They rode out before dawn, four of them—Samuel, Ella, a local farmer named Holt who had lived on the northern estate his entire life, and the quality of watchfulness that accompanied Raymond's presence, which Ella had come to find strangely steadying, like a good lock on a door.
The northern estate in June was a different landscape from the main house—wider, rawer, the sky sitting directly on the horizon without anything to interrupt it. The old outpost buildings at the northern edge were a hundred years old and had spent most of that time being slowly reclaimed by the ground: stone walls intact, rooflines gone, doorways opening onto rooms with grass floors.
The first hiding place was a cellar. Catherine's journal had described it in terms that required translation—she had used landmarks that had changed in seventy years—and it took forty minutes to locate the right building, another twenty to find the cavity behind the false stone. The iron box inside had rusted shut. Holt had brought tools for this; the lid came off in a shower of rust flakes.
Inside: four rolls of parchment, the writing still legible, the ink foxed but present. Ella read them quickly, standing in the cellar doorway. Correspondence, copied in Catherine's hand—the two officials coordinating the false charge. Names, dates, amounts paid. The letter acknowledging that the document was to be fabricated and placed.
She carefully wrapped them and put them away.
The second place was a tree—or had been. The oak Catherine had marked was still there, enormous now, which made finding the cavity in its roots easier than it might have been. The tin inside was smaller; the contents were a witness statement, written and signed, describing two men seen at the old earl's compound two days before his arrest. Neither man had any legitimate reason to be there.
The third place was the hardest: a disused well, the materials sealed with old pitch in a method Catherine had described in precise technical terms. They had to lower a lamp first to check the depth, then lower Ella—she was lightest, and she had offered before anyone suggested it—on a rope to reach the bundle fixed to the inner wall.
The bundle held a bark scroll, preserved by the sealing. A record of military dispatches from the northern campaign, the actual communications, demonstrating what orders were sent and received and by whom. The fabricated treason document alleged that the sixth earl had passed information in the other direction. These records showed what he had actually done. There was no overlap. There was no ambiguity.
She came back up out of the well. Samuel took the bundle from her, unwrapped it, and held the scroll in both hands in the thin summer light.
He stood there for a long time.
"It's real," he said at last. Not to her—to the air, to the land, to whoever deserved to hear it.
"It's real," she confirmed.
They rode back through the long June afternoon, and nobody spoke much. The land was wide around them, and the horses moved at a walk, and somewhere in one of the saddlebags were three boxes and a sealed scroll that had been waiting seventy years to be picked up.
Near the main gate, he brought his horse alongside hers.
"Ella."
She looked at him.
"Catherine left it for someone to find," he said. "You found it."
"She left it," Ella said. "I just went and collected."
He was quiet for a moment. "Not everyone would have gone to collect," he said.
She let that stand. They rode on through the gate.