"He'll not come to the gate." Charlotte laughed, and there was nothing good in it. "He'll come to church. He'll stand up in the churchyard at Ravensworth on a Sunday morning in front of three hundred people. A bereaved and patient man come eleven miles to see his stepdaughter. And he'll take my hands in front of everybody and ask me kindly to come home to my mother. And whatever I do next, he wins. If I go, he has me. If I refuse, I am the girl who turned her back on her own mother in a churchyard."
The Duke of Ravensworth stood in his empty gallery and looked at her. "Then we had better find out what he is," he said.
"He is what he is. He's careful. There's nothing to find."
"There is always something to find," said the Duke. "You told me in January that he got his money out of a man in Doncaster in a fortnight, four years ago, and the man's wife stopped coming to church. You told me a girl called Susan Yates left the counting house very suddenly in the spring of '23 and was said to have gone to an aunt." He was already walking. "You have been carrying those two facts about for four years thinking they were nothing but a bad feeling. They are not a bad feeling, Charlotte. They are a date and a name."
He stopped at the gallery door. "Mr. Coyle is in Ripon getting £411 out of a timber merchant," he said. "I am going to write and ask him to stop in Doncaster on his way back."
***
Mr. Coyle was in Doncaster nine days and wrote three times.
The man Hurst had been owed money by was called Prentice, and he had a corn business, and he had paid £400 in eleven days in the autumn of '22, and he would not say one word about it to a stranger. His wife would not come to the door.
Susan Yates was harder. She had not gone to an aunt. She had gone to Leeds and been in a mill for two years, and was now married to a man named Dobbs and had a child. When Mr. Coyle finally found her in the second week of July, she shut the door on him twice before she opened it a third time.
What she told him took four hours, and he wrote it out that night in an inn at Wakefield, and Charlotte read it in the housekeeper's room at Ravensworth with the door shut, and she was sick afterwards.
Susan Yates had been seventeen. She had kept the counting house books. In the spring of '23, she had found that money was going out of the business under the heading of freight to a carrier who did not exist. She had done the sensible thing and taken it to Mr. Hurst. Mr. Hurst had been very kind about it and had said he would look into it.
Nine days later, Gerald Hurst had gone to her father and said sorrowfully that Susan had been taking money, that he had the books to prove it, and that he would not go to the constable if the family would make it good and if the girl was sent away quietly where she would not be a temptation to herself. Her father had believed him. Her father had beaten her, paid Hurst £11 the family did not have, and put her on the Leeds coach.
*She has never been home,* Mr. Coyle wrote. *Her mother died in '26 believing her a thief. She says she will not come to a court and I did not press her. She says one thing more, and I set it down in her own words as near as I can. "He did not do it because I found it out. He did it because I was the one who kept the book, and if ever it came out, he wanted it to have a name on it that was not his."*
Charlotte sat for a long time. Then she went and got the four ledgers she had brought with her from Marsden in her small case in January, because she had kept the household accounts for seven years and had brought them without ever asking herself why. She opened the one for 1823 and looked at the freight entries in her own handwriting.
There were eleven of them. She had been fifteen years old, and Gerald Hurst had stood behind her chair and told her what to write.
***
Gerald Hurst came to Ravensworth Church on the second Sunday in August.
He had done it exactly as Charlotte said he would. He came eleven miles in a hired gig with his hat in his hand, and he waited in the churchyard among three hundred people coming out of the eleven o'clock service. When he saw her, he did not call out. He simply stood and let himself be seen, and let the crowd notice him noticing her. It was very well done.
Charlotte, coming out of the porch with Mrs. Ives, felt the whole churchyard turn.
"Charlotte." He came forward and took both her hands before she could withdraw them, and his voice carried without seeming to. "My dear girl. I would not write again. I thought it better to come."
"Mr. Hurst."
"Your mother is not well." His eyes were wet. They were genuinely wet. Charlotte had watched him do it for seven years and had never once worked out how. "She asks for you. The boys ask for you. I have not come to reproach you. You are of age. You have made your choice, and I have said so in Marsden a hundred times when people have said harder things." He pressed her hands. "But she is your mother, Charlotte. Come home."
Three hundred people were listening.
And Charlotte Neave, who had spent seven years being biddable and four weeks preparing for this exact minute, took her hands back and said clearly, "Yes, I'll come."
The churchyard made a small sound. Gerald Hurst's face did something complicated for about a quarter of a second.
"I'll come today," Charlotte said, "and I'll bring Mr. Coyle, who is the Duke of Ravensworth's man of business and is standing behind you. And I'll bring the four household ledgers from Marsden that I have had in my possession since January. And we will all three of us sit down with my mother and go through the freight entries for the spring of '23."
She had never in her life seen a man's face empty out so completely.
"And after that," Charlotte said, "we will talk about Susan Yates, who did not go to an aunt. She is married and living in Leeds, and her name is Dobbs, and Mr. Coyle has four hours of her account in her own words, signed. And her father is still alive in Marsden and has believed for six years that his daughter was a thief."
"Charlotte." His voice had gone strange.
"And then Mr. Prentice of the corn business in Doncaster, who paid you £400 in eleven days in the autumn of '22 and whose wife has not been to church since." She was speaking quite quietly now, and the churchyard had gone so silent that quiet was enough. "I don't know what that one is. I have a guess. Mr. Coyle has a guess. I would very much rather not find out, Mr. Hurst. And whether I find out is entirely a matter for you."
Nobody moved.