Daniel's Daughter: An absolutely stunning Cornish Victorian romance about family secrets and love (Cornish Tales Book 4) by Victoria Cornwall

Author:Victoria Cornwall [Cornwall, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Choc Lit Historical Romance: A Joffe Books Company
Published: 2024-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Grace drew up her knees and rested her forehead in the cradle of her arms. She had feigned a headache and retired to bed early, but in truth she needed the silence of her bedroom to reflect on the events of the day.

She had spent the day in the St Austell office, studying the accounts of the previous six months. It had started out as a task to reassure herself that nothing further was amiss. When she found it was all above board, she would happily return the ledgers to Henry and tell Talek he had requested them. Her help would be no longer needed.

At first she had found nothing. Relieved, she had sat back in her chair. Her gaze had wandered absently over the neatly scribed figures in front of her, before settling on a mark, so slight, that she had initially overlooked it. Thinking it was a fallen eyelash, she had attempted to brush it away only to find it did not move. A sense of unease had stirred inside her as she turned the page and saw another, both barely noticeable to the undiscerning eye. Once she’d noticed one, they began to jump out at her, growing like thistles on a manicured lawn. What did the mark mean or was she seeing problems where none really existed?

Grace tilted her head back and stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, looking for inspiration. She felt exhausted. The day had been fraught with discoveries as the strange mark was not the last one she had found. On her return, Tommy was waiting for her. He stepped out to halt her carriage before it entered the drive to Roseland.

‘Begging your pardon, miss,’ he said, appearing at the window. ‘I’ve found out what the lime was for. It was made into whitewash.’

The lime used to paint miners’ cottages seemed the least of her worries at the moment, but Tommy had scrubbed himself clean, put on his best clothes and seemed to have more to tell her, so she felt duty bound to listen.

‘Would you like to know where it was used?’

‘Miners’ cottages?’

Tommy shook his head, ‘No, on the walls of Stenna Pit.’

Grace frowned. It seemed a strange thing to do. ‘Why would they do that?’

Tommy had only shrugged. ‘I don’t know and the miners who were given the job probably don’t either. Only a foolish man questions their boss.’

Now, in the solitude of her bedroom, she wondered if Tommy had been trying to warn her in some way. She quickly pushed the thought to one side. He was a simple man who spoke plainly and would not hide the threat behind an indirect phrase. Tommy didn’t know how many miners were involved, but Grace had an idea. The same number who had not been paid for their extra shifts as those shifts had been kept secret and not recorded.

Grace sighed and rested her forehead on her knees again. She had no experience of the production of clay, perhaps painting the walls of a clay pit was part of the process? No, it couldn’t be or Tommy would have said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.