Читать книгу The Deserted Bride - Paula Marshall - Страница 10

Be damned to it! Drew had spent the whole afternoon with his wife and her Council, he and his Comptrollers examining books, papers and accounts, and at the end of it none of them could discover anything untoward with which she and they might be reproached. On the contrary, it appeared that Atherington was being more efficiently run than any of Drew’s other estates.

His lawyer and principal man of business, John Masters, had been particularly severe in his questioning, especially over the matter of Sir Braithwaite Hamilton, but he could not shake the men before him. They stoutly maintained that m’lord had been sent all proper and pertinent details of his illness and their response to it, and it was not their fault if matters had gone awry at the other end.

Bess had said little, Drew noted glumly, leaving her advisers to speak for her. She had intervened only on one occasion when Masters had complained that some vital accounts relating to the sinking of new coalpits near Bardon Hill had been lost.

Before Walter Hampden could answer she had said, “Oh, I ordered that a new book should be opened in another name, so that what was going into and out of the pit in terms of money should be clearly distinct from our other affairs. I believe it to be in the small pile before you. It is the new one in the blue cover.”

So it was, and John Masters was left to retreat as gracefully as he could, to his own and Drew’s annoyance. Was there no way in which he could turn the tables on the wench? He had hoped that all the food and drink which she had consumed at the banquet would have made her sleepy, but no such thing.