"They are not going to be able to stop me if I do," he said. "So what they are doing instead, and it is in the eleventh line and it is very cleverly put, is establishing now in writing, on the record, that any such marriage would be the consequence of an improper connection begun in September 1829 on the night of the dinner." He looked at her.

"On the night of the dinner," said the Duke of Hollingbourne, "which nine people attended and four of whom will remember exactly what you were wearing." Alice Verity did not sleep on the night of the 14th of June. By four in the morning, she had understood two things.

The first was that they were going to lose, not the marriage, because nobody could stop that, but the record. The letter was already written and lodged, and in five years or twenty, the sentence an improper connection begun in September 1829 would be in a file at Lincoln's Inn with a date on it. It would outlive every person who could contradict it, and there is nothing in this world so durable as a lie that has been filed.

The second thing she understood was that she had spent nearly three years building the answer without knowing it. She got up at five and walked the two miles to Hollingbourne in the dark. She let herself into the library with her own key, which she had had since October of 1829 and had never once used out of hours. The Duke found her there at seven.

"Verity-" "Sit down, sir. I have been here two hours, and I have got it, and I want to say it in order or I shall lose the thread." He sat down.

"They are going to say that this began on the 9th of September 1829 at a dinner table, and every fact they will put forward is true. A housemaid was brought up to dinner. She wore your late wife's gown. She left service within the month and has been paid eighty pounds a year by you ever since, and she has worked alone in a room with you almost every day for two years and eleven months."

Alice had her hands flat on the table. "There is nothing in that we can deny, and I am not going to try." He watched her. "Then?" "So we do not answer it," said Alice Verity. "We publish it."

The Duke of Hollingbourne stared at her. "The catalog," she said. She turned the quarto book around. "4,081 entries. 2,011 in her hand, dated 1816 to 1818, in ink that is eleven years older than mine and that any man in the trade could tell you was. 2,070 in mine, dated from the 1st of October 1829."

"Every page of it initialed and dated as I went, because you told me to on the 9th of October, and I have never once missed one. Sir, it is not a defense. It is a record. It says what I have been doing in this room, every day, for nearly three years, in my own hand, in ink, in order."

"It cannot be got up afterward, and any expert in London would say so in ten minutes." The Duke said, "You want it printed." "I want it printed by subscription, in two volumes, and I want it done properly by a good house. Payne and Foss, or whoever will take it."

"I want it to say on the title page exactly what it is." Alice took a breath. "A Catalogue of the Library at Hollingbourne. Begun by Sarah, Duchess of Hollingbourne, 1816. Completed by Alice Verity, 1829 to 1832." Neither of them moved.

"Her name," said the Duke of Hollingbourne. "Her name first, and mine second. And yours nowhere on it at all, except as the owner of the books." Alice looked up at him.

"Sir, they mean to put a sentence in a file. So we put two volumes in every library in England, with a date on every page, and in eleven years' time, when somebody at Lincoln's Inn takes out that letter and reads improper connection, there will be 4,081 entries sitting in the London Library saying what the connection actually was."

The Duke of Hollingbourne sat quite still for about eleven seconds. "You have been building an alibi for three years," he said, "and you did not know it." "No, sir. I have been making a catalog," said Alice Verity. "It only turned into the other thing at about four this morning."

It took eighteen months and cost the Duke of Hollingbourne 411 pounds, most of which was never recovered. Payne and Foss took it in November of 1832. Alice went to London twice, the first time in her life she had been farther than Canterbury, and sat in an office in Pall Mall with two elderly gentlemen who wanted to know why the earlier entries were in a different hand. She told them plainly in about four minutes, and one of them took his spectacles off and did not put them back on for some time.

A Catalogue of the Library at Hollingbourne in the County of Kent was published in two volumes in June of 1834, in an edition of 400, price two guineas. It sold 111 copies and was reviewed in three places. The Gentleman's Magazine gave it eleven lines and called it a model of its kind, then spent a further nine lines on the fourth column, which it described as an impertinence in a work of reference and the most entertaining thing the reviewer had read that year.

The fourth column was in it. Alice had fought for that with Payne and Foss for four months and had very nearly lost, and had won in the end by pointing out, accurately, that nobody would buy a catalog of a private library in Kent for the shelf marks. So the whole of it went in.