HER MOTHER TOLD THE DUKE SHE COULDN’T READ—THEN HE FOUND HER SECRET ROOM OF LAW BOOKS

Chapter 10

Charlotte considered claiming illness.

Her father told her she had already spent too many years missing rooms she had every right to enter. So she went.

The dinner table glittered beneath six branches of candles. Conversation moved through politics, horses, a new exhibition, and a composer Charlotte had never heard of. She had almost begun to relax when Lady Penrose leaned across the table.

“Miss Whitmore, you must settle a question for us.”

Charlotte’s stomach tightened. “What question?”

“How does one capture the attention of a duke who has ignored half the young women in England?”

Several people laughed.

Charlotte placed her fork down carefully. “I would not know.”

“Oh, modesty—”

“Lady Penrose.”

Nathaniel’s voice came from three seats away. He did not sound angry. That was worse. The laughter faded. He set down his glass.

“Miss Whitmore did not capture my attention. She corrected a legal error that my solicitors and I had missed. My attention followed naturally.”

Lady Penrose flushed.

Nathaniel continued, almost conversationally. “If you are asking how to achieve the same result, I recommend beginning with eleven years of study.”

Someone coughed into a napkin. Henry Beckett looked down at his plate because he was smiling.

The subject changed.

Later, Charlotte escaped to the terrace. The cold stone pressed through her gloves as she rested both hands on the balustrade; the gardens below lay silver under the moonlight, and music drifted out through the open doors behind her.

Nathaniel joined her after several minutes.

“You are angry,” he said.

“I am embarrassed. They are not identical.”

“Tonight they are close relations.”

He stood beside her, and Charlotte watched the light move across the pond below.

“I used to think invisibility was freedom,” she said. “It meant no one asked questions. No one expected anything. My mother could not be disappointed if I had no public self to disappoint her with.”

Nathaniel was silent.

“And now—” She stopped, then finished honestly. “Now I understand why people buy country estates and never return.”

He laughed softly.

Charlotte looked at him. “Do you never tire of being watched?”

“Constantly.”

“You hide it well.”

“I was trained.”

The answer carried more weariness than humour. For the first time, Charlotte considered what his title cost him — every dinner invitation carrying calculation, every conversation capable of being repeated, every unmarried woman a possibility that other people would discuss.

“You cannot disappear,” she said.

“No.”

“Then what do you do?”

Nathaniel looked toward the ballroom. “I try to give people something true to see.”

Charlotte’s throat tightened unexpectedly.

He added, “The wrong kind of attention is noisy. It usually passes. The right kind is quieter.”

“What is the right kind?”

His gaze came back to her. “Someone seeing what is actually there.”

The silence that followed changed shape. Charlotte became acutely aware of the warmth from the ballroom behind them, the night air against her face, the fact that his hand rested only a few inches from hers on the stone.

Footsteps approached. Henry stepped outside holding a glass.

“There you are. I have spent ten minutes being polite to a man who believes drains are a political conspiracy.”

Nathaniel closed his eyes. “Henry.”

“What?” Henry looked between them. “Oh.”

Charlotte laughed. The moment broke — but not entirely.

The next morning, a society column appeared beside her breakfast plate. No names were printed. None were needed. It referred to a bookish young lady of Mayfair whose frequent private consultations with one of England’s most eligible peers had become the season’s newest curiosity.

Margaret read the column in silence. Edward muttered something unprintable under his breath. Olivia reached for more toast and observed, “The writer has dreadful punctuation.”

Charlotte almost smiled. Then she read it again.

A detail stopped her. The column mentioned that the consultations involved old inheritance files and disputed valuations.

Those facts were not common knowledge. At Lady Eleanor’s gathering, people had known only that she had helped with an inheritance question. Nothing about valuations. Nothing about Ravenshire.

Charlotte looked up. “Someone is telling them about the investigation.”

Edward frowned. Margaret’s anger vanished. “What?”

Charlotte tapped the column. “This phrase. Only someone connected with the records would know valuations are involved.”

The room went quiet.

An hour later, a note arrived from Nathaniel. Urgent.

Charlotte did not ask permission to leave.

At Ravenshire House, Nathaniel and Henry were already in the library. The table held more papers than Charlotte had ever seen there at once. Nathaniel handed her two documents without greeting.

“Dates.”

Charlotte read them. One was an authorization letter dated the fourteenth of June. The second was an amendment filed on the ninth. At first she saw nothing.

Then she read the authorization again.

“This grants power under the amendment.”

“Yes.”

“But the amendment was not filed until five days later.”

Henry folded his arms. “Exactly.”

Charlotte put the papers down. “So either the authorization was backdated, or the filing date was altered.”

Nathaniel pulled a third sheet from a folder. “Now look at the registry copy.”

Different ink. The numerals had been overwritten.

Charlotte felt the room narrow around the table. This was no longer clever accounting. This was manufactured history.

Nathaniel opened another file. “We traced six estates connected to Graves. Four show valuation irregularities. Three contain amendments drafted through firms he recommended. Two have signatures we cannot verify.”

“And Whitmore?” Charlotte asked.

Henry did not answer. That was answer enough.

Nathaniel slid a report toward her. Her father’s name appeared near the bottom. The document recommended the shipping investment that had swallowed the first large portion of the Whitmore fortune. Leonard Graves had signed the advice. Edward Whitmore had signed the acceptance.

For several seconds, Charlotte could not hear anything but the small ticking clock on the mantel.

Nathaniel spoke quietly. “Your father’s signature does not make him part of the scheme. He agreed to it. He trusted the recommendation.”

“He should have checked.”

“So should I have checked the trust amendment before you did.”

Charlotte looked up. Nathaniel’s expression was steady.

“Mistake is not conspiracy,” he said. “Evidence first.”

The words were hers. She let out a breath.

Henry quietly crossed the room and began searching a cabinet, giving them privacy without announcing it.

Charlotte sat. “I have been angry with him for hiding this.”

“You can remain angry.”

“That is generous.”

“I am a duke. We specialize in permissions no one requested.”

A laugh escaped her — small and unwilling. Nathaniel smiled.

Then Henry returned with a bundle of archived copies. “You will both dislike this.”

An increasingly common sentence. Nathaniel said the pages were older records collected from county archives, but several looked newer than the paper around them. One had been trimmed differently. Another used a watermark from a mill that had not supplied the county office until years after the stated date.

Charlotte held it near the window. “This was inserted later.”

Henry nodded.

Nathaniel looked over the growing spread of evidence. “Someone has been rewriting records to make later transactions look inevitable.”

Charlotte thought of the newspaper column, of details placed carefully into public conversation, of her mother’s fear of scandal.

“They know we are looking,” she said.

Nathaniel met her eyes. “Yes. And they want me to stop, perhaps.”

“Will you?”

His answer came without hesitation. “No.”

Charlotte folded the altered page and set it back on the table.

“Neither will I.”