Chapter 6: The Empty Drawer At Montfort Manor
The preservation order reached Montfort Manor before noon, while I lay in a hospital bed with a monitor clipped to my finger and the baby shifting heavily beneath my ribs. I could not go there myself. That fact felt like another door closing between me and the truth.
Richard arranged for an authorized inspection, and Alexandre went with the investigators. I stayed behind because the obstetrician had warned me that the pain and stress could bring on contractions. My small bag sat sealed in an evidence envelope on the chair beside the window. It looked harmless now, reduced to a few clothes, a charger, and the shape of the life Victoria had decided I could carry away.
The investigator’s first report arrived through Richard’s representative. The relevant correspondence drawer had been emptied.
Not searched. Emptied.
At the manor, the storage room smelled of dust, wax, and cold stone. Alexandre knew the cabinets better than anyone there. He identified the system: correspondence was divided by household member and year, then locked in narrow drawers beneath the library shelves. The drawer connected to Victoria’s private records had been pulled out and left open. Its wooden runners showed fresh pale scratches. A clean rectangle marked the dust where a bundle or box had recently rested.
Nothing proved who had removed the papers. The investigators recorded that carefully. No one was permitted to turn suspicion into fact.
Alexandre did, however, identify the only person who ordinarily controlled that drawer. Victoria kept its key on her own ring and had never allowed the household staff to handle those records. His admission was included in the statement, along with the time he had last seen the drawer intact.
I read the copied inventory twice. The drawer had held correspondence, clinic references, and notes connected to old family matters. Now it held only dust and a broken paper tie.
When Victoria was found in the manor’s west sitting room, her silver hair was pinned neatly and her coat was buttoned to the throat. Her pearl necklace was gone. The skin beneath her collar showed a faint indentation where it usually rested, a narrow pale line against her neck.
The investigator documented that too.
I remembered the courtyard, Victoria’s hand releasing my bag, the small, deliberate way she had packed it. She had taken my identification papers, two dresses, and the medicine I needed. She had not packed the old photograph. She had not packed the loose lining from the inside pocket, either.
Richard’s representative asked me to consent to an examination of the bag. I agreed immediately. The evidence envelope was opened under observation, and each item was photographed before being moved. A technician turned the inner pocket inside out and found a stiff paper fragment lodged beneath the seam.
It was no larger than my thumb.
The paper carried part of a handwritten notation. Most of the sentence was missing, but a clinic name remained, along with a reference number and a date from twenty-nine years earlier. The same reference format appeared in the copied notation from the manor drawer.
For several seconds, I could hear only the monitor’s steady pulse.
The fragment was not a confession. It did not name Victoria, Richard, or the person who had taken a baby from a private Paris clinic. It did something more useful: it connected my bag to the same record system as the vanished correspondence.
The technician sealed it separately and logged every transfer. Richard’s representative prepared a lawful request for the clinic’s surviving records and for the archives that might hold admission registers, staff lists, or transfer documents from that date.
Alexandre returned after dusk. He stood near the hospital door, pale and exhausted, with his hands empty. He had helped the investigators access the storage room, provided the cabinet map, and signed a statement that placed Victoria’s control over the drawer in writing. It was not enough to restore what he had hidden from me. It was not enough to make his cooperation feel like loyalty.
But it was an action taken against her.
May you like
I looked at the sealed fragment on the tray between us. The drawer was empty. The pearls were missing. Somewhere beyond the hospital walls, Victoria had hidden the objects that could explain why she recognized me.
The clinic, at least, could still have its own answer.
