Page 37 of Every Rogue Has His Charm

A frown creased Fanny’s brow. “You would need something sturdy to pry with. If you were going to do such a thing. Which, speaking as your friend, I consider ill advised.”

“Like a paper knife?” Caro freed her arm to grasp Fanny’s hand instead. “Will you help me?”

“What will your husband say?”

“He’s gone out boating again. He’ll never know.”

With a trembling nod—either fear or anticipation, Caro could not decide which—Fanny agreed. After fishing in the drawer of the escritoire for the paper knife, she presented the blunt-tipped implement to her friend, handle first, and then hesitated. “I suppose I’d better be the one, just in case. That way, you cannot be blamed.” Following Fanny’s advice, she pried loose the tacks that held the lid in place, and then, drawing a steadying breath, she opened the crate.

The contents—stacks of documents and baize-covered ledgers—were still neatly arranged, despite what must have been a jostling journey. She felt almost disappointed at their mundanity. Brushing aside the packing straw, she reached for the first ledger and opened the cover.

Columns and rows of faded numbers greeted her eyes. The dates at the top of each page were many decades in the past. Though Caro was reasonably good with figures and had had the careful management of her pin money and her small household’s accounts, what lay before her was far beyond her scope of understanding.

She turned toward Fanny, seated on the floor beside her. “What does this mean?”

Fanny peered over her shoulder. “Oh. I have some familiarity with this sort of record keeping. Gains, you see, here,”—she ran a fingertip down one column—“and losses there. I suspect the Duke of Hartwell’s holdings are quite complex. I can look through them if you like—is there something in particular you want to know?”

Caro lifted the stack of ledgers and deposited them in Fanny’s lap. “I’m not sure.” Money troubles could, she supposed, be at the root of her husband’s conflict with his grandfather. “Something to explain why the late duke and the present one were at odds.”

“Were they?” Fanny’s mild question was the sort one asked to be polite, rather than urging gossip. When Caro offered no reply, she bent her head to her task.

Caro, meanwhile, began to riffle through what remained. Scores of legal documents, with bold seals and impossibly perfect copperplate. Matters pertaining to landholdings, the breeding of horses, a ship that had foundered off the coast of Canada and a subsequent claim on the insurance for lost cargo. All perfectly ordinary, she gathered, if one were wildly wealthy and powerful.

Laying those papers aside, she came to a letter book, in which the late duke’s secretary had meticulously recorded correspondence: every letter the duke had sent or received, every letter the secretary had sent or received on his behalf. Nothing revelatory, beyond the fact that the duke had been a prolific correspondent. She scanned through the list of names and dates, occasionally a memorandum as to the topic, all of it stretching back decades. Any one of the letters might have been the key to her quest, and she would never know. How ridiculous of her to have imagined she would find her answer in this rough-hewn crate.

And then a name leaped out at her. Chesleigh. A letter received from her husband, dated the day after he had left her—just for a few weeks, she had tried to tell herself, as she’d watched his carriage disappear. Three hundred fourteen weeks, as it had turned out. Beside her husband’s name, the secretary had written marriage. Her eyes raced down the remainder of that page and onto the next, and the next, but she found no indication a reply had been sent. She wondered whether the late duke had even seen the letter.

“What,” she wondered aloud, half to Fanny, half to herself, “could people with everything anyone could want at their fingertips find to fight about?”

“Not money,” Fanny replied, her nose still buried in a ledger. “I can’t find any indication of difficulties. No unpaid debts. No valuable pieces of property sold off. No sign of an unscrupulous steward trying to hide his tracks. No wayward daughter auctioned to the highest bidder.” She followed the last with a rueful laugh. “Perhaps I have read too many novels.”

“No such thing,” Caro insisted, patting her friend’s knee. “Besides, I don’t think there was a daughter. At least, Hartwell has never mentioned any family except his grandfather. No aunts, uncles, cousins. His father died when he was a boy, I gather.”

Fanny nodded, her lips pressed together, thoughtful. “What of his mother?”

“I don’t know.” She furrowed her brow, trying to sort through the rumors she remembered, to sift the plausible from the outlandish. “I believe she was French.”

At least, that had been the more ordinary explanation given for her husband’s dark hair and eyes; at the time, she had discounted the stories that claimed he was descended from the devil himself.

Fanny closed the ledger she’d been studying and tapped her first finger softly against the cover. “French, you say? I suppose that might have caused some hard feelings…if, for instance, his son—his only son, it seems—married against his wishes. And of course there are more than a few men with a particularly strong animosity toward the nation across the channel,” she added, tipping her head toward the bow window.

When in France, I am a Frenchman.

Last night, she’d almost laughed at those words. But could they hold the key?

“Perhaps we need to go back further,” she said, digging once more through the contents of the crate. “If the real conflict was between the late duke and his son, that could have involved something that took place forty, fifty, sixty years ago.” She still wasn’t sure what she was looking for.

But she knew when she had found it.

At the very bottom of the box, almost lost beneath a tuft of packing straw, lay a thin bundle of letters, tied with black ribbon so old, it crumbled away when she tried to untie it.

Pleading letters, angry letters. She wanted to close her eyes against them, at first, their contents familiar and wretched. Without conscious thought, she glanced up to her writing desk and her family’s letters secreted there.

Dragging in a breath, praying for strength, she began to read more carefully, the faded ink that told first of the late Lord Chesleigh’s Grand Tour, his fascination with the culture and customs of Breton; then of one young woman in particular, her unsurpassed beauty and goodness; and finally, of his marriage and the birth of a child. All those details were interspersed with pleas: for acknowledgment, for assistance. And then, one final letter, written in a more delicate hand and composed entirely in French: from Lady Chesleigh, reporting the death of her husband from an apoplexy and the hourly expected death of her young son, who in desperation had been sent for the physician for his father, was caught in a storm, and was trampled beneath his horse’s iron-rimmed hooves.

The tears that last night had refused to fall now streamed freely down her cheeks. Her fingers fumbled as she sought and found the letter book and raced through its pages, searching in it for some record of these letters’ receipt and whether any response had been made. She found nothing.

“Fanny,” she sobbed. “Help me. There must be something. Something from the summer of 1783. Or after. His mother…” Met with confusion, she thrust the last letter into Fanny’s hands.