She Fed the Workhouse Children in Secret for Three Winters, Then an Earl Chose Her Over Every Lad...
Chapter 4
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She worked in the library, where the estate records were kept in a condition that made her professionally melancholy. The Earl came and went, and occasionally sat across the table from her, asked questions, and listened to the answers with the full weight of his attention—which was the kind of listening that costs something and is worth more than any number of compliments.She found the first deliberate manipulation in the records on the fourth day. She found the second on the fifth. By the end of the first fortnight, she had mapped the shape of what his father's stewards had done, and she laid it out for the Earl on a Tuesday afternoon, with the figures arranged in a column on a clean sheet and her reasoning written in the margin in her small, precise hand.He read it in silence. He read it twice. He looked up."How long would it have taken anyone else to find this?""Someone with formal training in estate law would have found the broad strokes faster," she said honestly. "The details would have taken them longer. The second steward was clever about where he hid the amounts.""But you found it.""I find things," she said. "It is what I do.""What you do," he said quietly, "is a great deal more than keep accounts, Mrs. Trent."She did not answer. She had been on the receiving end of enough empty compliments to be wary of the form, even when the man delivering them did not seem to be using one. She looked back at her papers and turned the page.It was not until the third week that he caught her. She had been careless. She had stayed late, working through a particularly intricate tangle in the records from 1855, and when she finally came down from the library in the early dark, she realized she had missed the hour at which the hired gig was meant to collect her. She would have to walk, and she had her cloak and her basket, and she was already three-quarters of the way to thinking about the bread she needed to collect from the baker's boy before she went to Stonemill.The Earl was in the hall, still in his riding clothes, and he saw the basket. He had seen the basket before, of course—it was the same one from the lane—but this time, in the light of the entrance hall, he saw that the cloth tucked into it was the particular heavy cotton used for keeping things warm.She watched him see it. She watched him not say anything. She turned toward the door."Mrs. Trent."She stopped. "It is dark.""I am aware of that, my lord."