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

Chapter 14

They did it quietly, which was the only way it could be done.

Clara took the household accounts. For nine days she sat at the long table in the muniment room with a lamp burning and read her way through twenty years of expenditure, and learned things about this house that nobody had ever intended her to know — that the west wing had been re-roofed twice in a decade by the same man at twice the price, that the kitchen accounts had been padded so gently and so consistently that it had to be deliberate, that for four years running, the estate had paid a pension to a woman in Dorset whom nobody living in Ashbourne Hall had ever met.

Adrian took the legal papers. He read his father’s will and the codicils and the six deeds that hung off it, and did not sleep.

Theo took London, because Theo could go where a duke’s cousin could go without a single door closing, and because in a club or a coffee house Theo Sinclair was worth ten of any of them — he had a memory for faces and a gift for being underestimated that bordered on genius.

The answer came, in the end, from the stables.

Clara was the one who heard it, because she had made a habit of walking to the stables in the mornings before the house woke, on the theory that the men who mucked out the boxes heard everything and were asked nothing.

The boy’s name was Jem. He was fifteen and about as tall as a broom. He was brushing down the bay when Clara climbed onto the mounting block beside him and asked, without preamble, whether anything strange had happened in the house the week before the legal claim was filed.

He stopped brushing.

“Strange how, miss?”

“Anything at all. Anyone you did not recognize.”

Jem considered it for a while. Then he said, “There were a man.”

Clara kept her voice perfectly level. “Tell me.”

“Came in the afternoon, two Saturdays back. I were up at the top of the yard with the tack, so I seen the whole of the drive. Nobody come to the front. He went round the side, past the chapel, to the little door by the muniment room. Had a key.”

Her heart had begun to beat very hard.

“What did he look like?”

“Oldish. Grey. Not a gentleman — a gentleman’s coat, but he walked like a servant, like he knew where the floorboards creak.” Jem frowned, remembering. “Terrible weather, that day. Raining sideways. And he hadn’t no umbrella.”

“He was wet.”

“Wet through. And I remember thinking, that coat is ruined.” The boy looked at her. “It were a nice coat, miss. Dark blue with a great belt of a collar and silver buttons on the cuffs, and I thought, that’s a London coat, that is. Nobody here has a coat like that.”

Clara went back to the house so fast she was out of breath at the top of the steps, and found Adrian in the library with the deeds spread across four chairs.

“Grey hair. Nineteen stone, perhaps. Blue coat with a silver-buttoned cuff.” She had to stop and breathe. “Jem knows it because it was ruined in the rain. Do you know it?”

Adrian was already standing.

“Cranmere’s secretary,” he said. “Wren. He came here with Cranmere six years ago, to advise on the boundary settlement. I gave him a glass of sherry in this room.”

“He has a key to your muniment room.”

“He had a key.” Adrian’s voice had gone very quiet. “Which means he was here to find something, and he did not find it, or the claim would not have been filed in that shape.”

They stared at one another.

“What is he looking for?” Clara said.

And then she knew.

She knew before she had finished the sentence. She felt her own hand come up, unbidden, to her throat — to the flat gold oval lying against her collarbone, warm from her skin.

Adrian watched her do it.

“No,” he said. “Not that. That is a piece of family jewelry.”

“Which your grandmother said vanished out of a locked room, and which was never spoken of again, and which turned up sixty years later around the neck of a clerk’s daughter in a village four miles away.” Clara’s fingers found the little catch at the side of the pendant, the one she had never noticed in twenty-four years of owning it, the one he had found in a moment. “And inside it, there is an engraving that belongs to your house.”

She opened it.

The rose and the letter were there, as they had been in that hotel room in London.

But they were not alone.

Behind the little gilt inner plate, packed flat and tight so that it moved with the lid rather than against it, was a fold of paper no larger than a postage stamp — old, yellowed, and written on in a hand so small and so careful that it must have taken a jeweler’s tool to make the letters.

Adrian took it from her and carried it to the window.

He flattened it against the glass and read it.

For a long time, Clara watched her husband stand motionless in the light with his back to her, and heard a sound that could have been breath or could have been something else.

Then he turned.

“Names,” he said.

He laid it on the desk. Clara leaned over it. There were perhaps a dozen, written in that thread-thin hand, some with initials after them, some with only a surname, and at the very bottom, alone, underlined twice:

Cranmere.

Underneath, in a different ink, in a hand she knew from a hunting lodge among the beeches:

I will not do so. — G.H.

“He knew,” Adrian said. “My father knew. He had the list — he had it the whole time — but he had nothing that would hold in a court. A list of names and a clerk’s word against a peer.” His hand went flat on the desk. “So he put it inside the only object in this house that nobody could ever take from him, and gave it to the one man he trusted to keep it.”

“Your grandmother.”

“No.” Adrian looked at Clara, and his eyes were wet, and he did not seem to know it. “My grandmother said it vanished. She said it in exactly the tone of voice that warns a child off a subject forever.” He turned the paper in the light. “She gave it away, Clara. She took the only evidence of what happened to your grandfather and she put it around the neck of the girl who had married his son, and she sent it out of this house.”

Clara felt the floor move under her.

“She gave it to your mother.”

“She gave it to your mother,” Adrian said, “and drove your family into poverty for thirty years to keep it safe. Which is the coldest, most faithful thing I have ever heard about any Sinclair.”

Clara could not speak.

“And then a bird stole it,” Adrian said, “and brought it back.”

The clock in the passage struck eleven.

They went to bed at two, and the house was very quiet, and Clara lay awake in the dark for a long time listening to Adrian breathe beside her, so she was almost asleep when he said her name.

“Clara.”

“Mm.”

“Something is wrong.”

She opened her eyes.

Adrian was sitting up. “The dogs are quiet.”

“What?”

“Something set them off. In the yard.” He was already out of bed, already moving, and his voice was doing the thing she had learned to listen for — flat, quick, without the ornament of fear. “Stay here. Do not open the door to anyone you do not hear me name.”

He pulled on his boots and was gone.

Clara lay in the dark with her heart going, and counted to a hundred, and heard nothing.

Then she heard it.

A scrape, very close, on the wooden floor of the passage — the sound of a door being eased across a frame that no longer fit, and a smell, faint and wrong, of wet wool and lamp oil.

She sat up.

The handle turned.

Clara had time to reach for the poker by the hearth and to see, in the gray spill of moonlight through the window, the shape of the man coming in — a big soft gray shape in a blue coat, holding a hooded lamp, moving with the careful grief of a person who knows they are doing something that cannot be undone.

She got one good swing at him.

Then something heavy came down over her head from behind, and the room folded up like a letter, and she took one last breath of wet wool and lamp oil and — unbelievably, impossibly — roses, and then there was nothing at all.