Awakening Love: Reborn to Be His Duchess novel · Chapter 5 of 32
Chapter 5: The Steward's List
On my fifth morning at Wexmoor I came down to breakfast and found the whole household lined up along the dining room wall.
Forty servants stood in rows in their best black, and the steward stood in front of them with his hands folded over his waistcoat.
The duke sat at the head of the table with a cup of coffee he had not touched.
Maud sat at his right with a plate of kippers and an expression of enormous satisfaction.
"Linnet," she said. "Do sit. We are about to be entertained."
I sat.
The night before, I had written one page in the green diary.
I had written it with Wynne standing behind me, and I had made it sound like a girl's careless gossip.
It said the duke kept his private ledger for the army purse in the red cabinet in the library, and that I had seen the key in his waistcoat pocket.
It said no one else in the house knew.
I had left the diary on the library table, with a single hair laid across the clasp.
At dawn Wynne had gone to look.
The hair was gone.
"Steward," said the duke, not loudly.
The steward bowed.
"Your Grace?"
"Last night, between eleven and one, who went into the library?"
"No one, Your Grace. I locked it myself."
"With which key?"
"The master key, Your Grace."
"And where is the master key now?"
The steward touched his waistcoat pocket without meaning to.
I watched his hand go there, and I watched the duke watch it.
"The red cabinet was opened last night," the duke said. "Nothing is missing from it, because there was nothing in it but old receipts. It is a very ordinary cabinet. I keep nothing there."
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