Chapter 18
Adrian sat alone in the study long after the house had gone quiet, the working ledgers open before him. He finally had the leverage he needed to talk to him.
Coombe.
He had circled the thought for a fortnight, testing it, resisting it, telling himself each time that a man did not accuse another of theft on the strength of entries he half understood.
But the proof, laid out now in his own hand across the desk, had passed the point of honest doubt. He had never come with the documents he had promised to corroborate. Mr. Coombe was all but avoiding him now.
Payments to names that led nowhere. Repairs invented for work never done. Small sums, mostly, cunning in their smallness, each one modest enough to escape a glance and none of them modest enough, together, to escape careful review. Four years of them.
A man his father had trusted without question, bleeding the estate slowly enough that no single wound had ever looked like more than a scratch. He was sitting with it, cold and entirely certain, when a knock came, and Mr. Greaves was shown in by a footman.
“Forgive the hour, my lord. I saw your light and thought it better not to wait till morning.” Mr. Greaves settled into the chair across the desk without quite being asked, his manner easy in the way it always was as he puffed on a lit pipe.
“I’ve come about the very matter you’re sitting with, I’d wager. A man of business, like myself, notices what a master too long absent from his own books does not, my lord, and I confess I’d reached the same name some days past. I didn’t wish to raise it until I was certain.”
He did not press it further than that. He only laid, one by one, a handful of confirmations across entries Adrian had already found for himself. A name here, a date there, small corroborations offered with the mild reluctance of a man who took no pleasure in the telling.
And in the offering of them, without ever quite claiming to have led the way, he let Adrian feel that they had arrived together at a truth Mr. Greaves had simply been too careful to raise before the ground beneath it was solid.
“You’re certain of it,” Adrian said.
“As certain as any man can be who hasn’t a confession in hand. I’d have the confession too, my lord, if you’ll allow me to have it out with him properly in the morning.”
“And how did you come about all of this?”
“As an associate of Mr. Coombe, I had my suspicions for some time about where the money came from…and as you, so aptly, have been looking into his affairs…I have as well.”
“Indeed. If you will excuse me, I have business to attend to,” Adrian motioned as Mr. Greaves sauntered out with him.
***
By the time Adrian went to have it out with him himself, Mr. Coombe was gone.
The rooms above the estate office stood cleared out completely. No note. No word to any servant. The man had slipped away sometime in the night, between the last watch and the first light, without a soul in the house hearing so much as a door.
It sat wrong with him for a moment, turning it over.
A careful man did not bolt so cleanly on a single night’s notice; and Mr. Coombe had been careful, years of careful entries proved that much, and such a man did not bolt so cleanly on a single night’s notice.
His rooms were left orderly, and nothing taken that anyone could yet account for missing.
No crime committed, just abandonment. It was the sort of flight that wanted planning, and planning wanted time, and time was the one thing Adrian could not see how the man had had.
But before he could properly shape the puzzle of it, Mr. Greaves supplied the reading for him. He leaned against the door and puffed again.
“A guilty man runs the moment he feels the floor give under him, my lord. He’ll have marked the questions you were asking these past weeks and knew his time was short.
I’ve seen it before. Oh no, they never wait for the accusation.
They run from the asking of the questions, not the answer to them. That is their weakness.”
It was tidy enough, and Adrian, having no better explanation of his own to set against it, let it stand.
What of his family back in the cottage in the village? What of his future?
“Set the accounts right,” he said, deciding he cared not for his future after what he had done to him. “Whatever’s owed, whatever’s tangled, I want it in order. Come back to me when you’re wanted, and not before.”
“You have my word on it, my lord.”
“I will see you repaid.”
“You are most gracious, my lord.”
***
Whatever grimness the early morning had left in him, Cassandra undid after breakfast.
“There’s a fair in the next town today,” she said, catching him in the gallery. “I want to go. I mean to go to a fair with tents and music and people who have never once seen me carried anywhere, and I will not be argued out of it.”
He could not refuse her. Not with the color already high in her cheeks at the mere asking, not after years of watching her ask for nothing at all.
“Very well,” he said. “Gather the troops and let’s get in the bloody carriage.”
“Who are you and what have you done with my brother?”
“You can blame it on lack of sleep. Let’s get on with it before I change my mind.”
***
They made a party of it, Tristan insisting he would not miss it for the world, Nell quiet but willing, and by midday they were all four of them threading through a noisy field of stalls and striped tents with a musicians somewhere playing badly and cheerfully, all at once.
It was a wonderful diversion from all that had happened with Mr. Coombe and Mr. Greaves.
His wife surprised him again before the afternoon was half done, though he had come to expect surprise when it came to her.
“May I try my hand?” she asked as she walked over to a booth.
“By all means,” he said, following her.
There was a stall given over to some common game of skill. Upon closer inspection, Adrian saw it was rings tossed at pegs, a prize of ribbon for whoever landed three running. Nell was drawn to it by nothing more than passing curiosity, or so she claimed.
Three rings, then four, landed with an ease that had nothing of luck in it and everything of a steady hand long practiced at aiming for small, precise targets.
“Where in heaven did a countess learn that?” Tristan said.
“Yes, I need to know how my wife learned to do such things.” Adrian laughed.
“A misspent youth,” she said, entirely unbothered, and set herself at once to teaching him. “Let me show you,” she explained, guiding his hand at the wrist, laughing outright at his first two failures.
He was no good at it at all, and he did not care in the slightest. He would have lost the whole afternoon gladly, ring after ring gone wide of the peg, only to keep her hand over his and that laugh going. It was intoxicating.
Once they finished, they began to wander again. Somewhere among the stalls, with the noise of the fair loose and easy around them, he leaned in close.
“Mr. Coombe fled in the night,” he explained, handing her a roasted nut. “That Mr. Greaves was the one who’d found him out and the one who would stay now to set the tangled accounts right. I do not trust him, but find I must until I have reason not to.”
Something went still in her face at that, and they stopped walking.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course,” she said, popping another nut into her mouth. “I hope Mr. Coombe is all right, even with all he did against you.”
“Me too,” he said.
Twice that afternoon his eye went to his sister.
Tristan stayed close beside her through the whole of it, careful of the crowd, steadying her elbow at every uneven patch of ground, making her laugh at something every few minutes.
They were an interesting pair, and Adrian knew it was only a matter of time.
She looked up at him once, in the middle of it, with an unguarded warmth that Adrian did not entirely like. It was not because he doubted Tristan’s affection, on the contrary. It was because he had known Tristan before the war, really known him.
He had seen firsthand the sort of charm he’d once turned on every woman in a room without thinking twice of the cost, and he did not yet know for certain what four years and a “French ball” had left standing of that habit.
It was as they were gathering to leave, the light going long and gold across the field, that he looked at Honoria.
Honoria had wandered a little apart from the rest of them, near the edge of the last row of stalls.
She was speaking with a man Adrian did not recognize.
He could not hear what passed between them from that distance, only that whatever it was drained the color from her face in the space of a few short sentences.
The stranger bowed, unhurried, and turned away into the crowd before Adrian had crossed half the distance to reach her.