Catherine asked to see the paper.
Sutter held it just out of reach, then placed it on the table when Richard insisted she was merely curious.
Catherine recognized the seal, but the date was wrong.
The document had been issued after James arrived at the estate.
“How can he escape an arrangement that did not yet exist?” she asked.
Sutter said the clerk’s office sometimes corrected records retrospectively.
Catherine looked at him as though he had offered to change the date of yesterday’s sunrise.
Richard sent Sutter into the study, and Catherine waited until they were out of hearing.
She copied the seal number from memory onto a scrap of paper.
Mrs.
Fenwick carried it to Elijah along with the warning that the clerk could issue fresh papers before nightfall.
Elijah brought the number to Jacob, who had once repaired a bookcase in the courthouse and remembered seeing forms stamped in a particular sequence.
“The number belongs to a tax receipt,” Jacob said.
“Not a custody order.” Elijah asked how he could be sure.
“Because I carried the clerk’s box that morning,” Jacob replied.
“The forms were separated by their colors.
He thinks nobody notices who touches the paper.”
That detail gave Elijah a way to challenge the document without pretending that a court would simply trust his word over Sutter’s.
He asked Jacob to remember the names of the men present when the box arrived.
Jacob named two porters and a young apprentice clerk who had left the office suddenly the previous winter.
The apprentice, Henry Moss, was said to be working at a sawmill upriver.
Elijah wrote the name in the margin of his tool inventory, where it would appear ordinary if inspected.
Evidence would have to travel from people who remembered to people who could safely speak.
Later Catherine confronted Richard about the false date.
He laughed at her concern and said women rarely understood legal details.
She showed him the copied seal number.
“You never allowed me to read enough to know what a mistake looks like,” she said.
Richard’s smile disappeared.
“Stay away from county affairs.” Catherine leaned on her cane.
“Then keep county affairs out of my nursery.” He slapped the paper from her hand, then stopped as Mrs.
Fenwick entered with the tea tray.
The housekeeper looked at the fallen scrap, at Catherine’s face, and at the colonel’s rigid shoulders.
Nothing was said, but all three understood that another line had been crossed.
Catherine retrieved the paper after Richard left.
