Chapter 83 The Claimant's Cards

Twelfth Night came in white and went out gray, and on the morning they were to have ridden for the coast the messenger brought word that sealed Blackmore's own gate instead: a horse blown to a shadow, a groom half-frozen, and, an hour behind them on foot because no horse in Derbyshire would face the drift, Lord Philip Vane, in a coat that had been fine in London and was now a garment of ice, carrying a canvas sack tied with a length of rope. Graves met him in the yard with all the ceremony a man of the house owed a claimant and none of the warmth, and Vane, to his credit, did not try to charm the steward. He went straight in to the fire, let the household gather — Rosalind and Julian, Ines and Violet, Gabriel with his sketchbook closed, Thomas at the door — and put the sack on the long table and untied the rope. "These are my grandfather's letters," he said. "The strongbox letters. The ones that mention the deed only in the line I gave you at Westminster. I have decided —" he looked around the room once, and whatever he saw there let him go on plainly — "that my family's secret is no longer my family's to keep. You fed me when I came to be your enemy, and the least a man can do with a gift he did not earn is spend it on the giver. Read them. They are yours. I have sent my own clerk to Mr. Barrow with an affidavit to say so, and with my word that I will not put forward the deed of November eighty-one as my title. I mean to testify that it was never offered in honesty by anyone who could be asked." The silence that followed had texture. Then Ines, who never wasted a silence on ceremony, drew the first packet out and held it to the light, and the reading began. The letters spanned the last four winters of Hugh Thorne's life, and they were not the letters of a monster. They were the letters of a man who had stolen a page to save a house and then spent the rest of his days watching for the owner. Rosalind read them aloud with the fire snapping, and what they recorded, between the weather and the repairs and the careful endearments to a wife and children, was the long administration of a single fear. The deed troubled Hugh to the end. *It was made in the law's tongue,* he wrote to his steward in the autumn before he died, *because the law will not hear any other, and I have balanced my soul against a sheet of paper and lain awake ever since, asking which of them is heavier. The discharge stands as my protection and my shame. What comfort I have is this: when the day of asking comes, the answer will not be found in ink at all.* Vane, watching the fire, spoke the line Rosalind remembered from the corridor at Westminster. "What is done in ink must be answered in flame. He wrote a shorter version of that thirty times — I have counted the crossings-out, because a boy alone in a large house counts strange things. He meant the deed to be answered, not simply stood against. He built the answer somewhere the law would not think to look." "At Greycombe," Violet said. "At the chapel ground. The ground that was never in the settlement." "And the letters say more than that." Vane drew out the last packet and laid it open with a delicacy that surprised everyone who had ever seen him enter a room. "This one is not to the steward. It is to the keeper of the north-west light, whom he addresses as though she were alive and waiting for the post. *The headland was given to the light before the deed was made,* he writes, *and so was never mine to give away. Let them discharge every manor on the map. What I set outside the settlement cannot be discharged, because I was never its owner to promise it. Read this against the day the paper is produced. If my hand is doubted, the shrine knows a better witness than any clerk.*" There was a moment in which the fire seemed very loud. Then the messenger, who had been warming himself at the end of the hall with a cup in his fist, broke in with the second half of his errand, and the shape of the week changed again. Barrow's letter was short and, for Barrow, nearly angry. Selby, it said, had read his client's intended defection in some way not yet understood — the clerk's affidavit had no sooner been drawn than opposing counsel had countered it with an instrument of his own: the deed of 1781, duly assigned, for value, to one Josiah Pike of Cornhill, a scrivener who dealt in exactly such instruments and asked no questions of them. Whatever Vane chose to say on his oath, the deed would now speak through a stranger who had no ancestor to forgive and no letters to read, and who had already moved the Vice-Chancellor for a trial at the first day of the Hilary sitting, upon the genuineness of the paper alone, with an expert of Selby's choosing freshly engaged to swear to its ink. "Counsel keeps the war alive by changing its uniform," Ines remarked to the room at large. So the claimant's new cards lay on the table in front of them, and they were stranger than any of them had foreseen: the letters that damned his family had been freely surrendered by the only man alive who could have burned them, and the deed they were meant to answer had walked out of his hands into the grip of a stranger who would invoke it for money and nothing else. It was Julian who spoke into the middle of it, in the voice he kept for shipping articles. "Then we ride today, not tomorrow. The shrine holds a better witness than any clerk — Hugh wrote it himself. If the answer to the deed lives on that headland, we had better arrive there before Mr. Pike's agents learn west from Wales on a map." He looked at Vane with a captain's measuring attention. "You know the coves. You said your grandfather drew you the headland. How do you come at Greycombe in this weather?" "The old road runs along the tops," Vane said. "You cannot miss the chapel if you come at it from the sea side — the arch faces the water and the roof is gone, so it shows against the sky like a jaw with one tooth missing." He said it without affectation, and then added, quieter, "I have not been there since I was a boy. I have been wanting, for eight weeks now, to go back to something that was mine before the claim was ever my father's." Nobody consulted Rosalind as to whether the claimant of Blackmore should travel with the keepers of Blackmore. It was not, she understood, a question the house intended to put to itself. The chain had decided its company before any of them had spoken. They went out into the gray morning with the traveling lamp lashed into its bracket and the estate books locked and Barrow's letter buttoned into a coat pocket, and at the head of the valley, where the road bends north-west toward the water, Vane reined in and pointed. On the western horizon, small and steady against the white sky, a light rose and fell four times, and rested. "It knows we are coming," said Gabriel, who had been watching with the instinct of a man who draws shadows. "The station is counting its chain," Rosalind said. "Let us not keep it waiting." And the four-flash answer came again from the water, patient as a pulse, as the keepers — and the last of the Thornes, riding with them — turned their horses into the northwest wind.