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

Chapter 9

The trail led north and east, to a hunting lodge that had not been used in twenty years.

They found it on the third day, after two nights at inns where Clara slept badly and woke to find Adrian already dressed, already downstairs, already watching roads. The lodge sat in a hollow among beech trees, its roof half collapsed at one end, its windows boarded. Weeds stood waist-high in what had once been a gravel sweep.

Adrian walked around it twice before he would let her near the door.

“Your father came here,” Clara said.

“The week before he died. According to the stable books, which are the only records in that house nobody thought to prune.”

The door was warped. It took both of them, and Adrian’s shoulder, and a great deal of swearing.

Inside, the air was thick and sweet with rot. Light came through chinks in the boards in long dusty bars. There were two rooms, a hearth, a broken chair, and against the far wall, a chest.

It was locked.

Adrian looked at it for a moment. Then he picked up a length of iron from the hearth, and broke the hasp off with three blows.

Inside were account books. Names. Dates. Columns of payments in and payments out, and beside the largest entries, a single recurring initial, written in a hand Clara was coming to know as well as her own.

They were the missing ledgers. The real ones. The ones the balanced books upstairs had been built to hide.

Beneath them lay a letter, folded, addressed in that same hand to Mr. Gideon Hale, Clerk, Ashbourne Hall.

Clara opened it.

Sir — You have been warned once. You will not be warned again. What you have found is not yours to find, and what you intend to do with it will ruin a family better than yours. If you value your place, your name, and your life, you will burn the papers and forget what you have read.

I will not do so, her grandfather had written across the bottom, in ink gone brown with age. I will not.

And beneath that, in a hand that shook:

If anything happens to me, the truth lies with Ashbourne.

Clara read it twice. Then she handed it to Adrian.

He read it standing, the way he read everything, and when he finished he read it again, and his hands were not entirely steady.

“He knew,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My father knew someone was stealing from him.”

“Yes.”

“And he was trying to stop them.”

“Yes.”

Adrian sat down on the broken chair, heavily, as though the strings holding him upright had been cut.

For a while there was no sound but the bees in the hollow and the wind moving through the broken roof.

“I thought he was a cold man,” Adrian said at last. “I spent twenty years believing that my father cared about nothing except being right. And he died trying to—” He stopped.

Clara knelt in the dust beside the chair so that her face was level with his.

“Perhaps he was cold,” she said. “He may also have been brave. Those things can live in the same man.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you do.”

He looked away.

She kept going, quietly.

“You think loving someone means never frightening them. Never disappointing them. Never making them sorry they chose you.” She paused. “It doesn’t. People can love badly and still love. That is what most of the world is doing, every day.”

He gave a short, unhappy laugh. “That sounds like something learned the hard way.”

“My parents loved each other,” Clara said. “My father died young, and my mother never recovered, and for years I thought that proved something — that love is a debt with a cruel interest rate.” She looked at him. “I am beginning to think it proved nothing except that they were human.”

Adrian was quiet. Then he took her hand.

“Then we are both foolish,” he said. “Or both lucky.”

“Possibly both.”

They were still sitting like that when a noise came from outside.

Footsteps. Not one man’s. Two, maybe three, moving through the weeds toward the door.

Adrian was on his feet before Clara had fully processed the sound. He moved her behind him with one arm, and in his other hand, from somewhere inside his coat, there was a pistol.

“I can defend myself,” she said, annoyed, in a whisper.

“I know.”

“Then why are you standing in front of me?”

“Because I want to.”

She almost argued. Then she saw his face in the dusty light — and understood that he was not treating her as weak. He was frightened for her. It was written on him, plain, and Clara had never in her life been the reason a man was afraid.

She put her hand flat against his back.

“Then we stand together,” she said.

He glanced back at her. “Together.”

The door swung open.