The clerk gulped and jumped up from his seat. “Now see here… You can’t… You can’t just…”
“Can’t just what?” Darius reached into his coat pocket and withdrew his purse with a shake of coins for good measure. “How much would it cost me to see that record?”
The clerk drew himself up, standing tall and offended, and answered, “This is highly improper. What you are proposing is illegal and…and immoral.”
“We’re not committing any crimes,” Darius pointed out. “Merely expediting proceedings to save time. The duke and his daughter need us back at the estate immediately.”
“Is there something wrong with the duke?”
“Not today but who knows what the future holds?”
The clerk relaxed as he eyed both Darius and Marcus up and down, his nervous demeanour falling away just as fast as it had appeared. “How much?”
“Five pounds to see the record, fifty to let it walk out of this office.”
“And if I say no?” His bravado may have been an act but Darius let him have this one ounce of his pride.
“I’ll have my man take it by force but it won’t be pretty. He does like to make a mess.”
With a hasty nod and a sideways glance for Marcus, the clerk took a ring of keys from his pocket and beckoned for the two men to follow him into another office. “I’ll lose more than my position if this gets out,” he muttered.
“If you tell anyone we were here, I’ll kill you and save you the embarrassment.”
The clerk stopped rifling through a cabinet and turned back with genuine fear in his eyes. He saw that Darius was indeed serious and searched for the paperwork with renewed purpose. Marcus shook his head. Darius shrugged. He knew he might not emerge from this act of revenge with clean hands and would do what was necessary. He would be happy to stop at issuing threats. Of course, he also knew the clerk wouldn’t stay silent forever. They only needed a few weeks.
When the young man turned and gave him a thick envelope, Darius ripped it open and began to scan the pages.
“You should leave now,” the clerk warned them. “We won’t be alone for long.”
“Has anyone except Mr Westrill viewed this?” Darius asked.
“Perhaps a spouse or executor? A guardian? I couldn’t know.”
“Thank you.” Darius dropped the entire purse into the man’s hands. He’d known his bribe was lucrative and wouldn’t be turned down because it wasn’t enough. The clerk probably couldn’t make that much money in five years. Maybe ten. It wasn’t worth a working man’s pride to starve.
Darius and Marcus wasted no time as they hailed a hack and gave the direction of an out-of-the-way lodging house where they’d rented rooms for a few nights. The rain bucketed down, which gave a good excuse to pull coat collars higher and pull hat brims lower.
“What does it say?” Marcus asked once they were under way, shaking water droplets from his sleeves.
Darius was still scanning the documents and swore viciously. “It says the Duke of Penfold is a horse’s ass.”
“Was,” Marcus corrected him. “He was a horse’s ass.”
“He hasn’t updated this bloody thing since ’06. He’s named his neighbour, the Earl of Wickham, as the children’s guardian but hasn’t specified the man by name. That makes the current earl their legal guardian. Shit.” It was worse than he thought. Penfold had organised everything else except for this one thing. It meant he had to marry Eliza by the special licence before the death of the duke was discovered and the will read or Wickham would have complete control.
“Bad luck, that is.”
“It gets worse,” Darius muttered as he kept scanning the words as they blurred before his eyes. “Seems Eliza is to be settled with a rather large dowry, untouchable by the Duke of Penfold or his sons. A portion for Eliza and two more for the other two girls upon their marriages. Monies that came with their mother from her own dowry.”
“Lucky lass.”
“Not if Wickham finds out. He only has to trap Eliza with Harold and the two will be forced into marriage after all and they get the dowry to use on loose women and bad cards.”
“Then your problems are half over. Wickham can pay you from the dowry and we can repair our ship.”
“We won’t see a farthing of it, make no mistake. He’d gamble it all away and then as the Penfolds’ guardian, he will have power over the estate. It won’t be difficult to embezzle funds or arrange marriages for the other girls to pay some of his debts and then repay the others at a later date when they are old enough to speak their vows, perhaps before.”
“Repay them with what?” Marcus laughed. “Even if he can cover his debts now, he’ll never stop. That man has the disease and he has it bad.”
They’d seen it in America, how a man can get a fever for the cards and the win but then when he starts to lose… Well, it always ends nasty. His sire spent all his waking time in his clubs and hells. His wife had likely expired from loneliness by all accounts from the servants. She didn’t last more than a year after Harold’s birth, never being of robust health even before her confinement. She’d been nothing more than a trophy and swollen dowry for the heir to the earldom.
Her money had lasted him well enough though and when Darius’s grandfather died, Wickham turned to the estate funds. One would think Harold would have put a stop to it but the son liked the turn of the cards perhaps more than his father.
Pound by pound, property by property, the two idiot men had lost nearly everything. It was amazing how badly both his brother and his sire played. It took intelligence, cunning and a little recklessness to gamble and win. Harold and Wickham had only recklessness in their repertoires. Darius was grateful for their blind stupidity.
Now the wolves were at his sire’s door and Wickham
