Chapter Two #3
“Yours?” He furrowed his brow.
“My attempts to make sense of the others,” she explained, tracing a finger along the top of the book.
He reached for it.
Her palm came down atop the cover. “It is not official.”
“Few useful things are,” he told her.
That earned him another look. Less embarrassed this time. More searching.
Then she withdrew her hand.
Gabriel picked up the book and opened it.
He expected girlish confusion. Wishful arithmetic. Rounded figures, perhaps. Optimistic totals.
He did not find them.
He found columns. Careful columns. Dates, names, amounts owed, amounts paid, amounts delayed, sums negotiated downward, promises made to tradesmen, notations about which creditors pressed hardest and which might be soothed with partial payments.
Here and there, in neat, slanting script, Miss Montfort had written small reminders to herself.
Ask Jenkins whether coal bill includes overcharge.
Do not let Mama see March total.
Mr. Vale will wait if paid before Michaelmas.
No more credit at milliner.
Try again with wine merchant.
The final note sat alone in the margin of one page.
Find money somewhere.
Gabriel stared at it longer than he should have.
Miss Montfort, perhaps misreading his silence, folded her hands at her waist. “I know it is not how your father would have done it.”
“No,” he said.
Her chin lifted a fraction. “But I have done my best.”
He looked up. There it was again. That careful brightness. The smile held like a shield, polished and ready, though he could now see the slight trembling beneath it.
“Yes,” he said, more quietly than he intended. “I can see that.”
Her expression changed. It wasn’t much, just a slight parting of her lips, a faint shift in her eyes. Praise, he realized, startled her.
No. Not praise…being heard.
He looked back down at the ledger again.
The realization lodged somewhere it had no business being.
He had come here to bring the matter to order, not to notice that Miss Poppy Montfort had been fighting a war with ink and ledgers while the rest of the household drank champagne before noon.
“I will need several hours,” he said.
“Today?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” She glanced toward the door, no doubt thinking of Lady Viva, the wine merchant, whoever else waited in the hall, and the poet dying in the sitting room. “Of course.”
“You need not remain,” he assured her. “I can review accounts without assistance.”
“I am certain you can.” She smiled. “But the accounts cannot explain themselves, and they are notorious liars.”
He should have sent her away. He meant to send her away. Instead, he gestured to the chair across from the desk. “Very well.”
She sat.
Freddie scratched at the door until Jenkins admitted him. The puppy trotted in, inspected Gabriel with suspicion, then settled beneath Miss Montfort’s chair as though he were keeping watch.
For the next hour, Gabriel reviewed the Montfort affairs while Miss Montfort answered questions with unnerving frankness.
Yes, the wine merchant was still owed too much.
No, Lady Viva had not understood how much.
Yes, the milliner had been patient, but only because Miss Montfort had promised partial payment.
No, the late viscount’s remaining settlement had not been large.
Yes, the entire estate belonged now to the heir.
No, Lady Viva did not like to discuss the heir.
Miss Montfort did not like to discuss him either.
She spoke quickly, sometimes too quickly, filling the silence before it could harden into judgment.
At one point, she said, “I know it looks dreadful.”
Gabriel did not answer immediately. He was studying the figures.
“It is dreadful,” he said at last.
Her mouth opened, then closed.
He looked up. “That is not an indictment, Miss Montfort. It is a fact. Facts are useful.”
“I have rarely found dreadful facts useful,” she replied evenly.
He inclined his head. “They are preferable to pretty lies.”
She gave him a small, reluctant smile. “You must be quite popular at parties.”
He drew his brows together. “I do not attend many.”
She pressed a hand to her chest. “That is shocking.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
He bent over the ledger again, but the corner of his mouth betrayed him. She was teasing him. That was curious.
But the next set of figures sobered him quickly.
By the time the clock struck noon, Gabriel had found three errors, two unpaid notes, one forgotten obligation, and not a single hidden reserve of money large enough to matter.
The situation was not merely precarious. It was dire.
Worse, Miss Montfort knew it. Perhaps not in full legal detail, but in the way a person knew a floorboard was rotten because she had stepped carefully over it for years.
She sat across from him now, twisting the edge of a handkerchief between her fingers while pretending she was not holding her breath.
Gabriel shut the last ledger. The sound was soft.
Her gaze flew to his face. “Well?” she asked, and there was the first crack in her cheerfulness.
One word, nearly steady.
Nearly.
He had intended to be dispassionate. Clear.
Correct. He had intended to say that the accounts were unsustainable, that Lady Viva’s expenditures must be curtailed at once, that further credit would be all but impossible to secure, that a comprehensive settlement of debts would require more assets than appeared to exist.
All true.
All useless.
Because what she was really asking was, Are we ruined?
And Gabriel, who had come to this house determined not to be his father, found himself wishing with sudden, fierce irritation that he could give her any answer but the truth.
He looked down at the ledgers once more, hoping some overlooked sum had appeared by divine intervention alone.
It had not.
No forgotten annuity. No overlooked investment. No tidy legal instrument waiting to rescue them.
Only debts, dwindling funds, and a household that burned through coin like kindling.
Gabriel lifted his gaze. Miss Montfort sat very still, her hands folded now, her smile gone. Without it, she looked younger. Not girlish, precisely, but unguarded in a way that made something uncomfortable shift in his chest.
He disliked the feeling, which was safer than admitting he disliked how much it had to do with her.
“I will need to review the remaining papers before I give a final opinion,” he said.
She appeared to absorb that, nodding slowly. “But you have an opinion already.”
“Yes.”
She bit her lip. “And it is bad.”
“It is not favorable,” he admitted.
Her laugh was small and humorless. “How delicately put.”
Gabriel pushed the ledger aside and leaned back. “Miss Montfort—”
The study door burst open before he could continue.
Lady Viva swept in, her expression bright with imminent mischief. Freddie leapt to his paws and barked with all the ceremony of a herald announcing royalty, which perhaps, in this household, he was.
“Poppy, darling,” Lady Viva said, “you must come at once. Mr. Loxley has composed a farewell ode to the sofa, and Lady Stone is weeping into the tassels. You know how much I dislike weeping.”
“It is the second-best sofa I’ve ever known,” came Lady Stone’s devastated drunken wail from the salon.
Poppy rose immediately. “Mama, not now.”
“Oh, very well. In a moment.” Lady Viva turned her radiant gaze upon Gabriel. “Dear Mr. Ashby, have you discovered that we are secretly wealthy?”
The question landed in the room with all the force of a dropped vase.
Poppy went pale.
Gabriel stood.
He could have answered lightly. He could have evaded. His father might have done both with a gentleness Gabriel considered weakness.
Instead, he looked at Miss Montfort. Not Lady Viva. Miss Montfort.
“No,” he said quietly. “I have not.”
Miss Montfort’s face did not crumple. She did not cry or gasp or clutch at furniture. She merely nodded once, accepting confirmation of a truth she had been braced to hear.
Somehow, that was worse.
Lady Viva sighed. “How disappointing. I have always thought secret wealth would suit me.”
Miss Montfort reached for her composure as visibly as another woman might reach for a shawl. “Thank you, Mr. Ashby. We shall discuss it later.”
Gabriel inclined his head, though every instinct in him rebelled against leaving the matter there.
Later.
That was a word people used when the present was unbearable.
He watched as Miss Montfort guided her mother from the study with a hand light upon Lady Viva’s arm and a smile already restored to her face.
By the time the door closed behind them, she was laughing at something Lady Viva had said. The sound was bright, beautiful, and false.
Gabriel remained alone in the study, surrounded by ledgers, unpaid bills, and the mess his father had spent years softening with kindness.
He had come here to set limits. He had come here to put the Montfort affairs in order, withdraw his services, and never again allow this family’s chaos to become an Ashby concern.
Instead, he stood in the middle of the late Viscount Montague’s study and looked down at Miss Montfort’s careful little book.
Find money somewhere.
Gabriel closed it slowly.
There was no money.
Which meant that unless he found some other answer, Poppy Montfort’s future would likely depend upon either a settlement from the new heir or finding a titled man willing to marry her before the whole dazzling, ridiculous household collapsed around her.
That should have clarified matters.
It did not.
For some reason he could not explain, it only made Gabriel want to sweep every neat stack of paper from the desk.