Delia is complicated. She does not like me particularly, but she likes unfairness less. It is a different kind of loyalty, but it is real. He looked at her for a long moment. You are surrounded by people who underestimate you.
Yes, she said simply. I am counting on that. He almost smiled. Not almost. He did smile, just briefly.
And it changed his face entirely, opening something in it that made him look younger and less managed, and genuinely, unreservedly human. Nora felt that smile land somewhere in the middle of her chest and stay there. She walked back up to the house with her hands folded in front of her and her expression entirely composed, and the absolute certain knowledge that she was in very serious trouble of a kind she had not prepared for. Delia found her in the upstairs corridor at 10:00. She appeared around a corner with the purposeful speed of someone who had been looking for her and pulled her into the small linen room beside the staircase and closed the door.
Harwick was in the library this morning for 40 minutes," Delia said without preamble. "He had a letter with him. I saw him reading it through the window in the connecting room before he knew I was there. I could not see all of it, but I saw a name. " Nora looked at her. "Whose name? " Delia hesitated for the first time, just briefly.
"Your father's," she said, "and beside it the words trust account and the name of a bank in Edinburgh. " The linen room was very small and very quiet. "A trust account," Nora repeated. "I do not know what it means," Delia said, "but Harwick wrote something down after he read it. And then he went to find Mirabelle. " Nora's mind was already moving. Her father had been a quiet man, methodical, private with his finances to a fault.
She had spent 18 months after his death trying to understand the full picture of what he had left behind. She knew about the debt. She knew about the Eastern field. She had gone through every letter, every ledger, every document she could find. She had not known about any trust account in Edinburgh.
"Delia," she said carefully, "why are you telling me this? " Her cousin looked at her for a moment. Delia was 25, precise, practical, and had never wasted sentiment on things she considered impractical. She was also, Nora now understood, someone who had been watching from her own version of a corner for a long time. "Because Harwick was smiling when he wrote it down," Delia said flatly. "And I have disliked that particular kind of smile since I was 8 years old and first saw it on someone who used it right before he did something cruel.