“That would be our Felton’s father,” Gideon told her.
“Well, they didn’t get it. Look at this. A different hand on the bottom. A rather arrogant hand, if I do say so.” She gave it to him.
Writ large and dark across the bottom, it said,Returned message telling him never to contact again or show his face, the damned mushroom. Glenmoor.
Mia’s grin was wicked. “That puts our Felton’s branch of the family in its place.” She packed it back up and returned the box to its spot. “Do we want anything else?”
He searched the box for the current year and, finding it almost empty, put it back. “No bills of sale,” he said.
“What now?” she asked.
“I want you to go through the books for the past three years. See if you see what I do. Then we need to meet with Marshall about it. It’s time to confront him.”
“We never got Jem’s handwriting,” she reminded him.
“No need if we get Marshall to admit Jem is keeping the books.”
“What are you going to do this afternoon?” she asked.
“Ride over to visit this farmer, Grimes. I want his story about the land sale,” he said. “And then I want to come back for tea with my wife.” To emphasize his point, he took her into his arms and kissed her well and thoroughly, a kiss full of promise.
*
Mia reached thefamily wing and found maids going in and out of Lady Tavernash’s suite. An idea struck her. She unlocked the door to their suite and wrote a quick note to Jem asking him if he had seen Gideon’s gold cravat pin, one she knew to be on the counter in his dressing room. She cornered the maid named Agnes and asked her to kindly give it to Jem.
“Tell him he doesn’t need to come up. A written reply will do,” she told the maid. The maid frowned, knowing full well she would have to carry the return message.
Mia bit her lower lip, hoping it worked. If he replied, they could compare his handwriting to the ledgers.
Two hours later Mia came to the first discrepancy. She turned a daily entry page to a new date, and it struck her as odd. She went back to the previous day, and sure enough, it ended on a number different from the one the next day started with. The new day was short three shillings. It could have been a mistake, except Jem—or whoever had done this—had been meticulous up to then. Simple trick, odd number, not easily caught unless you were actively searching for trouble.
She stopped adding each column and began searching for other examples of daily end-of-day discrepancies, marking each one she found. They occurred at intermittent intervals throughout that year, always irregular amounts between a few shillings and a pound. Then she found one for seven pounds, a fortune to a footman making eight pounds a year!
Gideon returned midafternoon, and she rang for tea and eagerly shared her findings.
“It’s as obvious as I thought, then. It gets worse.” He opened the ledger for the current year. “We need to get this one back before Marshall creates a fuss. But look here.”
He opened the ledger to the previous February. “I checked with Fillmore. Tavernash came the end of January.”
She peered at the page he indicated. It followed the same pattern, only this time, the discrepancy was twenty pounds. “Mercy! Either whoever is doing this got bolder, or Tavernash has his hands in the till and thinks he’s untouchable. You said Marshall told you he kept funds away from him.”
“There are only a few possibilities. Marshall lied, and he’s giving Tavernash estate money. Or Tavernash is blackmailing him. Or Marshall has no idea what goes on with the bookkeeping, and whoever he has doing it has lost all fear of getting caught.”
“That’s insane. The larger amounts make it all too obvious. He must know we’ll catch it,” she said.
“Perhaps whoever it is doesn’t plan to stay around to get caught,” he said. “There’s more.”
The next example he showed her was from July, ninety-five pounds.
“That is enough to buy land—except I thought the problem was selling. Odd,” she said.
“Yes. Almost. Only, the transaction was never completed. Grimes told me Jem brought him a bill of sale for land Grimes had been coveting, that he had in fact offered one hundred and ten for. He gave over the money and kept the bill of sale. Then Marshall read him the riot act about farming on Woodglen land. They quarreled, Marshall demanded the bill of sale, and Grimes demanded his money back. Marshall refused. Grimes kept the bill of sale. He showed it to me but wouldn’t give it over.”
“You think someone else gave Grimes ninety-five pounds.”
“Yes. He still believes he’s getting the rest of the money or the land, ‘when the new duke succeeds.’ That’s all I got out of him.”
“Oh dear. Tavernash?”
