Don't be resigned, Sarah pleaded silently. I shall not be able to bear it if you are resigned. She fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief she did not yet need while she mustered her courage. "You have seen his deed. Is it legitimate?"
"Quite genuine." The old man sighed. "I saw it Tuesday last in Bath. Henry the Eighth, royal seal, witnessed by the king's remembrancer. Henry was selling off the abbeys, you know."
"I can't believe that no one has lost a deed before." Sarah twisted her handkerchief. "These old piles are always burning down. There must be some record of the grant by the Crown."
Rutherford Lestrom waved a hand. "No one can find anything in the public records. They have been kept so badly over the years that most are rotting away. And the ones that remain could be anywhere—the Tower, Westminster Abbey, the Rolls Chapel. Why, they are planning to move some to the stables behind Carlton House, I believe."
The man's father shook his head. "The House of Commons appointed a committee to find out where everything is, my dear. But they are having the devil of a time doing it. And they have been at it for almost twenty years."
Sarah put her hand to her eyes. It wasn't fair that this dreadful Davinoff could just destroy her life. She raised her head. "Well, I am not the kind to wait for the ax to fall, sirs," she announced. "If the records of the Crown are my best hope, then I shall comb London for them. If I have five days, I shall use them."
"It is a fool's errand," Mr. Lestrom, Jr., said, coming out from behind the huge desk.
His father raised his eyes from where they rested upon the neat pile of papers on the desk. "Lady Clevancy is right, of course," he said, with rather more resolution. "I shall go with you."
"No, Mr. Lestrom," Sarah announced. "We must split the territory. Who is in charge of these public records?" she asked, the task unfolding before her in her mind.
"The Master of the Rolls," old Lestrom answered. "The public records are all strung together upon parchment rolls affixed with the king's seal. If there is any knowing, he does. But we must apply to see him. It will take time."
"All right, Mr. Lestrom," Sarah said. "Do you apply to see him. I have another idea." With that, she strode out the door, leaving two generations of Lestroms staring after her.
She ordered a hackney to Finsbury Circle and the new library of the London Institute. If Parliament was looking into public records, there must be a report from the committee. She couldn't begin to search everywhere in only five days. Perhaps the report would give her direction.
She braved hostile male stares in the library to accost an unwilling clerk. It was not long before he handed her several handsome volumes, cornered in calf with marble boards. She sat at the tall table, sifting through the indices until her feet were both asleep. Thomas Ashton had been granted Clershing as reward for services rendered upon the Restoration. That focused her search. But grants of land were buried in with grants of every other sort: medals, honors, titles. Sarah began to bite her nails. Finally she found it. Grants of deeds from Charles II through the present were located in the Rolls Chapel. Now she had the trail. She would stop in Berkeley Square to make sure her trunk had arrived; then she was off to the Rolls Chapel.
When Corina's butler, Reece, opened the door in Berkeley Square and let her inside, Sarah could hear her yelling even from the hall. A footman scurried up the stairs with an empty trunk while the housemaid stumbled down them in hysterics, resulting in a near collision. The housekeeper shouted to the groom for the mistress's carriage. Reece did his best to seem unfazed by this maelstrom, but even he replied with some abstraction when Sarah asked if Corina was at home.
"For the moment." He frowned.
"Oh dear! She invited me to stay." Sarah felt like an intruder.
"Your trunk came this morning, Your Ladyship." Reece made no suggestions.
She had to see Corina. "If you don't mind, I will show myself up to Mrs. Nandalay's room."
"Of course, Your Ladyship." Reece stepped aside. Sarah passed the harried housekeeper, who looked on helplessly as Corina's two Yorkshire terriers completed the pandemonium by tumbling down the stairs. They skidded on the polished floors as they raced after the housemaid.
Sarah stepped over the yapping balls of fur and made her way up the stairs with a feeling of impending disaster. When she reached Corina's boudoir, her friend was pacing up and down while Lansing, Corina's dresser, and the second housemaid hastily put clothes and hats, brushes and face creams, feathers and wraps into four huge trunks, which crowded the room.
Corina still wore a yellow striped satin wrapper. "Is it so hard to comprehend that I would like my servants to make a little haste?" she asked the chandelier with upraised arms. Then,
"Sarah!" she cried, spying her friend. "What have I forgotten? The carriage is called for. I sent the second groom ahead to Chambroke. I cried off from Lady Hertford's rout. Whatever is left?"
Sarah wondered if Corina remembered her promise. She sighed. "Why all this haste?"
"What I want will appear in Bath very shortly, and I want to be there when he does," Corina snapped. She stalked over to the wardrobe and began pulling hats off the top shelf.
Sarah sat on a footstool. She was in a real dilemma. "Corina, come and sit with me a moment. They will do better without you, you know." Anger flashed in her friend's blue eyes. Then she laughed and sat in the chair beside Sarah.
"You are probably right. One cannot find servants who move at more than a snail's pace."
Sarah saw Lansing's dark look behind Corina's back. "Have you forgotten that I was to go home with you?" she asked, smiling ruefully at her friend.
"Of course I did not! You are welcome to come with me."
"But I need to stay in London for a few days," Sarah reminded her. "That was why I could not go with Lady Beldon this morning. I suppose all this haste is related to Davinoff."
"As Julien thinks upon our time together, he will make haste for Bath," Corina confided.
"Did you make a definite engagement when he drove you home?" Sarah pressed.
"Men are never very definite." The young woman waved a hand.
"Corina, you may be disappointed." Her friend's fixation seemed curious… unless one had seen Davinoff in person.
"He will come." She smiled slowly with the glowing confidence of the truly beautiful.
Sarah paced the room. It was no use asking Corina to stay. "I cannot leave yet."
"Stay at the Clarendon, then hire a chaise and four whenever you like," Corina returned, moving to supervise her servants once more. She didn't offer to keep the house open.
"And outriders too, I am sure," Sarah snapped back, but it was lost. Her friend did not seem to care how she solved her dilemma.
"You're crushing that dress, Lansing."
Sarah's mind raced. A hotel? What could she afford? As for her way home, it would be the Mail coach, with all the difficulties traveling alone would bring. So be it. "I will see you in Bath," she said, as she left. Corina did not even see her go.
Sarah borrowed A Picture of London, 1806, a well-thumbed guidebook from the library at Berkeley Square, on her way out, to get the exact location of the Rolls Chapel. She gave the hackney driver the address and told him to wait, since the coach now held her trunk. She resolved to stay at the Two-Headed Swan, the inn from which the Mail started for the west country. In the coach she carefully counted out the money she had left in her reticule. The hire of hackneys had depleted her resources. Enough for two days, not more, what with lodging and food and the ticket to Bath. She had better find the record of her deed at the Rolls Chapel.
The guidebook said the place had begun in 1232 as a church for converted Jews built by Henry III. One certainly couldn't tell that now. It had been rebuilt so many times it was rather a hodgepodge of styles. Inside, the stone floor of the nave was bathed in the dim blue light of stained-glass windows. Sarah couldn't see anything like rolls. The aisle held nothing but monuments. She peered at the nearest and saw that it was for o
ne John Yonge, a Master of the Rolls in the sixteenth century. Well, that was a good omen. Peeking about between the dark wood of the carved choir screens, she saw several stacks of rolls and sighed in relief. This wasn't so bad. If need be, she would look through every roll herself. Still, it would be better if she could find a keeper. She pushed through a short wooden door that rose beside the choir.
The sight that greeted her stopped Sarah as though felled by a blow. Gone was the dim stained-glass light. The ceiling of this huge stone room was supported by buttresses, ornately carved. Its windows streamed sunlight onto tables, shelves and piles, all stacked with paper rolls. They were everywhere, tied with red ribbons and closed with official-looking seals. Some, near the door, appeared new and bright; most were cracked and moldering. The smell of damp pervaded all, contradicting the bright sunlight.
Between the stacks ran a maze of narrow walkways, half overcome in several places with rolls that had tumbled from their piles. An old man scurried about, dressed in a dusty coat twenty years out of style, mumbling to himself and loaded down with an armload of fat, flaking parchment cylinders. At several points about the room narrow places were cleared on the tables. Clerks had unrolled bolts of the crumbling paper and were transcribing furiously.
Sarah felt her stomach churning. Each roll appeared to be thirty or forty feet long, once unfurled. And there must be thousands of rolls here. She hovered uncertainly. "Excuse me, sir," she said as the old man tottered down the nearest path. "Are you the Master of the Rolls?"
He peered up at her, distracted. "Oh dear me, no. No, no, no, no. I am just the head indexer, ordering up this mess. No, I am definitely not the Master of the Rolls."
Sarah pounced upon his implied knowledge, hope rising again. "If you are making the index, you are just the one I want to talk to, sir." He peered at her again, over his spectacles.
"To me? What business could a young lady have with me?"
"I need to find the record of a deed. The Report of the Committee on the Public Record said that memorials of deeds were in the Rolls Chapel."
The old man looked around. "We have all sorts of things here. We just don't know where."
"Are they sorted into any order at all?" Sarah asked, clutching at straws.
"We've made some progress," the head indexer acknowledged.
"The deed was granted by Charles the Second in 1664." Then, as the old man looked ever less certain, she pleaded, "I do need to find the record ever so badly. It means everything."
"Well"—the old man seemed to regret that he couldn't help—"I just don't know… Wait!" He stopped suddenly and turned to face her again. "Did you say Charles the Second?"
She nodded eagerly.
"We had those rolls out. Was it last week? Someone else asked about deeds from that period."
"What?" Sarah asked, wary. "Someone asked you to find deeds from Charles the Second?" Was this coincidental or the forces of chaos at work? "Who was it?"
The indexer waved his hand. "I don't remember faces, you know, just documents. But Geoffrey was able to help whoever it was." He led the way to a sallow young man bent over a roll. "Geoffrey, this young lady wants a land grant by Charles the Second. You had those out last week."
The younger man nodded and pointed. "Over by the window."
"Who came to look at them, can you recall?" Sarah asked, torn between the desire to rush to the window and a strange sense of foreboding.
"Can't say. I just pointed him to the pile over there, same as you," the scribe said, then turned dismissively back to his roll and his cramped lines of indexing.
Sarah went to the stacks by the window, hope fluttering her heart, as the head indexer drifted back to his former task. "Careful not to damage them," he called over his shoulder.
The stack of parchment was nearly as high as Sarah was. She lifted one from the top. It was surprisingly heavy, and inscribed with Charles II, Rex, XXIII for the twenty-third year of his reign. That meant her deed would be numbered IV. What could protect her from Davinoff was right here somewhere! She pulled down others: XVII, IX, V, III. All years except the fourth. Her stomach clenched. Number II, then I. She began to run into rolls labeled with Charles I and bearing his seal.
"Geoffrey," she called to the young scribe who'd pointed her here. Her voice was not quite steady. "There is a gap here."
"Cromwell didn't keep rolls," the man replied absently. "Dismantled the whole system."
"No," she managed. "I mean you are missing the fourth year of the reign of Charles the Second."
"Nonsense," he said impatiently. "That was a complete set." He flipped through his closely lettered sheets. "I indexed the whole sequence. You must have missed it."
"Come look," she called in a flat voice.
He rose from his stool and strode to the window. Searching her pile, he next began taking down others in growing frustration as he looked for the missing year.
Sarah stood like a statue during his flurry of activity. When he finally stood and put his hands on his hips to survey the disorder, she asked, "Could someone have taken it?"
"Of course not. What would anyone want with one of these moldering ruins?"
"You can't remember who came to inquire after these particular records?"
The clerk looked at her in growing consternation. "I can't say I paid much attention."
Someone was taking a great deal of trouble to make sure Sarah could not locate any record of her deed. Circumstance seemed to be building an impenetrable wall around her. Davinoff was the cause. She was sure of it.
Chapter Three
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Sarah came back to the waiting hack in the yard outside the church, her thoughts awhirl. The driver whipped up his horse to take her to the Two-Headed Swan, but Sarah hardly noticed. She needed either the deed, or the Crown record of the grant. She had neither.
What to do? She racked her brain. Could Davinoff have taken the deed from the Lestroms' offices? Her heart contracted. If he had the deed, he had destroyed it. He would not leave a record of his perfidy intact. Damn him! It wasn't fair! She brushed angrily at her cheeks. If he had destroyed all trace of her deed, there was nothing she could do. Yet she could not slink home to Bath to let Davinoff have Clershing whenever he liked. She lifted her head. After all, she did not yet know that her own deed was irretrievably lost. She only knew that the Lestroms couldn't find it.
Sarah sat bolt upright in the carriage. Lestrom, Jr., had written to Josiah Wells. That man might know. He had been her steward and her father's for more than thirty years. And she had another score to settle with Mr. Wells. He was acting for Davinoff. How could he betray her thus? Yes, she would see Mr. Wells, but first she must go back to Bath and gather her resources. She might have to sell her mother's pearl earrings. They were all that was left except for the ruby set her father had given her mother when they married. Sarah had resolved never to sell them. Unless, of course, it came to putting food on the table. Which was entirely possible at this point.
That evening, Sarah squeezed herself into the Mail coach between a taciturn clerk and a stout woman with a child sitting on her lap who smelled of garlic. The other passengers were a cleric and a middle-aged man with luxuriant black whiskers and a decided paunch tightening his unfortunate mustard-colored waistcoat. She noted with some distaste that his coat was spotted and his cravat not what one could call fresh. His broad smile did not reassure her.
On the open road between stops, the drafty, creaking coach jolted over potholes and lurched around corners. It seemed to Sarah to creep along at a snail's pace. It stopped often, but only long enough to check the passengers' tickets, heave off luggage and the mail, and hoist on the new cargo. There was no time to eat or even warm oneself with a cup of coffee. Passengers came and went. Only Sarah and the man in the mustard waistcoat always remained.
As her thoughts went round and round her predicament, something began to nag at her. No one remembered who had asked to see the records of Charles II at the Rolls
Chapel. Surely anyone who had seen Davinoff would remember him. An unimportant point, but one she could not explain. Soon, she could no longer think clearly at all, dulled by the rattling coach. She dozed fretfully through several stops. Just before dawn she found herself sitting next to the man in the mustard-colored waistcoat.
"Good morrow," he said, smiling down at her. At close range his whiskers were greasy. A pungent smell emanated from his person.
Sarah wiped her eyes and straightened. "Good morning," she responded, then pointedly turned her head to watch the sky lighten. She tucked her cold hands under her arms to warm them as the coach lurched, and the man in the mustard waistcoat leaned against her. She pushed herself as far as she could into the corner of her seat. "Please, sir," she protested.
The man slowly righted himself. Too slowly, to Sarah's mind. "Pardon, Miss." He grinned. "Jes' part of riding the Mail. I'd guess you ain't familiar with the Mail. Me, now, I rides coaches very frequent. Me lay makes me most familiar with coaches."
Sarah ignored the opportunity to inquire about his "lay," but she could not cut off his attempts at conversation. "Not as familiar as Jemmy 'Icks, o' course," he guffawed. " 'E was so familiar with the Mail, 'e swung fer it. Why, when me an' Gin Lane Jane was lookin' fer that servant girl what loped with them pearls, we was all the way to Manchester on the Mail." Sarah was sure his "lay" was on the shady side of the street.
At dawn, she took the opportunity provided by a change of horses to walk about the inn yard. The chief purpose of this stratagem was to change her place in the coach. But her persecutor contrived yet again to sit next to her by offering his seat in the corner to an elderly lady. As the coach moved off he steadied himself with a hand on her knee.
"You will kindly keep your hands to yourself, sir," she ordered in no uncertain terms.
Her adversary only chuckled. "Coaches just cain't be trusted, now, can they, m' sweet?"
Sarah had no desire to make a scene by asking the driver for help, and she wasn't even sure he would care. The day seemed to stretch forward interminably. They would be lucky to reach Bath by dark at this pace.
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