"Find Her a Husband No One Wants," Her Father Wrote—The Duke Intercepted the Letter

"Find Her a Husband No One Wants," Her Father Wrote—The Duke Intercepted the Letter Carenza Oldfield keeps the books for a household that has decided she is a debt to be settled. For four years she has balanced the ledgers of Pencreek House without pay, housed and fed and reminded daily of how fortunate she is to be either. Her uncle by marriage, the soft and agreeable Mr. Pickering, calls her a burden at every dinner, kindly, with a smile. She believes she is a charity. She believes she has no portion and no choice. She is wrong about both. Then Pickering writes a letter to a matchmaker ordering her married off to any man who will take her, quickly, before she can object. The letter never arrives. A careless courier misdirects it to Welbourne Abbey, where the Duke of Welbourne, a man who has spent eight years exposing quiet thefts, breaks the seal by accident and reads an instruction that makes him angrier than any letter in his life. What neither man knows is that Carenza has been recording the proof of her own robbery in her own hand, never realizing it was a weapon. As a dry solicitor traces a hidden settlement and a public dinner approaches, the witness her uncle tried to remove prepares to speak. Quietly. Levelly. With every figure exact.