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

Chapter 15

By evening, the whole household knew some version of it.

That is how a house works; there is no such thing as a private ruin. The servants knew before the family did, and the family knew before the family admitted it, and by the time the gong rang for dinner, Wren could feel it in the way the corridors arranged themselves around her — people turning to look at a doorway just as she passed through it, conversations dropping a note and picking up again on the far side.

Celeste would not look at her. Verity asked, twice, whether Wren was quite well, in a voice pitched for the room. Blythe, who was seventeen and had no idea what was happening and was frightened by it, came to Wren’s door at eight and stood there with her eyes full and said nothing and left.

Her mother did not come at all. Through the wall, Wren could hear her crying — and she stood with her forehead against the cold panel and her hand flat on the wood and did not go in, because she did not know what she would say if she did.

At nine, Wren went to the estate office.

It was a small room off the boot passage that had been the steward’s, and that nobody used now, because there was no steward. She had put a candle and a stool in it months ago and had told no one. On the table were the things she had built in the dark: every account she had altered, every creditor she had written, every rent she had reduced, every instruction of her father’s she had disobeyed and recorded so that the disobeying could be explained to somebody if it ever had to be.

She sat down and began to copy.

She did not cry. She had decided at some point during the walk down the stairs that she was finished crying in this house. She copied the December figures. She copied the letters to the merchant house and the grain merchant and the two banks. She copied the note on the southern leases, and the record of the ewes she had sold, and the entry where she had moved the drainage shortfall into the northern account.

If her name was to become a scandal, she would at least make it a useful scandal.

Near midnight, the candle had burned down to an inch and the fire in the little grate was red coals with gray skin on them, and Wren heard the door open.

She did not look up.

“You are leaving,” Atticus Vale said.

She looked up then. He was standing in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his coat over his arm, and his eyes had gone to the small traveling case beside her chair.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Because of me?”

“Because I am finished being useful to people who would prefer me invisible.”

He stepped inside and closed the door, and the small room became three times smaller.

“Wren. You had every right to question me.”

“I do not question you.” Her voice stayed quiet. “I have simply stopped being willing to spend my life begging people to believe I am honest.”

She tied the last bundle.

“Not my father. Not my family.” She looked up. “Not even you.”

Atticus’s hand closed around the back of a chair, and she watched his knuckles whiten.

“Where will you go?”

“My aunt Prudence in Bath will take me, temporarily, and Ashmoor—” She looked down at the papers. “Ashmoor may be lost entirely, after everything I did to save it.”

“Some things become too expensive to save.”

She picked up the largest bundle.

“Tomorrow morning I am giving these to Mr. Quill and to the bank. Every signature I made without authority. Every debt my father concealed. Every attempt he has made to place the losses on the tenants who cannot pay.” She looked at him steadily. “It will ruin him.”

Atticus stared at her. “That will ruin the name you—”

“Yes.”

“And your prospects with it.”

“Yes.”

His voice dropped. “Then what, exactly, were you trying to gain by marrying a duke?”

Wren met his eyes without flinching.

“Nothing.”

Before he could answer — and she saw, very clearly, that he had no answer ready — she turned back to the table to close the last ledger.

The clasp had come loose. As she lifted the cover, a folded sheet of paper slid out from between the pages and lay on the table between them, face up, in her father’s handwriting.

Wren stopped.

She had gone through that ledger four times that night. She had not seen it. It must have been slipped in the binding long before she ever took possession of the book — wedged deep, behind the stitching, where a page would sit for a year without a soul noticing.

Her hand was steady as she unfolded it.

The paper shook once between her fingers, and then stilled.

“What does it say?” Atticus asked.

Her eyes moved across the page and something inside her chest settled into a terrible, quiet clarity, the way a key settles into a lock it was always meant for.

“It is addressed to Mr. Quill.”

“Your father’s solicitor.”

“Yes.”

She read it to the end. Then she turned it around so that he could see the date.

Atticus’s expression sharpened. “Wren. That is dated six weeks ago.”

“Six weeks ago,” Wren said. “Before your visit was ever arranged. Before Thornbury was ever mentioned in this house.”

She read it aloud.