The Librarian's Spell by Patricia Rice (ebook offline reader TXT) 📗

Thinking like that did not come easily to a vicar’s daughter. Lydia automatically reached for the office door knob. Keya stopped her by touching her glove and opened the door for her.

Right. Duchesses had servants. Duchesses did not lift a hand to help themselves.

“Miss Lydia Wystan, the Malcolm Librarian, to see Misters Dobbs and Henry,” Keya announced to the startled clerk, while holding the door for Lydia to enter.

Head high, chin up, towering above Keya and the seated clerk, Lydia refrained from glancing about in curiosity but merely waited to be shown to the peons controlling her money. She tried not to laugh too hard at that whimsy—or weep in abject terror.

The clerk, a pallid, skinny man in spectacles, blinked in surprise. He rose to his short height and bowed uncertainly. “Miss Wystan, welcome. I. . . uh. . . if you’ll wait one moment. . .”

“We don’t have time to wait,” Lydia said in her best commanding voice, having no idea where the words came from except an overactive imagination. “Lead on and let us be done with the formalities. I need to return to the library posthaste.”

She started toward the corridor the clerk had glanced toward. He ran ahead to warn his employers.

“Most excellent,” Keya whispered with what sounded like laughter. “I had not thought about height as a factor in this battle. Let us hope the solicitors are very short men.”

Lydia bit her lip to hold back a terrified chuckle. “I fear that makes me a bully.”

As it happened, only one of the solicitors was short, the older one, Dobbs, if his name plate didn’t lie. Assuming the other suited gentleman was Henry, he wasn’t tall for a man, but he matched Lydia in height. They both rose at her entrance, looking vaguely cross, and bowed perfunctorily.

The office was all polished dark wood except for a window overlooking a park. Lydia longed to be outside walking through the green grass. Instead, she took the largest leather chair she could find and settled into it, wishing she’d thought to bring a parasol with a large point on it. She would buy one the instant she had her money reimbursed.

Keya hovered at her elbow, looking the part of apologetic servant in her drab brown gown.

Sitting down again, Henry, the younger man, located a file amid the confusion of books and papers scattered across both their desks. “You have brought the parish records showing Mr. Cadwallader’s death?” he asked in a voice that sounded as if he did not expect it.

Except Mr. Morgan and Keya had prepared her for this. With relief, Lydia nodded imperiously and Keya opened a leather carrying case. She silently produced the document.

Both men had to inspect it, as if they’d recognize the preacher’s signature.

Lydia was dying to ask questions, but she decided a duchess wouldn’t be bothered.

“And you have identification proving you are Miss Lydia Wystan?” the older man, Dobbs, asked suspiciously, looking over his gold-rimmed spectacles.

Again, she’d been warned. Lydia supposed it was good common sense and a sign that the solicitors were performing their duties. Keya opened the case again and handed over copies of Lydia’s own parish record of birth and a “to-whom-this-may-concern” letter from Mr. Morgan assuring the recipient that he knew both Mr. Cadwallader and Miss Wystan and verifying her identity.

Their delaying tactics failing, the solicitors harrumphed and took their time. Finally, the bespectacled Dobbs sat back and examined Lydia, perhaps to see if she might turn into a toad and hop away, she thought spitefully. She glared back, as surely a duchess would.

“Very well, Miss Wystan. Mr. Cadwallader has said you are an excellent assistant and capable of running his household. He wished to leave you in charge if you were still with him at the time of his demise.”

Lydia remained frozen. She wanted to make demands, but she didn’t like his tone. It sounded as if there might be a very large “But. . .” at the end of this speech.

“As it happens, we have had a most excellent offer for Mr. Cadwallader’s property that will remove the burden of the estate from your shoulders,” Mr. Henry continued with barely concealed eagerness, pushing a paper forward. “We have negotiated an excellent deal. You would be left with a sizable trust for your services and would no longer have to worry about a crumbling—”

Red rage roared through Lydia.

Normally cautious and implacable, she didn’t know how to control the fury boiling up. As if yanked by angry gods, she rose from the chair to tower over the men at their desks. “Over my dead body will I sell the library to that snake Crowley. I am the Librarian!” She roared this with all the vehemence she’d heard Mr. C employ, and for this moment, she actually believed it. Perhaps she channeled her former employer.

Dobbs and Henry scrambled to stand. “Miss Wystan, it is an honest offer from a gentleman who can better. . .”

“Am I, or am I not, executor of the Malcolm Librarian’s trust?” she demanded in a voice she scarcely recognized as hers. Except she’d used it on Crowley and had made him go away. She’d make these termites go away too.

“Of course, of course, Miss Wystan,” Henry said nervously. “But you are a woman, you see, and a woman cannot. . .”

Lydia tried not to turn purple. Her sisters had called her an old cow who harmlessly munched her way through the field until all the grass was gone. But right now, she was a raging bull about to trample annoying vermin.

Duchess. She had to be a duchess, not a bull. She was the Malcolm Librarian. With what she hoped was a sufficiently evil smile, Lydia turned to Keya. “Maharani, would you care to explain what a woman can do?”

Keya grinned at the purely fictional title of princess, nodded obediently, and opened her case again. “I have with me orders to remove the Malcolm Librarian’s estate trust to the offices of Morgan, Blair, and Trivedi. These are copies, you understand. The originals will be filed with