He reached into the inner drawer and produced the Brighton note. He unfolded it and set it in the center of the desk between them.
Harwood looked at it, his face becoming tight.
“I received this note at the Pemberton ball in Brighton,” William elaborated. “Three months ago. I went to the eastern shore as it instructed, and someone struck me from behind.” He looked at Harwood steadily. “I have been trying to place the handwriting since the morning I found it. I had my suspicions, but I dismissed them because the handwriting is disguised. But the capital B”—he pointed to the wordbehindin the note—“sits consistently above the line. As does every capital B in the estate accounts prepared in your hand over fifteen years.” He pulled one of Harwood’s account pages beside the note. “Here. Here. And here.”
Harwood looked at the comparison.
“Handwriting alone is not a conviction,” William allowed. “I know that. So tell me this.” He leaned forward. “The week I was in Brighton, the week I received that note, you submitted a standard quarterly review request for my signature. I found it in the files this morning, dated the same week. You had asked me to sign three large transfers: one to the property management account, one to the maintenance fund, and one—the largest—described as a legal retainer for estate restructuring.”
His lips thinned. “I was supposed to sign them that week. I did not because I was unconscious on a beach, and then I was managing a scandal and getting married. By the time I was back in London, the quarterly review had been rescheduled.” A pause. “Those transfers were never signed. And when I look at the account now, they were never made. They simply disappeared from the record.”
He sat back. “Someone needed me incapacitated for that week. Someone who knew the quarterly review was scheduled. Someone who understood that if I were managing a crisis, I would not be reviewing accounts.” He arched an eyebrow. “Tell me that was a coincidence.”
The room was very quiet.
Harwood looked at the Brighton note. “I thought,” he said finally, “that you would not last. Your father… your father understood the estate. He understood how it worked—the relationships, the systems. He trusted the people who managed it because he understood them. He understood me, and did not object.”
William looked at him squarely. “If you wanted me dead, you would have made certain of it. You wanted me, what? Frightened? Discredited? Unable to review the accounts with a clear head because I was recovering from a blow, marrying a woman under scandal, and managing the consequences?”
Harwood looked at the handwriting, then at William.
“I did not mean for you to be seriously harmed.” It was the voice of a man who had run out of road. “The intention was simply to get you to sign the documents that would… hide the missing funds. The men I hired were told to deliver a blow that would incapacitate you if you refused, not–”
“So it was to hide the missing funds,” William cut him off. “And the scandal?”
“It was simply a coincidence. I didn’t plan for it to happen.” Harwood said.
“You miscalculated a great many things.”
William stood. He looked at the man across the desk, who had managed this estate for fifteen years, who had sat in this room and looked him in the eye every quarter, who had used his sisters’ names as bait and had been stealing from orphaned children and had hired someone to put him in the tide at Brighton because the quarterly accounts were coming due.
“You used my sisters’ names in that note. To guarantee I would come.”
Harwood said nothing.
“They were fourteen and sixteen.” William couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “You used their names.”
“It was the most effective–”
“Get out of this house,” William snapped.
Harwood blanched and started sputtering.
“You are dismissed. Effective immediately. The full accounting will go to my solicitor this afternoon,” William continued. “Whatever was taken will be documented and pursued through every available channel. I strongly recommend you do not make that process more difficult than it needs to be.”
Harwood looked at him for a moment. Then he stood, picked up his folio, and left.
William listened to his footsteps in the corridor. The front door closed.
He looked at the desk. The house around him was very quiet.
He had fixed the accounts. He had dismissed Harwood. He had recovered the evidence and identified the man who had put him on a beach and endangered everything he had spent ten years protecting. He had done all of it this afternoon with methodical efficiency.
So why do I feel hollow?
The victory felt like nothing. It felt like winning an argument in an empty room. He should have been sharing the news with Cecily, and then they’d laugh about it.
He looked at his hands on the desk. Then he looked out the window. At the late November afternoon light, grey and bleak.
