She said all of it in under four minutes because she had planned what to say on the walk down the corridor and had kept it to the essential points and nothing else. When she finished, the room was quiet. The Duke looked at her. His expression had not shifted into pity or alarm or the particular careful blankness of a man recalculating. He looked, if anything, more focused than before.
"The boundary dispute. " He said. "Who is the lender? " She told him. Something crossed his face then, brief and specific, but she did not know him well enough yet to read it. "How long have you known about this? " he asked. "The full extent of it? " "18 months.
My father passed away 2 years ago. It took some time for everything to become clear. "And you have been managing it? " "Trying to," she said honestly. "I am not certain I have managed it well, but I have tried. " He was quiet for a moment. Then he said something she had not expected.
"My father also left debt, not at this scale, but present. The estate I inherited was more complicated than anyone had allowed me to know in advance. I spent the first 3 years of my tenure doing nothing but untangling it. " She looked at him. "I am not saying this to make you feel better," he said. "I am saying it because what you are describing is not a character failing.
It is a circumstance, and I do not confuse those two things. " He paused. "Oh, thank you for telling me directly. " She breathed out slowly. "Lord Harwick Fenn," the Duke said, and his voice had shifted into something considerably quieter and considerably less comfortable, "is going to find that the information he gathered this afternoon has a shorter shelf life than he expected. You do not need to involve yourself," tell you this to ask for help. I told you so the version you heard first was the true one. " "I understand that," he said.
"But I am involved. " He said it simply, not as a declaration, just as a fact. The fire in the study threw warm light across the maps on the wall, across the rows of ledgers, and the worn edges of the desk. Nora stood in the middle of the room and felt something she did not quite have a name for. Something that was not relief, exactly, or not gratitude, exactly, but something in the space between them that felt like ground underfoot after a long time of not being sure where to step. "Tomorrow morning," he said.
"East Garden. " "East Garden," she agreed. She walked to the door, then she stopped and turned back because there was one more thing and she was a poor pretender. "Your Grace," she said, "for what it is worth, the thing Lady Petra said to you about not being present. " She paused. "You have been present every moment of the last two days. I want you to know that I have noticed. " She opened the door and walked out.
In the study behind her, the Duke stood for a long moment looking at the map of his estate, at the fields and boundaries and roads he knew better than anything, and he felt something shift in him that was not a decision yet, but was very close to one. Well, down the corridor in the drawing room, Lord Harwick Fenn smiled at something Lady Mirabelle said and turned his cup in his hands and waited for Thursday with the patience of a man who believed he had already won. He had not yet learned that the woman he had spent the day investigating was the same woman who had told the Duke everything before dinner was even finished. That miscalculation would matter. It would matter very soon.