The papers were very old; she could tell as much right away, without even looking at the dates at the top. Their edges were curling, ink slightly faded, and they seemed overall as if they had been forgotten—as if someone running away had let them slip out of their grasp and lie gathering dust under the bed, or a maid who came in to clean had simply been unable to reach them with her broom.
This is stupid. Maids would have found those papers after cleaning under the bed long ago, and given them to their employer.
It's another immersion-breaking, poor plot contrivance thing that we're supposed to believe that those papers really sat under that bed for a generation.
