The handwriting here was the same. The entries were dated. Everything appeared correct at a glance.
She had grown up in the household of an earl. She had sat beside her father’s steward at seven years old while he showed her, with the patient pride of a man who loved his work, how accounts were balanced, how columns spoke to each other, how a discrepancy in one entry would surface as a ghost in another if one knew where to look.
She knew where to look and found it on the fourth page of the first ledger.
A transfer. Dated August, the same month Mrs. Peel had submitted the repair request that had never been addressed. An amount moved from the orphanage fund to a supplementary account she did not recognize, labeled in abbreviation, the annotation beside it readingadmin, costs, qrtlyin the brisk shorthand of something that wanted to look routine.
She turned to the supplementary ledger and found the corresponding entry. The amount did not match.
She looked at it again. It still did not match.
She pulled the ledger closer, tilting it toward the light, because surely she had misread it, or the ink had blurred, or she was looking at the wrong line entirely.
She had not misread it.
“Good Lord,” she muttered to the empty room.
She sat back.
The discrepancy was not large—not the kind of thing that would announce itself, not the kind of thing a busy man reviewing a full quarter’s accounts would necessarily catch in the pace of a normal meeting. It was small enough to be deniable and consistent enough to be intentional.
When she read through the previous quarters and found the same abbreviation, the same annotation, the same slight mismatch repeated with the patient regularity of someone who had been doing this long enough to trust their own system, her hands went still on the page.
Her jaw tightened.
She counted back.
January. October. July. April, the year before. She kept going, the pages turning under her fingers, and with each quarter, the picture assembled itself with the cold clarity of something that had been hiding in plain sight.
She pressed her lips together.
Two years. At minimum two years of small, consistent transfers from an account designated for children who had nothing, redirected into an account that led, when she followed the abbreviations, nowhere legitimate.
It went to a shell, a property management firm she had never heard of, registered to an address that, when she found it referenced in a separate correspondence file, turned out to be a solicitor’s office in a part of the city that had nothing to do with the Blackmoor estate.
She pulled out more documents and read them carefully, discovering more and more siphoning from the estate funds. Putting them all together, it amounted to several years of funds redirected to the same shell account.
She sat back in her chair.
“There it is,” she breathed.
It wasn’t triumph she felt. It was fear that her suspicions were right.
She thought of William signing those papers page after page in this very room, his quill moving without hesitation, the trust of fifteen years behind every signature. She thought of him sitting across from a man who had been stealing from orphaned children and calling it administrative costs, and she felt cold fury rush through her.
She reached for the paper on the desk.
She opened all the ledgers side by side and began to write figures, dates, cross-references, the trail from the orphanage fund and every other account to the supplementary account tothe shell firm, each entry noted precisely with the page number and the corresponding discrepancy.
She wrote quickly and without hesitation, not stopping until she had three full pages and the evidence was assembled in a form that could not be dismissed or explained away or attributed to clerical error.
She set down the quill and looked at what she had written.
The room was very quiet. The fire crackled. The morning light poured through the window at the angle she had come to know.
Harwood.
She thought of his face in this room, the composed, unhurried confidence of a man entirely secure in his position.
