Read Chapter 9: The Hidden Ledger

The ledgers lived in a narrow room off Lachlan’s study, a place Iona had passed three times since breakfast, each time feeling the weight of her own heartbeat in her throat. Braemore’s staff moved around her with the quiet efficiency of people who had been trained not to notice too much, and she used that to her advantage.

She waited until the house settled into the lull between midday dinner and the afternoon’s chores. Elspeth had retired to her sitting room with a book and a glass of something pale. The servants were below stairs. Even the dogs had found a patch of sun in the courtyard.

Iona slipped into the study and closed the door behind her.

The ledgers were not locked. That surprised her, and then it did not. The Campbells had run this estate for generations on the assumption that no one within their walls would betray them. Iona supposed that was the difference between their families. The MacTavishes had always known betrayal could come from anywhere. It was why her father kept his accounts in his head, and his true intentions in a place no one could reach.

She pulled the nearest volume from the shelf. It was bound in cracked leather, the pages yellowed but the ink still sharp. The most recent entries began six months past, in a hand that was neat and disciplined. Lachlan’s, she guessed. She flipped backward until she found the earlier pages, where the script loosened and sprawled. His father’s hand, perhaps.

The rhythm of the entries was soothing. Grain sold. Wool contracted. Rent collected from the crofters. Repairs to the mill. Payments to the factor. It was the music of a well-run estate, and for a moment Iona felt a pang of something close to envy. The MacTavish accounts had always been a scrambling affair, a patchwork of shortfalls and hopes.

Then she reached the spring entries of the previous year, and the music went sour.

There were payments. Regular ones. Monthly, in fact. Made out to a name she did not recognize: *D. MacAllister*. The amount was modest — not so large as to alarm — but it was consistent, and it was marked only with the letter *G* in the margin. No explanation. No invoice. No note of what service had been rendered.

Iona ran her finger down the column. Six payments. Then a gap. Then two more, larger, marked with the same *G*.

She checked the current year. The payments had resumed three months ago, just before the consortium threat had become public. That timing sat wrong in her stomach.

She pulled another volume from the shelf. The older ledgers were drver, the entries dustier. She searched for the same name and found nothing. D. MacAllister did not exist in the Campbell accounts before last spring.

The door from the study creaked.

Iona did not flinch. She had practiced stillness in a house full of brothers who delighted in startling her. She closed the ledger slowly, as if she had been merely browsing, and turned.

Mhairi, the housekeeper, stood in the doorway with a stack of folded linens in her arms. Her face was carefully blank, but Iona caught the flicker of assessment in her eyes.

“My lady,” Mhairi said. “I was not aware you had need of the accounts.”

“I was curious how the estate was run,” Iona said, and let a hint of sheepishness color her voice. “Lachlan is away, and I find myself with too much time. Thought I might learn something useful.”

Mhairi’s mouth tightened, just slightly. “The late laird kept those books. Mr. Lachlan has his own method now.”

“I see.” Iona slid the ledger back into its place on the shelf, aligning the spine with its neighbors. “Is there a problem, Mhairi?”

“No, my lady.” The housekeeper’s gaze dropped to the floor, then back up. It was the deference of a woman who had decided to be careful rather than honest. “Only that Mrs. Campbell — the dowager — prefers the accounts remain in the family’s hands. She is particular about such things.”

Iona smiled. It was not a warm smile, but it was polite. “Then it is fortunate I am family now.”

Mhairi did not answer. She dipped her head and retreated, and Iona listened to her footsteps recede down the corridor before she let out a breath she had not realized she was holding.

She returned to the shelf and pulled the ledger again, this time with paper and a stub of pencil she had taken from the study desk. She copied the entries for D. MacAllister, the dates and amounts, the strange little *G* in the margin. She did not know what it meant, but she knew what it looked like.

It looked like a secret.

She was tucking the paper into the bodice of her dress when the study door opened again, and this time she did not have time to move.

Elspeth Campbell stood in the doorway, framed by the dark wood of the corridor behind her. She was dressed in deep grey, her silver hair swept up in a style that had not changed since the old queen’s day. Her eyes moved from Iona’s face to the ledger shelf, and back.

“I heard you were in here,” Elspeth said.

Iona straightened. “I was looking for a book.”

“A book.” Elspeth’s voice was dry as autumn leaves. “In the accounts room.”

“I wanted to understand the estate. Since I am to be mistress of it one day.”

Elspeth stepped into the room. She did not raise her voice; she did not need to. The air itself seemed to bend around her authority. “You are mistress of nothing yet, girl. You are a wife by signature and by cold duty, and that is all. My son married you to save his land. Do not mistake that for an invitation to meddle in its affairs.”

Iona felt the heat rise in her chest, but she held it down. She had learned long ago that anger was a currency best spent where it could buy something.

“I am not meddling,” she said. “I am learning. There is a difference.”

“Is there?” Elspeth moved closer, and Iona caught the faint scent of lavender and something sharper beneath it. “I have seen women like you before. Girls who come into a house with empty hands and hungry eyes, thinking they can remake it in their own image. You will find Braemore is not so easily bent.”

“I have no wish to bend it,” Iona said. “Only to know it.”

Elspeth’s gaze held hers for a long moment. Then the older woman smiled, and it was not a pleasant expression.

“Know this, then,” Elspeth said softly. “There are things in this house that have been buried for longer than you have been alive. Some of them are yours to discover. Some of them are not. And some of them will destroy whoever digs them up.”

She turned and walked out, leaving Iona alone in the dim room with the ledgers and the weight of that warning pressing down on her chest.

Iona waited until Elspeth’s footsteps had faded completely before she pulled the paper from her bodice and looked at the figures she had copied. D. MacAllister. The dates. The amounts.

She thought of Gregor’s voice in the dark. *The raid was staged to blame the Campbells.* She thought of her father’s evasions, his hinted secrets. She thought of Morag, and the fear in the old woman’s eyes when Iona had asked the wrong questions.

And she thought of her mother, dead too young, leaving behind only questions and a brooch that did not belong to her.

Iona folded the paper and tucked it back into the bodice, close to her skin. Lachlan would be gone for weeks. She had time.

But she had already learned one thing Elspeth had not intended to teach her.

If the Campbells were making quiet payments to an unknown party, then they were not as solvent as they pretended. And if the Campbells were in debt, then the marriage that had been meant to save Braemore might be built on sand.

Which meant someone else was holding the strings.

And whoever it was, they had been pulling them long before she arrived.

She left the accounts room and walked back through the silent corridors of Braemore, the paper warm against her skin, and she did not feel like a bride at all.

She felt like a spy.