"Yes."
"I wrote on the fourteenth of March in every year." He closed his eyes. "Nineteen years. My birthday. Nineteen letters. Where are they, Miss Whitlow?"
And it was then that Clara understood, with the cold clean certainty of a thing that has been waiting to be understood, why the Dowager Lady Dunmere had given her only one instruction, in the room full of clocks.
You are not to leave any drawer unopened. Not any.
"I think," she said slowly, "that I know where to look."
The black desk had a hundred drawers, and she had opened ninety-six of them.
The four she had not touched were in the bottom row on the left, small and deep, and they had not been locked with the little brass keys on the ring. They had a different lock, an old one, with a keyhole shaped like an hourglass, and Mr. Pell, the steward, had told her on her first day that the late Viscount had kept his personal accounts there and that they would be dealt with separately. She had accepted it. It had seemed reasonable. It had seemed, in fact, perfectly in character.
She stood in front of them now in the grey afternoon light, with the Viscount at her shoulder, and for the first time looked at them as a postmaster's daughter, not as a secretary.
"He endorsed everything," she said. "Every letter that came into this house has the date of arrival in his hand, and the date of the answer. I have seen thousands. But there are no letters here from before the year 1797 that mention your mother. None. And none after. It is as if she had been cut out." She laid her fingers on the cold brass. "A man who docketed his own laundry bills would not have burned nineteen letters. He would have kept them. He would have wanted to know they were safe."
"Locked."
"Locked, my lord."
"Mr. Pell has the keys."
"Then I think, with respect, that we had better ask Mr. Pell."
The steward was found in the estate office, an old, round-shouldered man with a quill behind his ear and a face like a worried pudding. He rose when the Viscount came in, and went the colour of tallow.
"My lord. I was not expecting—"
"I want the keys to the four lower drawers in my father's desk."