Chapter 4
Estella knew it was rude to squint and stare, and yet, she couldn’t help it. She continued to stare at the woman across the counter. "I beg your pardon?"
The cheerful milliner on Bond Street repeated herself. Miss Hale's account had already been settled.
"Settled in full, miss," she added.
At Estella’s prolonged silence, the milliner consulted her ledger again. "The balance for the two bonnets and the evening cap. Paid last Tuesday."
"But… But…" Estella took a deep breath and tried again. "By whom?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't say, miss. The payment came through a solicitor's office. Quite regular, all very proper."
Estella opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. She felt rather like a fish, which was not the dignified impression she'd hoped to make on her first visit to a London milliner. "But I didn't authorize—I haven't engaged a solicitor to—"
"Will there be anything else, miss?" The woman's smile was pleasant and immovable. Clearly, anonymous payments were not unusual enough to warrant further discussion.
Estella stepped out onto Bond Street with her reticule still full of the coins she'd scraped together, and a feeling very much as she had that time Charlotte had rearranged all the books in the library by color instead of author.
Everything was where it should be, technically. And yet nothing made sense.
Someone had paid her milliner's bill. Not Papa.
Papa didn't even know she'd ordered the bonnets, and even if he did, he hadn't the funds.
Not her mother's cousin Mrs. Digby, who was currently in a tea shop around the corner with a novel and strict instructions to stay comfortable until Estella came to collect her.
Mrs. Digby was a dear, but she was seventy-three, prone to napping in public, and could not be relied upon to chaperone anything more demanding than a potted plant.
She'd been arranged as Estella's companion for the Season through means Estella had never quite pinned down.
Her father had been vague about it, and Mrs. Digby herself seemed cheerfully unclear on who had suggested the arrangement.
At the time, Estella had been too grateful to question it. A chaperone was a chaperone, even one who fell asleep during the soup course.
But now, standing on Bond Street with a mysteriously settled account, Estella felt the faintest prickle of something at the back of her mind. The same prickle she'd felt when Mr. Phelps vanished to Cornwall. When Mr. Ashby received his surprise inheritance…
It was a prickle that said someone was meddling in her affairs.
She tucked the thought away for later examination and turned her feet toward Hatchard's. She had an hour before tea with the duchess, and her nerves were wound far too tight. But there was no problem in this world that couldn't be temporarily improved by a bookshop.
Hatchard's was everything a bookshop should be—warm, quiet, and smelling of leather and ink. Estella felt her shoulders drop the moment she stepped inside. This, at least, was familiar territory.
She wound her way toward the back, past the popular novels and the volumes of sermons, to the shelf where the more practical texts lived.
Household management. Estate accounting.
The sort of reading that would bore most young ladies to tears but that Estella had been studying since she was seventeen, when she'd opened her father's account books and discovered that the word "solvent" no longer applied.
She reached for a slim volume on agricultural improvement. It promised new methods of crop rotation that might, if she was very optimistic, improve the Langley estate's yield by enough to matter.
Estella's fingers collided with someone else's. She pulled back. "Oh, I'm so sorry…"
The other hand did not pull back. It belonged to a young woman about Estella's age, perhaps a year or two older, with dark hair pinned in a style that suggested function over fashion and spectacles perched on a pert nose.
The young woman looked at Estella. Then at the book. Then back at Estella. "You want Whitmore's agricultural treatise?"
"I—yes. I was going to—"
"Are you a farmer?"
The question was so blunt and so genuinely curious that Estella laughed before she could stop herself. "Not exactly. My family has an estate in the country, and the current tenant yields are…" She searched for a diplomatic word.
"Dismal?" the young woman offered.
"I was going to say 'disappointing,' but yes. Dismal is more accurate."
The other woman gave a thoughtful nod. "Hmm.
Whitmore's methods are sound, but his mathematics are hopeful.
He assumes ideal soil conditions and a growing season that doesn't account for late frosts.
" The young woman pushed her spectacles up her nose.
"You'd do better with Humphry Davy’s Elements of Agricultural Chemistry. It's considerably more useful."
Estella blinked. "You've read both?"
"I've read everything on this shelf." It wasn't a boast. It was delivered with the same matter-of-fact tone one might use to note that it was raining.
"I'm working through a theory about nitrogen content in soil and its effect on crop rotation cycles, but I keep getting distracted by the accounting texts.
Did you know that most estate ledger systems haven't been updated since the last century? "
Estella stared at her. She'd never, in her entire life, met another young woman who had opinions about estate ledger systems.
"I'm Estella Hale," she said.
"Theodosia Evermore. But you can call me Thea." The young woman extended her hand with none of the ceremony a proper introduction required, and Estella took it without hesitation.
Anyone who had read every book on this shelf and had thoughts about ledgers was exactly the sort of person Estella needed in her life.
"Tell me about the Davy’s book," Estella said.
Thea's face lit up. It transformed her entirely.
She went from severe and slightly intimidating to animated and pretty, her dark eyes bright behind her spectacles.
"The key insight is that he separates the chemical composition of the soil from the mechanical composition, which means—" She stopped herself.
"I'm sorry. Most people's eyes glaze over at this point. "
"My eyes are not glazed," Estella said. "Keep going."
Thea regarded her with an expression that hovered between suspicion and delight. "You're not at all what I expected to find in the agriculture section."
"Nor you."
"I'm not what anyone expects to find anywhere." Thea smiled and pulled a book from the shelf and handed it to Estella. "Here. Read chapters three through seven. If you want to discuss it afterward, I'm here most Tuesdays."
"I'll be here," Estella said.
She bought the book and tucked it into her reticule beside the coins she hadn't needed at the milliner's. She collected Mrs. Digby from the tea shop, where the woman had fallen asleep with her face in a novel, and directed the hired carriage toward the duchess's residence.
Her newly cheerful mood lasted until she was shown into the duchess's drawing room and saw who was standing by the window.
The Marquess of Blackwood. Looking as warm and comfortable as a man awaiting execution.
He turned when she entered. Something flickered in his expression and then was gone. He looked away first, which she found oddly satisfying, though utterly confusing.
She had the feeling she’d just been dismissed even though she’d only just arrived.
The duchess entered from another room. She, at least, seemed pleased to see her. She wore a smile that didn’t entirely put Estella at ease, but which was far more comforting than Blackwood’s blank stare.
"Miss Hale," the duchess said as she approached. "How good of you to come. I believe you know Lord Blackwood."
Know was a generous word. She’d known the boy who'd called her "little Ella." And she’d had a run-in with the man last night. But she would not say she knew the person standing before her now, and she wasn't at all certain she wanted to.
Still, she forced herself to drop into a curtsy. "Lord Blackwood."
Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
"Miss Hale." His voice was exactly as it had been last night. Low, and devoid of any warmth.
And yet, there it was again. A tension in his frame that seemed less like indifference and more like he was bracing for a blow, or—
She let out an audible exhale as she realized what this was. What she was sensing from him.
Just like that, she understood.
It was Andrew.
Her heart gave a little twist, but she knew she was right. Andrew stood between them. Or perhaps, his ghost. His memory?
But she’d felt just as discomfited when she’d heard his title, so of course it would be like that for him too.
The mere sight of her was likely enough to bring back memories. And judging by the stern set of his jaw and the stiffness of his shoulders, she felt safe in assuming those memories were not happy ones.
She pressed her lips together and clasped her hands as the duchess issued orders to a nearby maid to bring in tea.
She felt oddly guilty that her presence here was enough to cause this man distress. She cast a furtive look his way. If she had any idea how to comfort him, she would. But he wouldn’t even look at her so she could offer a smile.
The duchess gestured to the settee. "Please, sit. We have much to discuss."
Estella’s brows arched in surprise. Did they?
But she hesitated for only a moment. And when she sank onto the settee, it was with relief, because her knees were not entirely reliable at the moment, and also because the duchess was not the sort of woman one kept standing.
She folded her hands in her lap and kept her spine straight and told herself that whatever this was… Whatever reason a duchess and a marquess had for summoning a viscount's daughter to tea, she would meet it the way she met everything else.
With her head up, shoulders back, and a smile in place.
Even if the smile, at the present moment, required rather more effort than usual.