Romancing the Past

by Darcy Burke

  There was so little of note in the document, it was so bland in its composition, that Julian had skimmed almost to the bottom of the page before he realized what made it extraordinary. Sophie’s trustees, Malcolm Roe and Clive, had made noise about their blamelessness in the loss of Sophie’s funds. The choices that led her to penury, they had insisted, had been in her father Harold Roe’s will.

  Not so.

  The will contained no detailed instructions to the trustees, and no restrictions at all on their behavior. Nothing to prevent the trustees from buying, selling, or transferring the funds they’d been charged to oversee—no yoke forcing them to hold to an unwise course—though it certainly left them plenty of room to borrow, embezzle, and defraud Sophie.

  “Malcolm Roe and Clive stole her inheritance,” Julian said, glancing up at Vasari Jones.

  The secretary nodded.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Julian said, and he was. “But I haven’t a clue how you connect this to Sophie’s desire to marry me.”

  “Because you are the only man who’s never failed her.” Vasari stood and slid the will back over to his side of the desk. “I have come to know her well these last years. She would tell you how ardently Clive supported her, that he acted as patron and substitute father, without giving a thought to what she offered him in return. But the ninth Duke of Clive was…” Jones puckered his lips as he searched for the right word. “Deeply troubled.”

  Jones hesitated. “I should note that I am grateful to His Grace. He was not an even-tempered man, but he treated me with respect and care. He appreciated my work and showed his pleasure by expanding my responsibilities. I have no complaints about him, as an employer. But as a man, as I believe you have guessed, Clive was in the grips of a spiritual anguish that increasingly dominated his moods.”

  Julian nodded, not entirely surprised. He’d assembled some of the clues—Clive’s likely suicide being the most obvious.

  “In all the world, only Miss Roe eased this affliction. She had the knack. I could speculate as to why, but it’s more important to tell you that she had the… motivation, I will say. She believed Clive was the only man never to have disappointed her, and so she would do anything he asked of her.”

  “Ah,” Julian responded, as all came clear.

  “Exactly,” replied Vasari Jones.

  “And so your idea is that I should show her the will.”

  “I will show it to her,” Jones specified. “You will pick up the pieces.”

  Julian winced. Jones didn’t exaggerate; the news would devastate Sophie. Julian opened his mouth to tell his secretary to forget about it, that he’d rather wait until she’d recovered enough from her grief to cope with this new disappointment, but his eyes caught on the fragments of broken vase across the room.

  He’d pushed Sophie too hard the night before. In the process, he’d undone all the progress he’d made. What if he could buy himself some time? If he could stop worrying about winning her hand, he could devote himself to winning her heart. At a gentler pace, with a vastly expanded field of opportunity.

  “Go on, then,” Julian instructed. “Show her the will. Explain the crime.”

  Jones stood up and collected the seemingly innocuous document, preparing to take his leave.

  “I assume you want something in return for this service?” Julian asked.

  A modest but firm smile turned up his lips. “We can discuss that once my scheme has proved successful, Your Grace.”

  §

  Despite the late night, Sophie woke before dawn. She thought about sinking back into her pillow, closing her eyes and drifting back into slumber. Iron & Wine wouldn’t suffer from one lazy morning, not when she’d already brewed so far beyond her requirements.

  The process of formulating an excuse, however, brought her to full wakefulness. She threw off the covers, dressed, and set out as the sun was rising. She arrived on foot at Halftail Road as it crested the mountains, just like any other morning. Max Dawe greeted her dully and Charlotte didn’t even look up as she passed by her workshop. After reviewing her current stock and schedule of orders, she set to work on a pot of blue-black gall ink. Business as usual, she thought, quite content.

  The ink had reached a boil when Vasari Jones arrived, rather comically attired in a plaid cape and matching floppy hat.

  “A moment please.” Sophie shooed at her guest to keep him by the door. Once she’d removed her ink from the heat, she covered the pot, peeled her gloves off, and finally motioned Jones into the room. “Welcome to Iron & Wine, Mr. Jones. It’s been too long. Have you breakfasted? I can send Mr. Dawe to The Raddle Pit for a bit of tea and toast.”

  “I—” Jones tore his attention away from her crowded shelves and squeezed the thin portfolio that he held with both hands. “It’s kind of you to offer, Miss Roe, but I shouldn’t stay for so long. And I’m afraid…” The young man drifted off.

  “Mr. Jones?” Sophie prompted kindly. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  She began clearing space at one of the central tables, shifting tins and scraps of paper to the side, and dragged two mismatched stools to either side of it.

  “We have been friends, have we not?” Mr. Jones asked, climbing onto a stool.

  “I should say so,” Sophie replied, sitting opposite and lacing her hands together atop the wood. “I don’t think His Grace had a truer ally here in Derbyshire.”

  “I would have said the same about you.” Jones blushed. “And—let me add—for as long as I knew him, and worked with him, he did everything in his power to earn your regard. He was a good man.”

  “The very best,” Sophie replied, tightening her hands.

  “Please keep that in mind.” Jones put the portfolio between them on the table. “The ninth Duke of Clive cherished your good opinion. He would not have wished me to share this with you, and I respect his desire to keep his misdeeds private. But circumstances being what they are…”

  Sophie waited.

  “You must read this,” he continued finally, flipping open the portfolio and rotating it to orient the writing to her. “You have a right to know.”

  “To know what?”

  But Vasari Jones only gestured at the portfolio.

  Sophie glanced over the first few lines. “This is my father’s will?”

  “That’s right.” Jones hesitated. “The language may not be readily comprehensible to you. If you need help understanding, I can explain. But I assume… that is, perhaps it’s best if you see for yourself. You might not believe me otherwise.”

  Sophie read, and she did see. Her father named Clive—still plain Mr. Swann in those days, and working as a solicitor—as the executor of her father’s will and Malcolm Roe her guardian. The will designated the pair as trustees, charged to oversee her inheritance.

  The will granted the trustees full power and authority over her money. It listed sweeping rights to sell, mortgage, transfer, or borrow from her property. They could sell and reinvest according to their discretion, without, as far as she could tell, any explanation or justification.

  As they saw fit. And without notifying her.

  They’d claimed that her father’s will had been arbitrarily and foolishly restrictive. That it hadn’t allowed Clive and her uncle, careful shepherds that they’d aimed to be, to avert financial disaster. Their hands had been tied, they’d said.

  “They lied.” She looked up at Vasari, saw naked pity in his hazel eyes. “Both of them?”

  “I did some additional research.” Vasari slid the will to the side to reveal a second document beneath it. “During my time with His Grace, I became intimately acquainted with his affairs. I was his witness when he changed his own will, almost a year ago, when he added you as a beneficiary. Were you not struck by the amount that you inherited?”

  “Exactly the size of my dowry when my parents died. I always knew that he felt responsible…” Sophie’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.

  Vasari Jones nodded. “Because
he was.”

  He felt responsible because he was. Their whole relationship, every tender moment, every expression of faith, had been a lie. Clive’s generosity had never been pure—all along he’d been a debtor and she his creditor, and he’d doled out kindness like interest, deposits in advance of a final payment.

  Sophie scanned the new document that Vasari Jones had revealed. “Mrs. Swann,” she said. Clive the Ninth’s first wife and Honoria’s mother. Born a curate’s daughter, marriage made her a solicitor’s wife. She hadn’t lived long enough to rise to the rank of duchess. “Writing to her husband from Baden-Baden. What’s this to do with anything?”

  “Neither Clive the Ninth nor Mr. Roe admitted to any wrongdoing in their correspondence.” Mr. Jones tapped his chest. “And I have read every letter that the Duke kept. Luckily, I was able to piece together the sequence of events without a confession. Once I knew I’d found myself on the trail of a crime, the rest was easy.

  “After Mrs. Swann gave birth to her daughter—Lady Honoria, though she was Miss Swann then—she began to suffer very poor health. Clive reduced himself to penury seeking treatments for his wife, sending her to recuperate first in Bath and thence south onto the Continent, to sites renowned for their clean air or natural thermal springs.”

  “That’s right.” Sophie nodded. “I never met Mrs. Swann. She was always abroad.”

  “For almost a decade,” Jones agreed. He rubbed at his temple. “Lady Honoria was born in 1821. By the time your parents died in 1823, our Clive had already bought himself a world of trouble. He went to debtor’s prison for a short while in 1825 and only narrowly dodged repeat visits in the years leading up to 1828, when he suddenly discharged all of his debts. In full.”

  Discharged all of his debts. Primed by Jones’s presentation of her father’s will, Sophie didn’t need to ask how Clive had accomplished such a dramatic turnaround. She’d been seventeen in 1828. Drunk on Julian’s love for her, on the love she felt for him in return. She closed her eyes, aching. Even her happiest days had been spent floating on a flimsy raft over a sea of misfortune.

  “From 1828 onward, Clive took out no further loans, though his expenditures increased. He kept letters from Mrs. Swann bearing the letterhead of spas in Switzerland, Italy, and Baden-Baden over the next two years. She died in 1830, only two months before her husband inherited the title Duke of Clive.”

  “Clive stole my dowry,” Sophie said. Speaking the words aloud felt reassuringly… wrong. False to her ears. She tried it again. “Clive betrayed me.” He couldn’t have. She knew him. “In order to fund his wife’s health treatments at European spas?”

  But there… ah, there. That felt true. A snarl of childish fury welled up in Sophie’s chest. She’d trusted him. Her father had trusted him. And he’d betrayed them both.

  “Correct. Though he did not act alone.” Jones slid the letter from Mrs. Swann to the side, stacking it neatly atop her father’s will, revealing yet another letter.

  This time, Sophie recognized her uncle’s handwriting.

  “The will named two trustees to deter exactly the sort of fraud that impoverished you,” Jones continued. “All changes to your finances required your guardian and your trustee to approve. Clive and Mr. Roe were meant to act as checks on one another, each guaranteeing the other’s honesty.”

  Sophie swallowed to hold back the bitterness in her voice. “My uncle permitted the theft?”

  “I believe he instigated it,” corrected Jones. “Your father, the eldest son, inherited the bulk of his parents’ wealth—all of which, in turn, he passed on to you. When Malcolm Roe found himself in the position of guardian, he saw it as an opportunity to rectify what he believed to be a great injustice.”

  Vasari gestured to the letter and Sophie leaned forward obediently. The date at the top read 1824, only a year after her parents’ deaths. Sophie would have been thirteen. The bulk of the sheet in front of her was a list, enumerating the costs of keeping her—everything from food and clothing to the tutors she’d shared with Bettina and a portion of the winter coal.

  “But this is no crime.” Sophie looked up, a little hopeful. She and her uncle didn’t get on well, but he’d always struck her as a just man. Stern, yes, but he treated her fairly, by his own lights. “My uncle had every right to draw from my inheritance to cover the cost of keeping me. And why shouldn’t he have done? I never wished to be a burden.”

  “But tell me, Miss Roe.” Vasari shifted the top letter to reveal a second in Malcolm’s hand, dated 1824. “How many horses did he keep for your exclusive use?”

  “None,” Sophie replied. The letter included two among her expenses.

  “And hats—did you buy them by the dozen?” Another shift revealed a letter from 1825 demanding funds to pay for extravagant hats she’d never owned. “Did you ever take lessons in Italian?”

  “Only French,” Sophie whispered, looking at another letter from 1826 that detailed the financial outlay necessary to retain a Florentine tutor.

  “Starting in 1827, there is a gap in the record,” Vasari continued. “The absence itself is remarkable. Up until this break in the record, the ninth Duke of Clive and your uncle corresponded daily. They were the warmest of friends.”

  “So there’s no evidence that they stole from me,” Sophie said. “No proof.”

  “My aim is to show you the truth,” Vasari replied. “These artifacts that I’ve collected should be more than sufficient to convince you. I have not—I would not—aid you in an attempt to make this information public, or blacken what little remains of His Grace’s good name.”

  Sophie let out a breath of laughter. “Then why tell me? Have you come to break my heart?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Jones said. “First, allow me to finish my conjecture. Malcolm Roe came up with the idea of siphoning away your wealth for his own purposes early on. I believe that when he realized the extent of Clive’s need, Mr. Roe proposed the solution. But that is my conjecture.

  “And your uncle—considering his state of constant shortage, always griping at Clive for an extra fifty or one hundred pounds in a quarter, how do you think he dowered his daughter?”

  Sophie blinked. “Bettina’s dowry—”

  “Is all that’s left of yours,” Jones confirmed.

  “My God,” Sophie whispered.

  “Now, your question, Miss Roe.” Vasari stacked his papers, tapped them against the rough wood table to even out the edges, and shut them into his leather portfolio. “In order to answer, I need to explain two things. First, you must know why I kept Clive’s secret for so long—how I could aid him and preserve him, though I knew he’d committed a crime.”

  “Yes,” Sophie said, eyes widening as she fixed them on Vasari Jones’s solemn, open face. “How?”

  “Because he stole from me as well.” Jones pulled a gold watch from the pocket of his trousers and unclipped it from its fob. He clicked open the lid and set it down on the closed portfolio. Sophie reached out to handle it. The watch was heavy gold, the exterior finely etched, the interior of the cap engraved with a pair of initials and a date.

  “A gift from my mother to my father on their wedding day,” Jones explained. “I first met Mr. Swann in the early twenties, when things were starting to get desperate for him. He was my direct superior; I was one of his clerks. It was not bad work, but I’ll tell you plainly that watch was the only truly fine thing I owned. Well—I also had a fine Sunday suit that I kept in pawn half the time, spending a sliver of my wages to claim it on Saturdays so I could wear it to church the next day and, more often than not, I’d have the suit back at the broker by afternoon on Sunday so I could buy bread and dripping for supper.”

  Sophie listened silently.

  “Clive stole my watch.” Jones met her eyes, letting her know just how devastating the loss had been. “What’s more, I knew he’d done it. Nobody else had the opportunity, and his demeanor changed toward me. You’d recognize the way he swung between resentment and almost c
loying kindness; it became the pattern of his later years. But I was a clerk at his firm, and if I spoke out against him I knew I’d be dismissed without a reference. So I kept quiet.”

  And yet he’d reclaimed the watch. Sophie gestured for him to continue.

  “After he inherited the title, Clive resigned his position. I never expected to hear from him again. But, only a few months after he left, a courier delivered this to me—the exact watch, as you can see. He sent it along with an offer of employment. A promotion of a kind I wouldn’t have dreamed of, superior in all ways to my job as a clerk.

  “I hesitated to take it. I’d hated him silently for years; the mere sight of him had grown repulsive to me. Still, at his request and with a rather convincing advance of funds, I agreed to an interview. Clive admitted that he’d taken the watch, that he’d sold it. He said he’d done many things that he regretted, but that after the death of his first wife and the windfall of a dukedom reversed his life twice in quick succession, he’d promised God to make adequate restitution for every one of his crimes. He told me that as his secretary, one of my tasks would be to aid him in his efforts. I accepted.”

  “And you forgave him?”

  “Eventually, I grew to love him,” Jones answered. “His guilt tormented him more than any punishment I would have administered, even in my bitterest moments.”

  “And he told you all about what he’d done to me?” Sophie pressed. “About stealing my inheritance?”

  “No.” Jones reattached the watch to its fob. “That is, he admitted his own role in the theft. He never attempted to explain how it had come about, nor did he implicate Malcolm Roe to me. That is the product of my own investigations.”

  Sophie watched Vasari Jones slip the watch back into its pocket.

  “It’s because of those investigations that I’ve decided to tell you what happened,” Jones continued. “Not, as you appear to suspect, to cause you any further grief. Clive was sensitive to shame and condemnation. He hoped you would never learn what role he’d played in your misfortune. He valued your high opinion too much.”