“Do you need help, Fanny?” Amy, who had eaten a hardy breakfast thanks to Eli Benson’s bounty, put a hand on Fanny’s shoulder. Her cheer had been the one bright spot on a dreary morning.
Fanny tried to smile at her little sister. “I don’t know how to organize this,” she admitted.
“Easy. Sort them. Like you taught me. We can do alphabetical, or date, or…”
Fanny gave Amy a smacking kiss. “You are brilliant, of course. Let’s do alphabetical by last name. Then date.”
At the implication of “us,” Amy sat down and picked up the first one. “Sixty-two quid for the tailor?” She gazed up at Fanny, in stunned disbelief. Her sister’s heart sank. She’d tried to keep the worst of their father’s excess from the ducklings, but here it was spread out before the girl.
Fanny shrugged. “He wanted to look the part of a prosperous merchant.”
“Prince Regent, more like,” Amy muttered, head shaking. She picked up the next bill and began to sort by merchant, leaving Fanny lost in thought.
How many suits did the worm have? He can’t have destroyed them all with gin. She hadn’t gone back inside his room after she’d found the ledgers and mortgage papers. She hadn’t checked his clothes press. Benson had said they needed to assess the assets. A fancy suit was an asset, wasn’t it? First debts, then assets, he’d said. She stopped tapping her foot and went to work with Amy.
An hour later, they had a dozen piles, from Abbot the greengrocer to Williamson the carter, each sorted by date. Even Amy noticed that the numbers increased with every bill. More tailoring debts surfaced, and so did ones from a fancy modiste never patronized by Fanny or her mother.
“They’re back,” Amy whispered when noise erupted downstairs.
For a moment, Fanny feared a break-in, but she heard Wil’s voice above the low rumble of other sounds. He didn’t seem alarmed.
“Why don’t you go down and see how the window project is progressing?” she asked.
Amy hopped off happily. Fanny sighed. She told the sneaky bookkeeper taking shape in her mind, the one she threatened to make the minion of the villain in her story, to be quiet and began her list.
