She was cruelly given to a drunken Duke to pay her family’s debts—none foresaw what would follow
Chapter 13
Margaret did not go home. She went, instead, to the one place in London where a woman could conduct business at an hour when respectable houses kept their shutters drawn — and where the men who lived in the shadows of money kept their ledgers open all night: the counting house of Mr. Phineas Goode, a thin, stooped accountant in a back street off Cheapside, whose reputation for discretion was so complete that no one was quite certain his premises existed.
Goode examined Cecil Crane’s ledger under a gas-jet with a jeweler’s lens, turning pages with the reverence of a man who respects arithmetic. When he finished, he set it down and said only: “The margin letters are not initials to a name. They’re initials to an account. Let me show you.”
He produced a file of his own — correspondence, receipts, copies of invoices — and laid them side by side with Crane’s book. Across the top of the file’s first letter, in the same neat, educated hand, the letter H recurred with the same flourishes, the same angle of the pen.
“Hobbs,” Margaret said.
“He calls himself a clerk,” Goode said mildly. “His signature appears on a great deal of paper that does not belong to him. The interesting thing, Miss Prescott, is not that he signs — it is what he signs for. Every payment in your yardmaster’s book traces, through one intermediate hand or another, to a single well of funds.” He turned a page. “The trust is called the Corvus Trust. Named, I understand, after the crow — an animal of sufficient intelligence to find weak meat.”
Margaret’s heart had gone very quiet. “It is Pierce’s trust.”
“It is nobody’s and everybody’s,” Goode said. “That is the design. The trust is administered by a solicitor in Chancery Lane, Mr. Merritt, who signs its orders with the same pen Hobbs signs his threats with.” He paused. “And it is the trust, Miss Prescott, into which the mortgages of the Silvermont estate were transferred three years ago — two months after your brother’s death, and one month after the Duke of Silvermont’s family estates collapsed.”
The world tilted again — but this time Margaret held it steady. Because suddenly the pieces were not pieces. They were an engine, assembled, turning over.
“Silvermont’s debts,” she said slowly. “Pierce owns them.”
“Through the trust,” Goode agreed. “Through the same trust that paid your yardmaster; the same pen, the same signature, the same ink.” He looked at her over the lens. “The Duke of Silvermont does not know who holds his family’s ruin. I doubt he has dared to ask. But if you can persuade Mr. Merritt to produce the trust’s accounts — the whole accounts, not the polite copies — then you will have, in one document, your brother’s murder, your fiancé’s ruin, and the man behind both.”
Margaret sat in the silence of the counting house, watching the gas-jet stab the dark, and thought about the night at the sidings — about the receipt, the threat, the figure in the greatcoat. About William, who had come to London believing he was merely a ruined man seeking a practical wife, and who had walked, without knowing it, into the exact center of a conspiracy that had been running for three years.
“Mr. Merritt,” she said. “Will he speak to me?”
Goode smiled, without warmth. “Miss Prescott, Mr. Merritt has a daughter dying slowly of consumption and debts he cannot pay. He keeps the Corvus accounts because he is a hostage, not because he is a fraud. If you go to him as a creditor, he will show you the door.” He folded the lens into its case. “But if you go to him as the one woman in London who can afford to be generous with frightened men — he will show you everything.”
Margaret stood. “Where will I find him?”
“His chambers are in Chancery Lane.” Goode hesitated. “But I should tell you, Miss Prescott, before you go: you are not the first person to ask for Mr. Merritt’s records. I know he is asked by three people in this city — himself, his daughter, and the man who holds the whip.” He looked at her directly. “If you shake hands with Mr. Merritt, you will be shaking hands with a man who has been waiting years for permission to be brave.”
The words stayed with her all the way back through the sleeping streets, the ledger heavy against her ribs. And as she reached the corner of her own square, she stopped — because the lamp above the Prescott House door was burning, and the door was open, and on the top step, in the cold, with his coat collar up and his hat in his hand, stood William Hawthorne.
He had not been told. She had not sent for him. Yet there he was, in the small hours, like a man who had found that waiting at her door was the only place the silence made sense.
“Margaret,” he said. His voice was steady, but his eyes went to the bulge in her cloak. “You have been to the sidings.”
“I have been to Wapping, and to Cheapside, and to the night that killed my brother.” She climbed the steps until they stood close enough to share breath. “William, I have spent my whole life keeping the arithmetic of this city in my head. Three years ago I buried my brother’s death because I was told stability required it. I am done being stable.” She looked at him. “You asked me once what you could give me. I am about to ask you to give me everything — your name, your ruin, and the debts you have spent three years hiding from. Are you still certain I am worth the danger?”
William looked at her for a long moment. Then he smiled — the first full smile she had ever seen on his face — and said: “I have spent my whole life learning to be afraid at the right moments. That day has never come. Whatever you are planning, Margaret, I have been practicing for it since the day I wrote you that letter.”
Dawn was breaking over the roofs of the square, gray and cold and full of things to come. Margaret Prescott took her ruined duke by the hand, and led him indoors, and began, at last, to set the trap for the man who had built the cage.