The Duke Came Home Early and Found His Fiancée Forcing the Maid to Confess to a Theft She Never Committed — But When He Opened the Ledger, He Discovered His Future Wife Was the Real Thief

PART 3

The answer to that question began at a clockmaker’s workbench in Stroud.

Thaddius gave the household the appearance of an ordinary morning, breakfast in the small dining room, a word with the head groom about a lame mare, and rode out alone once the house had settled into its routines. The mist was still low over the fields when he came into the town and found Silas’s carriage tucked into the yard of the Black Bull, the horses blanketed, and Rosalind waiting in a private corner of the tap room with a small wooden chest on the table before her, its lock already undone. Her cousin Edmund had carried it from his workshop at first light, she said. He had wanted to come in and see the duke for himself, and she had asked him, gently, to go back to his clocks. The innkeeper’s wife paid them little mind beyond a curious glance at a gentleman of evident standing keeping company with a woman in a plain gray dress.

Inside the chest lay a modest clothbound book, its pages filled edge to edge with neat, careful figures in a hand without flourish.

“This is everything I entered these past six months,” she said. “I copied each one the same evening I made it in the estate book, so there could be no question of memory failing me later.”

He took the book and compared it page by page against the fixed costs he remembered approving before departing for London. The pattern emerged quickly and unmistakably. Where her record showed forty sovereigns to the coal merchant, the estate ledger showed sixty. Where her book recorded twelve sovereigns in stable wages, the ledger showed nineteen. Small differences, individually unremarkable, always in the same direction. Always more than had truly been spent.

“It is not simple theft,” Thaddius said slowly, half to himself. “Simple theft would take a sum outright and be done with it. This is something more patient. Someone has been drawing off small amounts month after month, disguising the excess as ordinary expense.”

“But to what end, your grace, if the sums are drawn so slowly?”

“Because a sudden loss draws notice, while a slow one can be explained away. Or blamed elsewhere, as very nearly happened to you.”

He turned back several pages, frowning at a set of entries near the middle: drafts made out to linen merchants and timber suppliers, carrying numbers he did not recognize from any supplier Highwood had used in his time. Rosalind leaned in, and something in her expression sharpened. The draft numbers should have corresponded to invoices from known Gloucestershire merchants. Instead they followed a sequence she had never seen in any local tradesman’s account.

“These are not local drafts at all,” she said slowly. “The numbering resembles the drafts issued by a private banking house, your grace. The kind used for larger transactions, that pass through a city institution rather than a country tradesman’s ledger.”

Thaddius sat back, the shape of it settling into something he could almost see whole.

“Holloway & Sons. In Bristol. They hold my funds for anything larger than a tradesman’s bill.”

“Then you believe these payments were never made to merchants at all?”

“I believe the merchants’ names were written in to disguise where the money truly went. If those drafts were drawn on Holloway’s, then somewhere in Holloway’s ledgers is a record of who was paid. And no draft leaves that house without my seal, or a convincing likeness of it.”

“Then that is where the truth of it will be found,” Rosalind said, “in whatever ledger records where those drafts were finally deposited.”

Bristol was a day’s hard drive. But Thaddius judged it wiser to return to Highwood first. A duke vanishing from his own estate for days together, so soon after a quarrel over missing sovereigns, would invite exactly the sort of talk he wished to avoid until he understood the matter fully. He left Rosalind at the inn under Silas’s watch and rode back alone, arriving to find the house in quiet upheaval: trunks standing open in the entrance hall, housemaids folding gowns with brisk efficiency, and at the center of it all, Clarissa directing the packing.

“Thaddius.” She arranged her expression into something wounded and dignified. “I had thought you occupied with your correspondence. I did not expect you back so soon.”

“Nor I to find you departing. Where is it you intend to go?”

“Home to my family. I think it best, given how plainly you doubted my word yesterday in front of the staff. I will not stay where my honesty is questioned so readily in favor of a servant’s.”

He studied her a moment, searching for a crack in the performance, and found none. Whatever Clarissa Vain was, she was not careless with her composure.

“You are of course free to go where you wish. Though I would have thought a woman confident in her own account of events would prefer to remain and see the matter settled properly, rather than depart before it is.”

Something flickered behind her eyes, quickly smoothed away. She turned back to the maids, and Thaddius excused himself to his study.

He wanted his seal, the small brass stamp with the ducal crest, kept wrapped in felt beside a stick of his usual dark blue wax. He drew it out and turned it toward the window light.

Along the fine grooves of the crest, pressed into the metal itself, sat the faintest traces of red.

He turned it over slowly, examining it from every angle. Someone had used the seal recently, and not with his blue wax. Red, a color he had never once used in all his years managing the estate’s correspondence. Red, the color of urgency, sent quickly without waiting for a household clerk to prepare the usual materials.

The seal had been taken from this very drawer, used without his knowledge, and returned so carefully that only a man who inspected it under good light, searching specifically for it, would ever have noticed.

A soft knock came at the door, and a young footman entered, bowing.

“Begging your pardon, your grace. Lady Clarissa asked that a rider be sent express to Bristol this morning, before you returned. I only mention it now because I was not certain whether you would wish the matter noted in the correspondence book.”

Thaddius straightened. “A rider, to whom?”

“I could not say for certain, your grace. Her ladyship sealed the letter herself before it left the house, and asked that it go with urgency. To a man of business, I believe.”

“When did the rider leave?”

“Not two hours past, your grace. Before you arrived.”

He dismissed the footman and sat alone a while longer, turning the brass stamp over once more in his hand. A letter sent urgently to Bristol, dispatched before he had even returned home, on the very morning he had meant to trace forged drafts through a Bristol banking house himself. It might have been coincidence.

He did not believe any longer that it was.

Before he slept he wrote to Mr. Witcom, his solicitor in Gloucester. He asked him to obtain from the county magistrate a letter of authority to inspect any draft drawn on the ducal account under suspicion of forgery, and to meet him at the doors of Holloway & Sons within two days. He sealed it with blue wax, and then, after a moment, held the brass stamp to the light again and looked at the faint red in its grooves.

Whatever Clarissa intended by her sudden departure and her hurried correspondence, she was no longer merely defending herself against suspicion. She was moving to protect something, or someone, before the truth could reach it first.

Bristol Could Not Wait Another Day.