Page 17 of A Vow for the Viscount
She leaned back in her chair and glanced at the upper shelf. Hamish’s old ledger was still there, tucked beside the annual indexes…She remembered how he used to steady the scale with one thick hand while she read the figures aloud, nodding approvingly when she spotted a discrepancy before he did. Hamish had trusted her with more than numbers. He had given her quiet encouragement, a belief that she saw clearly, perhaps more clearly than some wished her to. She could still hear his voice sometimes, low and gruff but always patient when hetaught her how to read manifests or warned her never to trust a cargo count until she’d verified it herself. Hamish had been more than a dock manager. He had been a quiet sort of guardian, a man who saw more than he ever said. His absence still echoed in the quiet places of the house. She missed him more than she dared to admit.
“You’d know what to make of this,” she whispered. “You always did.”
She didn’t wait for the silence to answer. Instead, she returned to the desk and pulled another volume toward her. There had to be more. A thread. A slip. Something.
The candle sputtered, casting the shadow of her profile across the page. Her head ached from squinting, and her shoulders were stiff, but still, she pushed on. If Hamish had died trying to tell her something, she owed it to him to listen to what the numbers told her. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that the truth was somewhere in these pages, buried under ink and polite deception.
She stared at the names again,Carrabelle,Redwake,Winsome Tide. They had appeared before. She was certain of it. She crossed to the shelves, scanning the spines until her hand hovered over an older ledger. This old ledger was Hamish’s first year managing independent dock operations. If he had ever flagged problems with these ships, it would be there.
At last, she turned toward the shelf. The old ledger, Hamish’s, waited like a quiet witness She reached for the thick volume on the upper shelf behind the desk. She slid it free and set it on the desk.
Carefully, she opened the cover. The pages crackled softly, brittle with age. She leafed through the first half of the book, scanning the tidy rows of cargo logs written in Hamish’s hand, which was characteristically heavy and loopy. He used to cram notes into the margins of manifests with quick judgments aboutcrews or cargo. She got to the back of the book and found newer entries. This ink was darker, and the writing was definitely not Hamish’s. This handwriting was almost impatient. The pages were neat. Too neat. A prickle ran up her spine. She glanced over her shoulder. Nothing moved, there was no sound but the low tick of the mantel clock. Still, the air felt heavier somehow, charged. Her fingers hesitated on the page. It wasn’t just the neatness. It was the sense that whoever wrote this didn’t care to explain themselves. This wasn’t a record. It was a private reckoning.
No. This wasn’t Hamish’s at all. Someone else had written this, someone who didn’t expect other eyes to read it.
As she was about to close the old ledger, her fingers brushed something lodged between the binding and the cover. She turned the cover back and caught the edge of a slim, cloth-bound booklet, its spine barely visible against the seam. Carefully, she eased it free and turned it over in her hands. There was no title. The cloth cover was worn, plain, and soft from use. Whoever it belonged to hadn’t wanted it labeled. Or found.
The paper inside was rough and of low quality, with ink bleeding slightly along the grain. Someone had written these notes quickly or carelessly.
Mary-Ann traced a finger down the margin. Symbols, names, ship titles. The entries weren’t organized like her father’s books. These were coded. Intimate. And familiar, somehow. She paged ahead and caught a distinctive curl in the capital “H” and the flourish on a descending “G.” Her breath caught. She leafed back to the newer entries at the end of the old ledger and found the same impatient strokes. Whoever had used the back pages had written this as well. She returned to the booklet and read on.
Some of the names she recognized: TheCarrabelle. TheRedwake. And again, theWinsome Tide. They were all ships connected to discrepancies.
She sat back, her heart thudding. This wasn’t a second copy of official records. This was something else entirely.
These weren’t official errors. These were patterns. The same ships, again and again. And someone, whoever wrote this, had been tracking them. Quietly. Illegally. Which meant they already knew what she suspected. That the crates were being diverted long before the ship left the dock.
And Hamish had kept this book hidden. Not destroyed. Not discarded. Hidden. He’d known it was dangerous, but also that someone might need it.
Her mind drifted to her father. He was methodical, principled, and always precise with numbers and names. He trusted his managers to handle the day-to-day work of the docks, but he reviewed the ledgers himself every quarter. If he had seen this, would he have dismissed it? Or had someone made sure he never laid eyes on it at all? She hated the creeping doubt that whispered through her. When she was a girl, she’d sit cross-legged on the rug while he worked, asking endless questions about tariffs and tonnage, all of which he answered with patient delight. He was proud of his precision, of knowing exactly where every coin had come from, and every crate was bound. To question that now felt like pulling at the foundation stones of her childhood. And yet, here she was, ledger open, truth unraveling.
She didn’t want to believe her father had been careless or, worse, manipulated. But the deeper she looked, the more difficult it became to convince herself that it was all a coincidence. She used to believe her father knew everything that happened beneath the Seaton banner. But now, that belief felt less like certainty and more like a bedtime story. The kind told to keep children safe from the dark.
Her fingers tightened on the pages. Who had written this? And why was it hidden?
Mary-Ann rose and crossed to the window, pulling the heavy curtain aside just enough to see the quiet street beyond.
The street lay still, steeped in that half-moon silver that turned every edge soft and strange. Her breath fogged the glass as she leaned closer. Throughout her life, she had always felt safe in this house and this town. But now it felt like something had shifted beneath her feet, as though nothing was quite what it seemed anymore. For the first time, the darkness outside seemed to be watching her. No one lingered. The town was asleep. But that didn’t mean she was alone.
She returned to the desk and sat slowly, turning another page. In her younger years, she’d found comfort in the quiet of the house at night, curling up by the library hearth with a book. But tonight, the hush felt hollow, stretched too thin. The shadows seemed longer than they should, and the tick of the clock struck harder. There were strange symbols next to some of the entries, triangles, dots, and slashes. Some cargo items were circled, others underlined. Whoever had written it had their own system, and it made her skin prickle to know she was looking at something not meant for her eyes.
A strange tightness gathered at the base of her throat. The symbols blurred for a moment as her eyes scanned too quickly, desperate to make sense of it all. A single slash beside the name Winsome Tide caught her attention. What did it mean? She didn’t know, but her stomach turned as if her body understood before her mind could catch up. She pressed her palm flat against the desk to steady herself, then stiffened at a faint sound in the corridor. Her mouth went dry. Every sound sharpened, the tick of the clock, the rush in her ears. She didn’t breathe. The knob turned again, and she prepared to lie, or flee, or—She held her breath, straining to hear more. The sound came again, slow, deliberate, like a footstep just beyond the door. Her heart pounded against her ribs. She reached instinctively for thebooklet, sliding it closed, her mind racing with excuses, another creak, and then the doorknob turned.
Mary-Ann froze.
She closed the booklet quickly and slid it into her own writing folio. Then she reached for the official ledger and opened it wide, keeping her expression neutral just as the door to the study eased open.
It was Mrs. Aldridge, the housekeeper, her hair wrapped, her shawl clutched around her shoulders. “You’ll work yourself to parchment at this rate,” she murmured, not unkindly. “One of these nights, I’ll find you tucked between the ledger pages like a cat on the hearth. Forgive me, miss,” she whispered, “I heard someone moving and thought…”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Mary-Ann said softly. “Just some bookkeeping.”
Mrs. Aldridge gave her a knowing look but didn’t press. “Would you like tea?”
“No, thank you. I won’t be long.”
“Very well. Don’t sit up too late, miss.”
The housekeeper left, closing the door behind her.
