"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 11
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"Mr. Grimshaw says the master needs it," the old woman said without complaint, folding her swollen hands. "And the master's a good man that lost his sister, poor soul. So I don't grudge it. I only wonder the roof's not mended that he charged us the mending of two year back. But I don't like to trouble His Grace with it—not with his grief."Juliet stood in the doorway of the leaking cottage with the jelly in her hand and looked at the old woman not troubling anyone. And she was ashamed.Because that was it, exactly. That was the whole machine: Grimshaw had not needed to be clever, only patient. He had built his theft on other people's decency—on a grieving man who would not look, on old women too loyal to complain, on a companion too frightened for her own skin to speak. Everyone in it was being good. And a house full of good, frightened, grieving people was being quietly gutted, and would go on being gutted until someone was willing to be seen.Juliet went home, and washed the jelly basket, and made up her mind.She could not go to the Duke as a companion carrying a rumor: he would not believe her, or Grimshaw would call her a hysteric and have her turned off before the week was out. She needed the thing itself: she needed the true book and the fair book beside it, and a witness who could not be waved away. She needed to be, for once in her careful, invisible life, entirely and dangerously visible.She began to build her case the way she kept her accounts: quietly, in her own hand, a shilling of proof at a time.Spring turned toward summer while she built it. She got the tradesmen's own tallies—the butcher's stick, the chandler's book, the corn factor's receipts—under the honest pretext of settling the kitchen accounts herself, and she copied every figure fair. She had Widow Sefton and two other tenants make their marks to a plain statement of what rent they truly paid.She could not get into the office again; Grimshaw kept it locked now and watched her. But she did not need the office: she had built the true accounts from the outside in—from the doors and the tally sticks and the marks of honest people. And where her figures met the posted figures, they told the whole story in daylight.She built it at night mostly, when the house was asleep and the passages were dark. She kept the fair copies in a false bottom she had made in her own small workbox under the thimbles and the darning wool, where no maid would think to look and no steward would dare. Each night she added what the day had brought her: a figure from the corn factor, a mark from a tenant, a receipt begged from a Marrow tradesman on the honest pretext of the kitchen accounts.It was slow work, and it was frightening work, and she did it by a single candle with her door bolted, because she had understood from the first that a half-built case was worse than no case at all. A rumor Grimshaw could laugh away; a ledger he could not.