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

Chapter 12

Lord Edmund Cranmere did not rise from his chair.

He was seventy-four years old, thin as a birch in winter, with a face like a well-kept garden — everything in its place, nothing permitted to grow wild enough to show what lay beneath. A fire burned at his back, too large for the afternoon, and he held a glass of claret in a hand that had not shaken in fifty years.

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

Adrian did not sit. Neither did Clara. Vivienne closed the door behind them and stood against it, and Clara understood, in that instant, that she was not here as a hostage or a witness. She was here as a wall.

“I have the ledgers,” Adrian said. “All of them. The real ones. I have the letter my father’s clerk carried to his grave, and the man who wrote the threats — the one you left behind to rot in a shop selling fishing hooks two counties away. I know the name of every account. I know the date of every withdrawal. I know what Gideon Hale found, and what happened to him after he found it.”

The old man drank.

“That is a great deal of knowing,” he said.

“It is.”

“And yet you have come to my house in the afternoon light, on a fine day, with your hat in your hand. Which suggests that you do not know what to do with it.”

Clara felt Adrian go still beside her. It was the stillness of a man being read accurately, and hating it.

“Say his name,” Adrian said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Gideon Hale. The clerk. Say his name out loud, in this room, and tell me what you did to him.”

Cranmere considered this for a long moment, the way a man considers a card in a game he has already won.

“No,” he said.

The refusal was so quiet, so complete, that it took Clara a full second to understand that the conversation was over. There would be no confession. There would be no scene. The old man would not weep, would not rise, would not even put down his glass.

“You will not say it.”

“I will not.”

“Then I will.”

“You may.” Cranmere turned the glass slowly, watching the light move through the wine. “You may stand in the middle of a drawing room and swear that thirty years ago I arranged the death of a Hampshire clerk on the strength of a ledger and a dead man’s word. Do you know what happens next? Your lawyers write to my lawyers. My lawyers write to the Lord Chancellor. And in eighteen months, when the case is finally heard, every newspaper in England will have decided that the Duke of Ashbourne is a young man with a grudge and a family history of instability.” He looked up. “Your mother, I believe, was not well.”

Clara heard Adrian’s breath change.

“And your father,” Cranmere went on, gently, “died in a field with a broken neck and a reputation for being difficult. There are people who still say he did it himself.”

The fire cracked.

Adrian took one step forward, and Clara put her hand flat on his chest — not pushing, only there. He stopped as though he had walked into a wall.

“You will not provoke him in his own house,” she said quietly. “It is what he wants. Look at him.”

Cranmere’s eyes moved to her for the first time.

“Miss Hale,” he said.

“Clara Hale.”

“Yes. I have read a great deal about you this week. Very little of it kind, I am afraid. The world is fond of a girl who catches a duke, and fonder still of disliking her for it.”

“How fortunate that I have never needed the world’s affection.”

“No.” He studied her, and there was something in his attention that made her skin prickle — not desire, not contempt. Classification. “Your grandfather had that same way of speaking. Like something was already decided and he had merely arrived to inform you.”

Clara’s heart hit once, hard, against her ribs.

“You knew him.”

“I employed him.”

“You used him.”

“I promoted him,” Cranmere said. “Twice. He was remarkably good with figures. It was the only thing about him that was not a liability.”

Clara took a breath, and the room smelled of wax and old paper and the claret, and she understood with a clarity that frightened her that she could kill this man with her own hands if there had been a weapon within reach and no witnesses.

“And when he found the money missing?”

“An interesting question.” The old man set down his glass. “I imagine he felt what clever men always feel when they discover something they believe no one else has seen. Righteous. Enormous. Alone.” He looked into the fire. “It is a very expensive feeling.”

Vivienne spoke from the door.

“That is enough.”

Cranmere turned his head slowly, as though he had forgotten she was capable of speech.

“You are very bold for a niece I clothed.”

“I am very bold for a woman you have used twice,” Vivienne said. “Which is the only training you ever gave me.”

Clara looked at her.

“I told you he did not trust easily,” Vivienne said. “I did not tell you why the engagement ended.” She kept her eyes on her uncle. “There were letters. I did love someone else. That much was true. But I did not leave them where he could find them, and he did not stumble on them in the way he has told the world he did. I was shown them. Deliberately. The same week Adrian came back from the north with questions about the estate accounts.”

Adrian went white.

“You arranged it,” he said.

“I arranged it,” Cranmere agreed. “And what a service it was. I removed from your path a woman with four brothers, three of them in the Commons, and an inconvenient habit of reading her husband’s correspondence.” He smiled, and it was a courteous smile, pleasantly shamefaced, like a host confessing he has eaten the last of the cake. “I merely advised a young man that he had been betrayed. He supplied the rest. Grief is very reliable.”

“You let me believe,” Vivienne said, evenly, “that I had been found out. You let me believe there was no way back.”

“There was not. I was thorough.” He picked up his glass again. “You have both come to me looking for a confession, and I have given you one, and I notice that neither of you has asked the obvious question.”

Adrian’s jaw was tight enough to be painful.

“Which is?” Clara said.

“Why should I tell you any of this.” The old man drank. “I am seventy-four. I have outlived your father by twenty years, and I will outlive you by more than you like to think. What do I have left to be afraid of? Exposure? At my age, scandal is a word people use in the paragraph where they also write distinguished and great age. Prison?” He laughed — a thin, dry sound. “I would be released into a warm room within a year. There is no punishment in this country for men like me. There never has been.”

He set the glass down a final time.

“And so I will offer you something instead. Give me the ledgers. Give me the letter. Tell no one what your clerk told you in his fishing-hook shop. And in return, I will sign a statement — properly witnessed, properly sealed — setting out everything your father suspected in the year of his death, and confirming it.” He tilted his head. “You would get your truth, Sinclair. All of it, on paper, signed by a peer of the realm. You would just have to wait to publish it until I am dead, which by my own arithmetic cannot be very long. And I would die with my name intact, which is the only thing I have ever actually wanted.”

The fire hissed.

“That is not justice,” Clara said.

“No,” Cranmere agreed. “It is arithmetic. Which is a thing your grandfather understood, and a thing you do not.”

Adrian picked up his hat. His hands were steady. His voice, when it came, was worse than shouting.

“What happens if I refuse?”

“Then I will fight you,” the old man said mildly. “And I will fight you with the only weapon I have ever needed.” He lifted a small folded paper from the table beside him — cream, heavy, sealed. “I know how your father’s will was drawn.”

Adrian did not move.

“It was drawn very carefully,” Cranmere said. “I should know. I chose the man who wrote it.”

He held the paper out, and after a moment Adrian took it, and broke the seal, and read it there in the middle of the room while Clara watched his face change — not dramatically. Just quietly. Completely.

“Two weeks after you left this house,” Cranmere said, “a claim will be filed against the will. I have made very sure it is a good one. Not unanswerable — you are too clever for that. But expensive.” He smiled. “Have a pleasant drive home, Your Grace. Miss Hale.”

They walked out through a hall full of dead deer and dead men in oil paint, and Clara did not breathe properly until the carriage door shut behind them and the house began to move backwards down the drive.

Adrian sat with the paper in his lap and did not speak for two miles.

“Clara,” he said at last.

“Tell me.”

“Someone in London is claiming the will was altered after my father’s death.” He turned it over. “If the claim succeeds, I lose the northern farms, the salt rents, and the Marchgate woods.”

“How much is that?”

“Enough that I could no longer afford to repair cottages, or pay a village schoolmaster, or keep forty servants in a house that has room for a hundred.” He looked at her. “Enough that I would be a duke the way a man with one good coat is a gentleman.”

Clara looked out at the hedgerows going dark.

“Do you believe the will was altered?”

“No.”

“Then who is making the claim?”

He folded the paper and put it in his waistcoat, and the last of the light went out of the sky.

“A distant relation,” he said. “Viscount Cranmere’s godson.”