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

Chapter 14

Wren looked at the paper.

It was her handwriting. Not a forgery, not an imitation — her own hand, the small close slant she had taught herself at fifteen so that more figures would fit on a page. It was in ink, and it was dated, and it was one of eleven.

“Because I did bargain with them,” she said.

Atticus’s face changed so slightly that another man would have missed it. Wren did not miss it. She had spent her life reading faces for weather. The warmth that had lived in his eyes since the stable yard — the warmth she had begun, dangerously, to lean toward — went somewhere behind a wall, and what came out in its place was guarded and level and very cold.

“In your father’s name,” he said.

“At first, with his permission.”

Lord Ambrose laughed, without humor. “At first.”

Wren turned on him.

“You stopped answering their letters,” she said. “You stopped opening them; I found them in the coal scuttle unopened, twice, in August. And there was nothing left to offer them. There were tenant leases, and household wages, and grain contracts, and people who would have been destroyed if the creditors moved without warning. So yes. I told them I had authority.”

“Which you did not possess.”

“I told them I had authority,” Wren said, “and then I made sure that what I promised was true. That is a different thing from lying.”

Atticus picked up the top document and read it. His eyes moved across the page, line by line, unhurried. It was a letter to a London merchant house, dated in November, offering a payment plan on the northern bond. Wren remembered writing it. She had written it at half past one in the morning with her fingers so cold she had had to stop twice and hold them under her arms.

“Did you.” He set the paper down. “Sign it.”

“Yes.”

The single word seemed to make the study colder.

Lord Ambrose leaned back in his chair and folded his hands, and Wren saw with a lurch of something close to nausea that he was enjoying this. He had brought them here to be seen. He had unlocked a box he had kept hidden for a year, and he had done it in front of a duke, and he had timed it exactly.

“Perhaps now Your Grace understands,” he said, “why my youngest daughter was not presented as a suitable match.”

Atticus looked at him. “Be careful.”

“I am trying to protect you.”

“You are trying to protect yourself.”

“She has spent over a year writing to creditors in my name. Manipulating the accounts. Delaying payments that were lawfully due.” Lord Ambrose’s voice was almost gentle. “Keeping this estate alive by methods that would ruin any man who married into it. And now Thornbury arrives.” His gaze settled on Wren with deliberate, surgical cruelty. “How fortunate.”

Wren went very still.

Atticus lowered the document. “Explain what you mean.”

Lord Ambrose gestured at the packet.

“Three weeks ago, my daughter wrote to Mr. Quill and promised him that a substantial settlement might soon resolve our obligations.”

Atticus’s eyes found hers.

Three weeks ago. Before the visit. Before the sugar bowl. Before he had ever asked her name.

Wren understood the trap only as it closed.

“That is not—”

“The letter does not mention Celeste,” her father said pleasantly.

Atticus’s jaw tightened. “What does it say?”

Wren remembered every word. She had written it at two in the morning, three weeks before, with fourteen families’ worth of eviction notices on the desk beside her and a candle that had burned down to a stub.

“That a marriage settlement might become available.”

“Whose?”

“I did not know.” It came out fast, too fast. “I did not know it would be you. I knew my father was seeking a match for Celeste; I knew nothing about Thornbury, I had never heard your name until Thursday.”

“Yet when I arrived,” Atticus said, “you knew the estate needed money.”

“Yes.”

“And you never told me.”

His voice was quieter than anger would have been. Wren stepped toward him.

“You were a guest in my father’s house. What was I supposed to say? Welcome to Ashmoor, Your Grace — the flowers are borrowed, the candlesticks are borrowed, and the roof belongs mostly to a bank.”

His mouth almost moved, and the humor did not reach his eyes.

“You could have told me when I asked why you were hidden.”

“I barely knew you.”

“You knew enough to let me defend you.”

Wren’s face warmed. “I never asked you to.”

Silence struck between them like a dropped glass.

Atticus looked away first. And that — that small turning of his head — hurt more than any accusation he could have made.

Lord Ambrose gathered the papers with careful, satisfied hands. “There are other documents.”

Wren turned sharply. “What documents?”

“Letters in which you proposed delaying foreclosures until after this house secured a favorable alliance.” He tapped the packet. “Because eviction notices were already being prepared. And you signed them, Wren, because you refused to let them be sent.”

Her father stood up.

“Your Grace, my daughter is clever. Far cleverer than I allowed for.” He smiled at the Duke of Thornbury, and it was a warm smile, an almost fatherly smile. “Perhaps you should consider whether her modesty is merely another talent.”

Atticus’s head snapped toward him. “Enough.”

But the damage had already landed. Wren could see it in the distance he had put between them — eight inches of polished wood and twenty years of careful caution. She looked at him.

“Do you believe I arranged this?”

Atticus was silent for one long breath.

“I don’t know what I believe,” he said.

Honest. Controlled. Devastating.

Wren nodded once.

“Then I have my answer.”

She walked out before either man could stop her.