Arthur arrived early, before the clerks had finished unlocking the great doors, and gave the old archivist a coin and two quiet words: he wished to see the legal papers concerning the House of Crestwood—the trial, the seizure of property, the judgment that had ended them ten years past.
The archivist's brows rose, for no one had asked after that name in a very long while. But a Duke's coin asks no questions, and soon Arthur was led down a narrow aisle between towering shelves to a long reading table lit by a single tall window.
Someone was already sitting there.
A young woman bent low over a great leather volume, a stub of pencil in her hand, copying figures onto a scrap of paper with quick, careful strokes. Her bonnet was plain, her cloak gray and travel-worn. She had not heard him approach over the scratch of her own pencil.
It was Clara.
For a moment, Arthur stood quite still. He had granted her an afternoon's leave to attend to a personal matter in the city, and here was the matter spread across the table in dusty ledgers stamped with the very name he had come to find.
"Good afternoon," he said.
Clara's head snapped up. The pencil dropped from her fingers and rolled across the wood. The color drained from her face so completely that he feared she might faint, and she rose so quickly her chair scraped back with a screech that echoed down the silent hall.
"Your Grace," she began.
"Sit," he said quietly, "before you fall."
She did not sit. She stood gripping the back of the chair, her knuckles white, her eyes darting to the doors as though she might yet bolt. He saw the papers before her: copied dates, columns of sums, the seal of the Crestwood case pressed into faded wax. There was no hiding it now, and they both knew it.