Page 66 of Counting on Love

“Ha! Well, I think we’ve moved past that. I have faith in your discretion.”

As well he might, given he knew the worst about her.

“Bradwell has been the family’s steward for forty-seven years? Was this all under the Earl?”

“No, my grandfather brought him on.”

“How long did he serve your grandfather?”

He squinted. “Well, that would be arithmetic, wouldn’t it?” He rumpled his already-mussed hair. She felt a tightening in her chest, along with an absurd desire to fix his hair with her fingers. “Father is sixty-two. He rose to Earl at age thirty.”

“So,” she cleared her throat and focused. “I expect we will not need to look at the first fifteen years. But I’ll check one of the early volumes just to be sure. My reasoning is that I want to use major family events as touchpoints. If these…discrepancies started at some distinct time, for some distinct purpose, it seems likely we can identify the trigger by correlation.”

“Give me an example,” Reginald said.

She frowned with concentration. “Don’t take offense.”

“I won’t. It’s a hypothetical.”

Ah, she adored him. How he spoke. How logically his mind worked. How he was not reluctant to admit to having questions.

She decided not to start with the obvious: embezzlement. Instead, she said, “Let us say the Earl wants a particular bill passed, very badly, and stoops to bribery.”

He smirked. “Ha! Good Lord, you’re offensive.”

She refused to be distracted by his teasing. “If we were to check the books around the times of debates of bills you know he supported, we might find a time where money unexpectedly and unexplainably starts to flow out.”

“Bradwell would have had to be in league with the Earl.”

“That will be true no matter what we find. Unless Bradwell was acting on his own.”

He scowled at her and was about to protest again, but she kept talking.

“In which case, I expect that instead of finding approximately one hundred and twenty pounds disappearing every year that a particular type of bill comes up, we will find there will be quite small, randomly occurring discrepancies to start, gradually becoming larger and more regular as he grows more confident that he won’t be caught.”

He sulked. “Wouldn’t it be quicker to start from the beginning and look for your gradually increasing thievery?”

“Yes, but I am giving your man the benefit of the doubt.”

The crease of annoyance disappeared from his brow. “All right. But obviously, we are not looking for Parliamentary bribes. What are we looking for?”

“I don’t know. It isn’t as though I’ve done this before.” She dipped the pen in the well and stared down at the empty page. “But I want to try to narrow down the number of books we must examine. If something obvious jumps out, that would be wonderful. If not, once we know the timeframe during which all of this is occurring, we can narrow our focus to try to determine what it is.”

He moved out of her peripheral vision, and she heard him dragging the second little chair closer. Her breath quickened in an odd way. She held up her hand, motioning him to stop.

“I have just a few questions. Then I think you had better go get some sleep.” She added quietly, “And change your clothes.”

His eyes grew wide, and he grasped the top of his shirt. “I beg your pardon. You should have said—I should have—oh, my God! You must think—”

“I think you need some sleep.”

“Yes, yes. I’ll go. Immediately.” He stood immobile, his face as red as a brick.

“Reginald?”

“What?”

“Before you go, tell me when your parents married, how old you all were when you went off to school, and when Crispin went into the army. That should be enough to get me started.”