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

Chapter 8

The letter arrived the following morning at the hotel, on a silver tray, and Clara knew before she opened it that something had changed.

She had not written to anyone. Nobody knew where she was, except her aunt.

The paper was heavy, the hand was a clerk’s — narrow, upright, tightly ruled — and the seal was a solicitor’s. She read it twice standing up, and then sat down on the edge of the bed and read it a third time.

Madam — In the course of settling certain matters pertaining to the estate of your late mother, we have cause to raise a question regarding an item of jewelry enumerated among her effects…

The pendant. Authenticated, per the enclosed memorandum, as an object recorded in the Sinclair family inventories of 1784. It had been described, in that inventory and in the family’s private papers, as having belonged to Aurelia Sinclair, great-grandmother of the present Duke of Ashbourne.

Clara sat very still.

There were footsteps in the corridor. A knock, and then the handle, and Adrian came in already speaking — about the carriage, about the hour — and stopped when he saw her face.

“What has happened?”

She held out the letter. He read it standing, the way she had. Then he read it again, and she watched the color leave his face.

“That is impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“That necklace was my mother’s. She gave it to me when I was nine. I gave it—” He stopped. He crossed the room, took the chain from where she had laid it on the table, and turned the pendant over in his fingers, looking for something.

There was a tiny catch. He found it with his thumbnail.

Inside, engraved so small she had never noticed it in twenty-four years of owning the thing, was a rose and a single letter.

He went white.

“My grandmother used to speak of that necklace,” he said, very quietly. “It vanished. Before I was born. She said it vanished out of a locked room, and that no one ever spoke of it again.”

Clara looked down at the pendant in his hand.

“How did my mother get it?” she said.

Adrian did not answer.

“We need to find out,” she said.

They went back to Ashbourne Hall that same evening. The family records were kept in a locked cabinet in the muniment room — the old strong-room off the library, cold even in summer, smelling of paper and iron. Adrian lit the lamps himself. They searched for hours.

Just before midnight, Clara found the ledger.

It was bound in cracked calf, water-stained along one edge, and its columns were full of names she did not recognize — tenant farmers, tradesmen, suppliers, yearly accounts. And there, again and again, in the neat hand of an estate clerk, one name.

G. Hale.

Clara felt her hands go cold.

“My grandfather,” she said. “Gideon Hale. He was an estate clerk. I knew that.”

Adrian took the ledger from her and read the entries. Then he read further. Then he turned pages faster, and faster, and then he stopped.

“He was more than a clerk,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“The accounts for the year forty-nine. They do not balance. They have been made to balance.” His finger moved down the page. “Someone was moving money out of this estate in three directions at once. Whoever did it was good. Very good.”

“And my grandfather?”

“He found it.” Adrian’s voice had gone flat and strange. “He found it and he wrote it down, in his own hand, and he took it to my father.”

The room was very quiet. Somewhere above them, the house creaked with the settling of old timber.

“And then?” Clara whispered.

Adrian turned to the last page in the sequence.

The entries stopped. They did not taper or conclude or sum. They simply stopped, halfway down the page, as though the man writing had set down his pen and walked out of the room and never come back.

“My father died two weeks later,” Adrian said.

Neither of them spoke for a long moment.

They kept searching. It was Clara who found it: a gap in the correspondence, a sequence of letters bound together by year whose numbers ran forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty-one. One year was missing. Not lost — removed. The binding threads had been re-sewn. And three pages further on, a page had been cut out with a blade, so cleanly that the stub barely showed.

Someone had done this deliberately.

Someone who had access.

Adrian sat back in the chair and stared at the mutilated page for a long time.

“Someone did not want this found,” he said.

Clara reached over and closed her hand around his.

“Then we find out who,” she said.

He looked at her. And then, to her surprise, he shook his head.

“You should leave.”

She blinked. “What?”

“This is my family’s problem. My father. My estate. My—”

“Your grandfather is not in it,” she said. “Mine is.”

“Clara—”

“You asked me for six weeks to get to know you.” She stood, and stepped closer, until she was standing directly over him, and he had to look up. “You did not say I had to disappear the moment your life became complicated.”

He was silent.

“I am afraid,” he said at last.

She softened. “I know.”

“Someone may have hurt my father. And someone, almost certainly, hurt your grandfather.”

“Yes.”

“So you understand why—”

“I understand that you are trying to protect me,” Clara said. “I do not need protecting. I need to know what happened to my mother’s family. And I am not going to find that out standing in a lane in Hampshire while you ride around the county getting yourself killed.”

He stared at her. Then, slowly, something gave way in his face — not defeat, exactly. Relief, badly disguised.

He took a breath.

“Then we do this together,” he said.

She held out her hand.

He took it.

And that was the moment the arrangement changed. Neither of them said so. Neither of them needed to. They had stopped deciding whether to fall in love. They were already standing in it.