The soup spoon stopped halfway to my mouth. Twenty-three people sat in dead silence, and every single one of them was staring at me.
Part 2
I looked down at the massive, leather-bound ledger resting on the small mahogany table.
My eyes went to it the way a thirsty creature’s goes to water.
I understood in that cold, clear instant that the laugh at dinner had merely been the door.
This ledger, sitting in the firelight of the duke’s library, was the room behind the door.
“You did not look sorry,” Arthur said, his voice entirely without heat.
It was a low, steady voice that stated facts rather than performed them.
“I have watched a great many people be sorry at that table, and you were the first in years who was not.”
“There was absolutely nothing to be sorry for,” I answered, keeping my hands folded calmly before me.
“A man caught his coat on a chair, and it was funny.”
“I would think far less of myself if I pretended I did not see exactly what I saw.”
“And what did you see,” he asked quietly, “that no one else at that table appeared to see?”
I understood the question was not truly about the unfortunate footman.
It was a test of some kind, and I had taken many tests alone by candlelight with my livelihood hanging on the final answer.
I had long ago learned not to flinch at the terrifying moment of being weighed.
“The truth,” I said, meeting his dark eyes without blinking.
“People are very busy not seeing it.”
“It makes them poor company and terrible witnesses.”
He did not reply for a long moment, letting the heavy silence stretch between us.
The fire popped and settled in the iron grate.
He turned the open ledger a half turn on the table so the lamplight fell perfectly across the columns.
“Then perhaps you will tell me what you see here,” he said softly.
“I have had four very clever men look at these pages and swear to me they are honest.”
“I do not believe them, and I cannot prove why.”
I crossed the room, knowing full well I should not.
I knew a proper lady did not bend over a strange man’s financial accounts in a firelit room at night.
My aunt’s entire social campaign, our damp rented rooms, and the bread of next winter all stood between me and that book.
I crossed the quiet room anyway.
The pull of an honest column toward an honest reading was far older in me than my fear of poverty.
I bent over the yellowed page, carefully keeping my hands from touching the paper.
I read the figures the way I had taught myself to read them in the dark.
I did not look at the numbers first, but rather the shape and rhythm of them.
I looked for the places where an honest hand grows tired and an honest sum grows slightly ragged.
I found the glaring issue almost at once.
“This entry,” I said, tracing the air above the page.
“And here, and here.”
“They are far too round, Your Grace.”
“A working account is full of awkward sums, the pennies and halfpennies of real things bought from real men on real days.”
“Someone has built you a house with absolutely no dust in it.”
“And a house with no dust is a house no one has ever truly lived in.”
I straightened my posture, realizing I had said entirely too much.
I watched his still, unreadable face for the final verdict.
He did not look at me with the anger I had expected.
He looked at me with a profound recognition that shifted the very ground beneath my feet.
“Sit down,” he ordered softly.
I took the seat across from him, the warmth of the fire pressing against my cheek.
He told me his steward had served the estate for thirty years.
He confessed he had felt the certainty of being robbed for two years without finding the gap.
He told me he had summoned me because a person who laughed at the truth was the rarest creature alive.
He offered me the position of keeping his books, changing the trajectory of my life with a single sentence.
But taking the job meant living in his massive house as something between a servant and a guest, and I had no idea the danger that awaited me in those quiet halls—would you have accepted the offer of a feared man if it meant finally being seen?
