellamy says that the Chancellor will see you first, by yourself, in his own room,” Linnea told him. “He is an old gentleman, and they say that he is kind to children. He will ask you questions. Nobody will tell you what to answer.”

“I should not say it if they did,” said Crispin. He was pale. “May I tell him things he does not ask?”

“You may tell him anything that is true.”

On her own knee lay Lady Edmund’s receipt book in its marbled boards. She had read the last entry so often that she could see the long tails of the letters with her eyes shut.
***
Lincoln’s Inn Hall was old and dark, with a carved screen at one end and a great painting at the other. The day outside was the colour of slate. Candles had been lit on the registrar’s table, under the bench, and in sconces down the walls.

The place was packed to the doors. There were barristers in rows, and clerks, and a bench of men with notebooks on their knees whom Quince identified, with distaste, as the newspapers. There were a great many people who had no business there at all. A duke and a forged name and a riot the day before had filled every seat.

Quince had kept a bench for them behind Mr. Bellamy. Linnea sat down on it with Pip and Mercy. Gideon had gone with Crispin to the door of the Chancellor’s private room, and Tabitha had declined to be parted from him.

Across the gangway sat Rupert Pargeter, in a good black coat, with his hat on his knee. He bowed to her. His sandy face was grave and kind. Beside him his wife sat with her thin hands locked together, looking at the door through which the children would come.

Linnea waited ten minutes by the clock over the screen, and it seemed a very long time.

Then the side door opened, and the talk in the hall dropped.

Gideon came in first. He walked up the length of the gangway at his ordinary pace, with his head up and the candles on his left. He made no turn to spare himself. Every face in the hall was toward him. She saw a reporter’s pencil stop, and a young barrister nudge another.

Tabitha walked beside him, holding his left hand, in her black bonnet. She had a doll under her other arm. She looked about her at the wigs with great composure. Halfway up she caught a stout clerk staring at her uncle, and she stared back until the clerk looked at his papers.

Crispin came behind them with his ledger.

They sat down. Gideon took the place on Linnea’s right, so that she had his left side. Tabitha climbed onto his knee.

“Well?” Pip hissed along the bench.

“He asked me what the glass read this morning,” Crispin whispered. “I said thirty-six, and that Mr. Preece has the gauge. He asked whether I should like to live at Clifton. I said no, sir, and I told him why. Then he asked whether my uncle had ever been unkind to me. I said he went away once without speaking, and I showed him the page.” He swallowed. “He read it. He read the line for the twenty-sixth as well, and what Uncle Gideon wrote under it. He read that out loud. ‘Will not go again.’ Then he asked me whether I believed it, and I said yes.”

Gideon was looking straight ahead. Linnea saw the muscle move beside the scar.

“He was right to show it,” he said, very low.

“All rise,” called the usher.

Lord Eldon came in by the door behind the bench. He was a heavy old man of five and sixty in a full-bottomed wig, with thick black eyebrows and a slow, careful step. He sat down and arranged his papers for some time. He looked once at the bench where the family sat, from under the brows, and his eyes rested on the boy.

“In the matter of the Kynaston infants,” said the registrar. “Exceptions to the Master’s report.”
***
Mr. Skrine was on his feet before the words were out. He was as small and sharp as she remembered, and his voice carried to the screen.

He took the first three exceptions quickly. The marriage had been a contrivance, he said, and the child’s own words proved it. The Chancellor heard him with his chin on his hand.

“I have read the Master’s report, Mr. Skrine. He says that the marriage, whatever its occasion, has made a home. Have you anything upon that which he did not hear?”

“I have the fourth exception, my lord. It goes to the lady upon whose evidence the Master relied.” Skrine turned half round. She felt the whole hall turn with him. “For three years the Duchess of Brackenhope set the name of her father, a clergyman, to drawings which were her own. She sold them under that name to a hundred and sixty subscribers at five pounds apiece. She continued the practice after his death, and after her marriage, and told the publisher to his face that the work was the dead man’s. My lord, there is a short word for one who puts another’s name to paper for money. I say that the infants are in the care of a forger.”

A murmur ran down the benches. The pencils were going hard.

Linnea kept her hands folded on the marbled book. Her face was hot, and she did not lower it. Gideon’s shoulder was against hers, and she could feel that he was holding himself still with some effort.

Mr. Bellamy rose without hurry. He looked as lazy as ever.

“My lord, my friend has a taste for short words. I have three papers, and I shall let them speak.” He lifted the first. “This is the affidavit of Her Grace, sworn on Thursday last. She did not wait to be cross-examined into it. I shall read it entire.”

He read it in his easy voice. Linnea heard her own sentences go out over the hall. There was the pencil stopping in the autumn of 1813, and the three days her father had tried. He never asked me to keep silent. I chose it, and he permitted it. There was the coal merchant, and the stove. There was the counting room in August, set down without excuse. I said that the drawings were from my father’s portfolio. The paper was. The statement was meant to deceive, and I regret it.

The hall had gone quiet. Pip’s hand had come into hers, hard and rather sticky.

“The second is a further affidavit of Mr. Nettleship, sworn yesterday. He says that no subscriber has complained to him or asked for the return of a shilling. He exhibits the third paper, which was signed in his presence on Sunday evening at the house of Dr. Yarrow of the Linnean Society. Thirty-one subscribers declare that they do not think themselves deceived in the value of what they bought. They ask that the work be finished by the Duchess, with her name upon the title beside her father’s. I shall read the names, my lord. There is an admiral among them, and two Fellows of the Royal Society.”

He read all thirty-one. It took some time, and nobody coughed.

The Chancellor had taken the paper up himself. He looked at it for a good while, and then at her affidavit, and then down the hall at Linnea. His eyes under the heavy brows were shrewder than she had expected.

“Mr. Skrine, forgery is a word with a meaning in the law. It wants an intent to defraud. I look for the person defrauded, and I find thirty-one of them asking for more.” His voice was slow and rather hoarse. “An old man lost the use of his hands. His daughter lent him hers, and let him keep the credit, and held her tongue after he was dead, when she might have had the praise of it. It would have been better told sooner. She says so herself, more severely than you do. But I see no forger here. I see a dutiful daughter. If that is your fresh matter, it does not move me.”

Linnea found that she could not see the bench. She did not take off her spectacles to wipe them, since Pip had her right hand and Gideon had taken the other.

“It is half of it, my lord,” Skrine said. He did not look beaten. “I come now to the mother.”

Gideon’s fingers went rigid in hers.

“Your lordship has an office copy. I produce the original.” Skrine took a folded sheet from his junior. “It is a letter from Lady Edmund Kynaston to her brother, the petitioner, written from Brackenhope Castle on the second of November 1815, twelve days before her death. Mr. Pargeter has sworn to its receipt by the post, and to finding it in his writing desk in September. I shall read it.”

He read it. The Duke is not fit; he frightens them. Do not let them be left here.

She had heard it once in Quince’s level voice. It was worse in Skrine’s. Across the gangway Mrs. Pargeter had bowed her head, and her husband patted her hand. Gideon sat like a man under fire. He was looking at the floor between his boots.

Crispin had turned quite white. He had never heard it before.

“It isn’t true,” Pip whispered fiercely. “Mama never said that. She never said ‘the Duke.’”

“Hush, my love.”

Linnea had the receipt book ready. She had meant to pass it forward to Bellamy as soon as Skrine sat down, open at the posset, so that the two hands might be laid together.

“I ask that it be handed up,” Skrine said.

The usher took the sheet from him. He was an old man, and slow, and he carried it to the registrar’s table at arm’s length, as if it might be hot. The registrar rose to receive it. For a moment the letter hung between their two hands, open, in front of the branched candlestick.

Linnea saw the light come through it.

She had held sheets of paper to a window every working day for fifteen years. She did it before she drew a line, to find the right side and the flaws. She could no more have helped looking than she could have helped breathing.

The writing showed dark. Behind it, low in the half sheet, there was a paler shape as large as a crown piece. It was an oval with a seated figure in it. Under the oval there were smaller marks in a row.

She could not read them at five yards. She knew only what they were likely to be. All good English paper. The maker and the year. She had said that to a boy at her bench at Midsummer.

It might say 1814, or 1812. Lady Edmund might have written on old stock out of a drawer, as Linnea herself drew on her father’s Whatman. If it did, they would have lost nothing by asking.

Her heart was going so hard that it shook the book on her knee.

“Aunt Linnea,” Crispin breathed. He had seen it too. His eyes were on the candlestick. “It has a label. Like the tub.”

She leaned forward and touched Bellamy’s sleeve. He bent his handsome ruined head back without turning it.

“Ask him to hold it to the light,” she whispered. “There is a watermark in the sheet. English makers put the year in the mould.”

Bellamy did not move for one second. Then he was on his feet, quite gently.

“My lord, before your lordship reads that letter, I have a request which may appear idle. I ask that your lordship hold the paper up to the candle.”

“For what purpose, Mr. Bellamy?”

“I am instructed that the sheet may carry its maker’s mark. I do not know what it will show. Nor does my friend, I think.”

Skrine was frowning. He looked round at his client. Pargeter’s face had not changed. He was still patting his wife’s hand. But Linnea saw that the hand under his had gone still, and that his own had stopped moving on it.

The Chancellor took the letter from the registrar. He was not a man to be hurried, and he was not hurried now. He drew the candlestick toward him and turned the sheet until it stood between his eyes and the flame.

The hall was silent. A horse stamped somewhere outside in the frost.

“There is a figure in an oval,” Lord Eldon said slowly. “A woman seated, with a shield and a spear. It is Britannia. There are figures beneath.” He moved the paper an inch. He looked for what seemed a very long time, and then he lowered it and looked over it at the bar. His brows had come down. “One, eight, one, six.”

Nobody spoke.

“Mr. Skrine, the lady died on the fourteenth of November 1815.”

A sound went through the hall like wind through a wood. The reporters’ bench was writing as if the place were on fire.

Skrine had gone the colour of his bands. “My lord, I... I must ask leave to take instructions.”

“You may take them. I shall be interested to hear how a letter comes to be written in 1815 upon paper which was not made until the year after.”

Pargeter had risen. The pleasant smile was on his face, and it sat there like a thing left behind in an empty house. “My lord, there must be some error of the stationer. A mould misdated. One hears of such things.”

“I never heard of a paper-maker who dated his moulds a year forward, sir, and I have sat here fifteen years. You swore that this came to you by the post in November of last year. Sit down. You will be asked about it in another place.”

Pargeter sat. He put out his hand to his wife, from habit.

Dorothea Pargeter stood up.

She did it without any noise at all. She looked down at her husband’s hand as if she had never seen it before. Then she gathered her brown pelisse about her, stepped past his knees into the gangway, and walked to the end of an empty bench by the wall. She sat down there alone, with her back very straight. Her thin face was turned toward the children, and it was wet.

Linnea looked at Gideon.

He had lifted his head. He was staring at the sheet in the Chancellor’s hand, and his eye was wide and blind with something she had never seen in it. His lips moved. She thought that he had said a name.

“She never wrote it,” Linnea said under her breath. “She never thought it, Gideon. She warmed your bed three times and ordered your posset, and she said that Tabitha would be on your knee by Easter. Mrs. Hobday will tell you all of it.”

He could not answer. He shut his eye, and she felt his hand close on hers until the bones ached. Tabitha put up her mittened fingers and patted his chin, on the left side, as she would have comforted a doll.

Bellamy had the receipt book. Linnea had put it into his hand without knowing that she did so.

“My lord, I had meant to tender this for the handwriting. It was kept by Lady Edmund until three weeks before her death. Perhaps it is hardly wanted now.”

“Hand it up.”

The Chancellor turned to the last page and read it to himself. He glanced from the page to the letter, and then, briefly, at the tall man with the child on his knee.

“The hand is like, and the heart is not,” he said. “A lady who orders a sleeping draught for her brother-in-law on the twentieth of October, ‘without his asking, for he never will ask,’ does not call him a terror to her children thirteen days later. I need not decide who made this letter. Let it be impounded, and let the registrar keep it under seal.”

He laid both down. He was silent for a full minute, with his chin on his hand, and the hall waited on him.

“I am not often accused of haste,” Lord Eldon said. “I have doubted in my time over plainer cases than this was a month ago. I do not doubt today. I have seen the eldest infant alone. He keeps a book in which he writes down only what he has measured, and he showed me a page that did his uncle no credit and another that did. I had rather have that boy’s ledger than most affidavits. The exceptions are overruled. The Master’s report is confirmed. His Grace the Duke of Brackenhope is appointed guardian of the persons of the three infants, and I think their mother would have been content with it.”

Mercy Onions gave one sob and stopped it with her glove.

“There remains their fortune. A trustee who brings such a paper into this court is not a person in whose sole hands I can leave thirty thousand pounds for a day longer than I must. Let the fund be brought into court and laid out in the name of the Accountant-General. Let the trustee carry in his accounts before the Master within twenty-eight days. Mr. Skrine, you will explain that order to your client.”

Linnea was watching Pargeter. He had borne the reading of the date with his smile nearly whole. At the word accounts it went. His sandy face turned grey from the collar upward, and he took hold of the bench in front of him.

She did not understand it. She only saw that the letter had frightened him a good deal less than the order did.

“All rise.”

The old man went out by his door. The hall broke into noise.

Quince was shaking Bellamy’s hand, which she had never expected to see. Bellamy turned and bowed to her over the back of the bench.

“I have been at the bar twenty years, Your Grace, and I never looked through a sheet of paper in my life. I shall do it every morning from now on.”

“Most people never ask it,” Linnea said. Her voice was unsteady. “It was Crispin who saw it with me.”

“It was like the label,” Crispin said. He was still looking at the candlestick. “Only you cannot unscrew it.”

Pip had got up on the bench. “Does it mean it’s finished? Properly? Say it exactly.”

Gideon stood. He set Tabitha on his arm, and he had to clear his throat twice.

“It is finished, Philippa. The Lord Chancellor has said so, and there is nobody above him to ask. You are mine to keep, the three of you. Your mother did not write that letter. I shall tell you about her on the way, all that I should have told you a year ago.”

“I knew she didn’t,” Pip said. She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes, furiously.

People were pressing up the gangway to look at them. Gideon did not turn from it. He stood in the candlelight with the child on his arm and Linnea’s hand in his, and he let them look.

Crispin shut his ledger. He put the pencil in its loop. Then he looked up at the two of them, and the solemn thin face was a small boy’s again, and very tired.

“Please, sir,” he said. “Aunt Linnea. May we go home now?”
***