"'Where his enemies would never stoop to look,'" he murmured. "A proud man stooping to a cold grate."
He set the lantern on the floor and ran his fingers along the boards before the fireplace, pressing each in turn. Most held firm, but one close to the hearthstone gave the faintest shift beneath his hand.
"Genevieve," he said quietly.
She was beside him in an instant. Together they worked their fingers into the seam, and the short length of board lifted free with a dry crack, sending up a puff of ten years' dust.
Beneath it lay a hollow, and in the hollow, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff with age, a thick, leather-bound book.
Genevieve's hands shook so badly she could not unwrap it. Arthur took it from her, peeled back the cloth, and laid the ledger open in the lamplight.
It was her father's hand; she knew it at once: the firm, looping script she had watched fill so many pages at this very desk. Page after page of accounts, dates and sums, and the names of creditors, all set down in patient detail.
And there, in the latter pages, a record she did not at first understand until Arthur read it aloud in a low and careful voice.
"He kept records," Arthur said. "His own true accounts, and a second column: monies he believed were being drawn from the estate without his knowing. He suspected it for months; he was tracking it." Arthur's finger moved down the page and stopped. "And here he names the man he believed responsible."
Genevieve leaned close, the lantern trembling in her grip.
A single name was written there, scored twice, with a date and a note in her father's hand: Lord Sterling. Funds diverted through the Holloway account, falsified against my seal.