Bodice Ripper

"If that's all, ma'am. I need to get back to work."

Mary looked up at him, her face angrier and angrier.

"Very well, then."

She wouldn't give him the satisfaction, she decided. Whatever happened now, she wouldn't be able to stop. But if he weren't going to admit to it, then she wouldn't reveal that she knew. The door was closing as she thought of one last, closing jibe.

"And Mr. Poole?"

The door stopped, and opened up once again. James Poole stood on the other side, filling the door frame and obscuring her view of the room inside.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Don't ever do anything of this sort without my express permission again. Is that clear?"

"I apologize, ma'am. It won't happen again."

"Good," she said, turning on her heel and walking away.

Why did he torture her like this? What motive could he have? She was right there before him, and if he were going to do her harm, that had been as good an opportunity as one could hope for.

If he hadn't, though, then why had he been so secretive and so unilateral in dismissing her household servants?

It made no sense. But Mary knew one thing. There was a hidden advantage that he hadn't thought of when he had tried to get her alone. She was free, now. Free to pursue the mystery of her father's death away from prying eyes, because there was only one person in the entire house to stop her.

6

James

James sat back, not for the first time that day, and tried to think for a moment about what he could possibly do next. He had thought that he'd reached the end of his rope several times before. Each time, with a little bit of thought, he'd found a new avenue to pursue. Each time had been a dead-end.

He had expected things to be a challenge. If the finances of Lord Geis had been easily deciphered, and his problems solved trivially, then there would have been no reason to hire James in the first place. What worried him more than that, though, was that there didn't seem to be any issue at all.

He had checked carefully, several times. The numbers didn't add up whatsoever. It seemed that the house's daily expenses were fairly carefully tracked; each week, hidden somewhere in the tomes that Lord Geis had kept, he had taken down the food costs and wages paid. He'd marked taxes each month.

And all of that money was more than compensated for by his real estate trading. In theory, the house should not only have been solvent, but should have been fairly well-off.

The answer, he had decided long ago, was in the scraps.

He had a few guesses as to what they could have meant, of course. The first letter more than likely signified a fellow's name; the numbers more than likely referred to debts incurred by the named party.

He had acted on that assumption and tallied the total on a separate sheet. They seemed to add up fairly closely. The problem was the sheer amounts. To one of the men, he paid out very frequently, and never was paid back. The sums were too small to be overly concerned with, but given that there were no dates on any of the scraps it was as likely to have been near-constant as it was to have been an occasional couple of pounds.

To another, he paid out vast sums that seemed to be paid back…at some point, if he guessed at the time line correctly. To a third, he paid out regularly, the same few pounds each time. There was never a second number on the note; he must have either been collecting money from the man, or been paying him "off the books," so to speak.

There was a clear picture being painted by the notes, and the picture was of a household that was being crushed not by their expenses, but rather by the charitable nature of its head. The answer was nearly obvious, but it was there that the trail stopped.

All he would need to do to get things back into order would be to collect on the debts that Geis had lent out, and the bank should be more than satisfied with the account statements.

Therein lied the rub.

None of the names were ever more than a single letter, written in the midst of a cryptic string of letters and numbers that he could only guess at the meaning of. That they got him to within a few dozen pounds when he summed them, meant he was almost certainly on the right track. But that meant nothing if he couldn't identify the men in the notes.

James tried to steel himself for what he knew would have to come next. There was only one person in the entire world who would know the meaning of these notes; he was lying in a beautiful plot in the churchyard. James had made a point of going to see it before he sent the servants away.

After he had examined the expenses, he had found that there were virtually none that were perfectly unnecessary. His only concern had been that with only one person living in the house, the personal staff was fairly massive. With her father alive, the Geis family had entertained fairly regularly, and the staff paid for itself in those evenings.

With her father gone, Mary Geis received no guests, and rarely left her library. When she did, it was for food or to sleep. Or, it seemed, to snoop on his work.