Mr. Fairclough's Inherited Bride

by Georgie Lee

  * * *

  Silas laid his cheek on the top of Mary’s head as he gently rocked her, her pain his. Her family hadn’t forgiven her for her transgression, neither had his mother forgiven his given the tension over the last two days, but she and his sisters hadn’t cut him from their lives either, even if they’d had every right to after the way he’d slunk away. He’d been able to return home and, if he trod carefully around his mother, he might find some kind of reconciliation. Mary wasn’t likely to have a chance at either. ‘Don’t worry, Mary. All will be well. I promise.’

  She leaned back in his arms to look at him. ‘How can you always be so sure?’

  ‘Because I refuse to allow it to be any other way.’ He cupped her face with his hands, amazed how in so short a time her life had become so deeply interwoven with his, that she should mean as much to him as the people residing in this house and that he should crave her happiness and safety as much as he did theirs. It pained him to see her hurt and suffer the way he had. She didn’t deserve it and he would do everything he could to banish it, to make her happy and to hold her through these heartaches. They were husband and wife, for better or for worse.

  He touched his lips to hers, a tender kiss not of passion but of the warmth and growing affection. He was a part of her life and she his and together they would muddle their way through these heartaches and make better, happier memories, and a family of their own.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Slowly, I don’t want you to twist an ankle in the dark.’ Silas held tight to Mary’s hand as they tiptoed through the hallways of the Fairclough house and into the Foundation building next door. They’d spent their time after dinner together whiling away the hours until the noises outside had quieted and the light beneath his mother’s door had finally gone out.

  Together they crept through the Foundation’s dark hallways, pausing now and again whenever they thought they heard footsteps overhead, but there were no sounds except a cat crying on the street outside. Everyone was asleep and Silas prayed Mr Edwards was, too. His heart pounded as fiercely as it had when he’d climbed aboard the ship in Liverpool, aware that once they cast off, he couldn’t change his mind and turn back. If anyone caught him and Mary here, he had no good explanation for why they were skulking about, at least not one his mother would believe. She’d be disappointed in him once again.

  ‘Not much further. It’s just there at the end of the hall,’ Silas whispered, trying to hold back the laugh of nervousness gripping them both. They were adults sneaking through the house like a couple of wayward children making for the kitchen to steal a tart. Except if Silas was caught, the distance between him and his mother would grow wider than he feared it already was. She’d asked him not to pry into the Foundation books and he was going behind her back and ignoring her dictates. It was almost enough to make him demand that they turned around, but he continued leading Mary down the hall. He was doing this for his mother and the Foundation. Even if she couldn’t see it, it was the truth.

  ‘Here we are.’ He pushed open the door and waved Mary inside. Silas followed her, carefully closing the door behind him so as not to make any noise.

  ‘Where should we begin?’ Mary whispered as Silas lit the lamp and turned it up as little as he dared while still allowing them to see. If anyone came down the hall, they’d notice the light under the door and they would be caught.

  ‘Let’s see what he keeps in this office. Look for any of my letters or bank drafts, anything that might be out of the ordinary, but make sure you don’t disturb too much. I don’t want him to notice anything amiss.’

  He and Mary picked through the letters, papers and correspondence on the desk and in the drawers, careful not to leave it all out of sorts. They found nothing.

  ‘Now what?’ Mary asked.

  ‘The ledgers.’ Silas sat at the desk and flipped open the book, aware that only this month and last month’s were in the office. Who knew where the manager kept the others? Silas hoped that if there was any evidence to be found, it was here or that Mr Edwards hadn’t taken advantage of Silas’s delay to erase it.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Mary leaned over his shoulder, the lavender scent of her enticing in the tight confines of the room. He’d rather be with her upstairs in his bed than here, but this had to be done, even if guilt plagued him while he did it. Despite his earlier protests, he was accusing a potentially innocent man of misdeeds.

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’ve seen enough books in my time to recognise discrepancies.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘Sit by the door and listen in case anyone is up so we can douse the lamp as quickly as possible.’

  Mary sat in the slender chair beside the door, diligent in her guard duties while Silas studied the ledger. Page after page he reviewed the figures, waiting for something to reveal itself even if he wasn’t sure what it might be.

  It felt like hours went by before he closed the current ledger and reached for last month’s. Beside him on the desk, the lamp flame flickered, the oil inside the well running low. Silas hoped there was enough left for it to burn until at least before sunrise even if sunrise seemed like ages away, though it could be minutes, he couldn’t tell. The night had stretched on far longer than he’d imagined a night could, except the one his father had died. Time had almost stood still then, but the grief that had haunted him in that darkness hung over his shoulder like the chill in the house. This was what his father had always hoped he would do, what his parents had expected of him, what he’d failed to do until a crisis had forced him back to it.

  ‘The oil in the lamp is almost gone.’ Mary’s quiet voice broke the still. ‘You can’t work in the dark.’

  ‘I know.’ Silas set down his pencil and sat up, rubbing the stiffness out of his back, but he made no move to refill the lamp, almost praying it would go out and end this night of clandestine work. He was no closer to finding any answers about the missing money or giving himself a legitimate reason for defying his mother and risking more of her disappointment. There was nothing out of sorts with the ledger entries, no hint that his money had been here before it’d been squirrelled away to somewhere else, its existence hidden in an improperly added sum or an erased figure or some outlandish grocer bill that had been forged. Either Silas had failed to notice any suspicious entries or there were none to be found.

  Without being asked, Mary lit a candle and placed it beside the oil lamp, then blew out the wick, casting the small office into a darkness broken only by the orange flicker of the flame. She slid off the hurricane glass with a delicate grip, her movements fluid, easy, untouched by the tension inside Silas. Then she refilled the lamp, the oil smell a harsh contrast to her fresh scent. With the scrape of the thin glass against its metal base, she replaced the glass and lit the wick. Light filled the room again and she set the lamp on the desk.

  ‘Thank you.’ He wasn’t sure he should. He appreciated her gentle care, but not the harshness of the light or the figures in front of him. He used to work on these books with Septimus while longing to escape the grind of it and here he was sneaking in to do it again. The irony was not lost on him.

  ‘Anything?’ Mary whispered when Silas finally reached the last page of the last ledger, then closed it.

  ‘Nothing. It all appears in order. My mother was right.’ He shouldn’t have questioned her or been so quick to spark what could have been a nasty argument, the kind that would have made everything that his quick departure from England years ago had already made even worse.

  She laid her hands on his shoulders and rubbed out the stiffness that had settled there. ‘Be glad it isn’t Mr Edwards. There’ll be a great deal less trouble between you and your mother because of it.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He laid his hands over the tops of hers. ‘I suppose I was looking for the easy answer.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ll learn something when you visit the bank
today.’

  ‘I hope so. I don’t want to fail my mother and the Foundation again.’

  Mary knelt before him and rested her hands on his knees. ‘You aren’t a failure, you never have been, but a man who strives and carries on in the face of whatever difficulties he’s facing.’

  Silas caressed her face, bolstered by her faith in him. He would meet this new challenge as he had all the ones before and he would prevail. He had to or his conscience would burden him even more than it already did.

  * * *

  ‘Sir, all of the bank drafts were cashed,’ Mr Perkins, the slender bank manager with the slicked-back brown hair, told Silas from across the mahogany desk in his office. Outside, the sounds of shuffling shoes and the murmur of conversation as people deposited and withdrew fund from their accounts filled the air. Silas fought his exhaustion from the night spent perusing the Foundation books with Mary to concentrate on what the man had said.

  ‘That can’t be. My family never received any of the money I sent,’ Silas insisted, irritated at arriving at what appeared to be another frustratingly dead end. ‘Who cashed them?’

  The manager opened the leather folio in front of him and flipped through the stack of papers inside before selecting one and laying it on top and then turning the folder around so Silas could read it. There in black and white were the cashed bank drafts, all of them signed by Tom Smith on behalf of the Foundation.

  ‘No one by this name was authorised to cash those drafts.’

  ‘According to this letter, he is.’ The clerk showed him a letter with Silas’s signature at the bottom authorising this Tom, whoever he was, to collect the funds on behalf of the Foundation. He leaned back in his chair as if to say the matter was resolved and no longer his concern.

  Silas read the letter written in a hand he didn’t recognise, but there at the bottom was his signature. It wasn’t unusual for him to dictate letters to Mr Hachman and then sign them, but he had never asked for or sent this one and this was not written in Mr Hachman’s hand.

  ‘This is a forgery.’

  ‘How can you be certain, Mr Fairclough? Perhaps, given the time it takes for letters to reach England, it was simply overlooked or forgotten.’

  ‘I know it is forgery because I gave instructions to this bank that a letter from me and my English solicitor is required for any changes to the management of the money. Given my residence in America, it’s meant as a safeguard against exactly this kind of situation.’ Silas rasped his knuckles against the desk, furious that the protocol he’d established to prevent something like this had been ignored. If he’d been here in England, it wouldn’t have been necessary, but he wouldn’t have had the money to make this account and the personalised attention he was receiving from the bank manager either. ‘When Septimus Clark retired, you received the double correspondence allowing the new manager to cash the drafts. Why wasn’t it done this time?’

  The manager flipped through the folio, Silas guessed, in search of the letter from the solicitor but, as expected, there was none. ‘Unless this forger was clever enough to create two letters, you will not find the authorising letter from my solicitor.’

  ‘No, it does not appear to be here,’ the manager mumbled, his confidence in his institution and his doubts about Silas’s claim of the bank mishandling his account gone. The manager’s face went red and he assumed a much more conciliatory posture than when Silas had first began discussing the issue with him. ‘I apologise, sir, but in the last few months we have merged with another institution and I’m sorry to say that this isn’t the first mistake we’ve caught as clerks familiar with some accounts have been let go and new ones hired. I’m afraid your account and the instructions pertaining to it were caught in the confusion and failed to come to our attention in a timely manner.’

  There was no accusation in the man’s profuse apology and explanation, but Silas couldn’t help but hear one. Silas hadn’t been here to notice trouble or to stop it before it had threatened to put the Foundation and his family at risk. All he could do was try to clean up the mess his absence had helped create and even in this he was barely succeeding. ‘I wish to speak to the clerk who regularly processed these transactions. I want to know what the man who did this looks like.’ It was the only lead Silas had as to the forger’s identity.

  ‘I’m afraid that clerk is on holiday, but he’s set to return soon. Once he does, we’ll pay you a visit to discuss the matter further. In the meantime, I’ll do all I can to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. We value your faith in us and your business and we would hate to have it ruined by this unfortunate matter.’

  Silas’s faith in this bank was already gone and he would find a new institution to handle his English affairs once the forger was found. However, for the moment he merely offered the manager his thanks. If Silas announced that he was going to move the account, the manager might wash his hands of the matter quicker than he’d been about to do until he’d realised his bank’s role in this incident, then Silas would never get a good description of the man who’d forged his signature or recover the missing funds.

  * * *

  Silas watched the train engine roar through the London and Greenwich Railway station near London Bridge, the rush of wind against him offering a momentary relief from the barrage of thoughts tumbling through his mind. It’d been years since he’d last sat here, when this had been the only place in London where he’d been able to find any kind of calm. It was Mary by his side, her small hand pressed into his, that brought him the most comfort tonight.

  ‘It has to be someone familiar with the family, the signature on the letter was an exact copy of mine. Also, all the letters I’ve sent home that would’ve alerted people to the fact that the money was being stolen have gone missing, too, and I received none of their letters to me. It must be someone in the Foundation who had access to our correspondence.’

  ‘After all your mother has done for them, how could anyone there betray her like this?’

  ‘One or two in the past have repaid our generosity by betraying our trust, but it was usually obvious fairly soon or they did not stay around long enough to do this kind of damage.’

  ‘Maybe your mother will have an inkling of who might be involved?’

  Silas titled his head back in frustration, anticipating the hundred more problems emerging from this little twist. ‘If I ask my mother about the women, she’ll think I’m second-guessing her judgement or throwing scorn on women who’ve received enough for a lifetime, especially if I’m wrong about their involvement with the forger.’

  He touched his signet ring, practically able to hear his father reminding him that he hadn’t been raised to look down on fallen women and that his time grasping after money had made him suspicious of some of the most vulnerable people. His father was no longer here to say those words, but his mother was and he refused to hear them for the second time. The sound of them after he’d spoken to Mr Edwards about the ledgers had been enough.

  ‘Then wait until the clerk returns and provides a description. It’ll give you more evidence and, in the end, maybe you won’t have to question her.’

  ‘I don’t like sitting still when there’s something to be done.’

  ‘You must until you have more evidence or it might make things worse.’

  ‘I know.’ He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pressed a kiss to her temple. She smelled of rosewater perfume and the faint soot of passing trains. The burning coal from the smokestacks left small flecks of ash on the thick pelisse she wore over her fine dress. He didn’t want his wife sitting in the grime of the city, but in the splendour and grace to which she’d been born and to which her marriage to him had raised her again, but he’d needed to come here, away from the Foundation, to think. ‘Let’s be off. A little shopping, perhaps, a new pair of gloves or a fine fan for you to carry to Millie’s wedding celebration. I want you to turn every
head and make every woman jealous of you. I also want you to work on Millie about coming to America, give her a woman’s view of it while I convince the Marquess to make the journey. I don’t know what kind of man he is, but if Millie married him, he can’t be all bad. He could add a great deal of aristocratic glamour to the Baltimore Southern.’

  He tugged Mary off the bench, ready to lead her to the somewhat cleaner air of Jermyn Street. He wanted them both to return to America more polished than when they’d left and for Mary to set the fashion in Baltimore instead of following it. Silas was stunned when Mary pulled out of his grip and he turned to face her, baffled by the sight of her hands balled in fists at her sides and the hard set of her lips.

  ‘You’ll have to win over the Marquess and your sister without me. I can’t go to the ball.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course you can go.’

  * * *

  ‘I can’t and I won’t.’ Mary hated how the fear undermined her. She should be there helping Silas the way she’d promised to do when she’d become his wife, when she’d sold herself to him as a solid investment worthy of his name and his future, but she couldn’t. Her past made it impossible. ‘I don’t know who might be there and what they might say to either me, society or your sister if they see me.’

  ‘I don’t care what they say. They mean nothing to us.’

  ‘They mean something to your sister and to the Foundation. If word of my being in England and my now-intimate connection to the Foundation gets around, then the donors your mother relies on to fund her work might abandon her. I refuse to create more need simply to peacock in front of people who won’t care what I am wearing or that I’m married because I’m already tarnished goods in their eyes.’