The Same Hand

I was engaged in the ordinary way by the Harbour Court to determine whether a land grant produced by the Vessik family was contemporaneous with its claimed date or had been executed later and aged.

It had been aged. That took four hours and is not the subject of this note. The forgery is competent and the report on it went to the Court on the ninth.

While I was working I noticed something on the reverse of the third leaf, which was genuine, and which the forger had reused because good pre-Catastrophe stock is difficult to obtain and he was lazy in the way that forgers are usually lazy, at the one point where nobody was going to look.

There is a word struck out on the reverse of the third leaf.

I want to be exact about what I mean by struck out, because the Committee has read three of my submissions now and I am aware that I have not made myself understood.

I do not mean the word is illegible. Illegible is common. Ink fails, damp lifts, a clerk scrapes a line and writes over it, and half my working life is spent recovering what is underneath. I mean that a single horizontal stroke has been drawn through the word, and that the stroke was made by a hand which made no other mark on that document, and that I have now seen that stroke four times.

The Committee is not obliged to know my trade and I have been told my earlier submissions assumed too much. I will set it out once.

A hand is not a style. Style is chosen and can be imitated and is imitated well by the man whose work I examined this month. A hand is what a person does with a pen when they are not thinking about it, and it is made of things that cannot be decided: how the nib is held against the paper, where in the stroke the weight goes, the angle a line takes when the wrist is tired, whether a terminal is lifted or dragged.

A forger copies letterforms. He cannot copy the pressure, because the pressure is not a decision, and by the third page he is tired and his own wrist comes back.

That is the whole of my usefulness to this Committee. I am employed because a person’s hand is the part of them that does not lie, and it does not lie because it is not being asked.

I set this out because everything that follows depends on it and because I do not want to be understood as having recognised a fashion.

The stroke has six features. I have listed them in the order in which they can be checked, so that another examiner may confirm or destroy this note without my assistance.

One. It enters left and finishes right, which is unremarkable.

Two. It is made without a rule. There is no straightedge indentation and the line has the slight bow of an unsupported wrist.

Three. The pen is held at a shallower angle than the surrounding text, by roughly fifteen degrees.

Four. Pressure is heaviest at the second quarter and releases through the third, which is the opposite of the ordinary cancellation, where a hand bears down at the end to be certain.

Five. There is a lift and a return at the terminal. The pen comes off the paper and comes back and makes a short hook downward, about the width of two characters, and this hook is the diagnostic feature and I would stake my grade on it.

Six. The stroke is placed to leave the ascenders and descenders of the cancelled word visible above and below it.

The sixth is the one I would ask the Committee to sit with.

An ordinary cancellation is a scribble, or it is a scrape, or it is a heavy bar, because the point of cancelling a word is that the word should go. This stroke is placed with care so that you can see there was a word. It is closer to an underline that has been put in the wrong place than it is to a deletion.

I do not have a term for it. I have called it a cancellation throughout because the Committee needs me to call it something.

Four. I give them in the order I encountered them, not the order they were made.

Notarial reserve, Free City Leagues, held here. The Vessik leaf. One word struck on the reverse of the third leaf. Six of six features present.

Harbour survey office, Kalyon Hold. A schedule of pre-Catastrophe seabed titles, examined by me six years ago in a boundary matter. Two words struck on the same page. Six of six.

Physical Bureau, Varix. An inventory of instruments received, examined by me eleven years ago, in an authentication I did badly and would do differently now. One word struck. Six of six.

Synod register, the southern shelf. A page of provisioning accounts, examined by me nine years ago. One word struck. Six of six. This is the one I am least certain of, because I had poorer light and no glass, and I would want it re-examined by another grade.

Assume for the moment that I am wrong about the Synod and consider only three.

The three documents were held in three cities. Kalyon Hold and Varix have never corresponded, and I am told by the Committee’s own clerk that they have not exchanged so much as a customs schedule in living memory. The notarial reserve here was sealed after the Catastrophe and opened in my grandfather’s time. The Kalyon survey office was under water for forty-one years and its papers were recovered wet and dried badly, which is how I can date the damage and be certain nothing was inserted after the flooding.

The three documents were made, on the internal evidence of their own contents, no fewer than ninety years apart.

I have not been able to read a single one of the struck words, and I want to be clear that this is not a failure of technique. The stroke does not obliterate. The words are legible in the sense that the letters are there. I can trace them. I have traced them. Four times I have produced a clean tracing of a word I cannot read.

Each is a designation of some kind, in the sense that it sits in a document where a designation would sit: after pursuant to, after the programme, after under the terms of. The surrounding text is ordinary administration and can be read without difficulty.

The words themselves do not resolve into anything. My tracings are accurate. I have had two of them checked by a colleague who does not know what they are for and who returned them with the note that they are not in any orthography he is trained in and that they are not, in his opinion, words.

I record his opinion. I do not share it. He was working from a tracing and a tracing is not a document.

What I will record as my own finding is narrower and I believe it is defensible. Across four archives, over ninety years, the only category of information which has been uniformly removed from the pre-Catastrophe administrative record is the designation of whatever these documents are administering. Names of persons survive. Dates survive. Sums survive, and are boring. Three separate polities kept their paperwork, and in all three the same one thing is gone, and it is gone in the same handwriting.

I am aware that I am describing a shape by the hole it left. It is the only method available to me and it is a standard method in my trade.

I offer five. I have eliminated all five and the Committee may take my eliminations as findings rather than as opinions. Any of them can be checked.

A house style. Rejected. House styles vary within themselves, because a house is made of people. Twelve clerks trained to the same manual produce twelve hands, and the variation is measurable and is the ordinary business of my trade. These four strokes vary less than one clerk varies from himself between morning and evening.

A trained tradition of copyists. Rejected on the same evidence and more strongly. Trained hands diverge under fatigue in ways that can be plotted. There is no fatigue in these strokes. There is also no improvement, which is what troubles me more, because a hand that makes the same mark over ninety years and does not get better at it is not practising.

One later archivist with access to all four. This was my own explanation for six years and I argued it in my second submission and I now withdraw it. It requires a person to have entered the Kalyon survey office before the flooding and the notarial reserve after its opening, and those two dates do not overlap in one life. I was attached to this explanation and I held it longer than the evidence allowed. The Committee should discount my second submission entirely.

Coincidence of gesture. Rejected. Two hands may share three features. I have never in nineteen years seen two hands share the terminal hook.

Forgery, or my own error. I cannot reject this and I do not propose to. It is why I have listed the six features in checkable order and why I ask for the Synod page to be re-examined by another grade. If I am wrong, this note is the instrument of showing it.

The Committee resolved on my note at its sitting of the twenty-second. I was not present. I was sent the resolution and I want to record that it was correct in every particular and that I have no complaint of any kind against this body.

The Committee found the note admissible, found the six features sufficiently described to be tested, appointed an examiner of the first grade to re-examine the Synod page, wrote to Kalyon Hold and to the Physical Bureau at Varix requesting sight of the originals, and voted me the customary fee and eleven marks above it. The clerk added a line thanking me for nineteen years and noting that the Committee had not previously had occasion to write to Varix.

I have read the resolution four times. It does everything I asked for. I had prepared myself for years to be told that my eyes were tired and instead I have been believed, promptly and in writing, by serious people, and I find I do not feel what I expected to feel.

I have been trying since the twenty-second to name what is wrong and the nearest I can get is this. The Committee has resolved. Varix will answer or it will not. And the thing I found is not in this building and was not waiting on our resolution and does not know that we have sat.

I understand that this is not an objection to anything. I am entering it because it is true and because I do not think it belongs in the report proper.

I went back to the Vessik leaf on the second because the first grade examiner wanted my glass.

There is a second word struck on the reverse of the third leaf.

There was one word struck on the reverse of the third leaf on the ninth. I have my working tracing from the ninth, made in my own hand, dated and initialled in the ordinary way, and it shows the leaf with one cancellation, and I have compared them under the glass and the tracing is accurate in every other particular including two flaws in the stock which I recorded and which are still there.

The second stroke has six of six features.

The leaf has been in the notarial reserve since the ninth under the ordinary custody, which is a locked press in a room that two people hold keys to, and I am one of them, and the other is seventy-four and has been in that room for fifty years and would sooner burn.

I am not making an allegation against anyone. I want that on the record before I go on.

I have spent four days on my own tracings and I am going to set down what I have found in the plainest way I can, because I have noticed that I am writing longer sentences than I usually write and I know what that is.

In the margin of my working tracing from the ninth, below my initials, there is a horizontal stroke about the width of two characters with a lift and a return at the terminal.

I do not remember making it. That is not evidence of anything. I make marks in margins all day and I do not remember one in a hundred of them.

I have measured it. The pen angle is shallower than my hand by fourteen degrees. The pressure is heaviest at the second quarter and releases through the third, which is not how I cancel, and I have four hundred documents in this building initialled by me over nineteen years against which that can be checked by anybody, and I ask that it be checked by somebody who is not me.

That is the whole of the finding and I will not go past it.

I am aware of what a reader will do with it. I have done it myself for four days and I have got nowhere, because there are two readings and the evidence supports both of them equally, and I am not going to choose between them in a document that goes to the Committee under my grade.

Either something has been in the press, or I have.

I would ask the Committee to note that I have written that sentence and left it standing, and that I did not strike it out, because I am aware that I could have, and I find that I want it on the record that on the sixth I could still tell the difference between a thing I had decided to do and a thing my hand had done.