Chapter 15 The Ledger

What came through the door was not, in the end, the bottles, which could be argued about by clever men, and not the grave, which could be condemned as a crime, but a book. Ephraim Cope had spent the whole of the autumn and the beginning of the winter reading the Unity's quarterly returns, and it had taken the charge against Prudence, and the light that the charge threw into her shop, to give him the last piece, because the last piece was a signature. He came to the weighing room on the Thursday night with a satchel of copies, and he spread them out on the bench under the lamp and put his finger on the bottom of each return, where the three trustees of the society signed. "There should be three signatures on every quarterly return," he said. "There are three here, and three here, and three here. Look at the names." She looked. Every return carried the name of Barnaby Skell, as secretary. Beside it, every time, the name of Mr. Trubshaw, as trustee. And beside that, on every return but the last four, the name of a third man, an auditor, a retired brewer named Mr. Rufford, who had died in the summer. On the last four returns, the third name was different. On the last four returns, the third signature was Skell's own, written in a smaller, straighter hand, and under it, in the space for the auditor, the words *in the absence of Mr. Rufford*, which was true, because Mr. Rufford was in the ground. "A dead man has been signing the society's accounts," Ephraim said. "Or rather, a living man has been signing them for him, and writing his own name in the margin so the hand would match, which is a thing a clerk notices and a gentleman does not, because a gentleman reads the sums and a clerk reads the letters. The sums were very tidy. The letters were not." He turned to the figures. The Unity's fund for the sick and the dead had, on the returns, held within a few pounds of the same figure for three years, through a bad trade and falling levies and rising sickness. Ephraim had reconstructed what the fund must in truth have received and must in truth have paid out, from the society's own lists of members and levies, which he had copied from the chapel's books, and from the number of claims, which he had counted from the depositions. And the two sets of figures told a story so simple that Prudence wondered how no one had read it before: the true fund had been falling, year after year, and the returns had been smoothed to hide it, and a man cannot smooth a fund for three years without at some point putting his hand into it, so the hole had grown, and the hole was now roughly the size of eleven death benefits. "He did not poison them for the money," Prudence said slowly, working it out aloud. "The death benefits went to the families, or to a pauper's funeral. Those would dip into the fund. He poisoned the ones who were beginning to ask." "He poisoned the ones who could read the returns," Ephraim said. "A society has its members, and among the members there are always a few clever ones, the men who can read a quarterly account and add a column, and who are asked to speak at the annual meeting. A member like that is a danger to a man with a hole in his books. And so, one by one, over a season, the members who could read the returns and add the column began to take the fever. The cooper, who kept the society's own accounts in his spare time. The gatekeeper, who had made a nuisance of himself about the levy. The needlewoman, who had asked at the annual meeting why the sick money had come down." He put his finger on the list of names. "Look at them, Miss Ruddock. Not the poorest, though he chose the poorest quarters so no one would look. Not the oldest, though age would have been the easiest to explain. He chose the ones who were nearest to the accounts, and then he made them a fever, and the account was safe." "A man can be killed twice," Prudence said. "The first time with the cordial, and the second time with a column in a book." "Aye. And the second killing is the one that is hard to charge him with, because a book cannot be cross-examined and a column is not a witness. So the Crown must have the cordial after all, which is why your jars and your graves are not wasted, and why the two of us are in this together whether we like it or no." Ephraim turned the page and put his finger on a name near the middle of the list. "But there is a third thing, and it is the thing that will decide it. Somebody carried the bottles. Somebody stoppered them on the Fridays and wrote the day in the wax, and somebody was standing in the room when the white powder went into the ones that were meant to go, because no machine folds a paper in three folds and no ledger pours a bottle. That somebody is Coombes, and Coombes is frightened, and a frightened visitor will swear to what he carried and whom he carried it for, and when he swears it, Skell's own wax and Skell's own hand and Skell's own arithmetic all come together in one place, which is the place a jury likes best, which is a man's own hand on the thing he cannot explain." "And if Coombes will not swear?" "Then we have the book and the bottles and nothing to tie the hand to the bottle, and the learned gentleman for the society will say the powder was added by the woman who found it, which is the story they have already prepared, and half the town is already telling it." Ephraim met her eyes. "I have spoken to Coombes. He will swear. He cried, and then he said a thing I have thought about since. He said he had washed his hands every Friday for eight years and had never once been able to say why, and that a man who washes his hands without knowing why has known all along." Ephraim folded the copies again. "He will not forgive you for having found the jars, but he will hate me more for having found the letters. And the letters are what will hang him, because a body can be argued about and a grave can be condemned as a crime, but a man's own hand in a man's own book is not an argument. It is a confession." He looked up. "I have made a copy for the coroner, and a copy for the assize, and I have put the third copy in a place I will not tell you, in case a light comes in the night. If anything happens to me before the assize, that third copy goes to a newspaper in the next town, and there is no society in the county that can buy a newspaper in another town." He smiled, a small, ink-stained, frightened, determined smile. "I am a clerk. It is not a great deal, but it is a great deal of paper, and paper is what I know." Prudence looked at the three copies on the bench and thought that a man who makes three copies of a thing has already decided which side of history he means to be found standing on, and then she put the kettle on the hob, because it was long past midnight and neither of them was going to sleep. ---