“I would tell him the truth, even if I had to stand there all day.”
They visited two more cottages before dusk. A former mill worker produced a note from Fenwick refusing a promised coal delivery, while a widow recalled being told that all aid had ended because William Finch had stolen the fund. Eleanor listened to each person without interrupting, recognizing the humiliation of people who had been made to apologize for asking for what the trust already promised them. Adrian did not defend his steward. He took notes, asked precise questions, and gradually lost the rigid composure she had first mistaken for certainty.
On the walk home, they stopped beneath the bridge where the stream ran fast and brown after the rain. Adrian admitted that he had spent much of the year trying to appear decisive because he feared being judged as weaker than his father. Eleanor told him that a decision made without listening could cause more damage than an honest admission of uncertainty. He looked across the water before answering.
“You have no obligation to teach me how to be a decent man.”
“No,” she said. “But the people here have a right to expect you to learn.”
The next morning they traveled to York with the copied accounts and Margaret's letter. Adrian had arranged to meet Mr. Ellery, an elderly bank clerk who remembered William Finch and the unusual structure of the relief fund. The original trust money had been deposited in an account requiring two authorized signatures for withdrawals above a fixed sum. In the records presented by Fenwick, William's name appeared repeatedly beside the late Earl's, authorizing payments to a merchant named Pritchard & Vale for grain shipments that no tenant remembered receiving.
Ellery frowned at one entry and pushed his spectacles higher. “This was paid on the seventeenth of February.”
“My father was already confined to bed then,” Eleanor said. “He died six weeks later.”
The clerk checked another register, then went into the adjoining office and returned with a thin book containing specimen signatures preserved when the account was opened. He compared them slowly, pointing out the differences in the slant of William's capital letters and the spacing of his surname. He would not declare the signatures forgeries without a formal inquiry, but he agreed that the discrepancies were serious and that the bank should preserve all relevant books immediately.
They discovered something even more troubling. Pritchard & Vale was not a grain merchant at all, at least not in the form described on the invoices. Its recorded address belonged to a warehouse connected with a proposed canal route across the eastern meadows. The payments had traveled through intermediaries until the relief fund was nearly empty, while a private investment account had increased in value. Ellery would not disclose the account holder without proper authority, but he promised to provide the records to the county magistrates when formally summoned.
Adrian came out of the bank looking older than he had that morning. “My sister was right,” he said. “And your father was right before her.”
“Then let us make certain everyone else hears it,” Eleanor replied.