"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 9
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
The dowager's authority let Juliet into the storerooms to inventory the linen. One gray afternoon, it carried her further than she meant to go: the great press of household stores was kept at the end of the north passage; the storeroom and the estate office shared a wall there, and a door. The office was Grimshaw's kingdom. But Grimshaw was gone to Marrow that day for the quarter sessions; the door between stood unlocked.Juliet told herself she was only counting sheets. She stood in the doorway of the estate office and looked at the ledgers on the shelf: there were two of them for the current year. That was the first thing: two field books, two rent rolls, bound alike in the same brown calf, standing side by side. One was worn at the corners from handling; one was clean.She should not have touched them; she knew she should not.She opened the clean one first: it was the fair copy, the one that was shown when a thing was shown. Rents received, sums neat, the estate a little poor but honest, tenants all paid up, repairs accounted for. A roof over the east wing, she noticed, had been repaired last autumn for £40. She had stood under that roof three days ago and watched the rain come through it in four places.She opened the worn one: the worn one was the truth, and the truth was ugly. Here were the rents as they were truly gathered, higher in many cases than the fair copy owned. Old widows and small farmers had been squeezed for a shilling here, a shilling there, and the shillings did not appear in the fair book at all. Here were repairs charged for that had never been made. Here were tradesmen's bills marked paid at one figure in the fair book and settled at a lower figure in the true one.The difference ran off the page and out of the house, the whole quiet river of it, into no name at all.Juliet stood in the failing light and understood that she was looking at three years of theft. Not a servant pocketing spoons: this was a man robbing a house from the roots, patiently, in good ink, while its master grieved upstairs and could not bear to look. Grimshaw had waited for exactly the right house: a house with no mistress, no housekeeper, a master who would sign anything sooner than open his sister's ledgers. He had settled into it like rot into a beam.She heard the outer door. She had not time to think. She put the worn book back exactly as it had stood, corner to corner, and she was in the storeroom counting sheets aloud with a slate in her hand when Mr. Grimshaw came in from Marrow with the rain on his shoulders.He was a soft, pink, pleasant-faced man of 40. He smiled a great deal; he smiled now."Miss Eldstone. In my office?""In your storeroom, Mr. Grimshaw." She did not look up from the slate. "The Dowager Duchess has asked me to inventory the linen. Two dozen pair of Holland sheets, and 11 only whole. I make it a poor account."