The numbers were wrong.
Isadora had known it for three days. She had found the first discrepancy on a Tuesday, buried in the household accounts that Mrs. Hargrove kept in the study — a leather-bound ledger that tracked every expenditure at Blackwood, from candle wax to coal to the obscene quantity of blood-wine that the estate consumed on a monthly basis.
She had not been looking for discrepancies. She had been looking for something to do.
Bread could only take a woman so far. She had baked enough loaves to feed the entire village twice over, and Mrs. Hargrove had stopped accepting them with gratitude and started accepting them with the particular, strained patience of a woman who had run out of storage space and was too polite to say so.
