Description

She cost him fifty-eight thousand pounds. He was not permitted to refuse.
Norfolk, 1817. Nine people drowned when the sluice at Hobb's Gowt gave way, and the Commissioners took four days to decide whose fault it was. They chose the engineer. Three weeks later Thomas Cleeve died with his name in the minute book and his daughter in the room.
Honora Cleeve is six and twenty, unmarriageable, and better with a ledger than any man in the county. She is also, by the terms of a dead uncle's spiteful and extraordinary will, the holder of every mortgage on the Duke of Wexhall's estate. He marries her within twelve months, or he is ruined.
Julian Marchmont has been a duke for one year and nine days, and has spent all of it discovering that everything he owns was arranged by frightened men who did not write things down. He refuses her in writing. He gives her a cottage, asks nothing, and expects never to see her again.
So Nora proposes to him instead. Nine terms, set out on a single sheet, in an estate office, with the steward standing in the yard. Separate rooms. No pretence of affection. And free access to every paper the estate holds.
She wants the truth about her father. What she finds is a timber invoice, a forged signature, and eleven perfectly reasonable people who each made one small decision in the wettest summer in living memory. What she does not expect is a husband who reads her evidence and never once asks her to stop.
But the man who let the bank fail is loved by the entire parish. He mends the schoolhouse roof. He gave her a coat when she was a child. And proving what he did will cost her the only two things she has left to lose.
For readers of Evie Dunmore, Mimi Matthews, and Joanna Shupe: a slow-burn marriage of convenience with a spine of real history, where the heroine's weapon is an account book and the villain is somebody you will be sorry to lose.
Some things are not recovered when the water goes down.