Chapter 12
Adrian sat at his desk the following morning, and Mr. Coombe sat across from him. It was a day after the discovery of the first disputed entry. He had marked it with a slip of paper and laid it flat between them on the desk.
“This,” he said. “And several others I’ve found since, none of which I can match to any work done on the estate that I recall authorizing, even in passing, and not noted in any correspondence or other documents.”
“May I review, my Lord?” Mr. Coombe said as he lifted his glasses and began rifling through the papers.
Mr. Coombe had an answer ready for each of them.
“This line here was a repair to the home farm’s east wall,” he said confidently. “You had approved it in passing last autumn and had likely forgotten.”
“What of this one?” Adrian said as he shifted the account book and pointed. “Can you clarify for me here?”
“Ah yes…let me see,” he said as he stroked his chin. “That, yes. That was a payment against an old debt of the late earl’s, hence the larger sum. It was settled at last after years of the creditor’s patience.”
“Do you have correspondence?”
“Of course, my lord! I will need some time to find it, but I will present it to you.”
The answers came smoothly at first, and then, as Adrian pressed, the answers began to thin.
“Very well. And this last one?”
“A matter of…”
“A matter of what?”
“Seed corn! You see, it was bought ahead against a bad season that had, mercifully, never come. It is hard to plan such matters, you know?”
“Do you have receipts somewhere I can review?”
“Yes, I will present those as well…I think that’s all, my lord?”
“For now, yes. Thank you for humoring me,” Adrian said flatly.
“You ask a great deal of questions…and all at once, my lord,” Mr. Coombe said at last, and there was something almost wounded in his tone as his confidence returned to him. “You know, I have kept these books since your father’s day. He never once had cause to doubt the ordering of them.”
“My father is four years in his grave, Mr. Coombe. I am asking now.”
“Very well.”
“And who was that gentleman who came to see you the other day? A Mr. Greaves was it?”
“Just a business associate,” Mr. Coombe said before he hesitated.
He seemed on the very edge of saying something more, his mouth opening, some greater admission gathering behind his eyes that Adrian could almost smell.
“Do I need to worry?”
“Not at all, it is just the closing of some old account…from your father.”
“I see. And that is all?”
“Yes,” he said and almost spoke again when he swallowed it back. “May I be excused this evening, my lord?” He asked quickly.
“What for? Is everything all right?”
“My girl is unwell,” he said. “My wife is alone with her, and there is no one else to sit up with her.
A month ago, such a request would have shamed Adrian into looking away, into letting the man go home to his sick child and closing the ledger on the whole uncomfortable business altogether.
He supposed that would be the decent thing for an earl to do.
But now, he found that decency and doubt could sit in the same chest without canceling each other out. They would speak of this again.
“Go now,” he said, evenly. “We’ll speak of this at a later time then. And I do thank you truly for your years of service, both to myself and this household.”
“It is my duty, my lord,” he said.
The heavy door clicked shut, leaving the study in a lingering silence. Adrian stared at the dark ink of the disputed lines until the letters began to blur under the dimming light. Mr. Coombe’s parting word, and that subtle, fleeting hesitation, hung in the room like a ghost.
The steward’s sudden urgency to attend to his sick daughter felt less like fatherly devotion and more like a hasty retreat. Adrian felt restless.
He leaned back, tracing the smooth leather binding of his father’s old journal. Decency demanded trust, but the numbers on the page offered no such charity. One entry in particular kept drawing his eye.
It was the substantial payout listed for timber and thatch work on the tenant cottages nearby. If Mr. Coombe’s records were to be believed, the village roofs had been fully restored to withstand the coming winter.
He rose from the desk, and the quiet resolve settled cold and heavy in his stomach. He would not wait for Mr. Coombe to draft conveniently delayed receipts, nor would he spend another evening buried in paper when the truth might be sitting out in the open.
By the time Adrian reached the stables, the sun had dipped below the tree line, bleeding a deep violet across the horizon.
He saddled his stallion himself, ignoring the hurried offers of the night groom, and set off down the narrow estate road.
The late evening air was crisp for late summer, carrying the sharp scent of damp earth and woodsmoke as the horse’s hooves beat a steady rhythm against the packed dirt.
The village materialized out of the gathering dusk, a cluster of low stone cottages tucked into the valley. Shadows stretched across the dirt lane, but as Adrian slowed his mount to a walk, the fading light was still enough to reveal the truth.
He pulled up near the center of the village green, gazing up at the row of roofs overhead. There were no fresh timbers, no bright yellow straw of new thatch. Instead, the roofs were dangerously shabby.
All matted, water-stained, and sagging under the weight of rotting moss. Large patches lay bare to the sky, patched crudely with scraps of old canvas. No proper repair work had been done here in years.
Adrian sat motionless in the saddle, the cool night breeze tugging at his cloak. The money was gone, the entry was logged, but the work did not exist.
***
That afternoon the drawing room had achieved something close to peace. Tristan was reading verse to Cassandra again, mangling it less badly than usual, and Cassandra was correcting him anyway, out of habit now more than necessity.
Honoria sat a little apart with a medical volume open on her knee, though he had watched her fail to turn a single page in the quarter hour since he’d come in. He crossed to her and sat down.
“If you are unhappy in this marriage,” he said without warning, “I would rather you told me so plainly than let me go on believing otherwise.”
She looked up from the book she was not reading, her blue eyes bright and confused.
“Hello to you as well.”
“Are you unhappy?”
“I am not unhappy.”
“That is not quite the same as being happy,” he pressed, leaning ever so slightly toward her.
“No,” she agreed, and said nothing further.
He let it stand, because pressing further felt, just then, like asking a question he was not yet entitled to have answered.
When Cassandra rose and went to the piano, Adrian did not move.
The pleasant notes of a familiar tune began to swing through the air, and he had the most peculiar thought cross his mind.
No, I cannot do that…
To offer his hand to his own wife for a dance in his own drawing room ought to have been the smallest thing in the world. It felt, instead, enormous. It was also a contradiction to the very arrangement he had promised his wife in name only.
Yet, the accumulated weight of four years spent keeping every living soul at the same careful distance, a habit so old it had stopped feeling like a choice, seemed pointless without something more to live for.
“Would you like to dance?” He asked her, to which she nodded. “Shall we?”
She took his hand, and they danced. It was nothing elaborate, nothing like the London balls he assumed she had attended, but only the simple turning steps the small space allowed. Cassandra’s playing was a little uneven, but she kept time well enough.
I am dancing, he reminded himself. And this is the nearest I have been to another human being in four years. And it has nothing to do with bloody duty, or grief, or the management of a household that had learned to run itself around his absence...or avoidance.
“I am shocked to see you are a better dancer than I,” Honoria said as she struggled to keep time. “I fear I never quite learned the art of dancing.”
“What do you mean? I am sure a woman like you had her share of dances with suitors.”
“You assume falsely.”
“Well, I am honored then.”
Cassandra stumbled on the keys then, and the room erupted into impromptu laughter until Adrian did the most surprising thing of all. He actually smiled.
***
Later, alone in his study with the candle burned low again, he found he could not let the evening go. He got up and poured himself a small brandy and sat down by the fire. He threw a log onto it and watched the embers dance against the brick. He grabbed a poker and began to stoke it.
It was not the dance itself. It was the moment before it.
He kept replaying the small but absurd effort it had cost him simply to rise and ask his wife to dance.
He could not believe how at home he felt, in his own home, the instant her hand closed over his and they moved together.
He decided it was as though the wanting, once permitted to exist, required no further courage at all. Only the permitting had been hard.
I need to learn to let go.
For four years, he had kept everyone at arm’s length because distance had never failed him. Grief could not reach a man who let no one close enough to see it. He had built the whole of his life on that single principle and had not questioned it until his wife walked into his life.
He had not offered his hand because courtesy required it. He had offered it because he wanted to be near to her. That wanting unsettled him a good deal more than any figure he’d found in Mr. Coombe’s books, and he poked the fire until the flames grew high.
A knock came at the study door.
“Come.”
The door opened.
“Mr. Greaves?”