Chapter 78 Reserved Judgment

The second day began with Selby and Daniel Cleave, and it ended — everyone in the chamber understood it by noon — with Selby wishing he had never heard the name Cleave at all. The lawyer's cross-examination was a thing of craft: he took the boatman through every payment, every date, every tide, hunting for one seam of exaggeration into which a court might insert its finger. He found none, because there was none to find, and the harder he worked the more plainly the chamber saw a hired oath dying in front of it while an honest man stood inside its skin saying only what he had seen. By the hour's end even the pigeons outside seemed to have lost interest. Then it was the defendants' day entire, and Rosalind had spent the night before preparing for it the way her mother had taught her to prepare a canvas: everything true, nothing wasted, ground laid smooth so the color could carry. Mr. Barrow read Graves's affidavit first — fifty years of stewardship entered in that upright, ink-cuffed hand, wages paid through bad seasons, accounts kept open, and one paragraph, added at the end in a smaller line, telling of Squire Hugh's visit to the registry thirty years gone: *one hour, unattended, among the oldest leaves.* The court heard the old man's voice in it without ever hearing the man. Then Violet. She went into the witness box with her white gloves on, and asked leave — the clerk blinked, but leave was given — to handle the exhibits herself. What followed the reporter from the Morning Chronicle would call, in a column nobody dared cut, *the most theatrical moment Westminster has offered since the Queen's trial*, though Violet would have bitten him for the word theatrical. The mutilated register leaf came out of one portfolio; the cut corner came out of another, in Vane's oilcloth under Barrow's certified seal; and before the Vice-Chancellor's own eyes she set the triangle of paper against the leaf's raw edge — chain-lines running true, pagination leaping the gap unbroken, five ghost-lines of stub meeting five lines of verse like a key entering the lock it was cut for. The paper fit. The chamber made a sound Rosalind had never heard a court make: half breath, half sigh. "And the hand upon this corner, madam?" the Vice-Chancellor asked, leaning forward despite himself. "Hugh Thorne's, my lord. Copied fair within hours of the cutting — the ink is his, the spelling is his, and the tremor where his nerve broke is his also." Violet turned the corner over with two gloved fingers. "For upon the reverse, my lord, he wrote eight words. I will read them, if the court pleases." She read them: "*A house may steal a page. Not what it says.*" Silence again, longer. At the claimant's table Lord Philip Vane did not look at his counsel; he looked at the ceiling, jaw set, eyes bright, a man watching his family's whole inheritance of guilt pass publicly out of hiding and finding — visibly, undeniably — lighter for it. Selby fought the rearguard action of his career. Forgery: unknown age, unverifiable custody, oilskin conveniently waterproof against exactly those tests that date paper; the whole apparatus of lamps and verses and Portuguese ledgers being, he submitted with something near feeling, a religion seeking the standing of evidence. He moved that the covenant and all associated documents be taken into the Master's custody for expert examination, costs following events. Barrow opposed; Ampthorpe weighed; and the law did what law does, which is proceed carefully where love would leap. The documents went into custody — the covenant, the corner, the leaf, the journal, all of it, labeled, sealed, inventoried — examination to be reported with all convenient speed, judgment upon the cause reserved until the sitting after the Christmas recess. *Reserved.* The word followed them down the steps into the blue afternoon like a verdict's shadow. Reserved meant alive; reserved meant winter; reserved meant that Blackmore's fate would hang in a drawer in Westminster while the snow decided whether December intended to be picturesque or lethal. They walked out through the corridor crowd in silence until the street door let the cold in, and then Ines stopped dead on the top step, sniffing the wind off the river like a pilot taking soundings, and delivered the day's epitaph. "Two hundred years ago a light left a harbor because two sisters said yes, and no court in Europe was told. Today eleven lawyers argued over whether yes is binding, and a man in a wig called our keeping *theater*, and God forgive me, I was proud of him." She drew her shawl tighter. "He is right, you know. It cannot be proved. Keeping is not provable. It is only *done*, daily, by people too stupid to quit — and then one morning the drawer is opened, and the paper fits, and the world discovers it has been living downstream of a miracle for two centuries without asking where the water came from." That evening, up in her room at Gower Street with the fire burning small and the city roaring softly below, Rosalind kept the hour. Julian found her at the window with her charcoal and the sketch he had carried four days in his breast pocket, and she turned the paper toward him as he came in: herself drawn at a ship's rail, coat collar up, watching to seaward. "You said I stood in the bow of a ship that hasn't been built," she said. "I have been thinking about that. A hull needs water under it, Julian. Whatever Ampthorpe rules after Christmas — estate, ruin, or something between — we are afloat already. We have been since the cove. There is no verdict that can beach us unless we consent to stand still and let the sea go out." Julian studied the drawing a long time. Then he crossed the room, and turned her chair from the window, and knelt — this captain who bowed to no one — and said, in the voice he saved for shipping articles and wedding vows: "Then here is my log entry, wife, for whatever master reads it after us. Sailed in company. Weather various. Crew of two. No port named, nor wanted. We keep each other; the rest is coasting trade." He kissed the ink stain on her finger, and rose, and lit the traveling lamp on the sill, where its little borrowed flame leaned gently eastward through the fog — toward Derbyshire, toward the towers and the valley, toward the wreck in the cove and whatever stood watch upon it, patient, four flashes and a rest.