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

Chapter 26

The committee’s first real case arrived in November, brought by a woman of seventy-three who walked up two flights of stairs rather than send a letter, because she did not trust letters and said so within four minutes of entering.

Her name was Mrs. Carrow. She had been a governess for forty years, then a housekeeper for seven, and she had been left an annuity by an employer who had died without children and without, it turned out, any clear instruction about what should happen to the sum he had promised her verbally in front of witnesses over the course of two decades.

The estate’s solicitor had written to her twice, politely, explaining that there was no document to support her claim.

Charlotte read the file. Then she read it again.

“There is no document,” she said.

“I know there is no document.”

“You understand that I cannot invent one.”

Mrs. Carrow looked at her over the rims of her spectacles with an expression of tremendous patience.

“Miss Whitmore,” she said. “I have been a governess for forty years. Do you imagine I am unaware that I have no document?”

Charlotte felt the tips of her ears go hot.

“Then what would you like me to do?”

“I would like you to tell me whether there is anything else that might be looked at. Because I do not know what else might be looked at. That is why I have come to you and not to a lawyer, and I will tell you why.” She folded her hands. “A lawyer looked at me for four minutes and decided what my case was worth. You have looked at me for twenty and have not decided anything yet. That is why I am here.”

Charlotte pushed aside the polite forms she had been mentally composing and started, instead, to ask questions.

It took three afternoons.

The annuity, it emerged, had been paid for eleven years and then stopped — not at the employer’s death, but a year before it, which Mrs. Carrow had assumed was an oversight and had not wanted to raise because he had been unwell. The payments had come from a personal account, not the estate’s. The account had been administered by a solicitor who had since retired. And one of the payments — the second to last — had been made by cheque rather than transfer, and the cheque had been signed not by the employer but by a clerk, under an authority that Mrs. Carrow had, after some searching, kept a copy of in a biscuit tin.

It was signed by the employer. It was dated. It named the account. And it said, in the employer’s own hand, on account of the annuity as agreed.

“That is not proof,” said Mr. Alden, when Charlotte brought it to him.

“No.”

“It is a hook.”

“Yes.”

They wrote to the retired solicitor, who was seventy-nine and living in Worthing and replied within a week, entirely willingly, with a letter confirming that the annuity had existed as an arrangement and that he had administered it for eleven years on instructions he had never thought to put in writing because the employer had been a friend.

The estate settled within four months. Mrs. Carrow received thirteen years of arrears and an apology drafted by a solicitor who, Charlotte suspected, had never in his life been made to write the word apology in connection with a governess.

She came to the office in March to thank them. She brought a cake, which nobody ate, and she sat in the chair by the window for half an hour and told Charlotte about the eleven years she had spent teaching two boys who had grown up to be a barrister and a naval officer and who had between them written to her twice.

When she left, Charlotte sat for a while with her hand flat on the table.

“Why are you smiling?” Nathaniel asked. He had come to walk her home and had clearly been waiting outside to avoid interrupting.

“I am not smiling.”

“You are.”

Charlotte looked at the empty chair.

“She did everything right,” she said. “She worked for forty years. She never made a fuss. She saved every paper anyone ever gave her, including one that nobody else thought mattered. And without one clerk who happened to sign a cheque instead of transferring money, she would have died with nothing.”

“Yes.”

“That is not justice. That is luck.”

“No,” Nathaniel said. “That is how justice usually arrives. It is carried in on luck, by people who kept what they were told to throw away. The question is only whether there is anyone in the room who knows what to do with it when it comes.”

Charlotte stood up and put on her coat.

“There should be more of us,” she said.

“There should.”

“Then that is what the fund is for.”

They went down the stairs together, and outside the snow had mostly melted, and the street smelled of wet stone and the first green things of the year.