Chapter Seventeen

G eorgiana was not, by habit, an early riser, but one would never guess this by her behavior at Chaumbers. She could not sleep. She intended to wait for Alice to wake too, but peckishness overcame her nerves.

She had hoped she would not stumble upon Reginald in the breakfast parlor again. Even so, she was disappointed to find that he wasn’t there. Rather, it was Crispin she found lounging at the table with a newspaper. He didn’t even rise when she came into the room. Odd man. She put a bread roll and a spoonful of berries on her plate, then sat down.

“Good morning,” Crispin said, without looking up.

She noted he was drinking weak tea. His plate held an apple core, which was somehow appropriate.

“Good morning,” she replied, wincing inwardly to hear her voice’s false brightness. She was still unsettled by the Taverston brothers’ own strange performance the night before. Although she did not believe Jasper had been mocking her singing per se —he couldn’t have been that ill-mannered—he had certainly been making fun of something. Crispin obviously knew what it was, and if it was what Georgiana thought…

He folded the newspaper and laid it on the table. “You sing beautifully. I meant to say so last night, but everyone else was telling you that, so I thought it would make more of an impression to wait.”

She blinked at him. It had seemed strange that her accompanist had been mute, even when she’d thanked him and told him he played well. “You are an odd man.”

He laughed. “I suppose I am.”

“I thought it was your habit to go walking in the mornings.” She put a berry in her mouth and looked up at him.

“I’m not odd enough to go out walking in this downpour.” He sipped his tea. “I’m afraid there will be no excursion today to the village shops.”

“We can go another day.”

“How very rational of you.”

It was hard to tell if he was in a good humor or a grumpy one. She decided to assume it was good. If she could have only one of her questions answered—the one that had kept her up last night—she would consider herself satisfied. And Crispin was the only one she dared approach.

“May I ask you something?” It was important that she know.

He set down his teacup and ground his jaws. Then he said, “I have a delicate digestion. I am on a program to see what agrees with me and what doesn’t.”

She stared at him, agape.

He put his thumb under her chin and pushed her mouth shut.

“I answered the wrong question.”

A huff of laughter popped out before she stifled it. “Good Heavens. You can’t possibly think me so rude.”

His face reddened. “Well, I’ll thank you not to refer to it again.”

She nodded.

“ Ever again.”

“I won’t!”

“Then what was the question you were going to ask?”

She took a breath and dove in. “Why did you throw an apple at Jasper?”

“Because he was being an arse. Excuse my language.”

“Was he…was he making fun of me?”

Startled, Crispin looked her full in the face. “Of you! How could he possibly make fun of you?”

She had given the evening a good deal of thought and it was the only answer she had. She’d seen Jasper’s expression after she’d finished singing. It was not only mocking but a little bit mean.

“Because,” she said, almost whispering now in her embarrassment, “I wore that frightful dress, and sang an aria, and he said,” her voice got even quieter, “there was a girl.”

Fury whisked across his face. “Georgiana, no. No one would ever compare you to an opera singer.” Then his laugh rang out but even that sounded angry. “Well, that came out wrong. You have a superb voice. And your dress was stunning but perfectly proper. Jasper was not making fun of you. He was making fun of—” He halted abruptly, blinked a few times, and finished—“of me.”

“Of you?”

“Well.” He rose from the table and poured himself more tea from the pot on the buffet. Behind her back, he continued in a calmer tone, “There was a party and there was a girl who sang, and I found her very pretty. And that is all I will say on the matter.”

“Oh.” She let out a long sigh of relief. So Crispin had once been enamored of an opera singer. And he was embarrassed to be teased about it. “Well.” She pulled off a piece of her roll. “I should imagine you won’t be joining me for breakfast again any time soon.”

He sat back down beside her, grinning broadly.

“No, next time I’ll take my chances with the weather.”

He drank his tea while she ate her roll.

“These are so good!” she exclaimed. Their own cook’s rolls were not half so delicious.

“Oh, God.” He groaned. “Yes, I know.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m so sorry,” she said, mouth full.

“Georgiana, do me a favor. Reginald is almost certainly in the library. Go pester him.”

She swallowed. “I shouldn’t.”

“Yes, well, you shouldn’t be eating Cook’s rolls under my nose, either, but you’re doing that.”

She scrambled to her feet. “But I can’t bother him if he’s working.”

“Go. Go.” He shooed her. “Take all the rolls with you.”

“There are half a dozen!”

“That will make him very happy.”

She hurriedly piled six rolls on a large plate and scurried away. As she left, she heard Crispin snap his paper back open behind her and she felt fortunate he had not smacked her with it.

*

The library door was wide open. And so were the curtains. Reginald was seated on a spindly chair that matched the one in the second little nook. Georgiana knocked lightly on the doorframe, then went in. Reginald’s head came up from his ledger. He didn’t look particularly happy to see her, but neither did he look displeased.

She held up the plate. “Crispin was in the breakfast parlor, trying to read a newspaper. He sent me here with these for you. I must have been annoying him.”

“Crispin is shockingly easy to annoy. Come in. Come.” He stood up. “Whereas I am pleasant to anyone bearing Cook’s rolls.”

She crossed the carpet and joined him in the nook. Then she realized at once that she shouldn’t have. Especially because he wasn’t wearing a neckcloth, and the top button of his shirt was undone. She set the plate down, intending to leave directly. But the ledger over which he had been hunched was surrounded by scratch paper and scribbled calculations, and she couldn’t tear herself away.

Reginald noticed her lingering, though she imagined it was hard for him not to—leaving a plate of rolls should only have taken a moment. He picked up a bread roll and gestured to the papers. “Does this mess make your head hurt?”

She knew he was not referring to the splash of papers but rather the inefficient figures upon them; but she refused to be so thin-skinned as to now imagine he was mocking her.

“I confess it does. Why are you spending so much time on accounts? Surely you have a steward.”

Good Heavens. Intrusive questions were now rolling easily from her tongue.

He rubbed his stubbled cheek. This sleepy, somewhat rumpled look was oddly attractive on him. Of course, she’d never seen a gentleman, or any man, so… mussed . Yet somehow, she didn’t believe she’d find dishevelment attractive in any other man. Faith! This train of thought was terribly inappropriate. She forced herself to focus on his words. “We did. The man passed recently and hadn’t been keeping up for several months. I don’t think it was topmost in Jasper’s mind until he saw how muddled it had become.”

“But surely he doesn’t expect you to be his steward!”

“Oh, no. Jasper’s expectations are more in line with my father’s. Fairly medieval ones. First son heir. Second son soldier.”

She finished the triad. “Third son to the church?”

He nodded. Then yawned before sitting wearily back down. “Jasper has a man in mind to take over, but he wanted the books a bit cleaner before handing them off.”

“And then?”

“Then?”

“What will you do with yourself?” She couldn’t really see him as a clergyman. “What would you be doing if you weren’t poring over these ledgers?”

He hesitated, then gestured to a leather case on the floor. It was the clasped one she had noted before. “In there, I have a manuscript, in ancient Greek, that was presumably meticulously copied by monks a few hundred years ago. If Bastion is correct—”

“Frederick Bastion?”

His eyes glowed a moment and he said, “Yes. By God, how do you—”

“My brother Charles has mentioned him. I’ve only heard the name. Sorry, go on.”

He gazed at her a moment as if he were going to say something different, but then continued, “If he’s correct, there is no one alive today who knows what these manuscripts say.”

“Plural manuscripts?”

“He has twelve of them.”

“And you are going to learn what they say.” Oh! Now this ! Gooseflesh rose on her arms.

“Well, a few pages of one.” He rubbed his hands down his thighs and smiled ruefully. “After that, I suppose I will settle into a living at Framingham. But!” He tapped the ledger. “I have forbidden myself to work on the Greek until I get these accounts sorted.”

It occurred to her she could sort them out for him. But putting her nose into the Taverstons’ finances would be—it would be heinous.

It would also be fun. “Are you even almost finished?”

“I thought I was.” He shook his head. “I was rattled yesterday, by that mistake of eight versus five. What if I’ve been sloppy, reading others’ handwriting? So I’ve been double-checking some of the receipts and they look correct, but what if they’re not? I really don’t want to go through them all again. Then I remembered what you said about patterns.”

“What I said?”

“Yes. Most of the expenses are for the same things over and over. If the cost was the same each time, I wouldn’t have to sum it all up each time.”

Well, obviously. “But?”

“But the cost is not always the same. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less. I’d have to look deeper into the invoices to see why. And, well, the devil. It’s too boring to contemplate.”

She laughed lightly. “I can imagine.”

“So I went back to assuming the entries I’d made were correct and just tallying them to get the whole thing finished.” He pointed to his scratch paper. “And I shouldn’t have been working on it so late because none of my sums came out the same twice.”

“You should have gone to bed.”

“Yes, but then here is the worst of it. When I started this whole project, I thought I’d be clever and start by looking at the account book from five years ago. Bradwell was taking care of things then. So I decided I would simply do as he did.”

“That makes sense.”

“But because I have become so hopelessly muddled that I can’t even add and subtract anymore, I thought—last night I thought I’d go back to that first book and just…tally the columns.” He frowned. “Like a schoolboy exercise.”

“I’d call that a drastic measure.” She picked up one of the rolls and broke off a piece, but she was fidgety, not hungry, so she set the bread down. “I hope you aren’t redoing all the books for the past five years.”

“It wasn’t my intention but now—” He pulled his hand through his hair. “I was up all night.”

She tried not to think of him sitting here through the night. There was something more intimate about that than picturing him in bed. Which she would never do!

Reginald opened a worn book with a frayed cover and pushed it in front of her on the desk. He pointed to a column.

“Please tell me I’m wrong.”

Georgiana drew a breath, debating whether to look. But she knew she was going to. It was either look at the page or at the hollow at the base of Reginald’s throat, right there in front of her. She turned to calculating the costs and revenues and then compared her result to the total that had been recorded at the bottom.

“That is incorrect.” The significance of that fact gave her a cold, heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach. “Have you another ledger? Another year?”

He pulled out another from a short stack on his desk and opened it to a page he had dog-eared.

“Six years ago. Randomly selected quarter. This page.”

She ran her finger down the column. Then looked into Reginald’s pallid face.

“Oh,” she said, full of sympathy, but unsure what else to say. They were each off by thirty pounds. If that was true of every quarter, the books were off by one hundred and twenty pounds a year. For who knew how many years.

“Damn it!” he swore. “I’m sorry. I should not have burdened you. God! If I wasn’t so tired I never—I’m sorry, it’s inexcusable. I just hoped I was wrong, and you would—”

She waved his protest away. Now was not the time to be polite. Or ladylike, for that matter. No matter what Mama thought. “How many have you checked?”

“Three quarters. From randomly pulled years.”

“And they are all off?”

He nodded. “Not always by the same amounts. But usually close. Maybe I’m wrong.” He heaved a sigh. “But if I am, it’s not by much. I was concentrating on the numbers without paying much attention to what they were for, so after I talked to you I realized I should be looking for patterns, but…” He waved a hand toward the bookshelf where she had seen rows and rows of old ledgers. “It will take years.”

“If your steward was dipping—”

“But he wasn’t! Not Bradwell. I would stake my life on his honesty. And his competence. I can’t make sense of it.”

She said nothing. His father’s steward had been stealing from the family. And now the man was dead, and nothing could be done. And his father was dying. Reginald wanted to do this one simple thing for his family, and it had devolved into a nightmare.

He murmured, “And I feel as if I could decipher the books…”

Oh, Reginald . Her heart broke for the man because she knew he wanted to do what he loved, what he lived for, and was instead trying to reconcile himself to doing what was expected.

Gently, she said, “It’s not ancient Greek. You can’t translate it.”

“No. No, it’s not Greek, unfortunately. It’s numbers.”

Numbers.

“I—”

“Oh, God, Georgiana. No. I’m not asking you, of course, I’m not. I’m just bemoaning my own inadequacy. I know Bradwell is not an embezzler. But something is not right. And I’m concerned this is something that will come back to haunt Jasper. He should at least know there is something hidden. And the answer is in those books somewhere. The money came in. It went out. It has to add up.”

He could not have seduced her more effectively than that.

“I’ll help you.”

“I can’t ask that.”

“Reginald, you can’t put something like this in front of me and then snatch it away. It would be as if Bastion took away that manuscript and said, ‘Never mind.’”

He looked at her hard, then shook his head.

“Bradwell was the family’s accountant for forty-seven years. Forty-seven . Do you know how many ledgers that spans? Jasper is not going to let me lock you away in the library—”

“Reginald—”

“—for hours at a time, days on end. He has a million things planned.”

“Reginald, I don’t think he’ll notice.” She looked down at her hands and willed them not to tremble with excitement. “It won’t take me all that long.”