Colonel Fitzwilliam stepped inside without waiting for an invitation, shrugging off his coat. “You look terrible.”
Darcy gave him a flat look and returned to his seat. “You came all this way to tell me that?”
“Of course not.” Fitzwilliam pulled up a chair, casting a glance over the spread of ledgers and loose papers. “But I might have expected it. Have you slept?”
Darcy did not dignify that with an answer. Instead, he tapped the open ledger in front of him. “I need you to look at this.”
Fitzwilliam leaned in, eyes scanning the pages. After a moment, he frowned. “How did you get this? This is the government’s own treasury account.”
“It is,” Darcy said grimly. “And it is incomplete.”
Fitzwilliam’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”
Darcy flipped to another set of records, ones he had “borrowed”—perhaps less than legally—from a second department. “These are military expenditures. And these—” he gestured to another book, “—are payments made to known contractors. Now, compare the two.”
Fitzwilliam did so, his frown deepening. “These amounts do not match.”
“No, they do not,” Darcy confirmed. “Certain funds are marked as paid, but there is no corresponding recipient. The money is gone, but there is no record of who received it.”
Fitzwilliam let out a slow breath. “So it was diverted.”
“And it was done carefully. Not in large sums, but in small, regular increments over months—perhaps years.” Darcy tapped his finger against one of the entries. “It was routed through several hands before disappearing entirely.”
Fitzwilliam sat back, crossing his arms. “Someone inside the government was moving money into false accounts.”
“Or false ventures,” Darcy corrected. “Some of these payments were made under the pretense of ‘supply costs’—munitions, provisions for regiments, commissions for arms manufacturers. But the final ledgers do not match the purchases.”
Fitzwilliam nodded slowly, taking it all in. “You think any of this has to do with Perceval?”
“I do not believe in coincidences,” Darcy said darkly. “A man does not embezzle government funds for months on end and then, by sheer happenstance, the Prime Minister—the one man in the cabinet who might have discovered it—ends up assassinated.”
Fitzwilliam let out a low whistle. “That is a dangerous theory.”
“It is,” Darcy agreed.
Fitzwilliam exhaled sharply and rubbed a hand over his face. “You know, when I agreed to look into this with you, I was rather hoping it would be something simple. A man with a grudge, an unfortunate coincidence—something I could ignore in good conscience and go on about my life.”
Darcy arched a brow. “And yet you are here.”
Fitzwilliam huffed. “Yes, well. My conscience is a great nuisance.”
Darcy pushed another sheet toward him. “Then help me make sense of this.”
Fitzwilliam took up the page, his expression serious now. “And what of your witness? Have you written to… well, whoever it is you left in charge of her?”
Darcy hesitated—only briefly. “She is safe.”
Fitzwilliam gave him a look. “That was not what I asked.”
Darcy exhaled. “I will write tomorrow.”
Fitzwilliam shook his head but said nothing further.
For now, there was work to do.
Chapter Thirteen
May 21, 1812
