Sir Edmund's answer came the following week. He offered to forgive the entire claim against Rosebank Cottage, along with a private payment sufficient to care for Caroline for the rest of her life, if Helena signed a declaration that the matter had arisen from a misunderstanding. The solicitor who brought the offer described it as a generous chance to restore peace. Helena read the conditions at the kitchen table. She could almost feel the relief of money in a house where every expense had become a calculation. Her mother's medicines would be paid for. Thomas could complete his apprenticeship. She might even buy the small pear tree Caroline had wanted for years. For several minutes she said nothing.
Then she asked the solicitor a question. "Would the families who were denied coal that winter also receive their money?" The man blinked. His instructions did not address that point. "Would my father's name be cleared?" Again, he had no answer. Helena returned the papers. "I am not offering my silence in exchange for the comfort Sir Edmund has helped to take from us." After he departed, she sat beside her mother and wept for the first time since the garden party. Refusing had been right, but right choices could still be frightening. Caroline held her hand until the trembling stopped.
Nathaniel did not praise Helena for being courageous. He did something more useful. He placed the bank records and Lucian's signed testimony before the county magistrate and instructed Mr. Pritchard to begin formal proceedings for the production of the trust's original accounts. He brought in an independent accountant from Bath, a man who had never met Jonathan Vale or Sir Edmund Wycliffe. Over the next month, the accountant traced payments from the widow's trust through false repair accounts to builders and suppliers employed at Sir Edmund's Northbridge property. An invoice for new stable doors matched the date and amount of a payment supposedly issued for blankets. Another voucher for roofing slate had been entered as medicine for families affected by winter fever.
Faced with an order to produce the records and with Lucian ready to testify, Sir Edmund surrendered the walnut document case. He claimed the delay was merely a clerical oversight. Its broken handle had been repaired with a brass fitting, but Mrs. Bramwell recognized the mark left in the wood where it had struck the carriage step. Inside lay the original ledger, its pages crowded with Jonathan's neat handwriting and the later alterations of another hand. The independent accountant demonstrated that the entries charging Jonathan with the missing money had been written after his dismissal. More important, copies of the legitimate payments, preserved at the bank, contradicted the supposed balance on which the accusation depended.