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

Chapter 19

Mr. Alden asked her to stay behind after a committee meeting in April, and Charlotte assumed she had made an error.

She had, in fact, made an error — a small one, in a chronology, corrected before anyone acted on it. She had told him herself, within a minute of noticing. She expected, when he closed the door, to hear about it.

Instead he took off his spectacles and cleaned them, which she had learned over two years meant he was about to say something he had rehearsed.

“I have been asked my opinion on the inquiry’s final report,” he said. “By two of the arbitrators. They wish to know whether the methodology should be adopted for other reviews.”

“That is good news.”

“It is a question with a trap in it.” He put the spectacles back on. “If I endorse it, it becomes mine. If I disparage it, I am contradicting findings I helped to verify. What they are really asking is whether the approach can be trusted when I am no longer available to vouch for it.”

Charlotte said nothing.

“The answer I gave them,” Alden went on, “is that it can be trusted without me, because it did not originate with me. It originated with a person who reads differently — who sorts by claim rather than by collection, who asks when a document was found as well as when it says it was written, and who assumes that a respectable source may still be wrong.”

He looked at her.

“I gave them your name.”

Charlotte’s hands were quite still in her lap.

“I am not a solicitor,” she said.

“No. That is the point. If you were, the method would belong to a profession, and professions are conservative things, and it would be quietly absorbed and quietly dropped. Coming from an outsider, it is a technique. Techniques spread.”

“That is a very elaborate way of saying I am useful because I am unqualified.”

Alden’s mouth moved, which with him was a laugh.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

Charlotte considered being insulted. She found she could not quite manage it.

“Mr. Alden,” she said, “when I first entered a room with you, you expected me to ask something foolish.”

“I did.”

“Would you expect that now?”

He thought about it, honestly, the way he did everything.

“No,” he said. “I would now expect you to ask the thing that makes the rest of us go back through the file. Which is more annoying.”

He rose and collected his papers with the deliberation of a man who had decided, some years ago, to stop hurrying.

“There is one more thing,” he said at the door. “Your mother.”

Charlotte looked up.

“I met Lady Margaret at the Hartwell wedding,” Alden said. “She asked me, without preamble, whether the report would make you a public figure, and whether that would be good for you.”

“What did you say?”

“I said that I did not know, and that it was not for me to decide.” He opened the door. “She said that was the most sensible thing anyone had said to her all evening, and then she asked me to tell her exactly which of the arbitrators were likely to be difficult, so that she could sit beside them at dinner and say nothing at all.”

Charlotte stared at him.

“That is a very odd form of support,” she said.

“It is her form,” said Alden. “I have been a solicitor for forty years. I have learned that love and usefulness look almost nothing alike, and that people rarely offer the second when they mean the first.”

He went out.

Charlotte sat alone in the empty office for a little while, with the lamps burning, and thought about her mother at a dinner table, saying nothing at all, on purpose, for her daughter.