[A single slip, typed, on the ruled letterhead of the Office of the Coroner, County of Port Hume, with a second sheet in manuscript pinned behind it. Both were found pinned to the fourth sheet of the Montana letter in the locked drawer behind St. Casimir's. The pin has rusted through the typed slip and left a stain on the manuscript sheet beneath, so that the two have been kept together since 1921 whether or not anyone intended it.]
Sheet one — typed, office form
OFFICE OF THE CORONER, COUNTY OF PORT HUME
Re: your inquiry of 3 March 1921.
The certificate reads "Encephalitis." No further inquiry is contemplated.
— J.A.F.
Sheet two — manuscript, same date, not on letterhead, in a small clerk's hand
Miss Pytel —
The above is the office's answer and I have signed it as I am obliged to. What follows is not the office's and I will thank you not to bring it back to this building.
You asked me for the certificates of eleven men and you did not tell me why, and I gave you the two that were public and refused you the nine that were not, and you did not argue with me, which is how I knew you had expected to be refused. I have been in this office nineteen years. People who expect to be refused have usually been refused already by someone with more standing than I have.
So I will tell you what I can tell you without giving you a paper.
The form of words on the slip above is not mine. It is the office's, and it is older than the office. My father wrote it out in a letter-book in Gibraltar before I was born, in the Vice-Admiralty court there, and I learned it from his hand and not from any clerk here, and I have written it more times than I would care to count and I have never before been asked to write it about a thing I had also seen.
I say "seen." I mean this. Of the nine you asked for, four have a notation in the margin of the register in the same hand, not mine, made at intake: hand unsteady, signature declined, mark taken instead. That notation is not medical. It is clerical. It exists so that the office may say the document was executed properly. Nobody has ever collected them. Nobody has ever been asked to. I have been making that notation for nineteen years and it did not occur to me until your inquiry that I have been keeping a list without knowing I was keeping it, and that it is a better list than the certificates, because nobody has ever had a reason to make it say anything.
I will not give you the register. I will tell you it exists and where it is kept and that it is not indexed by cause. If you are ever asked for it by somebody with the standing to ask, ask for the intake margins and not the certificates.
One more thing, and then I have done.
My father kept a private book behind his fair copies. I have it. He wrote in it once that the difficulty with the form of words is that it is true — the Court is unable to assist you, that is a fact, it is simply not the whole of the fact, and a man may spend a life saying true things in the correct order and never once be believed to have lied. He crossed the passage out. He kept the book. I have read it perhaps twice.
I am telling you because you came to this office with a pattern and no standing, and I am the only man here who will recognise what that is, and because there is no one to whom I may bring what I have noticed either.
Burn this. I know you will not.
— J. A. Fairfax, Clerk
[Beneath, in Pytel's hand, pencil, undated:]
He is wrong that I expected to be refused. I expected to be answered and refused, which is different, and is why I went to him and not to Linden. Register kept in the basement room, north side, not indexed by cause. Intake margins, not certificates.
Ludko — this is the second one. There is a man in Gibraltar in 1873 and a man in Port Hume in 1921 and they are the same office and they are the same sentence, and neither of them lied, and both of them kept the book.