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

Chapter 16

Edmund returned to Marchwood House at two in the afternoon and knew something was wrong before his coat was off.

It was not the footman’s face. It was the quality of the quiet. A house in which a person has left is quieter in a specific way — not empty, but adjusted, the way a room is adjusted when a chair has been carried out of it and nobody has yet decided where to put the new space.

Marianne met him in the entrance hall.

“Where is Rosalind?”

She handed him the anonymous note and the demand from Mr. Pettifer, and watched his face while he read them, and afterward thought that she had seen her brother receive bad news a hundred times in thirty-nine years, and had never once seen him look like that.

He read the promissory note. Then the sentence beneath it. Then the demand, twice, slowly.

His face went still, and stayed still, and his stillness was worse than any anger she had ever seen in him.

“Who knew about the northern mortgage?”

“The trustees. Lord Prescott.” Marianne paused. “Vivienne, presumably.”

“Presumably.” He looked toward the stairs. “And Rosalind.”

“She left this morning.”

His fingers tightened around the paper — a small movement, barely visible, and the corner of the sheet creased like a leaf folding.

“Why?”

“Because she believes you are about to marry Vivienne Prescott to keep forty-three families in their houses, and because someone has very conveniently made the act of loving her even more expensive than it already was.” Marianne’s voice was steady, and her eyes were not. “She did not tell you because she did not want to be a bill that other people paid.”

Edmund read the promissory note a third time.

Then he stopped.

“Marianne. Bring me the correspondence from London. All of it. And Rigby’s case.”

She went, and returned in ten minutes with the whole bundle, and watched him lay the demand from Mr. Pettifer flat on the study table beside a letter from Prescott’s family solicitor and a schedule of the northern mortgages in Rigby’s careful clerk’s hand.

He stood over them for a long time.

The light in the study moved across the table as the afternoon went on. Outside, someone was rolling the gravel.

“Look at this,” he said at last, and put his finger on the demand.

The claim was purchased eleven weeks ago by a private creditor. Messrs. Harlow & Sons, of Exeter, acting for the purchaser.

“The reference number,” Edmund said quietly. “Harlow & Sons number their clients by the year of instruction and the order of the file: twenty-six, one hundred and four. Twenty-six is this year.” He turned to the Prescott solicitor’s letter and slid it across. “This letter, written to my trustees in June, carries the same prefix on its enclosure schedule. Twenty-six. One hundred and four.”

Marianne went pale.

“That is a coincidence.”

“It is a filing convention,” Edmund said. “Firms that share a holding company share a filing clerk.”

He straightened up, and his voice, when he spoke again, was the coldest thing she had heard from him in her life.

“Someone in that family has purchased the debt of a dead man, forged the dates on it, and delivered it to the door of a woman in my house — in the same season they proposed a marriage settlement to me. That is not spite, Marianne. That is a plan.”