Page 72 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

Magnus went.

He had thrown himself wholeheartedly into the investigation since the door closed on the warmth of his marriage. He worked the way other men drank because at least work did not stop when he closed his eyes and the cold half of his bed reminded him of Rosaline.

He rose before dawn, rode out after dark, and filled every hour in between with the patient, grim work of the case. And if he was hollowed out to a husk of a man doing it, at least the husk had somewhere to be.

The warehouse stood among the rotting wharves east of the Tower of London. It was a gaunt ruin of a building, with the river slapping back at its pilings and half of its roof open to the sky.

He arrived at the appointed time alone, with a pistol—a cold weight against his ribs—and a heavy purse on his belt. He stood in the vast, dripping darkness until a lantern uncovered itself twenty feet away and a voice spoke.

“Close enough. You’ll be the Scottish duke.” The man did not step into the light. “Show me the money before we waste one another’s evening.”

Magnus set the purse on an upturned crate between them and stepped back. The man, still shrouded in shadows, detached from the dark, weighed the purse, counted it by feel with quick fingers, and grunted.

“You’re here about your father’s business.” His voice was flat, almost bored, as if he were discussing an everyday transaction. “There was a letter that damned him, or near enough. It was correspondence with the King’s enemies, bearing Laird McCormack’s signature and written in a hand no court would have thought to question.”

A dry sound followed, not quite a laugh.

“But here’s the thing. Your father never wrote it. Someone paid to have it forged by a man who could imitate any hand in England and had been doing so for the right price for twenty years.” The lantern shifted. “When the commission destroyed its records, I kept that letter. Men in my trade learn early that what everyone believes is gone can be worth far more than what they know still exists.” Another pause. “And now it’s yours. You paid for it.”

A packet skidded across the crate. Magnus picked it up and unfolded it under the lantern with hands he struggled to keep steady.

There it was. The neat treasonous hand that was not his father’s, and his father’s seal. It was the lie that had killed a good man.

Sixteen years. He had waited out most of them in the north and crossed a country only when the title finally gave him a door into these people’s houses, and here it was in his hands at last, cold and light as any other paper.

“The man who forged it.” He kept his voice steady. “I’ll have his name.”

Silence followed, the silence of a man deciding whether one more betrayal would cost him anything.

“Weems,” the informant revealed. “Ambrose Weems. He’s an engraver by trade. He’s old now and frightened. He lives quietly on the money he was paid to forget he ever held a pen. Oldbrook gave him the task. But you’ll not have that from me. Or Weems, I think, unless you frighten him worse than his old taskmasters do. And they frighten him a good deal.”

The lantern withdrew.

“That’s all you bought, Scotsman. Don’t come looking for me again.” A final pause in the dark. “They killed your father over that paper. Those men carried on with their lives without another thought. And now you’ll be carrying that same paper about London. I would be careful about who you tell you have it and who might want it back.”

The lantern went out, and the footsteps faded away in the dark.

Magnus stood alone with the proof of his father’s demise in his hand. He ought to have experienced something immense. He had imagined this moment for years. He had imagined the moment the lie came apart in his fingers and the truth of his father’s death stood clear at last. He had always thought it would come like weather, like a storm breaking over the land, like the thing inside of him finally, finally set down.

Instead, he felt only the cold, the river, and the silence of the empty warehouse. He suddenly felt, with unbearable clarity, the truth he had been outrunning for a fortnight.

There was no one to bring this to.

He had the letter that would clear his father’s name. After years of searching in the dark, he finally held the proof in his hands. And the only person in the world he wanted to show it to was three miles west of him, behind a door he shut with his own hands.

Rosaline would know immediately what it meant and what to do with it. She would know how much it had cost him to find it.

He tucked the letter into his coat, over his heart, where it would be safe. It was only one piece of the puzzle: the forger’s own hand, and the name to go with it. But a single letter a hired man could always swear was itself a fake. It was Edinburgh that would make it unanswerable. He would have the sworn depositions to stand behind this, the whole rotten circle in their own signatures, and this to name the craftsman who served them.

He needed both. He had always needed both.

He headed for the horses in the fog. Passage north was booked for the morning. He did not let himself think about the long, cold ride to Edinburgh, or the empty bed he was leaving behind him.

CHAPTER 34

“Well, well, aren’t we fortunate that the Duchess has deigned to visit us?” Samuel came out of his study before Rosaline had gotten past the hall, as if he had been listening for the door. “You look thin. Is His Grace not feeding you, or have you made a complete hash of running his household already?”

“Good afternoon, Samuel.” Rosaline pulled off her gloves and did not stop walking. “I am here to visit my sisters.”