Her Stepmother Married Her Off as Punishment to a Ruined Man — But His Ruin Was a Disguise, and Her Dying Father’s Secret Deed Made Him the Only Husband Who Could Restore Her Inheritance and Avenge Them Both

PART 4

Her first obstacle came on the third day. She wrote to Mr. Havverstock as her father’s letter instructed — a careful letter, asking him to call at Blackwood Hall at his earliest convenience. The reply came not from Mr. Havverstock, but from a clerk at a firm she did not recognize — a thin, precise hand, informing her that Mr. Havverstock was unwell, and that all inquiries regarding the Fairfax estate should be directed to a Mr. Silas Peetton of Peetton and Sons.

Rosamund read the letter twice, and a cold certainty settled in her chest. Mr. Havverstock had handled her father’s affairs for thirty years. He had been a friend to Edmund before he had been a solicitor. It was inconceivable that he would suddenly be unavailable, his practice handed off to a firm she had never heard of.

She took the letter to Sir Aldis.

“This is wrong,” she said. “My father told me to trust Mr. Havverstock in all things. This reply says he is unwell and I should deal with a stranger. The trust deed that stands between me and Cecilia’s theft is held by the one man they have conveniently made vanish.”

Sir Aldis read the letter. His face did not change, but something in his eyes sharpened. “Mr. Peetton. I know that name. He is a creature of the syndicate.”

“What syndicate?”

Sir Aldis looked at her for a long moment, weighing something. Then he set the letter down. “I have been investigating a network of men who prey on families in distress. They buy up debts. They forge documents. They acquire control of estates through legal contrivances that are just barely within the law. They are led by a man I have been hunting for five years — the man who ruined my family, and the man who has been ruining half the great houses of England.”

He looked at her. “Your stepmother is not acting alone, Rosamund. She is in the grip of these men. And the disappearance of your father’s solicitor is not an accident. It is the syndicate closing ranks — because a trust deed, unlike a will, cannot be quietly rewritten. It can only be broken by breaking the man who holds it, or the marriage that unlocks it.”

Rosamund’s heart was pounding. “Then Mr. Havverstock may be genuinely unwell — or may have been removed.”

“Either way,” Sir Aldis said, his voice flat, “you cannot reach him through the usual channels. They will intercept any letter you write. They will send you to Peetton, who has no authority over the trust at all, but will happily let you waste months believing he does.”

He paused. “Unless we reach Mr. Havverstock ourselves.”

“How?”

Sir Aldis smiled — the first real smile Rosamund had seen on his face, and it was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting a long time to act. “I have been ruined for five years. Ruined men are invisible. No one watches them. No one believes them capable of anything but failure. And that, my dear wife, makes me the one man in England who can move against these people without being seen.”

He rose and crossed to a cabinet, and from a locked drawer he drew out a heavy leather case. He opened it, and Rosamund saw, to her astonishment, that it was not empty. It held money — a great deal of money, in notes and gold — and a sheaf of documents tied with ribbon.

“I have kept a portion of my fortune hidden,” he said, seeing her face. “The world believes I am penniless. It is the most valuable thing I own. It has funded five years of watching and waiting and learning the names of my enemies.” He hesitated, and for once the flatness left his voice. “It also funded a quiet word or two, put in the right ear this autumn, that a certain ruined baronet in this county was desperate enough for money to marry anyone at all. I did not know it would be your stepmother who took the bait. I am sorry it was.”

Rosamund stared at him. “You let it be known you were desperate. That is how Cecilia found you.”

“Havverstock’s doing, in truth, more than mine — though I agreed to it readily enough once your father asked it of me. He needed a peer no one would suspect of being a peer, in a county where your stepmother was already hunting for the most wretched groom she could find. I fit the description he required a little too well.” His mouth twisted, not quite rueful, not quite amused. “I did not know, when I agreed, that the bride would be worth the ruin.”

Rosamund looked at the hidden fortune, and the documents, and the man who was not what he seemed, and she understood that she had not married a ruin at all, nor even entirely a stranger’s scheme. She had married a weapon her own father had helped to aim.