Chapter Fifteen Every Sin She Ever Committed
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Every Sin She Ever Committed
Ambrose came back from Wakefield through Blackthorn’s front door, exactly as Mary Beth had asked him to.
He arrived a little after four on a gray Monday afternoon with mud on his boots, a leather case in one hand, and the tiredness of nearly two weeks spent arguing with stone in weather that had turned mean.
Mary Beth heard the carriage on the gravel from the morning room and was halfway across the hall before she remembered that dignified women did not run to greet civil engineers.
She compromised by walking very quickly.
The footman had barely opened the outer door when Ambrose stepped inside. He removed his hat, saw her at the far end of the hall, and smiled in a way that made the extra days feel suddenly unreasonable.
Mary Beth stopped in front of him. There were servants within hearing, a maid crossing the upper gallery, and enough polished oak around them to remind any sensible woman of propriety.
She kissed him anyway.
It was not a long kiss. It did not need to be. When she drew back, Ambrose’s hand remained at her waist for one dangerous second before he remembered the hall.
“I had a speech prepared,” he said.
“Was it a good one?”
“It began with ’Good afternoon, Mrs. Blackthorn.’”
“How dull.”
“I see that now.”
She took his hat from him and handed it to the footman. “You have the blue room. Your case can go to the carriage room tomorrow. Dinner is at eight. You may complain about my instructions after you have bathed.”
Ambrose glanced toward the staircase, then back to her. “I missed being managed by you.”
“You said ten days. You were wrong. Do not become sentimental.”
“Too late.”
For the first hour after his return, Blackthorn felt almost restored to the life Mary Beth had imagined when she asked him to come back.
He bathed, changed, and appeared in the morning room before dinner wearing a dark coat that fit his shoulders better than any work jacket had a right to prepare a woman for.
They drank sherry by the fire. He told her the Wakefield retaining wall had been built by a man who believed mortar could compensate for gravity.
She told him the county hospital had found another carriage without once writing to thank her for the one it had requested and then refused.
He did not tell her she was making light of something painful. He only reached across the small table and touched two fingers to the inside of her wrist.
“Your letter worried me.”
“I know.”
“You did not soften any of it.”
“You told me not to.”
“I was an idiot.”
Mary Beth smiled. “That is the trouble with issuing brave instructions from another county.”
His thumb moved once against her pulse. “How bad is the merchant?”
“Manageable. The deposits are inconvenient, not ruinous. I delayed the east bedrooms and kept the tenant roofs.”
“And the girl in service?”
Mary Beth’s smile faded. “Still employed. Her father sent word on Saturday. The mistress has not dismissed her.”
Ambrose let out the breath he had been holding. “Good.”
“Yes.”
Dinner was quiet and domestic, precisely what Mary Beth had wanted.
Afterward they walked through the long gallery while rain tapped the windows, and Ambrose stopped twice to inspect hairline cracks in plaster he had no contractual responsibility to inspect.
She accused him of being incapable of visiting a building socially.
He accused the building of being incapable of remaining sound out of courtesy.
They slept together that night without secrecy elaborate enough to feel like deceit.
Ambrose went to her rooms after the household settled, but he left his boots outside the sitting-room door as though a pair of boots could make their arrangement respectable.
Mary Beth laughed at him for it until he kissed the laughter away.
In the morning, there were three letters on the breakfast tray.
The first was from a woman who had once invited Mary Beth to a Christmas house party and had recently begun writing again after Lady Sablehurst’s dinner.
The note was brief, apologetic, and final.
Circumstances within the family made it impossible to receive Mrs. Blackthorn later that month after all.
The second came from the York merchant. The firm regretted that, upon review, Blackthorn’s account would now require payment in full before dispatch on all orders for the next six months.
Mary Beth read that one twice.
Ambrose, seated opposite her with coffee in hand, did not ask to see it. “Worse?”
“More expensive.” She passed him the page. “They have moved from deposits to full payment before dispatch.”
He read the letter and set it down carefully. “Can Blackthorn carry it?”
“Yes, if I am cautious.”
“That was not the same answer as easily.”
“I did not say easily.”
The third envelope had no return direction. Mary Beth recognized the handwriting before she broke the seal.
She had not seen it in years.
The letter inside was not addressed to her.
It was a copy, written in the hand of the former Blackthorn gamekeeper, the man she had taken as a lover after her husband’s death.
The original had been sent to a friend during the months of their affair.
Mary Beth read the first lines with an odd sensation of hearing a younger version of herself breathing behind a closed door.
He had written warmly of her. Too warmly for discretion. He had described the garden door, late hours, a green dressing gown she had forgotten owning, and one evening when she had laughed so loudly he feared the kitchen maid would hear.
The copy ended with a line circled in red pencil: She says she wants nothing from me beyond what we have, and I believe her, though I would be a fool to believe a woman like her means the same thing forever.
Beneath it, in another hand, someone had written: HOW MANY MEN HAVE BEEN GIVEN THE SAME ASSURANCE?
Ambrose was on his feet before Mary Beth finished reading.
“Who sent it?”
“There is no signature.”
“Is the letter genuine?”
She placed it on the table. “The handwriting is his. I cannot swear the copy is complete, but the details are real.”
Ambrose’s jaw tightened. “Who had his letters?”
“Anyone he wrote to. A friend. A brother. A landlord after he left. I do not know.”
“Benedict?”
Mary Beth met his eyes. “Possibly.”
“That is a mild word.”
“It is also the word for which I have evidence.”
Ambrose paced once to the window and back. His anger had the physical restlessness she had learned to recognize, as though every problem ought to submit to tools if a man could only find the correct size hammer.
“He warned you the county could close its doors. Now the merchant changes his terms and an old private letter appears on your breakfast table.”
“Yes.”
“And you still want ’possibly.’”
“I want proof. You should appreciate the distinction.”
He gave her a bleak half smile. “I do when it is not you being hurt.”
Mary Beth folded the anonymous sheet and returned it to the envelope. “Then appreciate it harder.”
By noon, the story had moved beyond letters.
Before it did, Mary Beth spent nearly an hour in the estate office with the account books open around her.
She wanted numbers before indignation. Blackthorn was not insolvent, and she refused to let wounded pride behave as though it were.
The merchant’s new terms would tie up cash earlier in each quarter.
Coal, roofing slate, lamp oil, seed, and imported iron fittings would all have to be paid before shipment.
The estate could manage it, provided no second wall collapsed and no harvest failed at precisely the wrong moment.
She found three expenditures that could wait and two that could not.
The schoolroom roof on the west farm would be repaired.
The drainage ditch near the tenant meadow would be cleared before winter.
New paper for the east bedrooms could remain in its crate another year.
Mary Beth wrote the changes in the margin herself, then sat back and studied the ink until the figures stopped feeling personal.
Ambrose appeared in the doorway without knocking. “You have been in here since breakfast.”
“A scandal apparently has a cash price. I am calculating it.”
He came to the desk. She turned the ledger so he could read the revised schedule.
“You moved the bedroom work again.”
“Bedrooms do not catch pneumonia.”
“And the schoolroom?”
“Still being done.”
Ambrose traced one line without touching the ink. “If the merchant keeps these terms for six months, you lose flexibility more than money.”
“Exactly. Which means if there is another emergency, I borrow or delay something that matters.”
His face tightened. “Because of me.”
Mary Beth closed the ledger. “Because someone has chosen to punish me. Do not improve his argument by agreeing that you are the offense.”
“I am trying to understand the damage.”
“Then understand all of it. I had a reputation before you crossed my threshold. Benedict did not invent that either. What is different now is organization. Someone has taken old contempt and given it a clerk.”
Ambrose leaned one hand on the desk. “That sounds like Sablehurst.”
“It sounds like a man with money, influence, and too much interest in my obedience. That is not yet proof of which man.”
“You are infuriating when you are sensible.”
“I have been told.”
He bent and kissed her forehead, which irritated her further because it was tender enough to make anger inconvenient.
A folded broadsheet arrived from York with a paragraph marked in pencil.
It did not name Mary Beth, but nobody in the county would have needed help identifying the ’notorious Yorkshire widow whose preference for estate employees has lately advanced from keeper and gardener to contractor.
’ The item claimed that her newest favorite had received a profitable commission at Blackthorn and had since been ’rewarded with a position beneath the same roof. ’