Lady Featherstone, sensing a shift in the room's currents that might yet be turned to her own advantage, hastily produced paper and ink from the writing desk in the corner, and Eleanor settled herself at a small table near the fire, the Duke's letter before her. An expectant silence settled over the room that had ten minutes earlier been howling with laughter at her expense.
She began the way her father had taught her: counting letters, marking frequencies, testing short trial keywords against the opening lines. The room watched her work in a silence that grew steadily less mocking and steadily more uncertain—the particular discomfort of people who have laughed too soon and are beginning to suspect it.
It took her fifty minutes.
When the last line finally resolved itself beneath her pen, translating from the tangled cipher into plain, legible English, Eleanor sat very still for a long moment, staring down at what she had uncovered before she raised her head and looked at the Duke of Blackwood with an expression that had gone quite suddenly gentle.
"Your Grace," she said, "I think you had better sit down."
The room, which had gathered in a loose, curious ring around the small table by the fire, drew in a collective breath.
Alexander did not sit. He stood rigid, his jaw set, bracing himself, Eleanor understood, for whatever blow the letter was about to deliver—the way a man braces for a blow he has been expecting for eighteen months and has simply run out of ways to avoid.
"Read it," he said. "Whatever it says, read it aloud."
Eleanor glanced once around the room at the dozen curious, avid faces waiting to hear whatever private grief the letter contained laid bare for their entertainment, and made a decision that surprised even herself.
"I will read you the whole of it, Your Grace, but not, I think, before this room. Some of it concerns the estate, and some of it, I believe, was meant for your eyes alone."
A ripple of disappointed murmuring passed through the assembled guests. Lady Featherstone opened her mouth to object, no doubt calculating exactly how much social currency she was about to lose by being denied the scene she had been promised, but Alexander cut her off with a single sharp look that silenced the room more effectively than any words could have managed.
"My study," he said. "Now, if you please, Miss Marsh."
They left the drawing room together, watched by two dozen pairs of eyes that would, Eleanor knew perfectly well, spend the rest of the night speculating about exactly what a duke could possibly want alone with his hostess's plain, penniless niece. And she found, to her own considerable surprise, that she did not particularly care.
Lady Featherstone's private study—borrowed for the occasion, since Blackwood House itself was in London and Alexander had no rooms of his own at Featherstone House to retreat to—was small and cluttered with account books and correspondence, lit by a single branch of candles. Alexander closed the door behind them and turned to face her. And for the first time since Eleanor had entered the drawing room that evening, the mocking, brittle mask he wore in company had fallen away entirely, leaving behind a man who looked, quite simply, exhausted and afraid.
"Tell me," he said.
Eleanor unfolded her translation, smoothed it on the small writing desk between them, and began in the same clear, unhurried voice she used for everything to read:
"My dear Alexander,
If you are reading these words, then the solicitors have opened this letter as I instructed, which means the estate has come to the ruin I always feared it might, and I am not there to help you through it because I am dead and you are alone with a title I never properly prepared you to inherit.
I have been a poor father to you in every way that matters, and I know it. I gave you tutors, and horses, and a fine education, and I never once sat you down and told you that Blackwood Court has been sliding toward ruin since before your grandfather's time. That the mines on the northern boundary were sold off decades ago for a fraction of their worth. That the London townhouse has been mortgaged twice over. That I spent the better part of your childhood shuffling debts from one account to another, and praying the day of reckoning would come after I was safely in the ground, rather than while you still had to look me in the eye.