“William?”
Cecily picked up her coffee. “Yes.”
Letitia set down the marmalade and looked at her with focused attention. Cecily simply drank her coffee and looked at the window, refusing to elaborate.
Isadora looked at her for a moment. Then she returned to her toast.
“William came down early,” Letitia said, with her mouth full. “Before we did. Prentiss said he was in the study by seven.”
Oh?
Cecily dabbed her lips gently with the napkin.
“Did he say anything?” she asked, in the tone of someone asking an administrative question.
“Just that he had correspondence to attend to,” Letitia replied casually, her attention already shifting to the marmalade, which she was applying with characteristic conviction.
Cecily looked at her cup. “He always has correspondence.”
“He always has correspondence,” Letitia agreed. “He usually attends to it at an unreasonable hour.” She paused. “He seemed… to be thinking.”
“Thinking,” Cecily repeated.
“Like when he’s working something out,” Letitia explained. “He goes very quiet and very early, and Prentiss says he drinks three cups of coffee before nine, which only happens when something is bothering him.” She looked at Cecily with the frank assessment of someone who had been studying the same subject for fourteen years. “Did something happen at the ball?”
“The lemonade,” Cecily said, “was extraordinary.”
Letitia opened her mouth. Isadora put a hand briefly on her sister’s arm. Letitia closed her mouth with a snap.
Breakfast continued. Cecily ate what was required of her, participated where participation was needed, and thought about a man who had been in his study since seven o’clock and was going to have to come out of it, eventually. She decided to pay him a visit instead.
The study was empty.
She stood in the doorway for a moment. There was a fire going and a half-finished letter on the desk, the quill resting on the page where he had set it down. His reading glasses lay on the corner of the desk, which he always moved the moment anyone appeared, as though they were evidence of something.
She went in.
She sat across from the desk and looked around the room with the attention she had developed over the past weeks for the spaces he occupied. The bookshelves were organized with a system only he fully understood, his correspondence was arranged in stacks, and the estate ledgers stuck out of the lower shelf with the serious, weighty presence of things consulted often.
She looked at the ledgers.
She looked at the half-finished letter, which she did not read. Then she looked at the ledgers again.
She had been thinking about the orphanage accounts since she met Harwood. She had several questions, but had not pressed. She had trusted William to look. She had sat in the warm nursery and listened to the baby breathe and told herself she would check the accounts when he was ready.
She stood up, crossed to the lower shelf, and pulled out the first ledger.
She told herself she was simply looking. That she was the Duchess of Blackmoor and these were her household accounts as much as his, and there was nothing unreasonable about familiarizing herself with them. She told herself this was entirely ordinary.
She opened the ledger.
It was the estate accounts—the full quarterly record, with Harwood’s handwriting in the columns she recognized from the afternoon in the study, every entry dated and annotated with thoroughness.
She flipped to the charitable disbursements.
The orphanage fund was listed underSt. Clement’s Home, quarterly allowance—a figure she noted and turned past, looking at the pattern of entries over the year. It was regular and consistent. The same amount, quarterly, without variation.
She stopped and turned back two pages. She looked at the figure again. Then she pulled out the second ledger, the one beside it, which was slightly thinner and bore the labelSupplementary Accountsin Harwood’s hand. She opened it to the first page.
