Page 80 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

Her hand was still against the front of his coat. She seemed to notice it and, after a moment, elected to leave it there.

“You said you loved me,” she said quietly.

“I did.”

“You have made the fact rather inconvenient.”

“I am sorry.”

“No, you are not.”

“No.”

A faint smile came and went.

Selina stepped back and straightened her sleeves. “We should return to the matter at hand.”

Nathaniel wisely agreed.

***

Over the next two days, the answer took documentary form.

The jewels came first.

Petherick obtained the proved copy of the codicil in which Selina’s mother had left the garnet set to her daughter by name. The wording was explicit. The jewels had been the countess’s personal property and had never formed part of the settled goods of the Merrow estate.

Beside it he placed the surviving account of Mr Aldingham, the Ludgate broker who had purchased the garnets four winters earlier. The entry recorded the set, the price, the seller and the date.

Nathaniel read both papers.

“So Giles’s first allegation fails.”

“Entirely,” Petherick said. “He may describe the jewels as entailed until he exhausts himself. The codicil remains what it is.”

“And the money?”

“That required more work.”

Mr Dunmore’s records arrived that afternoon.

He had kept them with precisely the dull accuracy Petherick had hoped for: dates, sums received from Selina, remittances made to Mrs Loxley and acknowledgements of receipt. The earliest payments corresponded to the period following the garnet sale. Later sums corresponded to Selina’s years in Suffolk and were modest enough to be consistent with the wages she had described.

There were no mysterious deposits from the Merrow estate. No concealed capital. No continuing estate account under Selina’s control.

Only money arriving in small sums and leaving again.

Petherick laid the sequence across the desk.

“This does not merely answer Lord Merrow’s insinuation. It shows how he has constructed it. He possesses, or has learnt of, enough of the outward payments to raise the question without possessing the records which answer it.”

“Which is why he has not gone to a court,” Selina said.

“Precisely. A court is troublesome about evidence.”

“But a ballroom is not,” Nathaniel said.

Petherick looked at him over his spectacles. “Ballrooms are outside my professional competence, Your Grace.”