"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 18
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For one heartbeat, nobody moved.Then Grimshaw laughed: soft and pink and pleasant. It was the wrong thing; he knew it the instant it was out of his mouth. A man does not laugh at a true account.Lucretia's face had gone very still. And the Duke of Northwell was no longer looking at Juliet as at a bill he had not expected: he was looking at her as a drowning man looks at a rope."Show me," he said.They did it in the library. It took the rest of that day and half the night.Juliet fetched her fair copies—three months of them, the whole quiet, patient case built a shilling at a time from doors and tally sticks and old women's marks.Dorset was sent for the tradesmen. They came that evening in their Sunday coats, uneasy in the great house. One by one, they laid their own books beside Juliet's and swore to the figures: the butcher, the chandler, the corn factor, the man from Marrow who had never mended any roof over any east wing because no one had ever paid him to.Amos brought the tenants, Widow Sefton on his arm. They made their marks again in the candlelight before the Duke's own eyes.When the tenants and the tradesmen had gone, the Duke sent Dorset to the estate office for the two brown books.Grimshaw had spent the evening growing smaller and pinker in his chair. He made a last, soft attempt: "The fair book was the only book," he said. "The young lady was mistaken. A companion could not be expected to understand an estate's accounts."The Duke opened the worn book on the library table beside Juliet's fair copies. He turned the pages in silence. He understood the whole of it in about four minutes, being, as his grandmother had said, not a fool, but a grieving man, which is a different thing.He was very quiet when he had finished. He closed the worn book. He set his hand flat on the cover—on his sister's estate, on the three years he had refused to look at. And when he spoke, it was not to Grimshaw at all:"She kept these," he said—to no one, to Cecily, to the shut east wing. "She kept them fair. I never opened them after. I could not open them." He looked up, and his face was terrible and awake. "I let this happen. I signed what you put before me because signing was easier than reading her hand." His voice did not rise; it went the other way, down to the bone. "Get out of my house tonight, Grimshaw. You will be at the Marrow Magistrates by noon tomorrow, and every figure this lady has taken will go with you. If you have a shilling of my tenants' money left, you will restore it. If you have not, you will answer for it as the law answers such men. Dorset, see him off the place. Watch him pack."