Chapter 26
Adrian had heard enough from the passage outside to know what he was walking in on, or at least the shape of it. Greaves’s voice was low and certain, a threat being tied tight around the whole of her life to squeeze something out of her. What it was, Adrian couldn’t imagine.
But he noted Greaves’ manner, how he did it as easily as a man might discuss the weather. Adrian stood in the doorway, then Nell and Greaves turned to face him.
“A man who stands in another man’s house threatening the lady of it,” he said, “has already told you everything you need to know about him.”
“Your lordship ought to know precisely what he’s married, my lord, before he takes sides so freely on her behalf,” he said as he walked toward him, his chest puffed out.
“She is no widow. She is a surgeon’s daughter, dressed up in a name that was never hers to sign, and signed anyway. She is not even a—”
“I know.”
He said it flatly, without heat, and watched the words land like an arrow piercing his chest. Then he watched the man deflate, taking a few steps back, shaking his head from side to side.
“You know?” Greaves repeated. “You know it all?”
“Yes, I believe so,” Adrian said dryly. “I had it from her own mouth, in the rain, with no one else present to hear it and no advantage to be gained by the telling. Not peddled to me secondhand by a man who thought to make use of it for his own purposes.”
Greaves recovered quickly, reaching for whatever card he had left to play.
“The letter, then,” he said as he presented it from his jacket pocket.
“This is her own confession, written in her own hand. Proof enough of her crimes, should it ever reach the proper eyes. Leave the books alone, my lord. Let this matter of my accounting rest where it stands, and it stays folded exactly where I’ve kept it. ”
“You mean to bargain with me?”
“I mean to offer you a sensible arrangement, my lord, nothing more. You keep your countess. I keep my position, and my silence. Everyone involved comes away with what they most wish to k—”
Adrian did not bargain with him. He crossed the rest of the hall in three long strides before Greaves had finished speaking and snatched the letter out of the man’s hand before his fingers had time to close properly around it in defense.
He put himself, in the same motion, squarely between the man and Nell.
“You will have to go through me if you wish to speak with my wife again.”
“My lord, I think you misunderstand—”
“I misunderstand nothing. The rope is mine now,” Adrian said, dangling the letter between his fingers. “And I find I have no use for it.”
Greaves stood for a moment, his eyes darting around. Some part of him, even then, was still searching the room for one more play, one more thread left to pull. He found none. With nothing left to hold over anyone in that house, he straightened his coat and shook his head.
“Very well, my lord.” He moved down the hall toward the door, unhurried even now, some last vestige of his confidence holding through pure force of habit.
At the end of the hall, he paused and turned back.
“Paper is not the only way to end a woman, my lord. You would do well to remember that, whatever you believe you’ve secured here today. ”
He was gone before Adrian could answer him.
“Thank you,” Nell said finally, nodding toward the letter still folded in his hand. “For that. I should have told you myself, all of it, and earlier. I should not have been foolish enough to pen it all.”
“I would do it again.”
He heard himself say the words and understood, even as they left him, that it was the warmest thing he had let himself say to her in a long time. He watched her face change at the hearing of it, something soft and hopeful flickering in her brown eyes before she could mask it.
He had been so conflicted at her lying, hating the act itself but knowing in every fiber of his being that she did it for a reason she felt honorable. He had avoided her, taking suppers in his study, making a point to use separate hallways, only to end up here…
Defending her. And yet, it feels too much, too fast…After all that has happened, and all that I still do not understand.
“That is,” he said, trying to pull back, “I would not stand by and watch any woman threatened under my own roof. It was a matter of principle, nothing more.”
He watched the hope that had bloomed in her face fold itself carefully away again, tucked away. He shook his head from side to side, trying to get his thoughts straight. He wanted to move forward, but felt stuck to the floor as if adhered there. He could not absolve her.
“Of course,” she said. “A matter of principle. I understand.”
She took the correction without a word of protest, without so much as a flicker of the hurt he suspected she felt. Or perhaps, it was a result of all she had endured with her confrontation with Greaves. Either way, he was glad of her composure and sorry for it in equal, uncomfortable measure.
Glad because it made the moment easier to survive. Sorry because he understood, watching her, that he had just taught her once again that whatever ground she gained with him could be taken back just as quickly.
“I should see to Cassandra,” she said, after a moment. “She’ll wonder at all the coming and going.”
“Nell.”
She paused, half turned back toward him and waited. But whatever had nearly escaped his lips a minute before had already been walled back up. He could not, standing there with her letter still warm in his hand, find his way to it again quite so quickly. He shook it off.
“Nothing,” he said. “Go on.”
She went, and he stood alone with the letter, turning it over once in his hands before he went back into his office. He set it carefully in the top drawer of his desk, unwilling, even now, to burn a thing that had cost her so much to write. He locked the drawer and placed the key in his pocket.
He was barely out of the room himself, moving toward the stairs to some unknown location, when Tristan found him in the passage. He had come back, though Adrian had all but thrown him out of Ashcroft with words neither of them was likely to soon forget.
“Adrian.”
“I told you to leave.”
“You did, and I meant to obey you, and got as far as the end of the drive before I found something on it that changed my mind entirely.”
“My word was final on the matter.”
Tristan’s face had none of its usual ease. “I found Coombe.”
Adrian went very still. “Hiding, I suppose? Was he on his way to a port? If he has any sense left in him, he will keep on running.”
“Not hiding. Coming back.” Tristan stepped closer, lowering his voice though there was no one else in the passage to overhear them.
“He was walking toward Ashcroft when I came upon him. He was on foot, no bag, no plan beyond the one road in front of him. I nearly rode past without recognizing him at all…He looked so entirely wrecked. Truly a shadow of the man he was.”
“What did he say? H coming back to do what? Beg for mercy before I could have him taken up?”
“To confess it he said. All of it, out loud, and take whatever came of the confessing, whatever that cost him.” Tristan held Adrian’s gaze. “He told me the whole of it on that road, Adrian. Everything.”
“Tell me now. What do you know?” Adrian said as he crossed his arms and listened.
“He began skimming the estate a few years back. Easy money, quietly taken, small enough sums at first that a careful man could convince himself it did no real harm to anyone. The sort of theft a man tells himself is borrowing, until enough years pass that the word stops meaning anything at all. It started as a desperate attempt to pay for his sick child’s care.
He said he had wished that he had come to you outright, but his pride…
” Tristan’s jaw tightened. “I don’t begin to understand. ”
“What of Greaves?”
“He entered the picture a year ago, Coombe says. Right around that time you started discussing the widow with the Vane family. He claims Greaves ingratiated himself as a business associate, then resorted to blackmail once he figured out Coombe had been skimming. He threatened to expose his thefts unless he took even more and handed the funds over to him.”
“This is lunacy, Tristan!” Adrian snapped.
“Then you began pulling the old ledgers yourself, asking questions no one had troubled you with in years, and Coombe never had the stomach for what came next. He wanted to confess the whole business to you directly. Greaves would not let him.”
“How did Greaves stop a man who wanted to confess?”
“Not with exposure. That threat had stopped working on him by then. I think he’d have taken his chances with the law rather than go on carrying what he was carrying. It weighs on a man…” Tristan’s voice faded.
“It was harm to the child. Coombe’s daughter.
Greaves made it plain what would happen to her if her father talked, and he made it specific enough that Coombe believed every word of it.
A part of me believed it, too. And, after that, he did whatever he was told, however much it cost him to keep doing it. ”
Adrian stood with that, the passage silent around them both, and let it settle into place alongside everything he already knew. The only thing was motive.
Why would Greaves go to such lengths, just to get to me? It doesn’t make sense. There are a million marks to be made in the world. Why me?
“Where is he now?” Adrian asked. “Coombe.”
“Below, in the kitchen, being fed by Mrs. Scott, who I gather has decided to forgive him everything the moment she heard about the child. He means to answer for whatever you ask of him. I believe him.”
Adrian nodded slowly, something in his chest unclenching very slightly, though the whole of the matter was far from settled yet.
“I threw you out of my house this morning,” Adrian repeated.
“You did.” Tristan’s mouth twisted into something that was not quite a smile. “And I came back anyway, because I find I’d rather be thrown out again tomorrow than leave you to sort through all this alone. That’s rather the whole of what friendship is worth, I think, if it’s worth anything at all.”
Adrian felt the tension he was holding in every fiber of his being loosen, just a bit more. He rubbed a hand along the back of his neck.
“I owe you an apology,” he said. “A proper one, not thrown at you in a passage on my way to somewhere else.”
“You’ll have time enough for that later. I am a patient man. Now, I think you’d better come down and hear Coombe out yourself, before Mrs. Scott feeds him so well he forgets half of what he came to say.”