Eleanor stepped back. “You should read that alone.”
“No,” Adrian said, surprising her. “My family has kept too much of this alone already.”
He unfolded the letter. Margaret described discovering that the income from the eastern meadow had been pledged years earlier to the Winter Relief Fund, ensuring that widows and unemployed mill workers could remain in their cottages without depending upon the generosity of whichever Earl happened to be living at Greymere. She had noticed that recent accounts showed enormous expenses for coal and grain, though the tenants said they had received only a fraction of the recorded supplies. When she questioned Fenwick, he insisted the missing funds had been taken by William Finch and claimed that William's own signatures proved it.
Margaret had not accepted his answer. She had obtained a second copy of the relief ledger, one with payment entries different from those Fenwick presented to the family, and discovered orders to sell land the trust did not permit to be sold. The packet contained that ledger, several letters, and a signed copy of the original trust agreement. On the last page Margaret wrote that she intended to confront the bank and the county solicitor, but illness had interrupted her investigation. She asked Adrian to find the truth before he punished an innocent family or displaced the families depending on the bridge cottages.
Adrian sat down as though someone had taken the strength from his legs. His sister had died while he was in London, and he had spent the months since her funeral telling himself that grief explained her increasingly urgent letters. Now the pages showed that she had been begging him to investigate an injustice he had continued to enforce. He turned slowly to Eleanor, whose father had been publicly disgraced under his family's seal.
“I signed the eviction notices,” he said.
“I know.”
“I believed Fenwick when he said the relief money was gone.”
“I know that too.”
Thomas placed his wooden horse in Adrian's lap, an act so unexpected that Adrian covered it with both hands. The boy's eyes were bright with tears, but he did not cry. Eleanor understood that the child had not been guarding a clever secret for the pleasure of surprising anyone. He had been terrified that if he showed what his mother had hidden, someone would take her words away as they had taken so much else.
There was a knock on the door. Fenwick entered before Adrian answered, carrying a folder of papers and the usual air of a man certain that every room belonged to his supervision. He stopped when he saw the open drawer and the oilcloth packet on the table. It was a small movement, nothing more than a tightening of his mouth, but Eleanor noticed it. Adrian noticed it too.
“You have been searching through my sister's effects,” the Earl said quietly.
“Only to preserve the estate's interests, my lord.”
“Then you will have no objection to an independent examination of these accounts.”