HER MOTHER TOLD THE DUKE SHE COULDN’T READ—THEN HE FOUND HER SECRET ROOM OF LAW BOOKS

Chapter 17

The inquiry had numbers. Charlotte wanted faces.

It was Henry who arranged it, because Henry had spent three months in taverns and solicitors’ offices and knew where the wreckage had washed up. He came to Whitmore House one grey morning in the last week of June with a list of six names and a hired carriage already waiting.

“Three of them will see us,” he said. “Two will not. One has left the county.”

“Three is enough.”

Three turned out to be a great deal.

The first was a widow named Mrs. Aldridge, who lived in a tall narrow house in a town Charlotte had never heard of and who received them in a parlour that had clearly once been grand. Two of the good chairs had been sold; the spaces where they had stood were still faintly marked in the carpet.

Her husband had borrowed against future rents on the advice of a man he trusted. The man had been recommended by a firm that had been recommended by another firm. When the rents did not arrive as forecast, the lender had called the loan early, under a clause Mrs. Aldridge had never read and could not have understood if she had.

She had lost the eastern farms. She had kept the house, barely.

“Everyone tells me my husband was foolish,” she said. “He was foolish. He was also fifty-one years old and had run that estate for twenty years and had never once been given reason to doubt a man who came to him with letters from people he respected.”

Charlotte wrote nothing down during that conversation. She did not need to.

The second visit was to a farmer, a tenant rather than an owner, whose lease had nearly been terminated when an altered boundary map moved a line through his best field. He was a broad, weathered man in his sixties who talked about drainage the way other men talked about religion, and he showed them the field in question with the flat pride of a man who has worked the same soil for forty years.

“They told me the line had always been there,” he said. “I said, I have walked that line since I was nine years old. They said, then you have been wrong since you were nine years old.”

“Did you believe them?” Charlotte asked.

“For about a week.” He spat, politely, into the hedge. “Then I went and dug out my father’s copy of the old map. It was in a tin under the stairs. The line is where I said it was.”

“And when you produced it?”

The farmer looked at her with something that was almost pity.

“They stopped asking me questions,” he said. “That is how you know.”

The third visit was the worst, because it was the emptiest.

It was a house that had been sold. The family had gone — to a smaller place, Henry said, an hour’s ride away, and he did not think they would want to be found. There was nothing to see but a gate and a drive and a stand of oaks that had presumably outlived three generations of the people who planted them.

Charlotte stood at the gate for a long time.

“You could not have known,” Nathaniel said.

“That is not the point.”

“No. But you are standing here as though it is.”

She looked at him.

“The point,” she said, “is that I found this by accident. I was in a drawing room because it was raining and my mother wanted me out of the way. If the Duke of Ravenshire had not owned a road in Hampshire—”

“Then someone else would have found it. Later. Worse.”

“Would they?”

Nathaniel did not answer, because he was honest strategically, and he knew he did not know.

On the journey back, the three of them sat in the carriage and said almost nothing. Henry, who talked when he was uncomfortable and was never uncomfortable, talked the entire way about a horse he had once owned that had been magnificent and had died of something stupid. Charlotte listened to every word and understood that he was not talking about the horse.

She wrote it all up that night, in the attic, by the lamp Nathaniel had given her.

Not the legal reasoning. That was already done, and better done, and would be argued by men with titles in rooms with high windows.

She wrote the faces.

Mrs. Aldridge’s two missing chairs. The farmer’s tin box under the stairs. The stand of oaks in front of a house that no longer belonged to the family that had planted them.

When she finished she sat back and read it and thought that it was not evidence, and would never be evidence, and could not be entered in any proceeding anywhere in England.

She kept it anyway, and filed it with the rest, and on the front she wrote a title in her cramped hand:

What the words cost.

She would show it to no one for eleven years.

And when she finally did — to a room of people who had never met Mrs. Aldridge, or the farmer, or the family who had left before she arrived — she would find that it did more work in ten minutes than two hundred pages of findings had done in a season.