Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen

Names Given Willingly

Ruth brought her blue-striped dress to Nella’s infirmary room and laid it across the end of the bed.

“You can keep the paper,” she said. “I want the dress.”

Nella had bandages over two fingertips. The surgeon had ordered her to stay in bed until she could cross the room without the floor tipping under her, an instruction she had already tested and disliked. She took the dress by its collar, not its hem.

“I meant to put the stitching back.”

“Before or after he searched me?”

Nella gave Ruth the sort of look she once reserved for badly cut paper. “I didn’t know he would come into the house.”

“You thought he might.”

“Yes.”

Ruth waited. Nella tried to bend one of her injured fingers and stopped.

“I should have asked,” she said. “I was afraid you’d say no.”

“I might have.” Ruth took the dress back. “You can repair it when you can hold a needle. Ask me then.”

She left with the cloth over her arm. Ms. Doe, who had been waiting in the passage, moved aside to let her pass. Ruth did not thank her for doing so.

Nella had wanted the conversation without an audience. Ms. Doe entered only when invited. The room smelled of boiled linen and the sharp soap used in the infirmary washroom. Outside, an early freight tram rattled over uneven track toward Saint Corda. Its wheels had a different rhythm from the trams near Ashgrove’s home; she knew this district better now than she had a week ago and less well than the women who slept in it.

“Lio lost her place at the works,” Nella said.

“Yes.”

“Because they came for the papers?”

“The registry notified her employer after the search. My hold made Sable file the complaint that brought them there.”

“You could have told Mrs. Thorne what you were doing.”

“I could have told all of you. I did not.”

Nella pulled the blanket across her knees. “Would you have listened if we said no?”

Ashgrove took longer with that than she would have liked. “I might have argued. I might still have done it.”

“Then you did know it mattered.”

“I knew.”

Nella set the blanket down. She wanted more than an apology delivered in the right shape; Ashgrove could see that. But Nella had not invited her in to be reassured, either.

“The estate money didn’t go to him,” Nella said. “I’m glad of that. I’m alive. I’m glad of that too.”

“I used your name in the registry after I said I would ask.”

“You did.”

“I am sorry.”

Nella shifted against the pillow, wincing when her hand took her weight. “You can tell Lio. She may have a use for it. I don’t know what I want from you yet.”

Ms. Doe left before she could turn the silence into a request for forgiveness.

Lio was waiting with a folded theatrical handbill. Ashgrove passed her in the corridor, then heard Nella ask from the bed whether the factory had really dismissed her. Lio said it had. She had brought the handbill because the gallery price for “The Duchess Beneath the Lake” had stayed where it was through the weekend.

“I have eleven pennies,” Nella said.

“You do. I carried the jar here myself.”

“You were meant to borrow two.”

“I was. Now I’m unemployed and you’ve been living in an oven. Perhaps we go and dislike the play together.”

Nella asked whether Lio could sit beside the window until the clerk came. Lio unfolded the handbill and began describing the costumes, including one painted crown she considered an insult to crowns. Her voice followed Ashgrove down the corridor. For a little while the women had a Saturday to discuss rather than a name to defend.

Harrow came in with a court clerk after the noon bell. He had arranged for Nella’s preliminary statement at the infirmary because she could not travel. The clerk had a clean form and a cramped stool. Harrow tested the stool before she sat; one leg was short, so he folded a scrap of card beneath it and went on with the business.

He explained what the statement would cover. Nella could identify the man who came as a parish clerk. She could describe Della’s token, the journey through the linen stair, the body in the drying room and the door Sable bolted from outside. She could testify to the demands he made for the ledger leaf. Harrow had other witnesses for the document boxes and the complaint, and he did not ask her to account for every woman at Thorne House.

“The name for the record?” the clerk asked.

“Nella Card.”

The clerk hesitated over the blank. Harrow said, “Enter the name she gives. Add ‘known in this inquiry as’ if you need a qualifier.”

“The burial return—”

“Is already in the file,” Harrow said. “The magistrate may ask more at trial. Today she can tell us what happened to her.”

Nella watched the clerk write. “I can tell him where I got the name if he asks me. I won’t tell him Ruth’s old one.”

“He has no reason to ask for Ruth’s,” Harrow said. “If that changes, I will tell you before you’re in the room.”

It was the size of promise he could make. Nella signed with the hand that had fewer cuts.

Her account supplied what the physical evidence could not. Sable had shown her Della’s brass thimble with a dent like a bitten edge, telling her Della was in police custody. In the bakery he let Nella see the body and demanded the removed leaf. She told him copies had already gone out; if she died, someone would send them to a reporter. It had been a lie. He believed it long enough to give her water and search for the original.

“Did you know Della agreed to the first false claim?” Harrow asked.

“She told me. She called it borrowing from a house whose owners never visited.” Nella watched a freight tram draw past the window. “She expected half. He gave her less, then said the police would only believe him about who invented it.”

“You still helped her.”

“She came back to undo some of it. That didn’t make the first part vanish.”

Harrow let the clerk finish writing before he asked another question. Della could be a murdered woman and a participant in fraud on the same page. The case would have to bear both facts.

The evidence around Nella’s statement was substantial without any resident surrendering a name she had not chosen for the inquiry. Calder’s stock register accounted for the retired Saint Wythe wrappers; the false request was cut from that stock. The ledger pulled from Sable’s fire showed transfers to the private branch account beside 418/9 and two earlier claims. In the bakery, black binding thread caught at Della’s cuff matched the missing ledger’s construction, though Harrow would not call thread alone an identification. One key surrendered at Sable’s arrest fitted the newer cylinder on the drying room. His complaint contained the trunk detail known to the man who had visited the house in a grey coat, and the constable who received it could testify that Sable himself delivered it. Esther’s account placed the shawl on her trunk only after the visitor reached the house.

Harrow showed Ms. Doe the list at the Agency office that evening. He had separated facts he could prove from explanations they still needed to test. Sable’s solicitor would challenge the cloth, the custody of Ruth’s leaf and the use of Nella’s chosen name. The arrest was secure; the trial was not finished simply because the right man was in a cell.

“Ruth kept the original under Mrs. Vale’s seal,” Ashgrove said. “Her permission is written with it.”

“Good. Let her decide whether to testify about finding it. We have the copied entry and Sable’s book without making her birth record a condition.”

He looked at the Agency’s new intake sheet on the desk. Mrs. Vale had crossed out a line that once allowed the person bringing a case to specify confidentiality for everyone mentioned in it. Underneath, in her square hand, she had written separate spaces for each affected person to state what could be shared and with whom. If that person was absent, the sheet required a recorded reason for any urgent action and a date for telling them afterward.

“That will slow you,” Harrow said.

“It slowed us after the fact anyway.”

He set down the evidence list. “I’ll need a statement from Lady Ashgrove about the holds.”

“I will ask her,” Ms. Doe said.

Harrow accepted that answer and moved to the next page.

At Thorne House, Sabine gathered the residents around the table after supper. She had taken the document boxes from their recess and left them visible. The walls no longer gave them safety; each box was a route into somebody else’s employment and past.

“We cannot pass these papers on again,” she said. “I’ll keep the rooms open while each of you decides how to replace what you need. There are solicitors who will help with a work card. Mrs. Vale knows one who won’t charge for the first appointment.”

“I know one who will tell you what he can and cannot do,” Mrs. Vale corrected. “I will not promise the result.”

Sabine nodded. She had learned to leave space after making an offer. Ruth asked to keep her box until she could read it alone. Mara said she would help people with food and bedding but would not speak to another Agency investigator about the house. Lio took her work papers and the contested wage notice. She might challenge the dismissal. She had not yet decided.

Sabine visited Nella afterward with the box marked CARD. She asked whether Nella wanted the original rent book and parish copy in the infirmary or kept at the house until she returned.

“I want to choose where they go,” Nella said. “I don’t know the place yet.”

Sabine rested the box on the chair rather than putting it in Nella’s hands. “I can wait.”

“You’ll have to.” Nella did not say it cruelly. She asked Sabine to bring the theatre jar the next time she came, and Sabine agreed to carry that instead of another form.

Esther collected her trunk after Harrow released it. Her train left in the morning. Sabine asked whether she wanted a meal for the journey, and Esther accepted. Sabine did not ask for the station where it would end.

That afternoon, Lady Ashgrove met Mirelle Quill at the Agency before the newspaper went to type. Quill’s notes contained the inheritance claim, Della’s death, the search and Lio’s lost job. She had no resident names from the police and had declined an offer from a registry clerk to sell her the house’s address.

“I intend to write that your hold stopped the money,” she told Ashgrove. “I also intend to write that it brought the examiner to the women you promised to consult.”

“Do not print the street.”

“I won’t. The street isn’t needed for either fact.”

“The Agency will take responsibility for its part.”

Quill uncapped her pen. “I need you to say what that part was.”

Ashgrove told her. She gave the time of the holds, the warning that licensed agents could see them and the consultation she had not made. She did not give Quill a resident’s unused name. Quill asked once whether Ashgrove would have filed the holds if she had been told no. Ashgrove said she had no answer she trusted. Quill wrote that down as well.

The following morning, a pot of bean stew waited at the Agency’s side door. Somebody had tied its lid down with a strip of clean cloth and left no note. Across the front sign, in red paint thick enough to drip onto the pavement, somebody else had written INFORMERS.

Mrs. Vale carried the pot inside. Theo went for water and a brush. Ashgrove stood at the sign long enough to see that the painter had taken care to keep the word level, then rolled up her sleeves and began with the bottom stroke.