Her Stepmother Planned to Make All of London Laugh Her Into Ruin — But the Cruel Scheme Backfired When the Reclusive, Scarred Duke Fell Hopelessly in Love With Her
PART 4
The room they gave her sat in the east wing, overlooking the unkempt maze of the kitchen gardens — a long-abandoned housekeeper’s suite, smelling faintly of dried lavender and old dust. When Norah woke the next morning, wool blankets pulled to her chin, she felt a sensation so foreign it took her several minutes to name it.
Safety.
She found her way down the labyrinthine corridors to the study. Alistair was already there, in a clean shirt of unbleached linen, a massive brindle-coated Irish wolfhound sprawled across his boots. The beast lifted its head as she entered, letting out a low, grinding rumble.
“Quiet, Hector,” Alistair murmured without looking up. “She is the new ledger keeper. Eat her and I will make you do the math.”
Hector sighed and rested his ugly head back down.
Norah’s small desk had been set up in the corner — bare save for three towering stacks of account books, a fresh block of ink, and a dozen sharpened quills.
“Where would you like me to begin, your grace?”
“The 1812 tenant records. I suspect the late Mr. Higgins was pocketing the grain surplus and marking it as rot. Prove it or do not. Just make the numbers match reality, Miss Hawthorne. I despise fiction in my accounts.”
The handwriting inside was atrocious — a frantic, spidery scrawl that practically radiated guilt. Norah picked up a quill and set to work. The silence of the room was entirely different from the oppressive quiet of Agatha’s house, where silence meant someone was listening at a door. Here it was simply the byproduct of two people absorbed in their own tasks.
By one o’clock, she had found the first discrepancy.
“Thirty bushels of wheat,” she said aloud, her voice rasping through the long quiet.
Alistair glanced up. “Pardon?”
“Harvest of 1812. He logged three hundred bushels lost to blight in the lower valley.” She tapped the page. “But the kennel supply manifest shows an extra eighty bushels bought from the neighboring county for poor local yield. The lower valley grows oats, not wheat — the wheat fields are on the eastern ridge, and there was no blight there that year. It was a drought. You do not lose wheat to rot in a drought.”
Alistair set his newspaper down slowly. “He sold the three hundred bushels.”
“Then used estate funds to buy back grain for the kennels at a premium, from a supplier I would guess is a relative of his.”
“His brother-in-law owns the mill in the next county.”
“There you have it.” Norah turned the page. “You are owed roughly four hundred pounds for that year alone. Shall I draft a letter to your solicitor, or do you prefer to break his nose a second time?”
Alistair let out a sharp, genuine bark of laughter. Hector flinched, looking up at his master in betrayal.
“Draft the letter, Miss Hawthorne. The nose-breaking was deeply satisfying, but unfortunately it does not replenish the coffers.”
They worked through the afternoon. Bates brought tea and cold meats at three, placing them silently between the desks. They ate without speaking. Norah realized, with a sudden pang of clarity, that she was neither a lady of the house nor a servant. She was treated as an equal. A colleague. It was the most intoxicating respect she had ever been given.
At dusk, Alistair rose, leg stiff from sitting, leaning on the desk a moment before forcing himself upright.
“Enough for today. The numbers will still be corrupt tomorrow. Leave them.”
“I have found another two hundred pounds missing from the forestry yields.”
“Miss Hawthorne.” He limped toward the door, then looked back over his shoulder, dim light throwing the scar on his face into sharp relief. “If you do not stop working, I will assume you enjoy the company of my ledgers more than is strictly healthy. Go to your room. Dinner is at seven. You will eat in the dining room.”
She paused. “With you?”
“I employ an estate manager. I do not ask my estate manager to eat in the kitchens. Seven o’clock. Do not be late.”
Three weeks passed. The letter to Agatha had been dispatched on Norah’s second day — a masterpiece of aristocratic brevity in Alistair’s aggressive hand: Lady Agatha, I accept your offering. Miss Hawthorne is quite suitable for my needs and will remain at Rookwood. Your concern for her future is no longer required. Westland. It was ambiguous. It was scandalous. Exactly the sort of match to toss onto the dry kindling of the London season.
The post arrived every Wednesday. Alistair usually used it to line the welping boxes in the kennels. That Wednesday, he carried it into the dining room and tossed it beside Norah’s plate of eggs.
“Page four.”
She turned to the society column, tucked between a review of a dreadful opera and an advertisement for macassar oil. Rumors swirl fiercely around a certain northern duke, long absent from town, who has reportedly taken in a stray. The spinster stepdaughter of a desperate local widow was sent to his estate on an errand and mysteriously failed to return. She read it twice, folded the paper, and set it beside her teacup.
“Well,” she said neutrally. “I am ruined.”
“Utterly,” Alistair agreed, tearing a piece of toast in half. “Does it bother you?”
She looked out at the sky, the color of bruised iron. “A reputation is a currency. It only matters if you intend to buy something with it. I am not shopping for a husband in London. I am auditing your timber accounts. The trees do not seem to care that I am a fallen woman.”
His eyes gleamed with dark amusement, pragmatic to the bone. “It is how I survived.”
She was still turning that over when, days later, a sudden sharp knock at the main entrance shattered the morning quiet — frantic, entitled, loud, nothing like the knock of a tenant.