The place where Hugh had fallen. There was no blood now, only shadow, but Sebastian’s posture tightened all the same. A memory was etched into the floor as surely as if it had been carved.
“My grandfather will finally have proof of corruption,” he whispered as he handed me the candle and pulled a second out of his coat to be lit. “I warned him about Julien. About the ledgers, the discrepancies. I don’t know if he listened, but he knows.”
Would Julien exact vengeance?
I turned away to examine the towering stacks of crates. The wooden surfaces were rough beneath my fingers, the stencil markings faded. Within the feeble light of the candle, I spied crate after crate stacked in uneven rows. A rodent skittered across the floor.
The inside was a rugged place despite the respectable redbrick exterior.
The walls remained streaked blue from years of careless handling of indigo. A residue of the fine dust clung to the floorboards, leaving footprints with each step I took. In one corner, rusted weighing scales sat atop a crooked desk.
Leaving my side, Sebastian slipped into a narrow side room where the old ledgers were kept. The door creaked faintly on its hinges.
Records were not my forte. I left Sebastian to comb through the yellowed papers while I moved swiftly past the crates with my candle held high, yet none bore the infamous tiger Edward had reported.
I suspected Julien would not flaunt such a sign. I drifted deeper into the space, with only the sound of my slippers shuffling against the floor, then halted in front of another stack of wooden crates.
I reached for one near the bottom of the stack, and my fingers brushed an image. A faded ink marking—almost smudged beyond recognition.
A tiger.
I gasped and stepped back just as a creaking footstep echoed nearby.
“Mrs. Sinclair, why must you insist on trespassing into spaces that do not belong to you?”
37:Sebastian
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
PSALM 121: 4-6
Dust coated everything in the cramped office. Ledgers sat in piles beside a broken quill and a once-polished brass scale. I pulled a book from the shelf and cracked it open, the pages brittle as dried leaves. At first the entries echoed the Company’s official manifests: indigo, saltpetre, textiles. Then, near the back, I uncovered a second column marked only with initials and vague destinations. Crates doubled. Revenues unreported. Worse still, opium, silver, and private commissions tied to men whose names I knew well.
My grandfather’s among them. And Colonel Grenville’s.
I recognized Hugh’s handwriting.
This was not careless bookkeeping. It was a parallel trade network, a second fortune siphoned from Indian laborers, unregulated, unrecorded, and unpunished.
A curse slipped from my lips.
I had been deceived, paraded before Parliament as a respectable front, even sent to argue with Wilberforce and Carey, never imagining my own grandfather could sink so low.
Finally, the connection between the two old men—tied across the continent through vice—made sense.
Colonel Grenville had saved my grandfather’s life and demanded payment for his silence. Later, he had stumbled across my grandfather’s operation and demanded a cut, ensuring that Kitty would become one of the richest heiresses in England.
No wonder the Iron Colonel had kept her hidden from every lord and fortune hunter who might sniff out the truth.
They needed a Company man to preserve the empire they had built. They needed a fool like me.
I had been too wild, too drunk, too much a rakehell to see what was happening right under my nose while Hugh and Julien likely knew the extent of the Sinclair enterprise.
Perhaps Hugh hadn’t died because of me ... Perhaps it had been due to our family’s smuggling.
