The Forger's Hand

"You've a rare gift," Jeanne said, examining the sample he'd produced at her request, a handful of lines in a hand indistinguishable from the queen's own. "I've never seen anything quite like it."

"It's never been worth much before now. A party trick. I used to copy friends' signatures to pass idle hours as a clerk, and no one ever thought to pay a man for that particular skill."

"I'm prepared to pay considerably for it."

Reteau understood, hearing the terms, exactly what he was actually being asked to do, and exactly how illegal it was. He also felt something he hadn't felt in a decade of unremarkable pamphlet-writing: the prospect of finally using a real talent for something worthy of its actual difficulty.

"It's only craft," he told himself, that first night, turning the commission over. "The ink and the penmanship are mine. Whatever she does with the letters afterward is her own business, not an extension of my hand."

It was a thinner argument than his own conscience would have accepted on a duller evening, and he knew it even as he built it. He accepted the commission anyway.

What he produced, across the following months, was the finest work of his entire career: letters and signatures matched so precisely to the queen's actual hand that Cardinal Rohan, a man with true daily familiarity with royal correspondence, never once hesitated over their authenticity.

"You should be proud of this," Jeanne told him, reviewing one particularly difficult signature.

"I am. That's rather the trouble." Reteau turned the page over in his hands. "I've spent ten years watching men with half my actual skill make comfortable livings at their own crafts, and now the one time my own skill finally matters to anyone, it matters because it's helping deceive a cardinal."

When the whole scheme collapsed, Reteau found himself facing consequences he privately considered out of proportion to his actual role. "I only provided the hand," he told his own lawyer, without much hope the argument would carry any real weight. "I didn't design the fraud. I didn't execute it."

"The court won't draw that distinction. You made the deception physically possible. That's enough for them."

It was enough, and Reteau spent the years of imprisonment that followed turning over the same uncomfortable question, without ever fully settling it. He asked himself, more nights than he cared to count, whether he regretted the forgeries themselves, or only regretted that the single moment his rare gift had finally found work worthy of it had also been the moment it cost him everything the previous decade's obscure, underpaid honesty had at least allowed him to keep.