daughter as well as a son. He made the lessons into games: one step forward, one step back, and a pause in which to decide whether the other person was telling the truth with his hands. After his death she continued practicing behind the cottage at dawn, not because she imagined herself challenging the county's gentlemen, but because the familiar sequence was the one conversation with her father she could still have.
The notice arrived on a wet Tuesday. It was written on expensive paper and bore the seal of Sir Edmund's solicitor. The cottage, it said, remained subject to arrears arising from Jonathan Vale's mismanagement of trust property. Unless Helena found three hundred pounds, possession would revert to the estate. Thomas read the letter twice, his face draining of color. He had only recently begun an apprenticeship with a bookbinder in Exeter, and he immediately offered to abandon it and seek labor on a farm. Their mother came down the stairs in her dressing gown and asked why both her children looked so pale.
"Nothing we cannot manage," Helena said, because that was what she always said when she was frightened. Later, alone at the kitchen table, she examined the date and the signature. The demand came from an account that should have been closed years earlier. The sum had appeared before, in papers she had found among her father's belongings, but not as money he owed. It had appeared beside the words Northbridge repair disbursement, crossed out so heavily that the original handwriting was almost invisible. Helena turned to the small notebook her father had left behind and found a page marked with a tiny drawing of a fencing guard.
Under the drawing he had written a line that had bothered her for years: The third measure was taken backward. She had always believed it referred to the scuffle at Larchmere. This time she noticed a second detail. Immediately below the sentence were three initials, E.W., L.B., and J.V., and the date of the night Jonathan had been disgraced. Beside the initials was an entry for the exact sum Sir Edmund now demanded from Helena. She could not make all of it fit, but she knew that a man who had stolen a fortune would have little reason to leave behind a meticulous record of the theft under his own name.
She wrote first to the current earl. Lord Nathaniel Harrow had inherited Larchmere after his father's death, and although he had never publicly questioned the old accusation, Helena had heard that he took an unusually close interest in the estate's affairs. She requested an opportunity to inspect the records of the widow's trust. The reply was courteous, brief, and deeply unsatisfactory. The trust accounts, it said, remained in the custody of Sir Edmund Wycliffe, who had served as trustee throughout the relevant period. Any inquiry should be addressed to him.