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Rigg set the pack on a stool and pulled out the letter. He laid it on the bar.
Loaf squinted over it. Leaky reached out and snatched it away. “For saints’ sake, Loaf, we all know you read as fast as a toadstool turns into a tree.” She scanned the document, moving her lips a little and humming a note now and then. “It’s an obvious fake,” she said.
Loaf stood up straight and looked down his nose at Rigg.
But Rigg knew the letter was genuine, and if it wasn’t, Leaky would have no way of knowing. “If it’s a fake, I didn’t fake it,” Rigg said. “The woman I got it from said my father wrote it. He never showed it to me while he was alive, but it looks like his handwriting.” Rigg looked at Leaky. “Have you ever seen his handwriting?”
“I don’t have to,” said Leaky. “It’s signed by the Wandering Saint. That’s like having it signed, ‘The Ring.’”
“That would be a really stupid thing to do, but he didn’t do it,” said Rigg. “Read that signature again.”
She scowled and read it again, moving her lips even more pronouncedly. “Ah,” she said. “‘Wandering Man’ instead of ‘Wandering Saint.’ But it’s still not even a name.”
“It’s one of the names his father went by,” said Umbo.
“What’s his real name, then?”
“All his names were real,” said Umbo. “He answered to them.”
They looked at Rigg, who said, “I never called him anything but ‘Father.’”
“Why do you think you can judge this paper?” asked Umbo. “It isn’t written to you. It’s written to a banker in Aressa Sessamo. So we’ll take it to him. Give it back.”
It was bold of Umbo to demand “back” something that he had never held. But Leaky put it in his hand all the same. Umbo scanned it, reading quickly—for the village schoolteacher in Fall Ford did his job—and then passed it on to Rigg.
“So your father made up names for himself and signed them on legal documents,” said Leaky. “You already know what I think of people who use false names.”
“Doesn’t matter what you think of this boy’s dead father,” said Loaf curtly, earning a glare from his wife. “I believe the boy and the letter, and whether the father came by the money honestly or not, the son surely did.”
“What are you going to do, then?” Leaky demanded. “Adopt him? He certainly lied to us.”
“I never said a word to you that wasn’t true,” said Rigg.
“You said those coins were all your money!”
“Do those jewels look like money to you?” said Umbo.
“Why did you take my clothes in the first place?” asked Rigg. “I’m the one whose belongings were taken by stealth in the night.”
Flustered, Leaky said, “I was going to wash them.”
“They don’t look any cleaner to me,” said Rigg.
“Because I picked up your trousers and I could feel something in the waistband.”
“And you had to rip open the seam and take it out?”
“My wife’s no thief,” said Loaf, glowering.
“I know she’s not,” said Rigg. “But she’s been spitting out accusations and suspicions, and I wanted her to see that those can go both ways. I have more cause of complaint here than she does—but I’m not complaining, and it’s time she stopped being suspicious of me for giving far less grounds.”
“The boy’s a lawyer,” said Loaf to his wife.
“Honest men don’t need lawyers,” she said huffily.
“Honest men are the ones who need them most,” murmured her husband, and when she made as if to argue with him, without even looking at her he raised his hand as if to smack her backhand across the face. He didn’t hit her and obviously never meant to, but she rolled her eyes and fell silent. So it seemed that a hand raised for a smack was the downriver equivalent of putting a finger to your lips.
“If you give me back my clothes,” said Rigg, “I can sew these jewels back into the waistband and we can leave.”
