Page 12 of The Reformed Rake of Moorfield

“The nursery accounts, my lord.”

“Miss Prescott.” He straightened, and took the book she offered, and did not put it down on the pile, which she noticed. “Mrs Brooks says you keep these yourself. They balance to the penny, which puts them in select company in this room.” He turned two pages, and she watched him

actually read them, the dates, the carried figures, the small economies, not perform the reading. “Where does a governess learn double entry?”

The question was the door, and Jane stood in front of it for a breath, because both of her answers were true and only one of them was safe. At home was safe. She heard herself take the other one.

“From a merchant, my lord. My father. Prescott and Sons, general goods, off Cheapside. He had no sons, so the name was hope and I was the bookkeeping.” She kept her voice level, a woman laying a fact on a table, not a confession. “I grew up on ledgers. He used to set me the tradesmen’s bills the way other fathers set their daughters sums.”

“Did he?” Robert looked at her a moment, and there was nothing in his face of the small cooling she had braced for, that well-bred pause in which a gentleman quietly re-adjusts his estimation of a lady. Instead, something opened in it, quick and almost unseemly, like relief. He turned to the ranked books, and back, and made his decision with the same speed she had watched him throw pride out of a doorway on her first morning. “Then I am going to do something my aunt would call unpardonable, Miss Prescott, and ask you to look at something. Not as the governess. As Prescott and Sons.”

“My lord.”

“I am aware of what I’m asking.” His voice stayed level, but the drawl had gone out of it entirely, and what was left was plainer than she had ever heard him. “I have spent three months labouring over these account-books. I can feel the leakage by the draught it creates, yet I cannot discover the hole itself. Watson can prescribe for a fever, and my aunt can direct a household, but there is not a soul in this county I could set at this desk without it becoming common gossip by Tuesday. Yet you balance every reckoning to the penny, having been bred at a merchant’s elbow, and I find I would rather commit an unpardonable breach than be robbed.” He stopped. “And if the asking is unwelcome, it is withdrawn, and the nursery accounts are excellent, and I am obliged to you.”

The rain had come back against the windows, soft, and the fire crackled in the grate, whilst Jane surveyed the orderly row of ledgers with their little white flags and felt the exact dimensions of the moment settle over her. For a governess to meddle in the estate ledgers was mere presumption if she succeeded, and ruin if she failed. In either event, it invited Sussex’s keen scrutiny. Every year of service she had endured was marked by steady decline. She thought of eight shillings, and two calendars, and a man’s eyes following her down a passage.

“The household book first,” Jane said, and drew off her gloves. “Small sums are where confidence lives, my lord. Nobody watches them.”

***

They worked on until the lamp grew dim for want of trimming.

She had not meant it to become that; she had meant to look, and indicate, and withdraw, but the books took her the way figures had always taken her, by the wrists, and somewhere in the first hour she stopped saying my lord at the end of every sentence and he stopped pretending not to watch how she read. She read fast, muttering, one finger walking the columns, and she asked for things a governess had no business asking for, the bank’s letters, the timber contracts, last Michaelmas’s receipts, and he fetched them like a junior clerk and stood at her shoulder learning her method aloud.

It was the strangest hour she had spent in a gentleman’s house, and she understood, somewhere in the middle of it, why he was not humouring her. She had been humoured before, by employers who asked her opinion the way one asks a clever child to recite, already smiling at the answer they had decided to find charming. This was not that. When she said a thing he did not follow, he did not nod and move past it to spare them both. He stopped her, and made her say it again, and turned it over until he had it, and once, over a query of hers about the timber accounts, said, “No, wait, go back. I had that wrong, not you,” and corrected himself, aloud, to a governess, without any apparent sense that the ground had moved.

It had moved. Jane could feel it moving under the whole hour, quiet and enormous, like a tide coming in over flat sand while you look at something else. For four years she had made herself legible only in the register a governess was allowed, the soft voice, the deferred opinion, the competence kept small enough not to alarm. And here was a man handing her the timber contracts and waiting, with the frank impatience of a colleague, for her to be as quick as she actually was. She found she had forgotten the pleasure of it. Not being admired, she had never much cared for that; it cost too much to maintain, but being used, at her true weight, by someone who had a use for the whole of her and not the polite third of her that fit a schoolroom.

“You’re staring at me, my lord, instead of the ledger,” she said, without looking up. “The ledger is where the thief is.”

“I’m learning the method,” Robert said. “You do a thing with your left hand. You cover the sum and read the date first. Every time. My brother read the sum first. I watched him do it a hundred times. That’s the whole difference between you, I think, and I should like to understand it before the candle goes.”

“The sum is what a man wants you to see. He built it, he’s proud of it, it’s dressed for company.” She did look up then, briefly, and found the plain attention on her that she was not yet used to and had no filing for. “The date is what happened. Gentlemen utter falsehoods in their calculations from morning till night, yet deem it no deceit at all, believing the total to be a mere matter of opinion. But a date is a fact with a witness. The calendar saw it. So you read the fact first, and then you read the opinion, and where they disagree, my lord, is where the money went.” She returned to the page, and her voice came down to its working murmur. “My father taught me that before I was ten. He said the sum is the face a house shows the street, and the date is what the house does after dark.”

“There.” Jane laid the household book flat and set her finger on a rent-day entry, then walked it back across four others. “And there, and there. Look at the dates, not the sums. The sums are perfect, that’s the first thing to notice. Honest books have mistakes in them, my lord, shillings dropped and found again, a man’s Tuesday arithmetic worse than his Friday. These have none. These have been made, as a laundered shirt is made smooth.” She turned the page back. “Now the margins. Every entry in this hand carries its date twice, once where it should be, and once small, against the sum. That is a working note. A man keeps a working note when the date he writes and the date the money moved are not the same, and he must remember, privately, which is which.”

“Two calendars,” Robert said slowly.

“Two calendars. My father called it the oldest music in the trade. Money that leaves on the first and is entered on the tenth has been somewhere for nine days, and it does not go there to rest.” She sat back, and only then heard how far past itself her voice had gone, quick, certain, the schoolroom softness dropped clean off it, and found him looking at her, not the page.

“Continue,” Robert said.

“The rest is pattern. The sums are always oddly sized, four pounds here, eleven there, never round figures. Round figures are remembered. They cluster where the estate is busiest, quarter-days and harvest, when a discrepancy has the most crowd to hide in. And they never touch the accounts you would show your banker. The rents are immaculate. It’s the working books that sing.” She squared the ledger’s edge with the desk, her father’s habit, and made herself say the last of it plainly, because they were past the place where it could be unsaid. “This is not error, my lord, and it is not carelessness. It is ten years old at the least. It was built by somebody who expected these pages to be read by a gentleman and never by a clerk, and it did not pause in January. There are entries in this hand dated the week of your brother’s funeral.”

The fire had burned low. Robert stood looking down at the open book, and Jane watched the last of the evening’s ease go out of him, not into temper, which she had half expected, but into something stiller and colder that she recognised, with a small shock, from the landing three weeks ago. It was the face the newspapers had never seen.

“James trusted him,” he said at last. “That is what lies under all of it. My brother checked these books every quarter of his life, and the man sat across that desk and watched him check them, and had the second calendar in his coat the whole time.” He looked up. “You haven’t said the name, Miss Prescott. You’ve been not saying it for an hour, very carefully.”

“It isn’t mine to say. I can read that the books are made. I cannot read who made them, not to swear to.”

“No. That wants proof, and proof wants a professional.” He was already moving, the decision arriving in him the visible way his decisions did, like weather crossing a field. He took paper, sat, wrote three lines and signed them while she watched. “There’s a man in London, Louth, in Lothbury. The bank recommended him to my brother once and my brother, always so thorough, never thought he’d need him. An examining accountant. He can be here within the fortnight, and he can read hands and papers and swear to things in ways that stand up in front of lawyers.” He sanded the page. “You have shown me the outline of the matter, which is sufficient for a hunt. The rest I’ll not have on your shoulders, you live in this house, and you are owed a good deal better than to be made a witness in it.”

It was, Jane thought, the first time in four years an employer had thought about the weight of a thing before setting it on her. She stood, and gathered her gloves, and it took her until the door to understand what was odd about the whole long evening. At no point in it had she felt examined. Read, yes, thoroughly, disconcertingly. But being read was proving to be a different country from being examined, and she was not yet ready to think about how different, and she said good night with her composure on straight and carried the thought upstairs anyway, where it kept her from her book for some time.

***

Robert took the letter down to the estate office himself the next morning, which was not the arrangement anyone would have advised.