Three days.
Ella said it to herself twice as she walked back down the corridor, Fischer trailing three paces behind her with the particular quality of silence that meant he had opinions he wasn't voicing. Three days was short. Three days was also, she had decided before she reached the staircase, exactly sufficient.
She had turned around failing hotel properties in less.
She did not say this to Fischer.
"I'll need access to the last three years of accounts," she told him instead. "All of them—not only what's kept in the study. The kitchen ledgers, the stable records, the supply receipts. Everything." She paused at the foot of the stairs. "And I'll need twenty minutes with each department head. Informally. I'm not conducting interviews. I just want to talk."
Fischer cleared his throat. It was a particular sound, layered—professional reserve on top, and beneath it, something she hadn't expected from him yet: the faintest note of curiosity.
"That's a considerable number of conversations," he said.
"I know. That's why I need to start today."
Lucy was waiting for her in the housekeeper's room, sitting on the edge of the small chair with the coiled energy of someone who had been restraining a great many questions for an unsustainably long time. She looked up when Ella entered, and her eyes went immediately to Ella's face, searching it with the particular anxiety of someone who had not quite decided whether to be glad or worried.
"He didn't send you away," Lucy said.
"He gave me three days."
"Three—" Lucy appeared to process this. "Three days to do what?"
"To make myself necessary." Ella sat down at the desk, pulled the stack of ledgers toward her, and opened the first one. "Would you sit with me while I work? You don't have to help. I just think better when the room has another person in it."
She said it because it was true, and because Lucy's face, she had noticed, had a quality of open warmth that the house otherwise lacked—that the earl particularly lacked—and Shen Yan, who had managed people for a decade, understood instinctively what she was working with here. Not a house. An ecosystem. And the first thing you did with a new ecosystem was listen to it.
Lucy stayed.
For two hours, Ella read. She read with the systematic attention she had developed over ten years of walking into properties in disarray—a kind of double vision that could register both the number on the page and the shape of the pattern it formed. The accounts at Blackwood were not dishonest, exactly. They were careless, and then, in certain specific places, they were something else. Intentionally obscured. She circled those pages with a careful hand and kept going.
When she emerged from the accounts room, she had thirty-one entries marked and a hypothesis that was two-thirds formed.
"I need to talk to your cook," she said to Lucy.
The cook was called Margaret, broad-shouldered and northern, with flour on her cuffs and a look in her eye that said she had seen housekeepers come and housekeepers go and had outlasted every single one of them. Ella recognised the posture—it was the same look she'd seen from long-tenured chefs at properties under management review, the look that said: you will find something wrong with my kitchen and I will not make it easy for you.
She didn't approach it as an inspection. She asked three questions about the supply channels—specific questions, the kind that showed she'd already done her reading—and let Margaret correct her assumptions. Within ten minutes, Margaret's shoulders had dropped two inches. Within twenty, Ella had revised three of her circled entries and added two more.
"You're not like the last one," Margaret said, as Ella turned to leave.
"The last housekeeper?"
"Any of them." Margaret's voice was neutral, measuring. "You listen different."
Ella didn't explain. She thanked her and moved on to the stables.
By the time the light through the narrow corridor windows had gone from grey afternoon to the deep blue of early evening, she had spoken to six people and rewritten her initial estimate three times. What she was building in her notebook was not merely an accounting of waste. It was a map of the house's nervous system—where it was healthy, where it was injured, and where, in two very specific places, something was feeding off it deliberately.
She closed the notebook and went to find Fischer.
"I'll need a candle in the accounts room," she said. "I'll be working late."
Fischer looked at her for a long moment. That measuring look again, but something had shifted slightly in it—the quality of the suspicion was different now, less like a wall and more like a door that hadn't yet decided whether to open.
"I'll send Lucy with tea as well," he said.
It was not a concession he named. But Ella understood what it was.