“I’ll Marry the First Woman Who Enters,” the Duke Declared— Then She Burst In Chasing a Bird With…

Chapter 10

Theo stared at them from the doorway.

“Why,” he said, “are you both standing like that?”

Adrian lowered the pistol. “You nearly died.”

Theo blinked. “I came to tell you the carriage is ready.”

Clara began to laugh, and once she started she could not stop — the release of it coming out as helpless, gasping sound, while Theo looked at her with the injured expression of a man who had missed the joke and knew he would never be forgiven for it.

Adrian put a hand over his eyes. “I hate my family.”

“No, you don’t,” Clara said, still laughing.

“Tonight I do.”

They rode home through the dark. The ledgers went in the carriage with them, tied in oilcloth, and Clara held the bundle on her lap the whole way as though it might try to escape.

It took another week to find the man.

His name, once, had been Fenwick. He had been Adrian’s father’s secretary for eleven years — the quiet figure at the corner of every portrait, the man who wrote the letters and kept the diary and knew which doors in that house were locked and where the keys were kept.

Now he was Mr. Fairbridge, a widower of modest means, keeping a tiny shop in a market town two counties away that sold fishing tackle and penny-novels and nothing else.

Adrian walked in alone.

Clara watched from the street through the window, which had been the arrangement, and which she had agreed to under protest loud enough to embarrass a less stubborn man.

Through the glass she saw the old man look up from his counter. She saw him recognize the face. She saw him put both hands flat on the wood, as though the room had tilted.

They spoke for a long time. Thirty minutes. Forty. Once, Adrian turned away from the counter and stood with his back to the room for nearly a full minute, and Clara’s hands clenched and stayed clenched.

Then he came out.

He walked past her without stopping, and she fell in beside him, and they walked three streets in silence before he spoke.

“You knew my father,” he said, to the air. “That is what I said to him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said yes.”

“Then what?”

“Then I asked him if he stole from him.”

Clara waited.

“He said yes. He said he did it for eleven years, and that he was not clever enough to have done it alone, and that he was sorry, and that he had spent every day since trying to find a way to be a different sort of man.” Adrian’s jaw worked. “I asked him if he threatened Gideon Hale. He said yes. I asked him if he killed my father.”

Clara stopped walking.

Adrian stopped too.

“He said no,” he said.

“He denied it.”

“He wept.” Adrian’s voice was strange. “He said he had been in that house when the news came, and that he had been glad, and that he had hated himself for being glad, and that he would have given anything to undo it and could not, because it was not him.”

“Then who?”

They stood in the middle of a narrow street in a town neither of them had ever been to, with the evening tradesmen hurrying past with baskets and the light going orange on the roofs.

“His employer,” Adrian said. “He gave me the name. He gave it to me without my asking for it, as though he had been waiting twenty years for someone to come and take it off him.”

“Who?”

He told her.

Clara did not know the name. In the way of the world, that hardly mattered and changed everything — she did not know it, but she knew what the name was: a title. An old one. A respected one. A man who had been a friend of Adrian’s father since school, who had stood at his funeral, who had advised the estate during the minority, and who — she learned this two hours later, sitting in a rented parlor while Adrian paced and said nothing — had been instrumental in securing Adrian the succession.

The man who had helped him inherit was the man who had taken everything first.

Adrian came home in silence and sat down in the chair by the fire and did not speak.

Clara waited. She had learned that much about him.

Finally he said, “My father was betrayed by someone he trusted.”

She sat down on the arm of the chair.

“Yes,” she said.

“I spent years thinking my father did not care about me.”

She touched his hand.

“And now?”

“Now I wish I had asked him.” His voice cracked on the last word, and hearing it, Clara felt something in her own chest open like a door. “I wish I had asked him one question. I had twenty years of dinners with the man. I could have asked him anything.”

“You were a boy.”

“I know.”

“Then forgive yourself.”

He looked up at her.

“I am trying,” he said.

She smiled, and it came out crooked because her eyes had gone hot. “That is enough.”

And he kissed her.

It was not like the greenhouse — no hesitation, no stopping, no hand lowered at the last moment. It was deliberate. It was a decision, made out loud in the only language he had that could not be misread, and when they parted he rested his forehead against hers and neither of them opened their eyes.

“I love you,” he said.

Clara closed her eyes tighter.

“I love you too,” she whispered.

The words were quiet. They changed everything.

And on the table behind them, in the bundle of oilcloth, the ledgers of Ashbourne Hall waited — because there was still a name to be answered for, and the man who owned it had spent twenty years making certain that nobody ever read those pages.