King's Last Letter

One king. Both genuine. They cannot both be true.One is held in London, the other in Paris. Each institution has catalogued its own for more than a century. Each calls it the last letter of Richard II. One says he gave up the crown freely. The other says a crown is not a thing that is given.In May they will be shown side by side for the first time in six hundred years, and Gabriel Vale has been hired to write four pages of provenance for the catalogue.He is not asked which is the forgery. He is asked what can be written.The parchment says the same of both. The ink says the same. The seals are struck from one matrix. And a conservator who refuses to look at anything she wants to find establishes something nobody has asked: the two sheets were cut side by side from a single calfskin.Which means they are not two documents. They are one object used twice, on one day, in one room, by one hand.January 1400. A clerk is told there will be two texts, and that one of them will afterward be destroyed.Nobody comes back to say which. So he keeps both, and enters in the register four words that prove an order existed without saying what it was.Six hundred and twenty-five years later those four words are the only thing anybody has.No villain. No forgery. No theft.Two national institutions acting in good faith for a century. A cataloguer in 1931 who asks exactly the right question and receives an answer that is entirely correct and ends the search for ninety-four years. And a historian who establishes that something existed without ever establishing whose it was.Book four of The Gabriel Vale Chronicles. Every case closes. The world never does.