"Teach Her Nothing Useful," Her Governess Was Told—The Duke Found Her Reading Greek

"Teach Her Nothing Useful," Her Governess Was Told—The Duke Found Her Reading Greek Brianna Dallimore has lived at Colverton Park since she was seven years old, a ward with no voice and no future, managed by a trustee who decided long ago exactly how much she was allowed to know. The letter he wrote to her governess was clear: teach her nothing useful. No Latin. No Greek. No higher mathematics. Nothing that would let her read a legal document or question an account. She found that letter when she was eleven. She taught herself Greek by the time she was twelve. When the new Duke of Colverton arrives to claim his inheritance, he walks into the library one morning and finds her reading Homer in the original. He does not laugh. He does not dismiss her. He asks which book. And then he asks for her help, because the estate accounts do not add up, and the original documents are in Latin, and the only person in the house who can read them is the woman everyone was told had no education at all. What they uncover together, line by line and ledger by ledger, is fourteen years of careful fraud, small adjustments that hid a fortune stolen not only from the estate but from her own inheritance. The man who kept her ignorant did so because he was afraid of exactly this. He was right to be afraid.