She Gave a Lost Stranger a Ride Home—Hours Later, the Duke Knocked on Her Door

Chapter 18

She read it standing up.

Then she sat down and read it again.

Then she took the entire estate accounts down off the shelf — three counties’ worth, stretching back eight years, eleven volumes, and they smelled of accumulated neglect the way old paper always does — and she opened the first volume and started at the beginning.

She worked for two days.

Mrs. Tandy brought her food and left it, and took the cold plates away again. Rowan came in twice on the first day and once on the second, and each time stood in the doorway, and each time did not speak, and each time went away again. Susan brought her tea at four o’clock on both afternoons, and on the second afternoon Nell looked up and said “thank you,” and Susan went out of the room at a speed that suggested she had been thanked very rarely in her life and did not know what to do with it.

At the end of the second day, Nell had it.

Four substantial errors in the first volume alone. Two suspicious expenditure lines in the Edinburgh records, running back six years, that suggested the previous solicitor had been helping himself to the travel expense allocation with a consistency that was almost respectable. One piece of genuine financial obfuscation buried in the northern tenant records, so sustained and so intricate that she had sat back in her chair and stared at it for a full minute in something close to admiration.

And underneath all of it, at the bottom of the pile, in a separate folder that had been tied with tape rather than ribbon, she found what she had actually been looking for since November.

A series of valuations on the Blackmoor estate, dated fourteen months ago, prepared for the executor of the late duke’s will.

They were wrong. Not by a great deal. By a very small amount, consistently, in one direction, across eleven separate properties.

The estate had been undervalued by nine thousand pounds.

Nell sat with that folder in front of her for a long time. Then she picked up her pen, and drafted a letter to the solicitor.

It was four pages long. It attached the valuation folder as an appendix. It laid out, item by item, with page and line references, exactly what had been done and exactly what it would cost to correct.

It then set out three alternative courses of action.

The first was criminal. It involved placing the evidence before the proper English authorities and letting the law take its course, which could end the man’s practice, ruin his family, and take eighteen months.

The second was silence, with restitution. Repayment in full, privately, with no admission, and the man’s continued employment — which Nell considered unacceptable, because it would leave him in a position to do it again to somebody else.

The third was restitution with public correction. Full repayment, a formal correction of the valuations lodged with the court, and a written acknowledgement filed in the estate’s own records, with the practice surviving and the man’s name surviving with it, and every other estate in the county quietly informed of what had happened by the simple fact of the corrected filing.

Nell initialed the third.

She wrote at the bottom of the letter, in her own hand: I am not interested in punishment. I am interested in what is useful. A ruined solicitor teaches nobody anything. A watched one is useful for thirty years.

Then she left the letter on Rowan’s desk, in the middle of it, where he would find it.

He came into the estate office at four o’clock.

He was still in his coat from the morning ride, and he smelled of cold air and open moor. He looked at the papers across the desk. He picked up the letter. He read it in silence, then read it again.

Then he opened the appendix, and read the valuations, and his jaw set.

“This will end his practice,” he said.

His voice carried the particular satisfaction of a man who feels a long-outstanding debt is about to be correctly settled.

“No,” Nell said. “It will compel him to return what he took. His practice will survive, diminished, and considerably more cautious, and he will not take from this estate again.”

She handed him the initialed proposal.

“This one.”

He reached for his pen and initialed it beside hers without turning to the alternative proposals.

She noticed that. She turned her face slightly toward the window so that he would not see the small private smile that arrived, uninvited, and refused to leave.