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 5

They rode through the night, changing horses twice at coaching inns along the way. Rosalind dozed fitfully against the carriage window. Witcom slept upright with his leather case in his lap, like a man who had trained himself to sleep anywhere his duty required. Thaddius remained awake, turning over the shape of what awaited them. The note Witcom had sent ahead asked for a constable at the Bath branch of Holloway & Sons by midday. Whether the magistrate would act on the word of a letter alone, however impressive the seals attached to it, was another matter.

They arrived as the mist was clearing from the honey-colored stone of the city’s crescents, and made their way directly to the branch office near the pump room, where Thaddius was relieved to find a constable already waiting: a solid, unhurried man named Reev, entirely unmoved by the presence of a duke, who asked precise, careful questions before agreeing to remain nearby.

They had not long to wait. Shortly before midday, a man in a dark traveling coat entered the office and presented a letter to the clerk with the brisk confidence of someone expecting no difficulty. Thaddius recognized him at once.

Fenwick. The Vain family’s manservant, who had run Clarissa’s errands for several years, and whom Thaddius had spoken with perhaps a dozen times in passing, never with any particular suspicion.

“That is her family’s man,” he murmured to Rosalind, who had gone very still beside him.

He stepped forward before the transaction could proceed, Constable Reev moving with him.

“Mr. Fenwick.”

Whatever composure the man had carried into the office dropped away at once, replaced by a flicker of alarm quickly suppressed.

“Your grace. I did not expect to find you here.”

“Clearly not.” Thaddius glanced at the letter still in the clerk’s hand. “You are here, I take it, on the instruction of the Vain family, to collect funds from an account held in Mr. Leland Vain’s name.”

Fenwick’s eyes moved toward the letter, as though calculating whether denial remained possible. “I am merely a messenger, your grace. I know nothing of the account’s history. Only that I was asked to collect the transfer notes and return them to Vain Hall directly.”

“Then you will not object,” Thaddius said evenly, “to Constable Reev examining what you carry, and to the notes remaining here until the origin of that account is properly settled.”

Fenwick glanced toward the door, a brief, involuntary motion that told Thaddius everything about the man’s inclination. But Reev had already moved into the doorway.

“On the strength of the magistrate’s letter, Mr. Fenwick,” the constable said mildly, “you will oblige me by emptying your pockets. Or you may oblige me at the lockup, and we shall do it there.”

The first thing to come out was a folded note in a woman’s hand, sloping and unmistakable, sealed once with a wafer of brick-red wax. Clarissa’s own writing. Its ink held a faint blue tint. It instructed Fenwick to collect the notes with all discretion and return them to Vain Hall without delay, and it was signed with a single letter: C.

The second thing came out of the lining of his coat. Reev felt for it with two fingers and drew out a flat packet of folded leaves, their edges cut clean and straight. Thaddius unfolded one. It was a page of household accounts, in a hand that was and was not Rosalind’s, the ink faintly blue.

“Her ladyship told me to burn them at the first fire I came to,” Fenwick said. His voice had thinned. “I kept them.”

“Why?” Thaddius asked.

“Because when a lady tells a man to burn something, your grace, it is generally the man who hangs for what it says.”

Reev looked between them and gave a short, dry breath. “Well. That is rather more than a lady instructing her man to collect a sum from her brother’s account.”

Rosalind said nothing. But Thaddius saw her look at Fenwick, at the small, stubborn packet of paper he had refused to burn, and saw something cross her face that was not quite pity and not quite recognition. Even the man who had carried Clarissa’s errands had kept his own account.

“You will remain here until this matter is resolved to the magistrate’s satisfaction,” Reev told Fenwick. “The notes will stay in the bank’s keeping.”

Fenwick offered no further resistance. Thaddius folded the note and the recovered pages carefully alongside the drafts from Bristol, the weight of evidence in his coat growing heavier with each city they passed through.

“One step remains,” he said. “We must see this laid before a magistrate, on oath, before we carry it to Clarissa herself.”

The guild hall stood a short distance from the bank, its gray stone front rising above the bustle of Bath’s market square. By early afternoon they sat in a wood-paneled chamber within its archive wing, Thaddius, Rosalind, Witcom and Constable Reev, the assembled evidence spread across a long table before Magistrate Gray, an older man, spectacled and deliberate, who examined each document with the patience of someone who had long ago learned that haste served justice poorly.

He began with the estate ledger itself, running a finger along the damaged spine, then laid the recovered leaves against the gap. They fit as a key fits a lock.

“Cut clean, and with deliberation,” he said. “Not torn in a panic. The remaining leaves shifted to disguise the gap. This suggests premeditation rather than a moment’s fear.”

He moved to Rosalind’s private record, comparing it entry by entry against the altered figures, occasionally asking her to explain a notation. She answered each question steadily, walking the magistrate through her father’s method of balancing, showing him precisely how the difference between what she had recorded and what the ledger claimed revealed itself, transaction by transaction, once set side by side.

“You kept this record before any accusation was made against you,” Gray said. It was not quite a question.

“Yes, sir. I began it some months ago, after certain figures did not sit easily in my memory against what I had entered myself. I did not know then what it would prove. Only that I wished to have my own account of my work, should it ever be doubted.”

Gray examined the forged signature against a sample of Thaddius’s genuine hand, holding the two side by side in the window light for some time. “The forgery is competent. Skilled enough to satisfy a busy clerk’s glance. But it will not withstand close comparison. The slant here and here does not match his grace’s natural hand.”

He turned to the smaller things. He set the unsigned confession, which Thaddius had kept, beside the note taken from Fenwick’s pocket and the altered ledger entries, and studied all three under a glass. “The same ink, or its brother. A faint blue, quite unlike his grace’s. And this” — he touched the broken red wafer on the note, then the brass seal Thaddius had not let out of his coat since Highwood — “is the same wax that has left its traces in the grooves of the ducal seal, unless I am very much mistaken. It is an unusual color for a household to use.”

“It is a color for urgent letters,” Thaddius said. “Which is exactly how it was used.”

Fenwick was brought in and sworn. He gave his deposition in a low, flat voice, without once looking at the door: three journeys to Bristol to open an account in the name of his mistress’s brother, a hand he had watched her practice on a hundred sheets of paper, the ledger pages he had been told to burn, the letter he had been sent to collect on. When it was done Gray sat back and took off his spectacles.

“I do not sit in judgment on Lady Clarissa Vain today, your grace. She is not before me, and she is entitled to answer what is said here. But I will tell you what I find. Taken separately, any one of these documents might admit an innocent explanation. A damaged ledger might be simple wear. A private record might be mistaken. A forged signature might be the work of some outside party. Taken together, the altered figures match exactly the sums drawn by forged drafts, the drafts were paid into an account in her brother’s name, and a note in her own hand and ink instructs its urgent, discreet collection the very day after suspicion fell on another. I find a case here that is more than sufficient to be laid before the Assizes, and I should not care to be the one who had to answer it.”

“And Miss Mallow’s record?”

“I will have it entered as an exhibit, stamped with this court’s mark, so that its standing cannot later be questioned by any party wishing to dispute it.”

The remainder of the afternoon passed in the methodical business of recording: statements taken, documents copied and sealed, Rosalind’s private book stamped on its final page with the guild hall’s official mark, transforming what had begun as a housemaid’s quiet precaution into a piece of validated legal proof. When it was finished, Gray rose and extended his hand first to Thaddius, then, somewhat to Rosalind’s evident surprise, to her as well.

“You have done careful, honest work here, Miss Mallow. It is not every clerk, trained or otherwise, who thinks to protect their own honesty so thoroughly before it is ever questioned. I dare say the house you serve owes you rather more than an apology.”

“Thank you, sir,” Rosalind said quietly, though Thaddius noticed the faint color that rose in her cheeks, a flicker of something she seemed unused to. Plain, unqualified respect, for work most in her position would never have been asked to explain, let alone praised for.

Outside, the afternoon light had turned soft and golden over Bath’s honeyed stone, and Thaddius stood with the sealed copies secured within his coat, the last piece of proof now beyond any argument Clarissa might attempt.

“It is done,” he said. “Whatever she intends to say when we reach her, there is no version of events left for her to tell that this evidence does not answer.”

“Then it is time, your grace,” Rosalind said, “to see it through to its end.”