“WHO MADE THIS APPLE TART?” THE DUKE ASKED — THEN HE SAW THE WIDOW NO ONE HAD EVER THANKED

Chapter 14

Their first kiss was careful at the start. Almost reverent — as though either of them might still choose, even now, to step back and stop, and both of them were giving the other the room to do it.

Then six weeks of denied feeling broke loose all at once between them, and the kiss deepened into something aching and unhurried. Longing and grief and relief all tangled up together. Tender rather than reckless. Patient rather than hurried, despite the hunger underneath it.

Rosalind’s hand gripped the front of his damp, soot-stained shirt as though she meant to anchor herself against him. Alaric held her the way a man holds warmth after a long and bitter winter he was never entirely certain he would survive to see the end of.

They broke apart only when footsteps sounded again in the corridor outside, and even then neither of them moved very far.

Rosalind pressed her fingers briefly to her own lips, as though she might keep the warmth there a little longer, and Alaric watched her do it with an expression she had never seen on his face before — something unguarded, almost boyish, entirely at odds with the composed Duke of Ravensmoor the county believed it knew.

“I have wanted to do that,” he admitted quietly, “since the evening you explained quince glaze to me as though it were the most natural subject in the world to discuss with a duke.”

“You hid it remarkably well.”

“I have had a great deal of practice hiding things I want,” he said. “Though I find myself far less interested in the practice than I once was.”

That afternoon, returning to the old estate office on a small matter of the charity accounts — because the kitchen receipts for the three parishes were kept there, in the long cupboard, and she had as much right to them as any steward alive — Rosalind noticed something.

The floorboard beneath the window sat slightly askew.

It was a small thing. A board that did not quite meet its neighbour, with a shadow under one corner where no shadow had been when she had last crossed this room in the spring to fetch the Kirkby register. She stood in the middle of Edmund’s old office and looked at it for a long moment, and then she thought of Lucy Pratt’s pale face in the scullery doorway at four in the morning. I know what a person looks like when they’ve just put something somewhere.

She knelt down.

The board lifted easily — too easily. Someone had been at it recently and had not had the time or the wit to set it back properly.

Beneath it, wrapped in oilcloth against the damp and wedged into the cavity between the joists, was a parcel the size of a thick book.

She carried it to the table, and unwrapped it with hands that were entirely steady, and found inside it four things she had never known to look for.

The original tenant ledger for the northern half of the estate — the real one, in Edmund’s hand, not the fair copy that lived in the estate office and went to the auditors.

A bundle of lease copies, nine of them, with names on them that did not match the names of the families who actually farmed the land.

A thin sheaf of letters, folded and refolded, bearing the signature of Sir Ambrose Corbin.

And folded separately from the rest, as though Edmund had put it in last and hoped it would never be needed — a single sheet of paper in his own careful, upright hand.

Rosalind read it twice.

Then she read the last line three times, and felt her blood run suddenly, entirely cold.

Should I fail to return, Silas Corbin must answer for it.

She sat down on the floor of her husband’s old office with the parcel open in her lap and the afternoon light shifting slowly across the boards, and did not weep.

Something past weeping had settled over her — cold and clear as the first frost on the orchard grass.

For eighteen months she had carried a grief she believed was simple. A husband lost to careless fortune. A road grown slick with autumn rain. A horse that stumbled in the dark.

Now she understood that the grief had never been simple at all. It had been waiting, patient as the orchard itself, for someone to finally read what Edmund Thorne had left behind.

The statement went on for two more pages.

He had discovered all of it in the weeks before his death. Invented arrears used deliberately to force honest tenants off good land. Leases resold quietly through a chain of intermediaries. Estate money bled away year after year in amounts small enough never to be missed by a duke too consumed by his dying wife to check his own books closely.

And a scheme already forming — this was the part that made Rosalind’s hands go cold — to sell the whole of the northern acreage to a railway syndicate out of Leeds for a price far below its true worth, with the difference to be pocketed quietly by men who had no right to touch it at all.

Edmund Thorne had uncovered every piece of it while Alaric Wensley sat at his wife’s bedside, too deep in grief to notice the estate slipping out from under his own feet.

And on the night Edmund died, Silas Corbin had summoned him to meet on the northern road, alone, after dark.

He had known, from the careful way he hid his notebooks before he left that evening, that the meeting might not end safely.

The statement did not say outright that Corbin had meant to kill him. It did not need to. Motive and opportunity and fear were written clearly enough between the careful, measured lines of Edmund Thorne’s hand.

Rosalind folded the paper in three, exactly along its old creases.

She wrapped the parcel again exactly as she had found it. She replaced the floorboard — properly this time, flush with its neighbours — and she put the parcel under her arm and walked the long corridor to find the Duke of Ravensmoor.

Her footsteps echoed off walls hung with portraits of men who had never once in their lives had to fight for the right to be believed.

She found him in the library, and she did not knock, and she laid the parcel on the table between them without a word.

Alaric Wensley looked at the oilcloth, and then at her face, and did not ask a single question.

He simply opened it.