Page 79 of The Forger and the Duke
She was surprised that her voice carried across the room, with its high vaulted ceilings, when she felt so out of breath. Shakily she opened her book and withdrew a matching piece of parchment.
She tried her best to sound calm and authoritative, though her knees quaked. “I have here the record of marriage entered into the parish register at St. Mary Redcliffe in Bristol. And a statement from the vicar of St. Mary Redcliffe, who conducted the marriage, attesting to its validity. If Your Honor will allow me.”
“The court acknowledges new evidence submitted by Miss Amaranthe Illingworth,” Oliver said. She was taken aback by what seemed to be a twinkle of amusement in his eye. “You may approach the bench.”
“This is preposterous!” The duchess’s barrister leapt forward as if he meant to bar her way. “You cannot produce more false information! This is entirely against procedure.”
“Froggart,” the judge said coolly, “you forget that you are in my courtroom, not yours. Miss Illingworth, proceed.”
“I visited the church while I was in Bristol,” Amaranthe explained to Mal as she surrendered the documents. He stepped close to peer over her shoulder at the record, and she thrilled to the sense of warmth at his nearness. He wasn’t angry. Astonished, but not angry.
“The vicar produced it when I told him the situation,” she went on. “The page had been removed from the rest of the register, which is why your Aunt Beatrice couldn’t find it when she looked. I gather your grandfather made the vicar understand that no one who came looking was to find this document. As an enraged duke, he was extremely persuasive.”
“But you found it.” Mal’s eyes glowed with admiration. Her sense of warmth increased.
Oliver put the two pages side by side. “These record a special license for the named parties and were properly witnessed as well as signed by the priest,” he said. “Hugh Delaval and Marguerite Grey were by these lines married in the eyes of the Church, and therefore under the laws of Great Britain.”
“Forged!” Sybil said shrilly. “Lies.”
Mr. Thorkelson coughed into his hand. “I’m afraid the duchess may be correct, Your Honor. I have reason to know that Miss Illingworth has involved herself in forgery prior to this.”
Every particle of warmth that had filled Amaranthe turned to ice.
“Ibegyour pardon.” Mal’s barrister turned to the witness. “Was anyone talking to you?”
“I have proof,” Thorkelson said. “My firm conducted an inquiry into the Illingworth family when Mr. Illingworth was hired into the Hunsdon household. I have been a personal witness to her habit of forging rare medieval manuscripts and selling them to unsuspecting owners for a very high price.”
“What’s this?” Oliver turned his attention to the witness.
Sybil stepped forward. “You were the one wearing my gowns?” she demanded. “You?” Her contemptuous gaze raked Amaranthe from head to toe before she turned an icy stare on the blond Viking. “Thorkelson, tell them,” she commanded.
Mr. Thorkelson looked at the judge, avoiding Amaranthe’s pleading eyes. “As I said, Miss Illingworth is a very skilled copyist,” he said. “My office is aware of at least one manuscript she was commissioned to translate, an alchemical treatise dating to the thirteenth century, whose owner, an Oxford don, thought he was in possession of the single surviving copy. Imagine my surprise when I later discovered a copy of this alchemical treatise in the library of a different client, a scholar whose estate I was in charge of. It happens my client procured the manuscript through the bookshop of one Mr. Karim, commonly known as the Moor.”
Amaranthe sucked in her breath. How had he found out about her copy? That alone was enough to damn her, but Thorkelson’s manner indicated he had more weapons in his arsenal.
“It then came to the attention of our office that Mr. Karim also sold, some years ago, a manuscript that bears a very close resemblance to a bestiary held in the college library of St. John’s at Oxford University. And just lately Mr. Karim conducted the sale of yet another valuable manuscript, also virtually identical to a holding in St. John’s College library. All of these manuscripts, he will swear under oath, he acquired from Miss Illingworth.” Thorkelson’s cold blue eyes bored into her.
“Forgery?” The man called Froggart gasped. “That is a capital offense, Your Honor!”
“Is it true?” Oliver fixed her with a stern glare. “You made these copies.”
Lying would achieve her nothing. “Yes,” Amaranthe agreed in a hollow voice. “The alchemical treatise he mentions was theTreatise on the Spheresby John of Holybush. I was asked by a friend of my old schoolmistress to make a fresh copy he could share with his students. I made a practice copy while I produced the fair copy, and Mr. Karim took interest in it, as the treatise draws much on the work of Arabic astronomers. The works I copied from St. Johns College Library in Oxford are thePhysiologus,a medieval bestiary, and the more recent sale is theSecretum Secretorum.Also known as theBook of Secrets, the?—”
“Yes, the advice of his tutor Aristotle to a young Alexander the Great.” Oliver nodded. “I saw your copy in the bookshop, remember? Only knew it because I had to read it for my exams. And you took the manuscript from an Oxford library?”
“Borrowed it, Your Honor, while my brother was a pensioner there.” She didn’t add she had parted with these copies—works she’d never intended to sell—only to support first her own household, and then Hunsdon House after Sybil had robbed them. Her purposes wouldn’t matter to an upholder of the King’s laws. Only the fact of the crime.
It was over. With her a known forger, Mal would not be believed. It was best he had already cast her from his life, now that she was about to be thrown into the bridewell and tried as a criminal. What would happen to Joseph with a sister in prison or transported, or worst of all, hanged? What would happen to her household, to Eyde and Derwa and Davey and Mrs. Blackthorn and Inez? She’d never have the chance to spend time with the Delaval children, if they ever forgave her. She’d never have the chance to spend time with Mal.
She turned her eyes to him, lost. She’d fallen in love, firmly and truly. She’d finally found a man she could envision sharing her life with. She’d regret losing him most of all.
“So, Mr. Thorkelson, you accuse Miss Illingworth of selling, for profit, copies she has made of ancient manuscripts,” Mr. Oliver said mildly. “Quite skillfully made copies, if her reputation is to be believed.”
“None of that constitutes forgery,” Mal said.
He wasn’t talking to her but to the judge. Amaranthe blinked, her vision blurred with the tears she fought to hold back. Mal, of all people—the man who had scolded her so thunderously in her own study, before he sheared her from his life forever—he would try to claim here, in a court of law, that she wasn’t guilty? She gestured at him to cease before he sank his own reputation along with hers. But he carried on.
“Was it forgery that Bishop Thomas Percy found and reprinted hisReliques of Ancient Poetry?” Mal said. “No. He was simply sharing antique works he had discovered that he knew would be of interest.”
