Page 63 of Counting on Love

“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.”