Read Chapter 9: The Inquiry

The Bedford road was little more than a ribbon of frozen mud, and the hired chaise lurched with every rut. Julian had taken a room at a coaching inn called the Swan, too respectable for his purpose, and had spent the better part of the morning in a taproom three streets over, nursing a single pint of small beer while the fire spat and the local gossip flowed around him like river water.

The Golden Hind was not so easily found. It had changed its name twice in the last decade—first the King's Arms, then the Blue Boar, and now, according to a toothless ostler who smelled of horses and cheap gin, it had settled back into its original signboard, freshly painted, as if the proprietors hoped to shed the establishment's murkier reputation along with its old colors.

Julian found it down a narrow alley off the High Street, a sagging timbered building that leaned against its neighbor like a drunkard. The sign creaked in the wind: a golden hind, antlers raised, a crown about its neck. He pushed open the door.

Inside, the air was thick with woodsmoke and the sour tang of old ale. A woman behind the counter—broad-shouldered, sharp-eyed, her grey hair scraped back beneath a widow's cap—looked him over once and did not smile.

"You'll be wanting the dining room. Through there."

"I want a word with the innkeeper."

"You're having it." She folded her arms. "Name's Morrow. What's your business?"

Julian placed a coin on the counter, not so large as to seem princely, but enough to buy attention. "I'm tracing a man who may have stayed here some months ago. Middle-aged, grey at the temples, a steward's bearing. Called himself Finch."

Morrow's eyes flickered—not with recognition so much as calculation. Her hand moved to the coin but did not take it. "Lots of men pass through. Stewards, clerks, all manner of trades. You've a description, but no more?"

"He left a note with this address. It mentioned the Golden Hind." Julian let the coin sit. "He was a trusted servant who vanished shortly after his master's death. The family wants answers. I'm prepared to pay for them."

"Family, is it?" She studied him. "You don't look like the family kind."

"I'm their solicitor."

That loosened something in her posture. Solicitors were a different breed of trouble—not the sort who broke windows, but the sort who broke reputations. She took the coin.

"A man matching that description—tall, stooped, with a nervous way about him—stayed here three nights last November. Paid in advance, which is more than most do. Kept to his room, ate alone. I remember him because he asked for the coach schedule to Cambridge before he'd even unpacked."

"Cambridge." Julian turned the word over. "Did he say why?"

"He didn't say anything to me. But I had a girl then—serving girl, gone now—who heard him talking to a gentleman in the corner. Kept their voices low, but she said the steward was agitated. Something about a letter that had gone astray. She thought he was worried about being followed."

"Who was the gentleman?"

Morrow shook her head. "She couldn't say. Well-dressed, she told me. Not local. Had the look of money about him, but not the manner."

Julian filed the information away. "And after Cambridge? Did he return?"

"He didn't. Left his greatcoat hanging in the wardrobe. I sold it come spring." She looked almost apologetic. "Dead men don't need their coats."

"You think he's dead?"

"I think a man who leaves his coat in November and never comes back for it has either found warmer climes or a colder grave." She reached beneath the counter and produced a scrap of paper, creased and yellowed. "He left this in his room. Just a list of numbers. I kept it, thinking someone might come asking."

Julian took it. The paper was covered in six lines of figures—each a payment of roughly two hundred pounds, marked at monthly intervals. The last entry was crossed through once, sharply, as if the pen had bitten into the page.

"Do you know what they were for?"

"Couldn't say." Morrow's eyes slid away. "I don't ask questions about that sort of thing. But you asked about the gentleman, the one he met with. The girl said he gave the steward a name. She thought it was a place, but it were a person."

"What name?"

"Umbridge. She remembered because it sounded like a hill, she said. Like a ridge made of something soft." Morrow shrugged. "That's all I've got."

---

Clara found the note tucked beneath the silver tray in the front hall, weighted by a visiting card that bore no name. The paper was cheap, the hand rough and hurried, as if the writer had been in a rage or a hurry—perhaps both.

*Give me the sapphire or lose all.*

She read it twice. The words did not change. The ink did not soften. The threat sat there, plain and brutal, and for a moment Clara could not catch her breath.

She looked up the staircase. Julian had left for Bedford at dawn, promising to return by nightfall. The household was quiet—Mrs. Hale in the kitchens, a maid sweeping the morning room, Lady Eastleigh still abed. No one had seen the note arrive. No one could say who had left it.

Clara folded the paper twice, then again, until it was a small, tight square. She slid it into the pocket of her gown, where it burned against her thigh like a coal.

The sapphire. Everyone wanted the sapphire. Sir Aldridge, with his easy smile and his proposition. The mysterious woman at the ball, who had spoken of Clara's mother as if she had known her in another life. And now this voice from the shadows, offering a simple trade: the necklace her mother had worn to the King's birthday ball, the necklace that had been supposed to rest in the Ashworth vault, the necklace her father had pawned without a word.

Clara had not told Julian about the pawn ticket. She had not told him about the gambling, about the true depth of the ruin her father had left behind. The lie sat inside her, a splinter she could not work free.

She walked to the study and pulled a sheet of paper from the drawer. She would respond to the note—she would demand to know who wrote it, what they wanted, what proof they had. It was a ridiculous impulse, the reflex of a woman who had learned that the only way to survive was to meet threats head-on.

But she could not send a reply. She did not know where to send it.

So she wrote instead a note to herself, a list of questions she could not put to anyone else: *Who knows the sapphire is missing besides my father and Julian?* *Who knows where it is?* *And why does everyone insist it can be found?*

She looked at the words. They offered no comfort.

From the window, she saw a rider coming up the drive—a man in livery she did not recognize. He carried a letter case under his arm, and he rode with the brisk purpose of a man delivering trouble.

Clara pushed the note deeper into her pocket and went to meet him.

---

Julian arrived back at Ashworth Park as the light was failing, his coat damp with mist and his mind churning with what little he had learned. Umbridge. The name again. It surfaced in the ledgers, in Finch's disappearance, and now in a Bedford innkeeper's recollection of a frightened steward and his well-dressed visitor. He should have been surprised, but he was not. Men like Umbridge collected secrets, and secret-collectors always left trails.

He found Clara in the study, the mantel clock ticking, a tea tray untouched at her elbow. She rose when he entered, and her smile—if it could be called a smile—did not reach her eyes.

"You're back early."

"The roads were kinder than I expected." He shrugged off his coat. "I found the inn. Finch was there in November. He took a coach to Cambridge. And I found this." He laid Morrow's paper on the desk. "Payments. Regular, monthly, to a person we have not yet identified. The last one is crossed out."

Clara looked at the paper but did not pick it up. "Did the innkeeper know who he met?"

"A gentleman. Dress and manner of money." Julian paused. "She said his name was Umbridge."

Something crossed Clara's face—so quick he might have imagined it. "Umbridge the same Lord Umbridge who—"

"I don't know. I intend to find out."

Clara was quiet. She had her hands clasped at her waist, and her knuckles were pale. Julian noticed, the way he had noticed the way she had stopped wearing his glove on her left hand, the way she had begun to look at him differently in the evenings, across the dinner table, as if measuring him against a standard she had not yet named.

"You received a visitor this afternoon," he said.

"Only a messenger. A letter from Sir Aldridge, renewing his inquiry about the sapphire. He seems impatient." The lie came smooth, practiced, and Julian felt a cold thread of unease wind through his chest.

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing else." She turned away, arranging the tea things with too much care. "You should eat. You must be hungry after the journey."

Julian watched her for a long moment. She would not look at him. He had been quiet about his reasons for this marriage, about the scar on his hand and the mother who had died when he was twelve and the years he had spent running numbers for a usurer before he had clawed his way to the bar. He had expected lies from everyone else.

He had not expected one from Clara.

"Clara." He said her name softly, the way he said it when he wanted her to listen. She stopped, her hand on the teapot, and at last she turned.

"Yes?"

He wanted to ask her what she was hiding. He wanted to hold out his hand—his burned hand—and demand the same honesty he was slowly, painfully learning to offer her.

Instead, he said, "Tea would be welcome."

Her shoulders eased, just slightly. She poured. And as she handed him the cup, the paper in her pocket seemed to rustle against her gown—a soft, betraying sound that Julian chose, for reasons he did not fully understand, not to hear.