The Vampire Duke’s Daylight Secret

The bailiff had put his hat on the parish register.

Beatrice moved it to the floor. She did so carefully, because the felt was damp and the register's leather had already suffered one winter against a leaking wall. Then she drew a line through the number he had chalked on its spine.

“That isn't yours to mark.”

Mr. Pell looked up from the writing table. His cuffs were cleaner than anything left in Fenwick House. “Miss Fenwick, ownership is precisely what we have come to establish.”

“Then begin by reading the inventory I gave you.”

Outside the library windows, the rain had flattened the roses against their supports. It was the second of June, and the kitchen fire had gone out because Beatrice had declined to buy coal while there was fallen timber to collect. She had been making that sort of decision for three weeks. At twenty-nine she knew how to repair a split vellum fold, locate a misfiled tithe receipt, and live on an archivist's salary. Her father's death had supplied a house, a funeral bill, and more creditors than cupboards. Losing her salaried post when the provincial repository closed had completed the arrangement.

The bailiff bent to recover his hat. “I have a schedule, miss.”

“You have Mr. Pell's schedule. These six volumes belong to three parishes. My father borrowed them for an index.”

Pell rested his pen across the inkstand. “A deceased gentleman's daughter naturally wishes to preserve his reputation. Nevertheless, there is no parish mark on the covers.”

There had been. Her father had paid a binder to scrape the old titles and put matching brown leather on the books. Beatrice had found the binder's bill yesterday, between an unpaid account for candles and an invitation to a dinner nobody could now afford to remember.

“The covers aren't the evidence.” She opened the first register on a folded towel. “Mr. Harrow, will you look here?”

The bailiff approached reluctantly. He smelled of wet wool and the onion he had eaten on his way in. Beatrice slipped a thin bone folder beneath the front pastedown without lifting it.

“This tab was sewn with the first gathering. You can see the same thread passing through both. The accession date is on the underside.”

Harrow lowered his head. “St. Anne's. Seventeen ninety-four.”

“And the return condition?”

He squinted. She wanted to take the book away and read it herself. Instead she moved the candle closer, keeping the flame well clear of the page.

“Upon completion of the Fenwick index,” he read.

Pell stood. “An old strip of parchment could have been inserted at any time.”

“Yes. A loose one could.” Beatrice pointed to the holes. “Inserting this would require unsewing the gathering. Here is my repair record from February, before my father died. It describes the tab and the broken third stitch. The parish clerk countersigned when he brought the loose burial sheet.”

She took the record from her apron pocket. The lower corner had softened from being carried against her body all morning, but the clerk's signature remained legible.

Harrow compared the stitch with her drawing. “I'll except this volume.”

“All six have tabs. Please inspect all six.”

It took twenty minutes. Pell drummed two fingers on the table until Beatrice put a piece of blotting paper under them, protecting a water-damaged map. He stopped. Harrow checked each tab, wrote the names of the lawful owners beside the struck-out entries, and finally signed the exceptions.

Beatrice had won six books she did not own. The rest of the room remained on the schedule.

“The removal cart is due at two,” Harrow said.

“Tomorrow's auction is at the neighboring orangery. Why move everything twice?”

“Because,” Pell answered, “possession prevents unfortunate losses.”

“You mean you expect me to steal my own chairs.”

“I mean that the estate owes ninety pounds on this instrument, and your father's effects secure it.”

He pushed the paper toward her. She had read it so often that the figures had acquired the shape of a landscape: the ninety-pound principal, the pledge, the default date. Still she checked the seal and the endorsement. Her father had signed in his broad, confident hand. He had never written a ninety as though it might be difficult to find.

Beatrice possessed four pounds. She had counted them before breakfast, then counted them again with less hope and the same result.

“I can't redeem it today,” she said.

Pell's expression softened into something he probably offered widows. “You needn't make this disagreeable.”

She laid the instrument flat. “I can make the removal orderly. These shelves have insect damage. If your men drag the volumes out by their headcaps, you'll reduce their price.”

“Then pack them.”

“I will need until tomorrow morning.”

Harrow glanced toward the window, where the cart's wheel tracks would have to cross the soaked lawn. “Would save a journey.”

Pell ignored him. “A delay has a cost.”

Beatrice looked at the silver tray beneath the tea things. It had belonged to her mother, who had used it to carry seed packets when the gardener complained about mud in his potting shed. One corner bore a shallow dent from a dropped flowerpot. The servants had polished around that dent for sixteen years.

She lifted the empty cups off it.

“This, and the two candlesticks in the dining room. Take them today for the expense of postponement. Strike them from tomorrow's lots. Give me a receipt with the agreed valuation.”

Pell inspected the tray's marks. “The workmanship is unremarkable.”

“Then you won't mind Mr. Harrow recording its weight.”

The bailiff hid a smile badly. He fetched his little balance from the leather bag by the door. Watching the tray tilt between the weights hurt more than Beatrice had expected. She had been managing the house in lists, and lists did not usually contain the sound of her mother laughing over a ruined seedbed.

She fetched the candlesticks herself. When she returned, Pell offered six pounds for all three pieces. She made him write that the payment met the removal expense, without adding a new balance to the ninety-pound instrument. Harrow witnessed it.

By noon the silver was wrapped in Pell's cloth. He put it beneath his arm and inspected the lower shelves again.

“Your father's business ledgers should remain with the library lot.”

“The probate accounts stay with the executor.”

“Earlier accounts, Miss Fenwick. They add historical interest.”

He touched the green-backed ledger she had been using to prop up a sagging shelf. Beatrice retrieved it before he could lift it by the cover.

“I will describe it in the inventory.”

“Describe every leaf.”

After he had gone, she did.

The ledger opened naturally at a damaged sewing station. Two narrow stubs stood between numbered pages. She had seen missing sheets before: children cutting paper for boats, a housekeeper borrowing a blank page, an accountant removing an error. These had been cut close to the fold with a sharp blade. There was no corresponding change in the pagination written in her father's hand.

On the preceding page, under September 1809, she found a payment to the Crown Serum Office. The amount was eighteen pounds. Beneath it he had written only “adjustment.”

Her father had liked explanations. He had once filled half a page defending the purchase of a musical clock. Eighteen pounds for an adjustment received a single word.

Beatrice drew the two stubs at their actual size, noted the ink and page numbers, and copied the payment. She did not write “concealment.” Missing paper proved missing paper. The rest would have to wait.

At one, somebody knocked at the open library door.

A man in a dark traveling coat stood holding his hat in both hands. “Miss Fenwick? Edmund Shaw, steward to the Duke of Aubrel.”

She glanced at the chimney clock, then at the empty space on the table. “If His Grace would like a chair, he must bid tomorrow.”

“He wishes to speak with you about employment.”

For a moment she hated how quickly she looked up.

Shaw offered a sealed note. The wax carried a crest she recognized from the stone boundary markers between this estate and Aubrel. She slit the fold with her bone folder. The duke required someone experienced in archival inventories and medical settlement records. He proposed a summer appointment, terms to be discussed, and requested a meeting at his house.

“Why me?”

“He understands you worked at the provincial repository.”

“So did eleven other people.”

“I wasn't given their names.”

She liked him better for declining to manufacture an answer.

The Duke of Aubrel had lived next door for longer than her father had been alive. Beatrice had never met him. His carriage sometimes passed after dusk; the parish children dared one another to touch his gate. He was a vampire, which did not distinguish him from several patrons of the former repository, though those patrons had generally wanted their family histories shelved above inconvenient tax records.

“I won't visit a stranger's house on the strength of an unspecified wage,” she said. “Tell him I shall be at the orangery tomorrow. There will be people there.”

Shaw nodded. “The auction begins at eleven. His Grace can attend under the covered portion.”

“And he should bring the particulars of the work.”

“I'll tell him.”

When Shaw left, Beatrice cut strips from an old linen sheet and made supports for the damaged volumes. She packed the parish books separately, with the signed exceptions on top, and wrote to their clerks requesting collection. A shelf emptied; a rectangle of unfaded wallpaper appeared behind it. Her father's house was beginning to show where it had been hiding its age.

At dusk she ate bread with the last of the cheese, standing at the library table because every chair had a lot number. She put her repair notes and the copied ledger entry into her work satchel. The original ledger remained on the inventoried shelf. On her own inventory she marked its two absent leaves so nobody could later claim she had removed them after the sale.

Then she put her duplicate of the ninety-pound instrument beside the duke's letter.

Tomorrow she would hear what he wanted. She would also watch who reached for the green-backed ledger. Pell had inspected its spine twice and never once opened the musical clock account.