"Legal fees on paper," Brynna says, agreeing with Lissy. "Extortion in practice."
Pa's mouth tightens.
Lissy crosses to the other side of the cloth, where the lease letters are pinned in date order. "The offers began after the price increases. Not before. The worse business got, the harder this agent pushed to buy." She sets one finger on the address beneath Arabella's letter. "Tanner's Row."
The exact same place that Caden told me yesterday.
Then she traces the green thread running from it to a shipping manifest.
"The agent's office is registered inside the warehouse collecting the false fees."
Pa leans in. Ma goes very still beside him.
Lissy looks around the room, and her finger presses down on the place where every thread meets.
"It's all one scheme. It always was."
Plain enough that nobody in here can look away from it.
Pa looks at Brynna. "Can you prove that?"
"I can prove the pattern," Brynna says. "Every figure has a source. Every source can be copied and sworn to."
"But?"
"But patterns don't put a duke's heir in shackles." She opens the ledger chest and takes out her final summary. "We need the accounting the ordinary clerks never see. Payments. Purchase instructions. How the profit gets divided."
"Men like this write everything down," Lissy says. "It's how they make sure nobody cheats them while they're cheating everybody else."
Ma makes a small approving sound.
Pa looks at me. "You said the Voss boy knew something about Tanner's Row."
"He does."
I turn to send Harek for him, but the door is already opening.
Caden comes in with a badly carved bird tucked under one arm, and the wings are different sizes. He has been sleeping inthe wing completely opposite from Mirelle’s chambers. She still refuses to see him, but that apparently doesn’t stop him from trying to carve another bird.
He still comes.
He notices everyone looking at the bird.
"It isn't finished," he says, somewhat defensively.
Nobody says otherwise.
His gaze goes to the muslin on Pa's desk. "You found the warehouse."
"Lissy did," I say.
She gives me a brief look I can't read.
Caden comes closer and points at the address. "The public offices are at the front. Clerks, shipping contracts, ordinary accounts. There's a safe at the back."
"The archive," I say.
He nods. "Princeton has the only key, and he goes every market day."
