The Reluctant Countess

Chapter Eight: The Witness

Calloway found the crack in Charles’s case a week later, and it was smaller than any of them had hoped for and larger than James had dared expect. The codicil’s witnessing clause named two signatories — the family physician, long since retired to Bath, and a clergyman James had never heard of, attached to a parish two counties away from where his father had died.

Calloway’s instinct, sharpened by years of untangling exactly this sort of convenient paperwork, was that a witness who lived two counties distant from a dying man’s bedside was either remarkably devoted or entirely invented. He proposed traveling to Bath himself to speak with the physician directly, before Charles’s solicitors thought to reach the man first and remind him, gently, where his continued comfort might depend on his memory.

James wanted to go himself. Aniya wanted to go with him, and when he hesitated — some old instinct toward protecting her from the uglier parts of the fight — she reminded him, with the particular flatness she reserved for arguments she considered already won, that she had not spent the last year building this life beside him only to be left behind managing correspondence while he did the actual fighting. He didn’t argue further. He’d learned, by now, when an argument with his wife was worth having and when it was simply wasting daylight.

They left for Bath within two days, Calloway riding ahead to make the introductions, Margaret staying behind — reluctantly, and with rather more interest in Calloway’s return date than James thought strictly necessary to mention.

The physician, a Dr. Whitfield, was old and a little frightened, and it took less pressing than James expected to get at the truth of it. He hadn’t witnessed any codicil. He’d been asked, some months back, by a solicitor he now understood to be in Charles’s employ, to sign a statement affirming he had — in exchange for a sum of money he’d told himself, at the time, was simply a fee for his trouble, and had spent the months since trying very hard not to think too closely about.

He wept a little, telling it. James, who’d expected to feel triumphant at finally finding solid ground under this whole miserable fight, found himself instead feeling only tired, and a little sad for a frightened old man who’d been made a tool in someone else’s greed.

It was Aniya who handled the physician gently in the end — thanking him for his honesty, assuring him that Calloway would need only a sworn statement of the truth now, not punishment, and that coming forward took more courage than staying silent would have. James watched her do it and thought, not for the first time, that she had a gift for finding the humanity in a moment that easily could have curdled into something harder. It was one of a hundred small things he’d fallen in love with without

ever quite noticing the moment it happened.

That night, in the inn at Bath, with Whitfield’s signed statement locked safely in Calloway’s case and the long ride home still ahead of them, James found Aniya standing at the window of their room, watching the dark street below with an expression he couldn’t quite read.

He asked what she was thinking. She admitted, after a moment, that she’d been thinking about the physician — an old man frightened enough to lie for money he probably didn’t even need — and wondering how many more people like him Charles had quietly bought or frightened along the way, and whether they’d ever fully know the shape of what they were fighting.

James crossed the room and drew her back against his chest, chin resting against her hair, and told her that it didn’t matter, in the end, how many lies Charles had paid for. The truth only had to be told once, clearly, by someone brave enough to say it — and they’d just found exactly that. Whatever else his uncle had built, it was built on sand, and sand didn’t hold, no matter how much of it there was.

Aniya turned in his arms to face him, and the worry in her expression softened into something else — something that had nothing to do with uncles or codicils or courtrooms at all. She told him that she loved him rather more than she’d ever expected to love anyone, and considerably more than she’d been prepared for the day she walked into her father’s drawing room and looked him over like a horse she suspected was lame.

James laughed — a real laugh, the first easy one in weeks — and told her he’d never quite forgiven her for that particular look, and that she was going to have to spend the rest of their lives making it up to him.

She kissed him then, slow and unhurried, with all the certainty of a woman who had long since stopped being afraid of what she felt, and the fight waiting for them back at Wentmoor felt, for one quiet hour in a small inn in Bath, a very great distance away.