Chapter 27
“Good morning,” William said at breakfast.
Letitia looked at her plate.
“Good morning,” Isadora said in a small voice.
William sat. A footman poured his coffee. The silver was laid correctly, the bread was sliced, and the butter dish was in its place. Everything was exactly as it should have been.
But the room felt entirely wrong and quiet.
He unfolded the first letter beside his plate and read it without registering a word of it. He reached for his coffee.
He was aware, with the specific awareness of a man in a room filled with tension, of the absence at the opposite end of the table.
Not the chair itself—the chair was there—but the atmosphere that had occupied it for two months, the warmth of it, the way breakfast had become something he looked forward to.
Letitia had not touched her toast.
Isadora was eating with careful, deliberate attention, giving her hands something to do.
“The weather has improved,” William said.
Neither of them responded.
“I believe there are two girls sitting at breakfast with me.” He chuckled lightly and looked at them.
Letitia looked away, while Isadora frowned slightly.
He set down the letter. “Letitia.”
“Where is she?” Letitia asked. Her expression was not the combative one he was accustomed to.
It was something quieter than that and considerably harder to interpret.
“Oh, I’ll tell you. She’s gone to Beatrice’s.
With a trunk. She kissed me goodbye and told me to give you time, but I can’t.
” A pause. “I want to know why she had to go.”
William said nothing.
“She said it wasn’t about us,” Letitia continued. “So it’s about you.”
“Letitia, please–”
“Did you do something? Because she has been in this house for two months, and in two months this house has been–” She stopped, searched for the right word, and landed on it with precision, as though she had been thinking about it since yesterday afternoon.
“Alive. Now that she is gone, it isn’t, and I want to know what happened. ”
William looked at his coffee. “It is complicated.”
“Then uncomplicate it.”
“Letitia.” Isadora’s voice was quiet.
“What?” Letitia huffed. “No. I am not going to sit here and eat toast and talk about the weather while–”
“Letitia.”
This time, Isadora’s tone made Letitia stop and look at her. A silent conversation passed between them that William had been watching for sixteen years and had never been fully privy to.
Letitia sat back.
Isadora looked at William. She seemed hurt. Worse, he could see her disappointment.
“She never acted like any of this was a burden,” she said quietly.
“She would ask Mrs. Eldridge about the house before she did anything. She found books for me because she noticed I wanted them and hadn’t asked.
She learned Letitia’s story and helped to plant Mrs. Beam’s kitchen garden.
” A pause. “She came to the nursery at half past two in the morning because she couldn’t not come.
She helped me feel comfortable being a girl.
That is not how someone behaves toward an obligation, William. ”
The words hit him painfully in the chest, but he said nothing.
Isadora looked at him for one more moment. Then she folded her napkin, set it on the table, and rose. “Excuse me,” she uttered, then left.
Letitia looked at him across the empty table. “Fix it.”
She followed her sister.
After sitting for a couple of minutes in silence, William went and sat in his study for a long time.
The fire was going. The correspondence was stacked. The day had the shape of a normal one.
It was not a normal day.
He dragged a hand through his hair.
If I am going to be miserable, I might as well get some work done.
He scooted closer to his desk and looked at the center, where a couple of papers sat. They weren’t his, so he drew them closer and remembered he had seen Cecily holding them. The notes she had set down just before she walked out of his home, his life.
His heart flipped at the sight of her handwriting.
He picked up the notes and read them once, very carefully. They were filled with figures, dates, the trail from the orphanage fund to a supplementary account.
Is this another estate account?
He frowned as he read them again. They didn’t make any sense.
St. Clement’s Home, orphanage fund—quarterly disbursement. Cross-reference: main ledger p.47, entry dated 14th January. Figures do not match.
He frowned.
He pulled the main estate ledger from the shelf and opened it to page forty-seven. The entry was there, exactly as she had noted it. He ran his finger along the line with the amount, date, destination account, and annotation.
He turned to the next reference in her notes.
He found the supplementary ledger. He looked at both figures.
That cannot be right.
He found the April entries.
She was right. They didn’t match.
He pulled both ledgers fully open side by side and went through each quarter she had noted, checking her figures against the originals with the focused, methodical attention of a man who had realized he should have been doing this and needed to understand the meaning of it before he could think about anything else.
Every quarter. The same pattern. The disbursement larger than the receipt by a small, consistent, carefully regulated amount.
Not large enough to catch. Small enough to explain away if questioned, but consistent. Always consistent.
He sat back.
He looked at the supplementary account name in Cecily’s notes—the property management firm, the address she had tracked down, which he now read properly for the first time.
He reached for a separate correspondence file and began to look for any reference to this firm in the estate’s business records. Any invoice, any contract, any letter of engagement.
Twenty minutes later, he had found nothing.
He had never contracted a property management firm for the administration of a charitable account.
He had never seen an invoice from this address.
He had signed disbursements to an account associated with a company that, as far as he knew, had no documented relationship with the Blackmoor estate at all.
She knew.
The thought came quietly. He looked at Cecily’s notes, at the careful annotation in the margin. She had looked for the invoice herself.
He pressed his fingers briefly against the paper.
He thought about the afternoon she had met Harwood in this room. The questions she had asked. They were simple questions, the questions of a woman wanting to be involved. And Harwood’s answers, which he had observed and had attributed to professional caution.
“A man with nothing to hide does not work that hard to close a subject.”
She had said that to him that evening, after Harwood left. And he had said Harwood was careful, protective of estate business, nothing more than that.
He had been wrong.
She had been right, on the day she met the man, without access to a single ledger or a single account entry. She had read it in the man’s evasions, she had told William, and William had said it meant nothing.
He pulled the main estate ledger toward him and turned to the beginning of the year. Then the year before. He had not read these originals—not properly, not with the attention they deserved—in longer than he was comfortable acknowledging.
He began to read now, and as he read, he began to pull other files from the shelf: the tenant accounts, the maintenance fund, the improvement budget he had authorized two years ago for the cottage repairs that Garret had been requesting.
He began to check.
He checked for over an hour.
By the end of it, what he found was not the neat, well-managed quarterly summary that Harwood had been presenting for fifteen years.
What he found, beneath the presentation layer, was a pattern—small, consistent, patient, embedded into the account structure so gradually that each increment was defensible and the accumulated total was not.
He sat in the quiet of his study with the evidence assembled in front of him and thought about a man who had sat across this desk and looked him in the eye every quarter with the easy composure of someone who had never once worried about being found out, because he had spent several years making certain he would not be found out, and he had very nearly succeeded.
William had been foolish to be trusting.
He set the notes down. But something caught his eye. It was a gnawing feeling that would not go away.
He looked at Harwood’s documents again. Then he opened the bottom drawer.
He had kept the Brighton note. He had kept it from the beginning, folded in the inner pocket of the coat he’d been wearing that night, and had transferred it after the wedding to the drawer where he kept things he intended to return to.
He had been returning to it in his mind since the morning he woke up on the shore, with the tide coming in and no memory of what happened after he got there .
He unfolded it now and set it beside Cecily’s notes. Then he picked up the top page of Harwood’s notes.
He looked at both.
He was not certain when he saw it, the handwriting. It wasn’t identical—the note had been disguised, written with the deliberate plainness of someone not wanting to be identified. But the particular formation of certain letters caught his attention.
The t-crossing. The capital B in Beach, which sat slightly above the line, in the manner of someone who had formed that habit long ago and carried it consistently into disguise. It was the same B that appeared seventeen times in Harwood’s notes.
William sat back in his chair.
He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the Brighton note. He looked at Cecily’s careful handwriting and the shell account that led nowhere legitimate.
He closed his eyes briefly. Then he opened them, straightened the pages, and rang for Mr. Prentiss.
Harwood arrived at a quarter past two, with his leather folio under his arm.