***
The library smelled of calfskin and cold ash. Edmund stayed in the green coat because taking it off would have looked like settling, and he did not yet know whether he was master here or only the scandal. He unpinned the star and set it on the blotter. Without the jewel he looked more like the captain.
Helena did not sit. She stood at the window that faced the avenue, where a carriage was not yet visible and would be, soon enough. Keene was by the desk with a leather case, loyal as a lock.
"Show him the debts," she said. "Show him the cousin's letter. Show him the draft of the settlement Sir Walter expects. Then leave us."
Keene had the virtue of not pretending to be surprised. He laid the papers out in a line. The entail. The mortgages. The note from a London cousin who wrote in a hand like a smile and mentioned, as if in passing, that irregular unions had undone better titles than theirs. The draft articles for a marriage to Beatrice Holme, handsome in their arithmetic, gentle in their language, absolute in their assumption that the duke was unencumbered.
"There is also this," Keene said, and placed a thinner sheet apart from the others. "A copy of the receipt. And the memorandum of the Heston bond, marked satisfied. I keep copies. Her grace dislikes relying on memory."
Edmund read until the numbers began to blur into a single accusation. He had known the estate was not a fairy tale. He had not sat with the sum of it under his brother's star. When he looked up, his face was quieter than it had been in the sewing room, which frightened his mother more than the noise had.
"You bought her father's life with my name," he said to Keene. "You may go."
Keene glanced at the duchess. She nodded. The secretary bowed to the precise degree owed a duke he had managed as a problem, and went out. The door closed.
"If you hate me," Helena said, "hate me for the bond and the false receipt and the months she spent under a name I chose. Do not hate me for seeing the mortgages. They do not care whether you are happy."
"I hate the use of her," Edmund said. "The mortgages I can learn. I am not a child who thinks love pays a banker. I am a man who was told his wife preferred fifty pounds to his letters. You made me a participant in her humiliation without even the decency of asking me to be cruel in my own voice."
"Would you have been cruel in your own voice?"