The classrooms were orderly but cold.
Desks stood in neat rows. Slates were stacked beside the walls, and a map of England hung above the teacher's table.
A small library occupied the adjoining room.
Several shelves were empty.
Clara touched the bare wood.
“Where are the books?”
“Some were sent away for safekeeping. Others were sold.”
“Sold?”
Mrs. Calder looked miserable.
“The trustees said we must reduce expenses.”
Clara slowly lowered her hand.
“My mother's books?”
“Several volumes, yes.”
The room seemed suddenly smaller.
Clara remembered her mother seated beside the nursery fire, reading aloud from those very books while Clara leaned against her knee.
She remembered the lessons in arithmetic, the patient explanations, the insistence that knowledge was not an ornament but a means of standing upright in the world.
Her mother had died two years earlier after a long illness.
The school was one of the few parts of her life that remained untouched.
Or so Clara had believed.
Julian stepped toward the shelves.
“What is the annual cost of maintaining this establishment?”
Mrs. Calder hesitated.
“Approximately two hundred pounds, Your Grace, including the masters' wages, fuel, and repairs.”
“And the income of the endowment?”
Clara answered.
“More than eight hundred pounds annually, at present rates.”
Julian turned sharply.
“Eight hundred?”
“Yes.”
“And the school has been closed for lack of coal?”
Mrs. Calder lowered her head.
Julian said something under his breath that no gentleman ought to have said in the presence of ladies.
Clara looked at him.
“Your Grace.”
“My apologies.”
“Please reserve such language for those responsible.”
He turned toward her.
“Gladly.”
Mrs. Calder brought out the school accounts.
For an hour, the three of them examined receipts, memoranda, and correspondence.
Clara was accustomed to figures.
Her father had been a barrister who maintained his own property records with almost religious care. He had insisted that his daughter learn enough arithmetic to avoid dependence upon the assurances of men who might have their own interests to protect.
Julian, meanwhile, had spent the previous three years buried in estate accounts.
At first, they worked separately.
Then Clara pointed out an inconsistency in a payment recorded for roof repairs.
Julian leaned over her shoulder.
“That amount appears twice.”
“Three times,” she corrected.
He followed her finger.
She was right.
The entries had been made under different headings.
“Extraordinary.”
“Not particularly. It is a common method of concealing a withdrawal.”
“You speak as though you have encountered it before.”
“My father's former agent once attempted to charge us for the same stable roof four times.”
“What happened?”
“He was dismissed.”
“By your father?”
“By my mother.”
Julian looked at her.
“I begin to understand the family.”
Clara smiled faintly.
The moment lasted only until Mrs. Calder produced another document.
It was a request authorizing the transfer of nine hundred pounds from the school's reserve fund into an account described as the Alderwick Northern Improvements Fund.
At the bottom appeared the signature of Sir Edmund Cross.
Beside it, as an approving beneficiary, was Clara's name.
Her smile disappeared.
“I have never seen this.”
Julian examined the document.
“Are you certain?”
“Quite certain.”
“This is becoming a tiresome pattern.”
Clara looked down at the paper.
The signature was remarkably convincing.
Someone had studied her hand with considerable care.
Even the slight upward flourish at the end of her surname had been reproduced.
But there was a difference.