Free Web NovelChapter 37: Chapter 37 The Chauffeur
_Rowena’s POV_
I couldn’t sleep at night.
It wasn’t the account records this time, Celeste had made me close the laptop at eleven and I had actually listened, which was progress. It was something else.
I gave up at half past midnight and went downstairs.
The Ashthorne estate at night was always different from the Varkos estate at night.
I went to the kitchen for water, took it to the small sitting room off the east corridor, and sat in the dark for a while.
That was when I heard them.
The voices were coming from outside, the narrow courtyard between the east wing and the staff quarters, where the chauffeur’s rooms were. Not loud enough to make out every word, but loud enough to catch the shape of it.
A man’s voice, low and defensive, rang out.
A woman’s voice, hurt and past the point of keeping it contained, followed.
I didn’t move toward the window immediately. I sat and let the sound clarify itself.
“.....not what I said, and you know it.....”
“Then what did you say? Because what I heard was.....”
“Keep your voice down, Hinari.....”
“Don’t tell me to keep my voice down in my own...... Patrick, I am telling you, if you think I don’t know what’s been happening.....”
Patrick. The chauffeur? He had been with the estate for eight years. He was an efficient person, the kind of man who did his work and never created friction.
The woman, Hinari, seeming to be his wife, was making a specific accusation that I couldn’t quite fully hear, but the shape of it was clear enough. She was not accusing him of anything abstract. She was accusing him of something specific, with someone specific.
An elder in the household, she had suddenly said.
I put my water down and went to the window.
I didn’t open it. I just stood close enough to hear.
“That’s insane,” Patrick said. “She’s..... it’s not.....”
“I saw you,” Hinari said. “I saw you coming out of that corridor at two in the morning. Last Tuesday. Don’t stand there and......”
“It wasn’t what you think.”
“Then tell me what it was.”
A long silence.
“Interesting,” Kyra muttered.
Very.
Patrick’s silence was the silence of a man caught between two things he didn’t want to say.....the truth, and whatever cover he had prepared. Neither option was comfortable. He was shifting between them, trying to find a third.
That was what told me.
I had seen the man who left Alice’s room. Medium height, unremarkable features, and mid-fifties. Patrick was none of those things, he was younger by at least a decade, noticeably tall, with a distinctive way of standing that I would have recognized in a dark corridor.
Patrick was not Alice’s nighttime visitor.
I stepped back from the window and stood in the dark sitting room, turning that over.
The nighttime visitor had come with documents and a specific purpose, the contested asset filing. The man was operational, a clear tool for the financial side of whatever Alice was running.
But Patrick was something different. A chauffeur with access to the house’s daily movements, staff schedules, who was where and when. If Alice had compromised him, she had eyes inside the household, not on the money, but on the people.
How many others?
“She’s been here for years,” Kyra said. “While you were at Moonreign. While the management company was running things and no one was watching closely.” freewebnσvel.cѳm
“Years to build a network,” I thought. “Years to place people, create dependencies, establish the kind of infrastructure that looked like ordinary household staffing until you pulled on a specific thread.”
“I went back to bed, but I didn’t sleep.”
In the morning, as early as possible, I asked Velvet to find Lucy, the head maid.
Lucy had been with the Ashthorne family for thirty-one years.
She had started as a junior housemaid when my grandfather was still running the estate with her full attention, worked her way through every domestic role the house offered, and by the time I was born had become the kind of presence that was simply part of the house itself, not a fixture exactly, because fixtures didn’t have opinions, and Lucy had opinions about everything and shared them freely with anyone who had the sense to listen.
She was seventy now, semi-retired, living in the cottage at the back of the estate grounds that my mother had offered her ten years ago and that she had accepted on the condition that she could still come and go from the main house as she pleased. She came and went constantly. She definitely knew everything.
I found her in the kitchen at seven in the morning, drinking tea she had made herself because she never trusted anyone else’s tea, and told her I needed to speak to her privately.
She looked at me over the rim of her cup.
We went to the small sitting room.
I closed the door and sat across from her and said, “I need you to tell me about the staff changes. After my mother died. Everything you noticed.”
Lucy set her cup down.
“How detailed do you want it?” she asked.
“As detailed as it gets,” I said.
She nodded slowly. “It started within three months of your mother passing,” she said. “Small things first. A kitchen maid let go for something minor, breaking a dish, I think the reason was. Replaced within the week by a girl I didn’t recognize who turned out to be the niece of someone in Alice’s family.” She paused. “Then the head groundsman. He retired suddenly, which surprised everyone because he’d said nothing about retiring. His replacement came with a recommendation letter from Alice personally.” She looked at her hands. “Then the laundry supervisor. Then one of the account clerks. Over about eighteen months.”
“How many in total?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Seven that I counted. Possibly more that I didn’t notice because they came in under ordinary circumstances.” She looked up. “I said something to your grandfather once. He said Alice was simply helping update the household after the management company period. That some staff turnover was natural.”
“He trusted her,” I nodded in understanding.
“He’s always trusted family,” Lucy said.
“Patrick,” I said.
Lucy’s expression shifted slightly. “Patrick is a good man,” she said carefully. “He got caught up in something he didn’t understand fully. I think he was flattered at first and then afraid.”
“Who approached him?”
“I don’t know the name,” she said. “But I know it came through Alice.” She paused. “That’s how she works. Small obligations that grow until the person doesn’t know how to say no anymore.”
I sat with that.
“Lucy,” I said. “Is there anything else? Anyone else I should know about specifically?”
She was quiet for a moment.
“There was a man,” she said. “About four years ago. He came to the estate twice that I saw. Always to Alice’s room, always after dark. The second time, I mentioned it to your grandfather’s secretary, he just flagged it, nothing formal.” She pressed her lips together. “A week later, the secretary left the estate. Said he’d found another position.”
My chest tightened slightly. “What happened to him?”
“He left the city,” Lucy said. “He took a position in another region. I heard from his wife that he’d had an offer too good to refuse.” She paused. “About six months after that, I heard he suddenly drowned. Swimming accident, they said. But he wasn’t a swimmer.”
The sitting room was very quiet.
“There it is,” Kyra said.
There it was.
I looked at Lucy across the table and felt the thing I had been moving toward without naming settle into something concrete and cold.
“A man who noticed something,” I said, “left the city under financial pressure, and then died in an accident that didn’t fit his habits.”
Lucy met my eyes. “That’s what I know.”
“Thank you, Lucy,” I said. My voice came out steady.
She reached across the table and covered my hand with hers briefly. “Be careful,” she said. “She’s been at this a long time. She knows this house as well as anyone.”
“I know,” I nodded with a smile.
