Chapter 24: Mad, They Said

Alaric sent the captain out before the tea had gone cold.

"Six men, fast horses," he said. "Watch every door at Rook Hall."

"If anything leaves in the night, I want to know which road it takes."

He did not ask me whether it was too late.

We both knew what Seraphine would tell Edmund, and how long it would take her to run.

I asked for the king at ten the next morning.

He gave me the council chamber and every lord in it.

The viscount had demanded that the whole court hear the duchess's "revelation".

The long room was full to the walls.

My father stood on my right, and Alaric on my left, with the guards a pace behind him.

Edmund stood across the table with his father and the stooped little clerk, and he was smiling a little.

Seraphine was nowhere.

"Your Grace," said the king, "you have something to tell the crown."

I opened the green diary on the table.

I slit the lining again, in front of them, and laid out the six brown leaves, and I said it.

I said it plainly, in the voice I had used to read my father's letter.

"Sire, I was Edmund Rook's wife for five years, in a life that has not happened yet."

"I died at twenty-four in a locked wing of Rook Hall."

"My father was hanged on a warrant bearing the Duke of Wexmoor's seal, which Edmund had forged."

Nobody moved.

"I woke on the night of my engagement, five years younger, with all of it in my head."

"I wrote it down on my first night at Wexmoor. These pages are dated before the mould, the groom and the letters to Calder."

"Behind the oak panel by the window of Edmund Rook's dressing room, there is a locked box."

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