Every Woman Avoided the Chair Beside the Feared Duke — Until the Quiet Spinster Sat Down

Chapter 14

Mr. Pettifer was thin, apologetic, and carried a leather case that had been repaired at one corner with a stitch of dark thread.

He rose when she entered the small front parlour, and bowed too deeply for the room, and did not sit again until she had. He had the manner of a man who had spent thirty years being the least important person in every conversation he attended, and had decided to make a career of courtesy.

“Miss Ellery. I am sorry to intrude.”

“You are not intruding. You are expected, it seems.” She sat. “Tell me what this is.”

He opened the case and laid out three documents, squared to the edge of the table with careful hands.

“A claim has been lodged against certain properties held under the name of your late father, Mr. Thomas Ellery, of Ellery Lodge, deceased eleven years.” He cleared his throat. “The claim is founded upon a promissory note, a copy of which I believe has already come into your possession.”

Rosalind kept her face still. “By whom was that copy sent?”

“I could not say, Miss Ellery.”

“Can you say who has lodged the claim?”

Mr. Pettifer hesitated — the first hesitation of the interview, and the only one that mattered.

“The claim was held for many years by a firm in Exeter. It was purchased eleven weeks ago by a private creditor, and it is that creditor who now demands payment.”

“Demands payment,” she repeated. “How much, and by when?”

“Payment of one hundred and forty pounds principal, with interest, totalling three hundred and nine pounds and four shillings, within thirty days of the date of the demand, which was served on Tuesday. In default, the creditor will proceed against the property.”

The figure sat on the table between them, and the room went very quiet, and Rosalind discovered that she was perfectly calm. Her hands were steady on the arms of the chair. Her voice, when she used it, came out level.

“And the signature. Is it valid?”

Mr. Pettifer turned the copy of the note toward her.

“It appears valid,” he said.

“Appears.”

He adjusted his spectacles, and then — and this was the thing she would remember afterward, the way he did it without being asked, as though some part of him had been waiting all morning for the permission — he put his finger on the date.

“There are irregularities,” he said quietly. “The execution date on the instrument, and the date of the witnessing signature of the clerk, are not consistent with the condition of the paper. The ink on the witness line is of a different character from the ink on the body of the note. And the register entry which ought to correspond with a note of this size does not exist in the parish records for that year. I have looked.”

“Then you are telling me the note is a forgery.”

“I am telling you, Miss Ellery,” Mr. Pettifer said carefully, “that a court would require considerable persuasion to accept it. But it is not my client’s claim, and I am not instructed to advise you. I am instructed to collect.” He began, regretfully, to gather up his documents. “You have thirty days.”

“The creditor’s name.”

“I am not authorized to disclose it.”

“Then tell me one thing, Mr. Pettifer.” Rosalind leaned forward slightly. “In thirty years of practice, have you ever been instructed to collect a debt of this size from a woman in my position within thirty days?”

He looked at her over the rim of his spectacles, and for one second the courtesy dropped away, and behind it was a tired, decent man who had spent a whole morning being ashamed of his instructions.

“No, Miss Ellery,” he said. “I have not.”

He packed his case, and bowed, and was shown out. Rosalind sat alone in the parlour until the sound of his shoes had gone off the gravel and the house had settled back into its ordinary quiet.

Then she looked down at her hands, and found them perfectly still, and understood that the calm she felt was not calm at all. It was the clarity that arrives when the last of a person’s options has been removed.

Someone had moved beyond rumor now.

Rumor was Vivienne Prescott saying unusual curiosities at breakfast. Rumor was a hundred whispers in a hundred drawing rooms, harmless and cheap, the ordinary weather of English society.

This was different. This was a case in a leather bag with stitched corners, a date, a demand, a figure, and a solicitor’s unwillingness to say a name. This was a trap built out of paperwork by someone who had gone through parish registers and clerks’ ink and the signature of a dead man, and who had done it with such care that the only thing that would save her would be spending money she did not have in a court she could not afford.

By evening, the whispers had begun.

A gentleman mentioned, over the sherry, that the late Mr. Ellery had been unfortunate with money, poor fellow, and that it was really striking how these things surface after a man is gone. A woman Rosalind had never spoken to twice asked her, with concern that glittered, whether the Ellery property might soon be sold, and whether it was true that the cottage had some very agreeable land attached.

The invisible spinster had finally become interesting.

And society was delighted to discover why.

Rosalind drank her tea, and answered pleasantly, and watched the room watch her, and thought: this is exactly what someone wanted. This is exactly the shape of it.

The whole point was not the money. The whole point was the noise.

A woman with a three-hundred-pound claim on her father’s name, attached to a house where the Duke of Harnwood had sat beside her in public and held her hand on a terrace, was no longer a curiosity. She was a liability. She was an embarrassment to be explained. She was, in the precise language of drawing rooms, an awkward business.

Whoever had built this trap had understood perfectly well that they did not need to win.

They only needed it to become unseemly for him to choose her.