It has not come after. I feel it closing now as I write this—some illness the physicians cannot name, eating away at me faster than I care to admit, even to myself. And I find I cannot bear to leave you with nothing but debts, and a title too heavy for a young man's shoulders to carry alone.
There is money, Alexander. Not a great fortune, but enough, I believe, to see the estate through its worst years, and buy time to set things right properly. My own grandmother, the sixth duchess, was a Kestrel by marriage, but a Sinclair by birth. And the Sinclairs, whatever else may be said of them, were never fools with money. She left a private fund established quietly outside the entail, so that no future duke's foolishness or misfortune could touch it, held in trust these sixty years and more, drawing interest all the while, in the keeping of a bank in Edinburgh that has no reason to know or care what is happening in Northumberland.
The papers establishing the trust are held by a solicitor in that city, a Mr. Alistair Blythe of Blythe and Sons, whose direction you will find enclosed with this letter in a second, unciphered note, should you ever have need of it.
I have written this portion in cipher, Alexander, not to torment you—though I fear it will feel very much like torment before you have solved it—but because I did not trust that any solicitor, however honest, would not be tempted by the knowledge of a hidden fortune sitting quietly in an Edinburgh vault, waiting only for the right signature. I wanted this knowledge to come to you only if you, or someone you trusted absolutely, possessed both the patience and the education to earn it properly.
Your mother taught me this cipher in the first year of our marriage, in the same evenings she taught me to love her properly, and I have never used it for anything but writing to her until now, when I find I have one final thing I need to say to my son, and no ordinary language seems equal to saying it.
I am proud of you. I have not said it enough. Perhaps not ever. Because pride was not a thing my own father showed easily, and I never learned the trick of it from him. But you have been your whole life a better man than the ledgers of this estate ever gave you credit for being. And whatever ruin you inherit alongside this letter, I believe absolutely that you will find your way through it.
And I am sorry—more sorry than any cipher could properly express—that I did not trust you with the truth of our circumstances while I still had breath enough to say it to your face, rather than hide it in a code only your mother and I ever shared.
Find Mr. Blythe. Claim what is owed to you, and forgive your foolish, proud, frightened old father, who loved you a great deal more than he ever managed to show you.
Your father,
Edmund Kestrel, 8th Duke of Blackwood."
Eleanor lowered the paper.
Across the small desk, Alexander Kestrel stood absolutely still, his hands braced against the edge of the writing table, his head bowed. And for a long moment, neither of them spoke at all, the only sound in the room the soft, steady hiss of the candles.
"He never," Alexander said finally, his voice rough. "He never once told me any of it. Eighteen months, Miss Marsh. I have spent eighteen months watching the estate crumble around me, dismissing stewards, selling off what horses I could bear to part with, lying awake calculating exactly how many more quarters I could keep the tenants housed before the whole thing collapsed entirely. And he knew. He knew the whole time there was a way through it, and he wrote it down in a code he was fairly certain no one alive could break."
"I think," Eleanor said carefully, "he did not intend it as cruelty, Your Grace. I think a man facing his own death, frightened for a son he did not know how to speak to plainly, reached for the one language he trusted absolutely—the one that had never failed him with the person he loved most. It does not excuse the silence, but I do not think it was meant unkindly."
Alexander looked up at her then, and something in his face had changed entirely from the brittle, brandy-flushed mockery of the card table an hour before.
"You solved in fifty minutes what three educated men could not manage in a year."
"My father taught me," Eleanor said simply. "He was a scholar of dead languages and lost ciphers at a small college that never paid him properly for either. He had nothing else to leave me, Your Grace. No dowry, no connections, nothing the world considers valuable in a woman. So he gave me this instead, evening after evening, for as long as I can remember. And I never once thought it would be worth anything beyond the pleasure of the puzzle itself."
She folded the translation with careful hands.
"I did not do this for the thousand pounds, Your Grace, though I will not pretend the sum is not a great deal of money to a woman in my position. I did it because you asked, and because I recognized the moment I saw that letter exactly what it was, and I could not in good conscience let a room full of strangers laugh at a dying man's last words to his son."