Page 60 of The Scottish Duke
“I did?”
She nodded. “Mrs.McDermott rounded us up one morning and gave us instructions. We were to go to your office. We weren’t to speak or ask questions, and if you addressed us, we were to be polite and respectful. Either you or your assistant put soot on our fingers and then made us press them against a card.”
He didn’t remember. Oh, he remembered the parade of maids, all right, but not her. Why not? Had he been blind that day?
“Did I speak to you?”
She smiled in response. “You held my hand gently and told me I had interesting fingers.”
How many times had he made that particular remark? A hundred? Five hundred? Women who were uncomfortable in his presence seemed reassured by it.
“What else did I say?” he asked, wishing he’d at least been original.
“You repeated my name as you wrote it on the card.”
If he’d followed his usual routine, he would have retrieved the jar of finely sieved soot, a clean card, and a feather brush he’d had made for him in Austria. Dipping the brush into the jar, he would sprinkle soot on the relevant finger, blow off the excess, and place the person’s finger against the card. As he’d gotten better at the process, he’d rarely had to repeat it. His earlier cards were not so pristine, however, and showed his inexperience.
“But why fingerprints? Why do they interest you? I would think that Blackhall takes all of your time.”
“Two reasons,” he said. “The first is that I can hire people with more practical experience than I have. My solicitor, for example, is from a firm that’s handled the family business for decades. The steward hires people to maintain the property. The housekeeper and majordomo handle the day-to-day affairs of Blackhall. My interference only compounds any problems that might exist.”
She didn’t say anything. She wasn’t, as many women he knew, eager to fill the air with words. But her silence sometimes felt like a measurement, almost as if she were gauging his words for hidden truths or falsities.
He never felt that way with anyone and it both intrigued and irritated him. He found himself wanting her praise, not her condemnation. That, too, was unusual. He’d never deliberately sought anyone’s approval.
“The second reason is that I need something that’s mine. I love my home but it’s more a responsibility than a possession. It doesn’t actually belong to me. I’m only the steward for Blackhall. I hold it in trust for future generations. I’ve been taught that from the moment I knew I was going to inherit all of this.”
“But why fingerprints?” She studied her own fingertips again.
He wondered if he should continue and tell her the truth of why he studied fingerprints. If he did so, it would be the first time he ever shared the knowledge with anyone else. Would she ridicule him for it, or would she understand? He’d only know after he told her the story.
“As to why,” he said, “it all started with a broken jar. One day, not long after my father died, I found my mother crying. She was holding pieces of this broken jar that he’d given her. I’d always thought it was ugly. It was blue and white with holes in it.”
“A potpourri jar,” she said.
He nodded.
“It had been a gift from my father and she was brokenhearted to find the pieces in the rubbish. No one came forward to admit that they’d broken it. I examined the pieces and noticed that while the outside of the jar was heavily glazed, the inside wasn’t. There in the middle of one of the shards was a fingerprint.”
“Your first fingerprint,” she said.
He nodded. “I wouldn’t have noticed, except that whoever picked up the pieces had something on their hands. Then I realized that it was the potpourri from the jar. Something cinnamon I think. I don’t remember. But it made a perfect impression of the fingerprint.”
“What did you do?”
“I began with my own fingerprints,” he said. “Once I realized they were different, I started making impressions of other people’s fingerprints, comparing them to the original.”
“Do you still have the shard?”
He glanced at her. “I do,” he said, smiling.
“You figured out who did it, haven’t you?”
He nodded. “I matched the print a long time ago. I even confronted the perpetrator, who didn’t remember breaking the jar. When he did, he apologized to my mother.”
“It was your uncle,” she said.
He nodded again.
