It took four days.
The Duke sat in the estate office with the account books open on the long table and Mrs. Oddie's ledgers beside them and Enoch Pridmore's stable book beside those, and a clerk from the bank at Huntingdon whom he had sent for on Tuesday morning.
What he found was not, in the end, a great villainy. It was a careful one. The July money had not been stolen. It had been placed, very properly, in the Consolidated Funds, in an account in Mr. Quarrendon's name "pending distribution," where it had earned a quarter's interest that had not found its way into any ledger. The seed corn had been bought and stored. The wages had been held "until the accounts were settled," which they never quite were. And in a separate book in Mr. Quarrendon's beautiful hand there was a list of every tenant on the estate, with a neat mark beside the names of those who had signed their assent to the enclosure and a sum against each, and it was the sum of the abatement, and it was to be paid at Michaelmas, as His Grace's particular kindness.
"I could take you before the magistrates," the Duke said to him on Friday evening, when the bank clerk had gone back to Huntingdon. "I'm told I'd likely lose. It's all very proper. Every penny's here."
"Every penny is there, Your Grace," said Mr. Quarrendon quietly. "I have served this estate for twenty-two years. The old Duke drained the fen on borrowed money and built a wing that nobody lives in, and I have kept the interest paid every quarter since, in good years and bad, and no one has ever thanked me for it. The common is the only part of this property that does not pay. I did what any competent agent in England would have done. I did it carefully. I am only sorry I was not careful enough to account for you."
The Duke looked at him for a long time.
"You'll leave at Lady Day," he said. "With a quarter's salary and a character that says you kept the books honest. You did. It's the rest I can't have." He closed the ledger. "And you'll pay the interest back to the servants. Mrs. Oddie will tell you the sum. She's worked it out to the farthing."
* * *
The rectory heard all of it, as the rectory heard everything, by way of Dinah, who heard it from the Abbey kitchen, which heard it from Matthew Sowerby, whose face, as Kezia had predicted, was a public notice.
On the Saturday, a week after the stable yard, Dr. Barnabas Thorley went to his study after breakfast and came out again an hour later with a letter sealed and directed to the parliamentary agents in Great George Street, and gave it to Dinah to take to the post, and went back into his study and shut the door.
Kezia found her aunt in the drawing room, sitting very upright by the window with her workbasket in her lap and nothing in her hands.
"He has written to say he will not accept the allotment," said Aunt Letitia, without turning round. "Even if the bill comes again. He says a parson who takes ninety-two acres off the poor of his own parish in a famine year had better take his sermons with them, for he will not be able to preach them." She gave a little laugh that did not succeed. "It is very fine. It is exactly like him. I married him for it, I suppose."