Three days without Damian was sufficient to establish, with the clarity that only absence provides, that his presence had been rather more central to the functioning of my days than I had been prepared to acknowledge.
This was aggravating information.
His temporary replacement — Lieutenant Marsh, conscientious and thorough and possessed of the kind of limited imagination that produces excellent documentation and very few useful observations — presented his first report on Monday morning with the earnest precision of a man who has been given a significant responsibility and intends to acquit himself of it through sheer diligence.
He was perfectly adequate.
I thanked him for his thoroughness each morning and received, in return, a look of such gratified surprise that I was obliged to conclude that the previous holder of the position had not made this a habit.
Which told me something about Damian's habits that I had not previously been aware of, and which I filed in the category of things I was not yet prepared to examine.
The work proceeded. The briefings were conducted. The correspondence was addressed.
And I noticed, with the specific quality of attention one applies to an absence rather than a presence, all the small moments in which the arrangement was simply not as good.
The morning briefing that produced three questions I would ordinarily have put to the person on my right, who was not there. The council session in which I made a point that I had planned, in some inarticulate way, to look sideways at someone after making.
The afternoon correspondence that required a second opinion and received instead the earnest and limited imagination of Lieutenant Marsh, who was perfectly adequate and not at all the person I required.
I was, I would acknowledge, rather thoroughly displeased about the whole situation. Not with Damian, precisely. With myself, mostly, for the degree to which his absence had become immediately apparent.
Ashworth's renewed documentation arrived on Thursday morning, which was either unfortunate timing or a deliberate calculation on his part, and I had decided, on balance, to assume the latter.
The new submission was substantially similar to the first, reinforced with an additional physician's statement and a letter from a former aide of the late king's, suggesting further evidence of instability.
Ashworth had also, I noted with some appreciation for the ambition of it, added a concluding argument that the concealment of the heir — the very fact of my having been hidden — was itself evidence of the will's illegitimacy.
He was, in other words, proposing to use my existence against my existence.
I read the submission twice, then set it down.
"Lieutenant Marsh," I said.
He looked up with the attentiveness of a man who has been waiting for precisely this development and has his notebook ready.
"Please inform Lord Fenwick that I shall be addressing the council directly this afternoon. No counsel required."
"Of course, Your Highness." A pause, during which he appeared to be deciding whether to say something further. "Shall I — is there anything you require by way of preparation?"
"I require," I said, "the original documents from the Lancaster household's crown records, the administrative log of the succession protocols from the relevant period, and a pot of tea that has not been standing for forty minutes."
He produced two of these three items within the hour. The tea was adequate.
The council session that afternoon had the specific quality of an occasion that has been arranged by one party with particular expectations and is about to be rearranged by another.
Ashworth sat at the far end of the table with the composed expression of a man who has submitted a thorough document and is prepared to watch it work.
I had decided, at some point during the preceding sleepless night, that arguing my legitimacy directly was the wrong argument — that it accepted, as its foundational premise, that legitimacy required arguing, which was precisely the premise I declined to accept. One does not strengthen a claim by contesting it. One strengthens a claim by making the alternative look implausible.
"My lords," I said, "I should like to proceed somewhat differently than perhaps anticipated."
Lord Fenwick's pen stopped moving.
"Lord Ashworth's submission raises the question of whether a will produced under conditions of mental instability constitutes sound legal instrument. I find this a reasonable question to raise. I also find it a rather limited one."
I set the relevant documents on the table — carefully, one by one, with the specific deliberateness of someone who knows exactly what she is placing where and why.
"I propose, instead, that we examine the conditions that would need to have been true for a legitimate heir to have been concealed for reasons of security, and compare those conditions to the conditions that would need to have been true for an illegitimate claimant to have fabricated the same record. Let us see which set of conditions the evidence actually supports."
Ashworth looked at me.
I looked at him pleasantly.
The council looked at the documents.
"Let us begin," I said, "with the Lancaster household accounts, which I believe some of you have not previously had occasion to examine."
They had not. I demonstrated the relevant contents with what I considered appropriate but not excessive thoroughness, and followed the logic that emerged from that demonstration with the patience of a woman who had spent twenty-two years following other people's logic to its conclusions and finding that logic, applied consistently, tended to arrive somewhere useful.
Lord Cavendish, whom I had identified from the first session as a man of genuine intelligence rather than mere convenience, followed the argument with the close attention of someone who had not expected to have to follow it and is now finding it rather more compelling than anticipated.
I watched him arrive, somewhere between the third and fourth points, at a place he had not expected to go.
The challenge was not formally resolved. It was deferred.
But Cavendish's certainty had shifted, which was rather more significant than resolution — certainty, once genuinely shifted, does not tend to return to its original position.
Afterward, I pardoned him publicly.
He received this with the expression of a man who has been disarmed without being defeated, and who is not entirely certain how to process the experience — which is, as expressions go, rather more interesting than gratitude would have been, and considerably more useful.
Ashworth said nothing. He gathered his documents with the composed efficiency of a man who has not lost but is revising his assessment of the terrain, which told me that whatever came next, it would be better prepared.
I walked back through the east corridor.
The antechamber off the main passage had a small table and two chairs. One of them had been, for the better part of the preceding weeks, occupied by a man who moved through the palace at roughly the pace of my own schedule and happened — consistently, reliably, with a regularity that I had ceased to consciously register precisely because it had become so reliably present — to be positioned wherever his presence was most likely to be useful.
The chair was empty.
I kept walking.
This was the correct thing to do. The chair was a chair. It had no particular significance. Chairs are not, as a general rule, significant.
I had spent twenty-two years navigating the specific emotional landscape of things that had been removed from my life without my consent, and I was not going to begin investing the furniture with meaning.
I did not look at it again.
This required a degree of effort I was not entirely prepared to examine, and I occupied the remainder of the afternoon with other matters with what I considered, all things weighed appropriately and honestly assessed, rather moderate success.
It was, at minimum, success of some variety.
Lieutenant Marsh produced his evening report at five o'clock with the thoroughness I had come to expect from him. He was a conscientious man. He would, with time and application, become a competent one.
I thanked him for his report and said nothing further, and returned to the correspondence, and did not think about the empty chair with anything approaching the frequency that the chair, had it been occupied, would have warranted.