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

Chapter 11

They did not go home the way they came.

Adrian sent the carriage on ahead with Theo and a letter to Lady Beatrice, and he and Clara took the mail coach north, because a man who is about to accuse a peer of murder should not arrive in his own crested carriage.

Clara spent the journey with the ledgers on her knees, reading by the window light, and by the second day she had taught herself the shape of the fraud.

It was beautiful, in the way a machine is beautiful. Money left the estate in three streams: one as payments to a fictional contractor for works never done, one as interest on a loan that had never been made, one as wages to servants who had never existed. The streams converged in a single account. The account was in the name of a partnership that had been dissolved in the year of Adrian’s birth, and the sole surviving partner was a man whose signature appeared nowhere, who had never been officially connected to anything, and who had nonetheless been — as Fenwick told it, in a shop that smelled of hooks and dust — the one who gave the orders.

“He was never there,” Fenwick had said. “That is how he did it. He was never in the room. He was never in the county. And when your father began to close in, it was Fenwick who had to stand in front of him, and Fenwick who had to write the threats, and Fenwick who had to sleep afterward.”

“And my grandfather?”

“Gideon Hale was the cleverest man in that house,” the old man said. “He worked out in four months what I had been hiding for nine years. And when he came to me with it — because he had decided I was the one who would help him reach your father — I went to my employer instead.” He had looked at his hands. “I have thought about that decision every day for twenty years. He refused to stay silent. And he was dead within the year.”

“How?”

“I do not know. That is the truth. I was told nothing. But your father died two weeks later, and I knew what I knew, and I knew that if I stayed in that house one more week I would die too. So I ran.”

“And the name?”

And he had given it, and here they were, in a coaching inn forty miles from London, with the name written on a slip of paper in Adrian’s waistcoat pocket and a decision to make that neither of them wanted to say out loud.

“You cannot accuse him publicly,” Clara said, on the third evening. “Not with Fenwick’s word and a set of ledgers. He will produce counsel. He will produce witnesses. He has had twenty years and a peerage to prepare.”

“I know.”

“So what do we do?”

Adrian looked at the fire.

“We go and see him,” he said. “Not to accuse him. To ask him.”

“Ask him what?”

“Whether he wants to spend the rest of his life wondering which day it will come out.”

Clara stared at him. “That is not a threat. That is a sentence.”

“It is the only weapon I have that he cannot buy his way out of.” He turned the glass in his hand. “He is seventy-four years old. He has a name that four generations have polished. He gave me my title, Clara. He stood at my father’s funeral. Whatever else he is, he is a man who decided a long time ago that what people thought of him was worth more than anything.”

“And you will take that away.”

“No,” Adrian said. “I will tell him that I can. And then I will let him decide what he is.”

Clara was quiet for a long moment.

“What about my grandfather?” she said. “What about justice for a clerk in a Hampshire village whose name nobody remembers?”

Adrian looked at her.

“I do not know,” he said honestly. “But I know that killing the man who did it will not bring Gideon Hale back, and that a scandal will be paid for by people who had nothing to do with any of it — his tenants, his servants, the girl in the village school who carries his name in her letters of reference.”

“That is not justice either.”

“No,” he said. “It is the least unjust thing I can find.”

Clara sat with that for a long time.

Then she said, “I want him to say it. I want him to say my grandfather’s name out loud, to my face, and admit what he did. If he will not — then we do it the other way, whatever the cost.”

Adrian nodded slowly.

“That,” he said, “I can promise you.”

They reached the house the following afternoon.

It stood at the end of a long drive, gray and gracious and utterly certain of itself, with deer moving under the old oaks and a footman already opening the door before they were halfway up the steps. Adrian sent up his card. They waited in a drawing room with a fire too large for the day.

More than an hour passed.

And then the door opened, and the footman said, “His lordship will see you now,” and Clara stood up and found that her hands were shaking, and Adrian took one of them and held it, briefly, before they walked in together.

The man in the chair by the window had a face like a well-kept garden — everything in its place, everything trimmed, nothing permitted to grow wild enough to show what was underneath.

He did not rise.

“Sinclair,” he said. “I had wondered when you would come.”

Adrian did not sit down.

“I have the ledgers,” he said. “All of them. And I have the letter my father never sent, and the man who wrote it — the one you left behind to rot in a shop two counties away. I know the name of every account and the date of every withdrawal. I know who Gideon Hale was, and what he found, and what happened to him after.”

For the first time, something moved behind the old man’s eyes.

“What do you want?” he said.

And in the doorway behind them, a voice Clara had never heard before said, very calmly: “Yes, Adrian. Do tell us what you want.”

They both turned.

Lady Vivienne Ellery stood in the door of the drawing room with her hand still on the handle and a look on her face that Clara had seen exactly once before — in a conservatory, at night, with a folded fan in her hand and a warning she had chosen to give for reasons of her own.

“You have met my uncle, then,” she said.