Her Sisters Were Presented to the Duke—But He Asked About the Daughter They Overlooked

Chapter 13

There were three of them around the pedestal desk, and the fire was not lit, and Wren knew before it began how it would go.

She had spent countless nights in this room after the house had gone to bed, moving figures across paper as though arithmetic could manufacture money. She knew the smell of it: cold ash, old leather, the particular sourness of a room where a man had once kept dogs and no longer did. She knew which floorboard creaked by the window. She knew where the good ink was hidden and where the bad ink was kept for the accounts he did not want anyone to read.

Her father opened the second drawer, lifted out the racing calendars, and set the expense books on the desk one by one, like a physician laying out instruments.

“The estate has experienced a temporary shortage of liquidity.”

Atticus remained standing. “How much?”

“These matters are private.”

“You invited me to your house while presenting three daughters as prospective duchesses.” His voice stayed level. “If marriage is part of your solution, then your finances stopped being private the moment my carriage came through your gate.”

Silence.

Lord Ambrose looked at Wren — a long, slow, deliberate look, the kind meant to establish in front of a witness that all of this was her doing.

“Thirty-one thousand pounds.”

Wren looked up. “Father.”

She had known about the mortgages. She had known about the merchant notes and the two bonds against the northern wood and the arrears on the tithe. She had not known the sum was thirty-one thousand. She had added the columns a dozen times and had always come out somewhere under twenty.

“There are additional notes,” he said, defensively.

“Against what?” she asked.

He did not answer, and he did not meet her eyes, and the room got about ten degrees colder.

Wren reached for the nearest ledger and opened it.

Several pages had been removed.

Not torn badly — cut, carefully, with a blade, so close to the binding that a careless eye would read the gap as a printing fault. Her pulse changed. She turned back a page, then forward, and the numbers on either side of the gap did not meet; there was money going out from the December accounts that arrived from nowhere and led nowhere.

“Where are the December accounts?”

“Irrelevant.”

“Those pages contain the southern leases.”

“I said irrelevant.”

Atticus moved around the desk and stood at Wren’s shoulder.

“Why?” he said.

Lord Ambrose brought his palm down flat on the desk with a crack that made the inkstand jump.

“Because this is my estate.”

The sound echoed through the study and died in the cold curtains. Wren did not flinch. She had not flinched at that sound in eleven years. But Atticus saw her thumb press hard against the edge of the ledger, hard enough to go white, and she watched his face change and understood that he had seen something he could not unsee.

“And there it is,” he said.

Her father went still.

“There is the reason,” Atticus continued, and his voice was very soft, “that you struck the desk instead of answering the question.”

“I did not—”

“Answer the question, my lord.” Atticus looked down at the neat, small figures in Wren’s hand. “She knows what this house owes. She knows which tenants cannot pay. She knows your steward is gone, your drainage has failed, and your creditors are preparing to foreclose.”

His eyes came back up.

“Your other daughters can repeat whatever version of the Ashby name you hand them. She cannot.” He straightened. “You know nothing about my family, Your Grace.”

“Then explain to me,” said Atticus Vale, “why the daughter keeping it solvent was instructed to stand behind a teapot.”

Wren’s throat closed.

Nobody had ever said it. Not once, not in twenty-two years, not in any room, not even in whispers where she could hear. It had been the water she swam in; you do not remark on the water. And now a stranger — a man who had been in this house less than a day, a man who had arrived with a coat that cost more than the southern farms would earn in a year — had said it aloud in her father’s study with the fire unlit and the ledgers open.

Her father laughed. A short, bitter, ugly laugh.

“Solvent.” He pulled a chair out and sat down heavily, as though the word had exhausted him. “She has delayed the inevitable by moving pennies between empty accounts.”

Wren opened the second book. Her hands were steady. Her voice was not quite.

“I renegotiated the grain merchant’s note for three months. I stopped you selling the north cottages in October.”

“Assets we needed to liquidate.”

“They are homes.”

“They are four walls that will belong to the bank in six weeks.” He leaned toward her, and for a moment something almost pleading crossed his face and was gone. “When the bank takes this house, will your tenants give you one of theirs?”

The words landed harder than they should have, because some frightened corner of her had been asking herself exactly that question since October, at four in the morning, with a candle and a pen and a column that would not balance.

Atticus’s hands settled on the desk beside hers. Close. Not touching.

“What was your solution?” he asked her father.

Lord Ambrose looked at him for a long moment.

“A marriage settlement.”

Wren’s stomach went cold.

“Celeste,” she whispered.

“Whichever match proved suitable.”

Atticus’s expression became almost frighteningly calm, the way a knife is calm.

“So this visit was never merely social.”

“Do not pretend that marriages among our class are made without practical considerations.”

“Practical considerations are discussed openly, before a man is invited to select among daughters the way one selects at Tattersall’s.”

Lord Ambrose’s face darkened. “You came seeking a wife.”

“I came willing to meet a family.” Atticus’s eyes flicked toward Wren and back. “Apparently I was not permitted to meet all of it.”

And her father saw the look.

Wren knew the expression that came over him then. She had seen it every time an unpaid bill became someone else’s problem. Something calculating, something that had stopped being a father and had become a man with a problem to solve.

“Wren,” he said softly. “Leave us.”

“No.”

The word surprised her as much as it surprised him. Lord Ambrose stared.

Wren’s hands had begun to tremble, so she flattened them on the desk, both of them, and looked her father in the face.

“If my work is being discussed,” she said, “I stay.”

Atticus said nothing. But the quiet approval in his eyes steadied her more than any speech could have.

Her father sat back slowly.

“Very well,” he said.

He reached down beside the desk and drew up a dispatch box — iron-banded, locked, a thing Wren had never seen in her life, though she had spent a thousand hours in this room.

He fitted a small key to it. He opened it. He removed a packet tied with black ribbon.

Atticus’s gaze sharpened. “What is that?”

Lord Ambrose set the packet down in the middle of the desk and untied the ribbon.

On the top sheet, beneath the amount of Ashmoor’s largest outstanding debt, was Wren’s signature.

“Ask her,” her father said, “why every creditor in London believes she has authority to bargain in my name.”