"Can he do it?"
"He can attempt it, and Mrs. Gill can spend £300 resisting it, which she has not got." Sturges took off his spectacles. "Your Grace, I want to be plain in front of both these women, because it is their house and not ours. Mr. Edmund Vane has not touched the book, and he is not going to. He is going to take away the room the book lives in, and the trade that pays for the room. And in eight months, there will be no house at Duke Street, and a fitting book from a dressmaker who has gone out of business is a curiosity."
"Then I shall buy the lease," said the Duke of Marchford.
"You may not," said Mrs. Gill.
Everybody turned round.
"Ma'am, Your Grace, I have been thirty-one years at this, and I have got four girls upstairs, and I shall say this once." Mrs. Gill's chin was up. "The day the Duke of Marchford owns this house is the day every word in that book is his. Not mine and not hers, yours. And every one of those eleven ladies who left me in August will say it in a fortnight, and they will be right to say it, and there will not be one soul in London who believes a line of it afterwards."
Mr. Sturges put his spectacles back on rather slowly. "She is entirely correct," he said.
"I am aware that she is correct," said the Duke of Marchford, "which is why I have been sitting here for four minutes not knowing what to do, and I find I dislike it extremely."
***
It was Hannah who worked it out on the 6th of July, and she worked it out because of the sleeves.
She had been going back through the book for the eleventh time. Sturges had asked her to look for anything about the brother she had not put in, and she had told him there was nothing, and had gone back through it anyway. And she had stopped at the entry for the 9th of March.
*Sleeve to be 3 in. shorter than pattern. She asked twice.*
Three inches shorter in March on a gown for a June wedding. Hannah Poole sat in the workroom at eleven o'clock at night with a candle and understood with a completeness that made her put the book down that she had written the whole of it in the very first entry and had not known what she was looking at for four months.
She went to Mrs. Gill at six in the morning. "Ma'am, in March, why does a bride ask twice for a shorter sleeve?"
Mrs. Gill was quiet for a long moment. "Because a longer one wants a longer glove," she said. "And a glove that goes above the elbow wants pulling on and off in front of whoever is in the room. And a short sleeve... a short sleeve with a long mitt," said Mrs. Gill, "which she goes on wearing indoors, and nobody remarks on it because it is the fashion, and she never once has to have her arms bare in front of anybody at all." She sat down. "Hannah, what is in the book about mitts?"
Hannah opened it. "*April 11th, would not turn. April 29th, kept her chin up. May 9th, did not move.* There is nothing about mitts, ma'am," she said. "There is nothing about her arms in the whole book. Eleven fittings and I have got her bust and her waist and her underarm and her shoulder, and there is not one measure of her arm anywhere in it. And I have taken arms on every gown I have ever made in seven years."
She looked up. "I did not take them because she asked for the sleeve on the 9th of March," said Hannah Poole. "And once a sleeve is settled, you do not take an arm again and she knew that. Ma'am, she knew that. That is why she asked twice."
Mrs. Gill of Duke Street put her hand over her mouth.
"There is one more thing," said Hannah, "and it is the reason I did not sleep. Whatever there was to see, ma'am, it was there in the March. Because a girl does not arrange in March to have her arms covered in June unless she already knows in March what is going to be on them."
***
They put it to Mr. Sturges on the 7th, and he was in that back parlor four hours.
"It is not proof," he said at the end of it. "I want that understood by everybody in this room, and particularly by you, Your Grace, because you have a face on you that I have seen before. A short sleeve is a short sleeve. Half the brides in London had them last summer."
"Then what is it?"
"It is a question," said Mr. Sturges, "that has never been asked and that cannot be answered by anybody except Miss Caroline Vane. And she is at Bath, and she has written four pages about her brother to a man she jilted, and she has not been asked one single question by one single person in her whole life who was not that family." He shut his notebook. "I am going to say something now that is not a lawyer's advice," he said, "and I shall deny it in a letter afterwards. The book cannot save Mrs. Gill's lease and it cannot touch Edmund Vane, and it will never in this world be read out in any court. But there is a young woman at Bath who has spent twelve weeks being watched by somebody who wrote down what she saw and never once told her. And I have been four hours listening to those entries, Miss Poole, and it seems to me that she is the only person in England who is entitled to know that book exists."
Hannah Poole sat in the back parlor at Duke Street. "You want me to go to Bath?" she said.
"I want nothing of the kind. I am a solicitor, and I want everybody to sit still and do as they are told." Mr. Sturges stood up and got his hat. "I am simply observing in a room at the end of a long afternoon that in eleven days that girl has had one letter from a man she wronged and eleven from a family she ran from, and that nobody at all has written to her from the room where she stood for twelve weeks and could not get away."