What do you think of this one, Isolde? There is some opalescence along the right edge.” Lady Hadley handed Isolde a rock from the pile stacked on the table before them. “Could it be something new? Or is it just another bit of ammonite?”
Isolde tilted the rock into the morning sunlight, giving every pretense of appraising it.
Her mother’s lifelong adoration of mineralogy was well known. This particular group of rocks had been collected last summer on a holiday to the Dorset coast.
Family lore asserted that Isolde’s parents had fallen in love over rocks. Lady Jane Everard, daughter of the Duke of Montacute, and Andrew Langston, Earl of Hadley and grandson of a wealthy Scottish industrialist, had first bonded over their shared passion for rocks and minerals. Hadley had even read geology as a course of study at St Andrews University in Scotland.
Her parents’ love of science had inspired Isolde’s own educational aspirations. But instead of geology and minerals—the exploration of things past—she relished mechanics and physics. Or rather, things that were forward-looking, that aimed to better people’s lives in the here and now.
“Do you ever tire of rocks, Mamma?” Catriona asked from her chair beside the hearth, pulling a needle through her embroidery.
Unlike Isolde and their mother, Catriona adored more traditional female pastimes—namely embroidery and lace-making—and identified with their mother’s heritage, her accent deliberately as English as Lady Hadley’s.
Catriona would make Lord Barnaby the best of wives.
“Do ye ever tire of shopping for ribbon and thread, Cat?” Mariah countered from the window seat where she was curled up with a book.
Mariah was somewhere between her sisters—loving books, learning, and Scotland—while not entirely eschewing the occasional embroidery project.
Lady Hadley smiled at her daughters. Nearing her fifty-fifth year, Isolde’s mother retained the elegant beauty of her youth, despite the silver threading through her auburn hair. Often, Isolde wondered if looking at her mother was akin to seeing herself twenty years into the future.
The four Hadley women were gathered in the drawing-room of the family townhouse in Mayfair. Late morning sunlight weakly shone through two large windows, clouds threatening rain. The dressmaker was due soon for another round of fittings for Catriona’s trousseau and wedding gown.
But none of those thoughts occupied Isolde’s mind at the moment.
No.
Instead, she could not stop spinning Mac’s revelations round and round in her head. She had spent the night with her stomach in knots, tossing and turning until nearly dawn.
According to her brothers, Stephen Jarvis had been accused of fraud. His supposed company—linking the English railway at Penrith with its Scottish neighbor in Glasgow—had been an elaborate ruse. There was no railroad. Instead, Jarvis had been using the funds from recent investors to pay out profits to past investors while pocketing a nice percentage for himself in between.
Though appalling, Jarvis’s crimes were not Isolde’s primary concern. He deserved any punishment that might come his way.
The real issue came from Hadley’s financial involvement with Jarvis—a relationship that Isolde had practically foisted upon her father.
Hadley had been the first credible investor in Jarvis’s fledgling company—an enormous feather in Jarvis’s cap and an association that he had widely touted. Given that Hadley was famous for his business acumen, other nobles in the House of Lords had jumped at the chance to invest as well, trusting in Hadley’s stellar reputation as a savvy businessman and honorable gentleman.
And now, the entire scheme had been exposed to the light of day—tumbling down like a house of cards and causing many in Lords to lose large sums of money.
Worse, rumors swirled that Hadley was in on the ruse. That he had profited along with Jarvis.
Mac said it was nonsense. Yes, their father had invested initially, but that was the end of it. Hadley had hundreds of investments at any given time, and occasionally, a bad one slipped through the cracks. With Jarvis, Hadley was as much a victim as anyone else.
But, James had added, though their father was widely liked and admired, he also had his detractors. A gentleman did not remain an outspoken member of Lords for over thirty years without collecting enemies along the way. And those lords claimed to have evidence—solicitors’ papers and personal testimony—supporting their father’s complicity.
There was even talk of impeaching Hadley, a formal process bywhich a member of the peerage could be accused, tried, and gaoled for crimes like fraud.
Isolde felt genuinely ill.
Her relationship with Jarvis had sparked this predicament. If she had just been less arrogant—less naive and trusting in her own discernment—she would have seen Jarvis for the reprobate he was. Or, at the very least, she would not have pressured her father so relentlessly to invest with the man.
Not that her brothers knew of Isolde’spersonalinvolvement with Jarvis.
No, that information remained the purview of the Duke of Kendall and her parents—to whom she had confessed the whole, sordid tale immediately after leaving Kendall’s bedchamber on that night two years past.
“Ye are correct. There is a wee bit of opalescence in this one.” Isolde handed the rock sample back to her mother. If Lady Hadley noticed her daughter’s distracted state, she did not mention it.
Isolde was desperate to speak with her father. To ascertain how truly dire the situation was. To understand what could be done to rectify it.
