Page 122 of Faceless

He drew breath unsteadily, a breath that had been held a long time and had finally let itself go, and his arms came around her without any of the distance he had been keeping from her this morning. She pressed her face against his throat. His arms tightened.

It was enough for now. It would have to be.

XLVI

The Accounts

She was at his desk by the second afternoon, the pen in her hand, and he stood at her shoulder. He had laid it out for her across two days — the figures, what had been done with the money in those five days in London before he sailed, the Continental arrangements Webb had made, what remained liquid and what did not. She had asked sharp questions, and then sharper, and he had answered every one.

He had not expected to find this so difficult to bear.

Not the figures. The figures were what they were — he had been living with them for eight months, and they had not improved with familiarity. It was the light on the back of her neck, the way her hair curled at her nape where she had pinned it up, a few strands escaping against the pale skin, the morning light from the ventilation slit catching them.

He had not seen her hair in daylight in months, except what a starving man could glean through the squint. He had been breathing borrowed air, and now she sat three inches from his chest where he could look at her plainly, and it nearly undid him.

“Tell me about Pemberley’s household accounts. Surely that is something on a smaller scale —”

“Frozen like everything else. The income from Pemberley, the housekeeper’s budget, everything held in the main estate funds — inaccessible except for certain necessities, which the Home Office must currently authorise. A dead man cannot draw on them.”

“But Pemberley itself has not been seized.”

“The warrant died before conviction. There was no instrument for seizure. The property sits there intact, the staff dismissed and the house closed, and I cannot touch a penny of what it produces.”

She turned slightly, not enough to look at him fully, just enough that he could see the line of her jaw and the flush the cold room had put in her cheek. “And the Continental accounts?”

“Bills of exchange, mostly. Amsterdam and Geneva. Webb moved what he could in the five days before I sailed — enough to keep me, and any family I might have, in some comfort abroad, if I were forced to flee. It is not what it was. Add what the Auchengray accounts hold, which you have seen, and what eight months of running has cost, and you have the shape of it.”

“And if we cleared your name,” she said. “If the clerk could be reached and a proceeding brought — the English accounts would unfreeze.”

“In theory.”

“In theory,” she repeated, with a dryness he had apparently taught her without intending to. She turned the paper over and made a column of figures almost certainly more accurate than his own estimates. “And Sterling’s assets are intact.”

“Entirely.”

She was quiet a long stretch. Between her shoulder blades there was a slight furrow, where she was thinking hard about something she did not yet have words for.

Then she reached for a fresh sheet, wrote something across the top, and turned it to face him. “What about the customs records? The real manifests — the ones filed at the ports against Sterling’s forged versions. You said the paper trail breaks somewhere. Has anyone found where?”

His eyes went to the paper. “Webb identified three discrepancies. Two of them require Customs House records that are not publicly available without a formal proceeding — which requires me to be alive, which requires the proceeding to already be underway, which requires the clerk.” He took the pen from her hand and drew a line between two figures on the page. “This is what I have been doing since April. Every road leads back to the clerk, and we cannot approach him until Webb has enough to force a confession, because if Sterling knows we are looking —”

“He moves him.” Her mouth tightened. “Or worse.”

“Or worse.” He tossed the pen back into the well. “I have drawn this map approximately forty times. The topology does not improve with repetition.”

She took the pen back out of the well, turned the paper over, and began again from a different point, and he stood at her shoulder.

“Who holds Pemberley’s rents now?”

“The estate solicitors, technically. Frozen with everything else.”

“And if a man were to die without a will, his estate would be administered by —”

“I have a will. Georgiana inherits.” He met her eye. “That is not a road.”

“I did not think it was. I was establishing the shape of the cage.” Her gaze went to the paper, then to her own hands, and the line of her shoulders gave away the moment she arrived at the same wall he had been staring at all along. The wall was real. It had not moved.

She turned to look at him, tilting her head back to do it, her face full in the morning light — and he made himself say the thing he had been circling for two days.