Chapter Nine #2
“The rest is pattern. The sums are always oddly sized, four pounds here, eleven there, never round figures. Round figures are remembered. They cluster where the estate is busiest, quarter-days and harvest, when a discrepancy has the most crowd to hide in. And they never touch the accounts you would show your banker. The rents are immaculate. It’s the working books that sing.
” She squared the ledger’s edge with the desk, her father’s habit, and made herself say the last of it plainly, because they were past the place where it could be unsaid.
“This is not error, my lord, and it is not carelessness. It is ten years old at the least. It was built by somebody who expected these pages to be read by a gentleman and never by a clerk, and it did not pause in January. There are entries in this hand dated the week of your brother’s funeral. ”
The fire had burned low. Robert stood looking down at the open book, and Jane watched the last of the evening’s ease go out of him, not into temper, which she had half expected, but into something stiller and colder that she recognised, with a small shock, from the landing three weeks ago.
It was the face the newspapers had never seen.
“James trusted him,” he said at last. “That is what lies under all of it. My brother checked these books every quarter of his life, and the man sat across that desk and watched him check them, and had the second calendar in his coat the whole time.” He looked up.
“You haven’t said the name, Miss Prescott.
You’ve been not saying it for an hour, very carefully. ”
“It isn’t mine to say. I can read that the books are made. I cannot read who made them, not to swear to.”
“No. That wants proof, and proof wants a professional.” He was already moving, the decision arriving in him the visible way his decisions did, like weather crossing a field.
He took paper, sat, wrote three lines and signed them while she watched.
“There’s a man in London, Louth, in Lothbury.
The bank recommended him to my brother once and my brother, always so thorough, never thought he’d need him.
An examining accountant. He can be here within the fortnight, and he can read hands and papers and swear to things in ways that stand up in front of lawyers.
” He sanded the page. “You have shown me the outline of the matter, which is sufficient for a hunt. The rest I’ll not have on your shoulders, you live in this house, and you are owed a good deal better than to be made a witness in it. ”
It was, Jane thought, the first time in four years an employer had thought about the weight of a thing before setting it on her.
She stood, and gathered her gloves, and it took her until the door to understand what was odd about the whole long evening.
At no point in it had she felt examined.
Read, yes, thoroughly, disconcertingly. But being read was proving to be a different country from being examined, and she was not yet ready to think about how different, and she said good night with her composure on straight and carried the thought upstairs anyway, where it kept her from her book for some time.
***
Robert took the letter down to the estate office himself the next morning, which was not the arrangement anyone would have advised.
Hamish would have told him to post it quietly.
His aunt would have told him to say nothing and smile at dinner.
But he had spent twelve years perfecting the art of being underestimated, and it had left him with a workman’s knowledge of the tool from the other side, and what he wanted now, wanted with a cold exactness that would have surprised the hazard tables, was to stand in that tidy office and put the thing on the desk and observe.
***
Winthrop rose as he entered. “My lord. An unexpected pleasure. The rents are ready for your…”
“I am not here for the rents.” Robert laid the sealed letter on the squared blotter, address up, where a man who read upside down for a living could not help but read it.
Mr Josiah Louth, Lothbury, London. “I’m engaging an examining accountant, Winthrop.
Louth. The bank’s man. I require a full examination.
Every book, every year of my brother’s time and mine, papers, contracts, the lot.
He’ll have the use of this office when he comes, and you’ll give him whatever he asks for.
” He said it pleasantly, in the voice he had used for a decade to tell hostesses their parties were charming.
“After ten years’ faithful service, I thought you were owed the courtesy of hearing it from me and not from the village. ”
And there it was.
A man’s face is a made book too, and Winthrop’s was a good one; the surprise arrived properly, the deferential nod arrived properly, the very wise, my lord, a prudent measure for any estate in these times arrived word-perfect.
But Robert had sat across candlelit baize from every kind of liar in London, and he had learned the tell that no discipline reaches, because it lives below discipline, not the face, the hands.
On the word examining, the estate manager’s right hand, the tidy hand, the hand that squared papers, flattened itself on the desk and pressed, until the fingertips went pale at their edges, and held there through the whole handsome speech like a man leaning on a door he could feel opening.
“I knew you’d see the sense of it,” Robert said. “That will be all.”
He walked back up to the house through the wet morning at an easy pace, whistling something idle, every inch the reformed wastrel taking the air, and behind his own pleasant face he was doing what she did, he realised.
He was entering it in the ledger with the sums perfect, and the hands pressed white.
Ten days remained before he departed for Louth.
Standing at the window of the estate office, he was sensible of being watched along the entire sweep of the gravel drive; yet for the first time in his life, Robert Moorfield found in that scrutiny a species of useful intelligence.
Somewhere behind him, a man with two calendars had just been handed a date by which the truth arrived, and whatever that man did next, he would have to do it soon, and in a hurry, and in view.
Sing, he thought, pleasantly, and did not look back.