Isla bit her lip. “What is in there, Edward? Truly. If it is not gold and treasure as your mother clearly wishes me to believe.”
“You think I imagined you prising at the lock in search of coin?” he said.
“What else was I to think,” she snapped, “when every person in your orbit insists on believing I am in league with my brother to fleece you?”
He flinched again. “I deserve that.”
He drew a breath, let it out slowly.
“It is nothing so dramatic,” he said. “No secret chest. No incriminating documents. I put all of my father’s personal possessions in that wing after he died. Clothes. Books. The things that sat on his desk. His scent lingered on them. I could not abide walking past them every day. I had the rooms shut and the key sent to my study.”
“You could not bear to see them,” she said softly.
“No,” he said. “I could not.”
The simple admission altered the locked wing in her mind. It was no longer a mystery hoard, no longer a test devised by a cold dowager to see whether a Scotswoman’s fingers itched for silver. It was a mausoleum. A place where a son had entombed the memory of a father whose approval he believed he had never won.
Anger at his mother flared anew. “She used that,” Isla said. “She used your grief as bait.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Does she know what is in there?”
“She claims she does,” he said. “Says she found a diary. Says she has read it. Says my father wrote thoughts I have never heard.”
“And she taunted you with it,” Isla said. “Like a carrot before a donkey.”
He glanced at her, a spark of unwilling amusement there. “Your imagery is charming.”
“It is accurate,” she said.
He sobered. “She threatened to burn it if I left.”
Isla stared at him. “And you came anyway.”
“Yes,” he said simply.
The wind sighed through the bare branches overhead.
Would I have done the same. Risked so much for Edward?
The answer rose in her chest, her heart telling her what she would do before she could quash it. She looked away, blinking hard against the sudden tightness in her chest.
“Your mother is afraid of something,” she said. “Something in Scotland. Or in York. Or both. She would not burn your father’s words lightly.”
“I know,” he said. “I do not yet know what it is. But I mean to find out.”
He nodded toward the trap. “Now. Before full dark. Will you drive, or shall I?”
“You?” she scoffed. “You sit a horse like a king, but I have yet to see you manage a trap through a puddle without drowning us.”
“That is a slander,” he said mildly.
“Prove me wrong another time,” she replied, climbing up to the seat. “You may ride beside so long as you do not lecture me on every rut.”
He swung into the saddle. “Very well. I shall merely wince at the worst ones.”
She gathered the reins. Morrow tossed her head, eager to be off. Edward’s horse moved up on the off side, the two animals settling into a companionable pace.
