Chapter 24
Cecily gradually became aware of the fact that she woke smiling. The shine of the morning light through the curtains, the warmth of the covers, and underneath it all, immediate and complete, the memory of a garden and a lantern and his hand on her jaw made her smile.
She pressed her fingers to her lips.
They are just lips, Cecily.
They had always been just lips. There was no reason for her to be lying in her bed at—she turned to look at the clock—half past eight in the morning, with her fingers on her mouth like the heroine of one of Letitia’s novels.
She was doing it anyway.
She stared at the ceiling and let herself have it just for a moment, just the private, unaudited version of it.
She let herself think of the warmth of him, the slow certainty of the lean, the way he had spoken in a voice that was for her and no one else, and the kiss itself, which had been nothing like she had imagined and considerably more than she had prepared for.
She had read a great many descriptions of kisses. She had always thought them somewhat exaggerated for effect.
She revised this assessment comprehensively.
This is what real feels like.
She had thought it and meant it, and the morning after, she still meant it, which was either wonderful or catastrophic or possibly both. She did not currently have the capacity to determine which.
She sat up. The question was—and this was where the ceiling became considerably less reassuring—where did it leave them? The arrangement, the terms, the careful distance that had been shrinking by inches since approximately the second morning and had now definitively closed.
What was on the other side of a kiss in a garden? What did it mean for the paper marriage that had stopped feeling like a paper marriage sometime around the first week in the nursery?
What did he think it meant?
That was the question she could not answer, and it was the only question that mattered.
She had absolutely no reliable information, because William Whitmore communicated his thoughts with the frequency and clarity of a locked safe, and she had been learning the combination for weeks and was not yet certain she had all the numbers.
“Your Grace?”
Cecily blinked.
Her maid, Ellen, was standing by her wardrobe with two dresses draped over her arm, looking at her with a patient smile. She looked like she had been waiting for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Cecily said. “What did you say?”
“The blue or the green dress, Your Grace. For this morning.”
Cecily looked at the dresses. She registered them as objects. Blue. Green. Colors that existed on a spectrum.
“The lilac,” she said absentmindedly.
Ellen turned back to the wardrobe.
William had kissed her like he meant it. Not the version of a man doing the correct thing at the correct moment for the benefit of an audience. There had been no audience. There had been a garden and a lantern and a music faint through the glass and his breath shuddering against her mouth and—
“Your Grace, the lilac dress is at the modiste’s. I sent it for alteration on Tuesday.”
She suddenly remembered the reason for choosing the lilac dress, even though it wasn’t among the options Ellen provided. It had to do with a certain green-eyed man with lilac thread on his coat.
“Then the blue one,” Cecily said.
“Which one? You have three blue dresses.”
Cecily looked at the ceiling briefly. “The one that fits.”
Ellen seemed to find that an adequate answer and began laying things out with quiet efficiency.
Cecily sat at the dressing table and looked at her reflection, thinking about the way William had said her name afterward.
“Your hair, Your Grace.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to sit still.”
“I am sitting still.”
“You are leaning toward the mirror,” Ellen said, pins in hand, “and swaying, Your Grace.”
Cecily sat still.
Ellen tucked in the last pin. “There,” she announced, with the satisfaction of a completed task. “You look very well, Your Grace.”
Cecily looked at her reflection. The ring on her left hand caught the morning light, the small stone the color of his eyes. She had noticed that on the first day she put it on. She was still noticing it.
You are in a great deal of trouble, she told her reflection silently.
She went down for breakfast, only to find he was not there. His chair was empty. His cup was not on the table. No letter beside his place, no coat on the back of the door, nothing to suggest he had been down at all.
She firmly told herself to stop feeling let down.
Letitia was there, eating toast with the comprehensive attention she gave to all activities. Isadora sat beside her, reading something she had tucked beside her plate in the way she always did, the book angled so it appeared she was simply looking at the table if anyone glanced over.
“You’re not reading at the table,” Cecily said, sitting.
“I am aware of the rule,” Isadora replied, without looking up.
“The rule still applies when you’re aware of it.” Cecily smiled sweetly.
Isadora closed the book with the sigh of a principled person making a concession, then looked up. “You look well.” Then, she leaned closer with interest. “You look like you slept well.”
“I slept adequately.”
“You’re smiling,” Letitia noted.
“I’m not smiling.”
“You were when you came in. Before you noticed William wasn’t here.” Letitia looked at her. “Was the ball very good? I heard the carriage at half past twelve, and I thought you had stayed until the end, which means either the company was excellent or something happened.”
“The company was excellent,” Cecily replied.
Letitia nodded her head once. “I knew it. Was Lady Pemberton kind? She looks kind in portraits, but portraits are unreliable. People say so.”
“She was very kind.”
“And Lady Ashford?” Isadora probed.
“Also kind,” Cecily replied. “In the end.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And something happened,” Letitia said. “Obviously.”
“Nothing happened,” Cecily said, and reached for the toast. She did not look at any of them.
“Mrs. Hatch says Lady Pemberton’s balls are always the best of the Season,” Letitia continued, undeterred, piling marmalade. “She went once, years ago, as a young woman, before she became Mrs. Hatch. She said the supper was extraordinary. Was the supper extraordinary?”
“I barely touched the supper,” Cecily said.
“Because you were dancing?”
“Among other things.”
“Who did you dance with?”
“Several people.”
“William?”
Cecily picked up her coffee. “Yes.”
Letitia set down the marmalade and looked at her with focused attention. Cecily simply drank her coffee and looked at the window, refusing to elaborate.
Isadora looked at her for a moment. Then she returned to her toast.
“William came down early,” Letitia said, with her mouth full. “Before we did. Prentiss said he was in the study by seven.”
Oh?
Cecily dabbed her lips gently with the napkin.
“Did he say anything?” she asked, in the tone of someone asking an administrative question.
“Just that he had correspondence to attend to,” Letitia replied casually, her attention already shifting to the marmalade, which she was applying with characteristic conviction.
Cecily looked at her cup. “He always has correspondence.”
“He always has correspondence,” Letitia agreed. “He usually attends to it at an unreasonable hour.” She paused. “He seemed… to be thinking.”
“Thinking,” Cecily repeated.
“Like when he’s working something out,” Letitia explained.
“He goes very quiet and very early, and Prentiss says he drinks three cups of coffee before nine, which only happens when something is bothering him.” She looked at Cecily with the frank assessment of someone who had been studying the same subject for fourteen years. “Did something happen at the ball?”
“The lemonade,” Cecily said, “was extraordinary.”
Letitia opened her mouth. Isadora put a hand briefly on her sister’s arm. Letitia closed her mouth with a snap.
Breakfast continued. Cecily ate what was required of her, participated where participation was needed, and thought about a man who had been in his study since seven o’clock and was going to have to come out of it, eventually. She decided to pay him a visit instead.
The study was empty.
She stood in the doorway for a moment. There was a fire going and a half-finished letter on the desk, the quill resting on the page where he had set it down.
His reading glasses lay on the corner of the desk, which he always moved the moment anyone appeared, as though they were evidence of something.
She went in.
She sat across from the desk and looked around the room with the attention she had developed over the past weeks for the spaces he occupied.
The bookshelves were organized with a system only he fully understood, his correspondence was arranged in stacks, and the estate ledgers stuck out of the lower shelf with the serious, weighty presence of things consulted often.
She looked at the ledgers.
She looked at the half-finished letter, which she did not read. Then she looked at the ledgers again.
She had been thinking about the orphanage accounts since she met Harwood. She had several questions, but had not pressed. She had trusted William to look. She had sat in the warm nursery and listened to the baby breathe and told herself she would check the accounts when he was ready.
She stood up, crossed to the lower shelf, and pulled out the first ledger.
She told herself she was simply looking. That she was the Duchess of Blackmoor and these were her household accounts as much as his, and there was nothing unreasonable about familiarizing herself with them. She told herself this was entirely ordinary.
She opened the ledger.
It was the estate accounts—the full quarterly record, with Harwood’s handwriting in the columns she recognized from the afternoon in the study, every entry dated and annotated with thoroughness.
She flipped to the charitable disbursements.
The orphanage fund was listed under St. Clement’s Home, quarterly allowance—a figure she noted and turned past, looking at the pattern of entries over the year. It was regular and consistent. The same amount, quarterly, without variation.
She stopped and turned back two pages. She looked at the figure again. Then she pulled out the second ledger, the one beside it, which was slightly thinner and bore the label Supplementary Accounts in Harwood’s hand. She opened it to the first page.
The handwriting here was the same. The entries were dated. Everything appeared correct at a glance.
She had grown up in the household of an earl.
She had sat beside her father’s steward at seven years old while he showed her, with the patient pride of a man who loved his work, how accounts were balanced, how columns spoke to each other, how a discrepancy in one entry would surface as a ghost in another if one knew where to look.
She knew where to look and found it on the fourth page of the first ledger.
A transfer. Dated August, the same month Mrs. Peel had submitted the repair request that had never been addressed.
An amount moved from the orphanage fund to a supplementary account she did not recognize, labeled in abbreviation, the annotation beside it reading admin, costs, qrtly in the brisk shorthand of something that wanted to look routine.
She turned to the supplementary ledger and found the corresponding entry. The amount did not match.
She looked at it again. It still did not match.
She pulled the ledger closer, tilting it toward the light, because surely she had misread it, or the ink had blurred, or she was looking at the wrong line entirely.
She had not misread it.
“Good Lord,” she muttered to the empty room.
She sat back.
The discrepancy was not large—not the kind of thing that would announce itself, not the kind of thing a busy man reviewing a full quarter’s accounts would necessarily catch in the pace of a normal meeting. It was small enough to be deniable and consistent enough to be intentional.
When she read through the previous quarters and found the same abbreviation, the same annotation, the same slight mismatch repeated with the patient regularity of someone who had been doing this long enough to trust their own system, her hands went still on the page.
Her jaw tightened.
She counted back.
January. October. July. April, the year before. She kept going, the pages turning under her fingers, and with each quarter, the picture assembled itself with the cold clarity of something that had been hiding in plain sight.
She pressed her lips together.
Two years. At minimum two years of small, consistent transfers from an account designated for children who had nothing, redirected into an account that led, when she followed the abbreviations, nowhere legitimate.
It went to a shell, a property management firm she had never heard of, registered to an address that, when she found it referenced in a separate correspondence file, turned out to be a solicitor’s office in a part of the city that had nothing to do with the Blackmoor estate.
She pulled out more documents and read them carefully, discovering more and more siphoning from the estate funds. Putting them all together, it amounted to several years of funds redirected to the same shell account.
She sat back in her chair.
“There it is,” she breathed.
It wasn’t triumph she felt. It was fear that her suspicions were right.
She thought of William signing those papers page after page in this very room, his quill moving without hesitation, the trust of fifteen years behind every signature.
She thought of him sitting across from a man who had been stealing from orphaned children and calling it administrative costs, and she felt cold fury rush through her.
She reached for the paper on the desk.
She opened all the ledgers side by side and began to write figures, dates, cross-references, the trail from the orphanage fund and every other account to the supplementary account to the shell firm, each entry noted precisely with the page number and the corresponding discrepancy.
She wrote quickly and without hesitation, not stopping until she had three full pages and the evidence was assembled in a form that could not be dismissed or explained away or attributed to clerical error.
She set down the quill and looked at what she had written.
The room was very quiet. The fire crackled. The morning light poured through the window at the angle she had come to know.
Harwood.
She thought of his face in this room, the composed, unhurried confidence of a man entirely secure in his position.
“Everything in good order, Your Grace.”
“Not quite,” she said.
She straightened the pages. Set both ledgers open at the relevant entries. Placed her notes on top. And then she sat back in the chair across from the desk, folded her arms, and waited.