The Duke Thought the Girl He Had Carried from a Burning Building Three Years Ago Was Dead — Until His Grandmother’s Quiet Companion Was Humiliated Before an Entire Ballroom, Revealing the Scar That Made Him Go White and Whisper, “Where Did You Get That?”

PART 5

The muniment room at Rothmir House was long and narrow and cold, with a barred window at the far end, and shelves to the ceiling on both sides. It smelled of dust and old leather. The account ledgers of the duchy were on the north wall — one volume to a year, in brown calf.

Cordelia Vain stood in front of them with a lamp in her hand and could not make herself reach out.

“Miss Vain, I am not frightened,” she said.

“I did not say you were.”

“I have wanted to be in this room for three years.” Her hand was shaking so badly the light moved on the shelves. “And I find I would rather stand here a moment longer, because at present my father is innocent, and in four minutes he may not be.”

The Duke of Rothmir took the lamp out of her hand and held it up for her. “Then let us find out,” he said.

She took down 1816. She knew the hand before the book was properly opened, and the sight of it went through her like cold water — the small upright letters, the long tail on the seven, the way he ruled his columns with a straight edge because he could not bear a crooked line. Her father had sat at a desk and written these pages. She had watched him do it.

She turned to the March quarter and stopped.

“What?” said the Duke. “Bring the lamp closer.”

Between the leaves, deep in the gutter of the binding, was a narrow ridge of paper. A page had been cut out — not torn, not pulled, cut close against the stitching with a blade, by somebody unhurried — and the stub of it still stood up out of the fold.

Cordelia set the ledger on the table. She put her hand into her pocket and took out a square of clean linen, and unfolded it, and there was nothing inside it but linen. She unfolded it twice more, as if the thing could be hiding in a crease.

“It is gone,” she said.

“What is?”

“I had a piece of paper. I have had it for three years. It was in a box under my bed, and it was locked, and it is gone.” She was already moving toward the door. “It was the corner of a page cut out of a ledger, and I have just found the ledger, and somebody took it out of my room tonight while I was standing in your ballroom with my back open.”

The Duke got to the door first. “Then whoever took it does not yet know there is a second book.”

She turned round. “What second book?”

“Your father kept a duplicate,” said the Duke. “You told me so yourself ten minutes ago, without noticing. You said you copied his totals into the duplicate book.” He was already lifting the lamp toward the high shelf at the dark end of the room, where a row of plain black volumes stood behind two hundred years of somebody else’s marriages. “Every clerk who works for a great house keeps a second set and lodges it with the family. It is how this estate has kept its accounts for generations.”

They found it on the top shelf, lying flat — the way a book is put by a man who has no intention of ever taking it down again. She carried it to the table and opened it at the March quarter of 1816, and there was the page, uncut, in her father’s small upright hand, the long tail on the seven.

£9,240 drawn in eleven payments over four years against the estate rents of the Northumberland property. And at the foot of the page, in the column where the duchy’s authority for each payment was recorded — one signature, repeated eleven times.

She had seen that signature every day of her childhood. It had been on her school bills and her mother’s headstone and the flyleaf of every book she owned. She could have drawn it with her eyes shut. Thomas Vain. Every payment authorized, recorded, and signed for by her father’s own hand.

“No,” said Cordelia Vain.

She read the page eleven times. She read it the way she had been taught to read a page — which is to say, she stopped believing anything it told her and began to look at how it was made. She held the lamp low and sighted along the paper for the shine of a scraped surface. She measured the spaces between entries with her thumbnail. She looked at the tail of every seven, the loop of every capital, the place where the pen had lifted. She looked for the small wrongness that is always there when a hand is copied — the hesitation, the drag, the letter that is drawn instead of written.

It was not there.

“Miss Vain—”

“Be quiet.”

She turned back four years and found the same signature on a receipt for coal. She laid the two pages side by side and put her face six inches from the paper.

Her father had written both of them.

Something went out of her then, quietly, without any noise at all, and she sat down on the wooden chair by the window with her hands in her lap.

“Three years,” she said. “Miss Vain, I have not eaten a hot dinner in three years. I have sewn shirts until my hands cracked. I wrote to fourteen solicitors. I stood outside the Rothmir offices in Lincoln’s Inn in the rain until a porter moved me on. I came into this house under a false name, and I forged two references to do it. And I told myself every single day, your grace, that my father would never have taken a farthing that was not his.”

“He did not.”

“His name is on it eleven times.”

“I know,” said the Duke.

“Then you know what I am.” She laughed, and the sound of it was not good. “I am the daughter of a thief who found out he was going to be caught and set fire to his own office with his child in the room. That is what the coroner said. Forty minutes, and he had it right. And I have wasted three years of my life proving him correct.”

The Duke of Rothmir put the lamp down on the table.

“Miss Vain, when a man means to destroy a book, he burns the book.” She did not answer. “He does not burn the building around it and leave the ledger sitting on a shelf two miles away in his employer’s own house, with a page cut out of it. And he does not put the piece he cut into his daughter’s hand.” He waited. “Somebody wanted that page gone and the rest of the volume left standing, because a missing volume is a scandal and a missing page is an accident. That is not a frightened man in a hurry. That is somebody being careful. It is his hand.”

“Yes. You cannot argue with a hand.”

“No,” he said. “But you can ask why he wrote it.”