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Page 75
to mine. Which chamber do your clerks use to keep your accounts?"
"Accounts on such a day!" Alinor protested, aware that her voice had become a little breathless.
"Even on such a day," Simon said grimly, just a hint of a snarl in his tone.
Of course, he was not angry with Alinor. It was a combination of irritation with himself, for seeking any excuse to stay in her company, and disgust at what he expected to find. And Alinor, who had never really feared any man, took a step backward because her guilt weighed heavy on her conscience.
"It is the chamber next beside that you sleep in. The books are there. I do not know where the clerks are now," she said hurriedly, and turned, and fled.
Had Alinor looked back and seen the stricken expression on Simon's face, she would have been saved some anxious hours. Had Simon followed her to explain, he would have saved half a day's effort. Alinor's alterations of the accounts had been well thought out and skillfully done. In fact, Simon did not realize that they were alterations. It was partly because he was so convinced that she was being cheated and partly because he was so aware that his mind was not really on what he was doing that he went over and over the entries until he noticed certain oddities.
Once the fact that certain expenditures were unbalanced came clear to him, he checked still again, hissing through his teeth with satisfaction. Probably it would be beyond his power to lift the hide off the clerk with a whip, but he would speak with such purpose to the abbot of his order or the bishop of his diocese that no other clerk would play games with the accounts on this estate for a long time.
He rose from the table he had dragged into the windowed antechamber, bellowed for a manservant, and sent him running to fetch the clerk who wrote the books. In a few minutes a frail, elderly friar entered.

 
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