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

Chapter 2

The room had once held trunks. Now it held the life she was not permitted to live.

Shelves covered three walls from the floor to the sloping ceiling, and the books stood double-deep wherever space allowed — law reports, parliamentary proceedings, histories, estate manuals, old journals, collections of judgments, translated Roman law, and account books her grandfather had discarded and she had rescued before they could be sold by weight. The air smelled of leather and dust and time. A chipped blue cup near the candle held pencils worn down to stubs.

Charlotte set the candle down and let her shoulders drop.

Here she did not have to lower her eyes when someone mentioned a statute. Here she did not have to pretend that columns of figures swam if she looked at them too long. Here she was neither the disappointing elder daughter nor the quiet one who could be trusted to sit anywhere. Here she was simply a mind among other minds — old ones, dead ones, but honest ones.

She drew out a volume of Chancery cases and returned to a dispute involving succession through a family trust. The language was dry. The consequences were not. A single badly drafted clause had kept three cousins in court for eleven years, and none of them had ever again spoken to the others at Christmas.

Charlotte copied the passage into a notebook, word by word.

At midnight she heard rain on the tiles above her. At one the candle burned low. At two the house clock struck, and she was still working, her fingers ink-stained, her back aching, happier than she had been all day.

She did not think about the Duke again until she closed the book — and then his face arrived unbidden. The slight change in his expression when she had said people can be mistaken. He had not pitied her. He had not corrected her. He had catalogued her, the way she catalogued a clause.

That worried her more than it should have.

The next morning Edward Whitmore came into the breakfast room before the servants had finished opening the curtains. He looked older in the grey light. His collar was straight, his hair combed, his hands folded around the newspaper — and his hands were the part that gave him away. They trembled as he turned the page.

Charlotte closed the notebook beside her plate.

“You did not sleep,” she said.

Her father glanced up. “That sounds very much like an accusation.”

“It was an observation.”

“Worse.” He tried to smile, and failed, and she pushed the coffee toward him.

“Is it money?”

The smile vanished. For one breath she thought he might actually answer her. Then he said, “Nothing you need concern yourself with.”

There it was again. The sentence that had followed her since childhood. Nothing you need concern yourself with. Nothing suitable for you. Nothing you would understand.

Charlotte looked at the steam rising off her cup. “Of course.”

Edward flinched. Then, too quickly: “The Duke is coming again this afternoon. There are questions about the Ravenshire trust and some Hampshire boundaries.”

Charlotte reached for the butter as though the next question were an idle one. “Are the original settlements still in force?”

Her father looked at her for a long moment. Before he could answer, Lady Margaret and Olivia swept in, Margaret wearing pearl earrings and the expression of a woman who had already reorganized the day before finishing her tea.

“Edward, the blue drawing room, at two. Mr. Tolbert and Mr. Mercer will also attend.” She turned. “Charlotte, you will be present.”

Charlotte nearly laughed at the irony. “Will I?”

“Do not be difficult. Olivia cannot sit alone among gentlemen discussing land.”

“And I can, because I can sit quietly anywhere.”

Olivia stared at her plate. Charlotte spread marmalade across her toast with great care. “Yes, Mama.”

At two precisely, Nathaniel Ashcroft returned with a leather portfolio and two solicitors. Lady Margaret had filled the room with fresh narcissus, and their scent mixed with coal smoke and furniture polish. Silver trays gleamed under the pale sun that had finally broken through the clouds.

Charlotte took the chair chosen for her, near the far bookcase.

Nathaniel noticed. She knew because his eyes moved from her to Lady Margaret and then back again. Nothing was said.

The first half-hour concerned boundaries, access roads, and maintenance obligations. Edward answered carefully. Mr. Tolbert unfolded a survey map. Mr. Mercer produced older papers tied with red tape. Charlotte listened while pretending to turn the pages of a novel.

Then a reference caught her. And another. A trust established forty-two years earlier, connecting three properties — one belonging to Ravenshire, one to the Whitmores, and one now held by a cousin in Dorset. Amendments had been added over the years. Administrative responsibility had shifted twice. The current draft was supposed to simplify matters.

From what Charlotte could hear, it did the opposite.

She stopped turning pages.

Nathaniel asked a question about beneficiary protections. Mr. Mercer reassured him. Lady Margaret interrupted almost at once.

“Surely the legal gentlemen have all this in hand. Charlotte, perhaps Mrs. Finch requires help with tomorrow’s flowers.”

Charlotte began to rise. Nathaniel looked up.

“Miss Whitmore need not leave on my account.”

Margaret’s smile held. “These discussions are terribly technical.”

“So I have been told.” He glanced once at Charlotte. “Paper rarely injures a bystander.”

Charlotte sat back down. Her mother did not look at her.

The meeting ended without resolution. Nathaniel packed the amendments back into his case, and at the door, drawing on his gloves, he paused beside her.

“Has your reading improved since yesterday?”

She looked at him. His face was perfectly composed. Only his eyes gave him away.

“Dramatically,” she said. “By tomorrow I may attempt a whole paragraph.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “I look forward to news of your progress.”

He was gone before Lady Margaret could intervene. Charlotte watched the front door close. Behind her, her mother’s voice came low and even.

“Do not mistake curiosity for importance.”

Charlotte turned. Margaret’s face was calm, but yesterday’s letter seemed to hang between them in the air.

“I did not.”

“Good.”

Her mother walked away. Charlotte stayed in the hall, listening to the carriage wheels fade down the street — and for the first time in her life, she could not decide which troubled her more: the flaw she suspected in the trust papers, or the fact that Nathaniel Ashcroft had begun to suspect there was more to her than her family allowed anyone to see.