He Dropped Three Women in One Night, Then We Took His Estate novel · Chapter 12 of 32
Chapter 12: The Handwriting
They asked him at breakfast, all three at once.
Evander Quist had come down to the kitchen in his shirtsleeves with ink on his thumb, expecting porridge and a quiet morning with the Marquis's cellar book.
Instead he found three women in a line along the far side of the table, with three sheets of paper laid out before them.
"Mr. Quist," said Calista. "We would like you to read some handwriting."
"I read a great deal of it."
"We would like you to read it and tell us what you think. Without being asked what to do about it."
"I will tell you what I see," he said. "I never tell anyone what to do about it."
"We know," said Ottilie, warmly. "It's your worst quality."
He took the papers to the window.
The morning light came in grey across the snow, and he cleaned his spectacles on his cuff, put them back, and bent.
They were three petitions of unusual neatness.
He saw the capital letters at once, each with a long hooked tail.
The way the pen lifted before every g, so the loop never closed.
He saw that the signatures, which differed beautifully from one another, were written with the same pressure.
A woman's hand does not change pressure when she changes a name.
"May I have an hour?" he said. "And the Marquis's desk letters. They're in the third crate from the Hall."
"The ones from his mother?" asked Calista.
"Those, yes."
He took the third crate to the attic, shut the door and spread out the correspondence of the Dowager Marchioness of Voltraine.
There were ninety-one letters.
They were dated across seven years, addressed to her son, about dinners and tenants and the price of wine.
In every one she wrote in a neat italic, with a long hooked tail on the capitals and an open loop on the g.
He laid the petition beside the letters.
He took a magnifying glass from his case, and compared the letter e, the t-bar, the way each word ended in a small flick upward.
He did it for an hour without moving.
Then he did it again from the beginning, in reverse, because he knew what he wanted to find and did not trust it.
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