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 9

The noise that went up took the recorder a full minute to put down.

“Your grace, this is not the manner—”

“My lord, I have with me a magistrate of this county, a coroner’s officer, and the chief clerk of Coutts, in company, and I have been nine days on the road between here and Northumberland. If the court will not hear it this morning, I shall lay it before the Lord Chief Justice this afternoon, and I would very much rather do it here, where the young woman I ruined nine days ago can hear it.”

The recorder looked at him a long moment. “Swear him,” he said.

He began with money, because money is dull, and juries believe dull things. The chief clerk of Coutts opened the japanned box. Eleven payments drawn against the Northumberland rents of the Duchy of Rothmir between March 1812 and January 1816, nine thousand two hundred and forty pounds in total, entered by Thomas Vain and signed by Thomas Vain.

“And where did that money go, Mr. Denny?”

“Into an account at our house in the name of Marcus Rothmir, Esquire, my lord. Within four days, on every occasion.”

The court came off its benches.

Marcus’s counsel was up at once, and it was the obvious answer, and he made it well: a guardian receives estate money, a guardian disperses estate money, there is nothing irregular in a clerk paying money into the hands of the man who ran the estate.

“Quite so,” said the Duke, “which is why I have brought the estate books as well.”

The clerk laid them along the front of the bench — all four years. Every one of those eleven payments appeared in the duchy’s own accounts under a different description. Drainage at Alnwick. Repairs to the sea wall at Bamburgh. A new roof on a tithe barn at Chatton — twice, in the same year.

“My lord, I have walked that sea wall. There has been no work upon it since 1798, and I have the parish surveyor’s book to say so, and the surveyor himself is in the passage outside this room. The tithe barn at Chatton was pulled down in 1809. There is a turnip field where it stood.”

Somebody in the gallery left, and was put out.

“That is your theft, my lord. Nine thousand two hundred and forty pounds of my money, taken by my uncle over four years, entered in my ledgers by a clerk who did as he was told because he had been shown what would happen to his daughter if he did not.”

“And the fire?” said the recorder.

The Duke of Rothmir put his hand into his coat. “My lord, I would ask the court to hear the fire office first.”

The man from the Sun Fire Office was small and dry, with a bad cold, and had surveyed the ruin in Coleman Street on the sixteenth of March 1816, made a report, been paid three guineas, and thought no more about it for three years. He had found the seat of the fire on the ground floor, in the back passage by the yard door — not upstairs, where the papers were.

“No, sir. The upper floor was worst burnt, but fire climbs. It begins low. It began by the yard door, sir, and it began in a quantity of spirit laid along the boards, because I found the burning in a line, and fire does not lay itself in a line.”

“Was that in your report?”

“It was, sir.”

“Who received your report?”

“It went to the coroner, sir, in the ordinary way.”

The coroner’s officer was sworn next, elderly, and had clearly stopped enjoying his retirement over the last nine days. The fire office report had been received on the seventeenth. The inquest was held on the eighteenth.

“Was it read at the inquest?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“It was not in the bundle, sir.”

“Where was it?”

The old man looked at his hands. “It was took out, sir, before the bundle went in.”

“By whom?”

“A gentleman came to the office on the seventeenth in the afternoon,” he said. “He said he was of the family of the party whose money was concerned, and he was very civil, and he gave me five guineas, and said the family wished the thing done quick and quiet, for the sake of the daughter. A suicide verdict is closed in forty minutes, and a fire is a matter of months, and it would be in every paper for a year.”

“Would you know that gentleman again?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look about the court.”

The old man looked for a long time, and then raised his hand and pointed into the second row of the body of the court, and Lord Marcus Rothmir sat quite still with his hat on his knee.

“That is not proof of murder,” said the recorder over the noise. “It is proof of a suppressed report and a bribe.”

“No, my lord, it is not proof of murder.” The Duke’s voice had changed. “I am obliged to give the court that myself, because I am the only man living who saw it, and I have had three years to understand what I saw, and I did not understand it until I stood, some days ago, in a turnip field in Northumberland, and finally understood who the fire was for.”

The room went quiet again.

“I have said in evidence that when I turned into Coleman Street, the upper floor was alight, and a man was standing in the road watching the windows. I have said I did not see his face. That is true, and I cannot mend it.” He turned and looked at the dock for the first time since he had come into the room. “But I have never told anybody the rest, because until a few days ago, I did not know what it meant. There was a man inside that building, on the ground floor, at the back, by the yard door, in the worst of it. I could hear him. He was not trying to come out. He was shouting one word, over and over, up the stairwell. I could not get past the passage because the ceiling came down across it, and two men from the fire office pulled me out of the doorway by my coat.”

“What word?” said the recorder.

“A name, my lord.”

Cordelia Vain put both hands flat on the rail of the dock.

“For three years, I believed I had gone into a burning building and heard a thief die in his own fire, and I could not decide whether I was sorry. Then, some days ago, I stood in a field where a tithe barn was supposed to be, and I understood at last that the whole of it was built to answer one question: what happens if somebody looks at the books? By March of 1816, two people had looked at those books. Thomas Vain had looked at them, and had already written to me twice, and had a page cut out of my ledger in his pocket. But Thomas Vain could be hanged with his own signature — my uncle knew that, and had known it for four years. He was not afraid of Vain. He had never once been afraid of Vain.

“There was one person in the world who could stand up in a court and say, I entered those figures beside my father, I copied that page into the duplicate book, I saw the money leave and I saw it come back described as a sea wall — and who had no signature on anything, and nothing whatever to gain, and could not be hanged for any of it. She was twenty years old and she sat at the desk in the corner because he could not afford a clerk. He stopped—” He had to.

“The fire was laid at the yard door at nine in the evening, on a night when the office was known to be working late, at the foot of the only staircase. My lord, it was not laid to destroy a ledger. The ledger was two miles away in my own house, and it is there still. It was laid to destroy the witness.

“My uncle stood in the road and waited to see it done. And Thomas Vain, who had four years of his life to be ashamed of, went into that passage and could not get up the stairs and would not come out, and stood at the bottom of the stairwell in the fire, shouting his daughter’s name.”

Cordelia Vain made a sound in the dock. It was not loud. Two women in the gallery began to cry, and one of them was the wife of a juror.

“He was not running from an inquest,” said the Duke of Rothmir. “He had been dead four days when they wrote suicide over him, and he could not answer it, and I did not answer his letters. He went back in for her. That is the whole of it. He went back in for her, and he did not come out, and the man who put that word on him is sitting in the second row of this court.”

Lord Marcus Rothmir stood up. He did it slowly, and looked around the room, and whatever he had been going to say, he did not get to say it, because of what happened next.