The Lady's Guide toCalculated Ruin

The appointment card said half past two. It was now a quarter to three, which Theodora Thornbury noted without displeasure—she had learned to distinguish between the lateness of a man who wished to establish advantage and the lateness of a man who was genuinely uncertain whether to come at all. The Earl of Briarcliffe, from what little she had been able to determine in the forty-eight hours since his card arrived, was probably the second kind.

She was reviewing her ledger when Mossop showed him in. She did not close the book.

He managed her name with deliberate understatement. “Miss Thornbury.” Not the Miss Thornbury, not the theatrical pause that some of her clients could not resist. Simply her name, plainly spoken, as though he were not standing in a room most of his acquaintance would have found difficult to explain.

“Lord Briarcliffe.” She gestured to the chair. “You have the inconvenient kind, I take it.”

He settled himself with the unhurried ease of a man accustomed to rooms arranging themselves around him. “I beg your pardon?”

“Of problem,” she said. “There are two kinds. The kind a person knows they have, and the kind a person suspects they have but cannot yet prove. You have been sitting in that chair for thirty seconds and you have already looked at my ledger, the card index, and the mechanism on the corner of my desk. You are trying to determine whether I am competent. That suggests you already know the answer will matter.”

The Earl of Briarcliffe looked at her for a moment with something she might have called respect, if she had been less careful with her assessments. “You have better arithmetic than reputation,” he said.

“My reputation is managed by other people.” She opened her ledger to a fresh page, uncapped her pen, and wrote the date at the top in her small, even hand. “I have a policy about rakes, Lord Briarcliffe. Not a prohibition—I am not sentimental about categories—but a caution. The kind of trouble that follows a man of your particular history tends to require a great deal of ancillary work that does not appear in the original estimate.” She looked up. “Tell me about the letters.”

He told her. It took the better part of twenty minutes. She did not interrupt. When he finished, she set down her pen, regarded what she had written, and allowed herself one moment to consider whether she wished to be sensible. She wrote his name at the top of the page. She had a column in this ledger that she kept for complications. She wrote it there instead.