One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

imagining him in some shady cellar with a pile of counterfeit coins in front of him. Jonathan, however, was a different story.

I looked him up at down, taking in the neat contours of his face that were so familiar to me. In the half-light of the carriage, he felt suddenly like a stranger.

“Wilder asked you to be involved?”

“Yes.” Jonathan picked at the stitching on the edge of the bench seat. “As he made clear, we have both the skills and the means to run such an enterprise. It seemed rather a logical progression for our business.”

I let out my breath in disbelief. “A logical progression?”

Jonathan squeezed my fingers. “Don’t get angry, Nell. It doesn’t suit you.”

I pulled my hand out from under his. “Why?” I asked.

He turned to look out at the passing street. Streetlights glittered through the glass, painting jewelled patterns on the carriage windows.

There were money issues, my husband told me then. Debts to be settled. Bills to be paid. He gave me a strained smile. “Perhaps you ought to have foreseen such things when you married a mere jeweller.”

“Don’t be so foolish,” I said. “You’re as fine a man as any.” But I could hear the thinness to my words. For my kind and decent husband had just revealed himself to be entrenched in criminality.

“Wilder knew I owed money,” he told me. “Said he could help me make what I needed. And plenty more.”

I wished for my old ignorance. Wished to be sitting in Hanover Square with closed eyes, letting the lush arpeggios of the cantata wash over me.

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked.

Jonathan reached for me again, covering my wrist with his long, thin fingers. “Because we need you to be involved.”

An expansion of their business. Thanks to contacts Wilder had curated, he and Jonathan had a seemingly endless array of apprentices, servants and cashiers across London, all responsible for handling their superiors’ money. Each would pay a fee for the counterfeit pieces, and exchange them for the genuine coins in their masters’ coffers. Send the forgeries out with the business and keep the authentic coins for themselves. There was great wealth to be made, Jonathan assured me. Wealth that would ensure we lived a life of concert halls and diamonds until the day we died.

But with he and Wilder working long hours at the jeweller’s, they needed a third person to run the coins to each business and manage the payments.

This, I realised then, was the reason for the evening at Hanover Square. The reason my tone-deaf husband had sat through two hours of wailing sopranos. It was not just to please me. It was to make me agreeable.

“You’ve plenty of time on your hands, don’t you, Nell.” It was not a question. “It’s not as though you’ve children to take care of.”

His tone of voice said it all. During the five years of our marriage, Jonathan had watched his friends’ wives produce child after child, while I had failed to give my husband an heir. Though he had never once said as much, I knew myself a failure as a wife. With each month, each year that passed, I became more and more certain he would find another woman who could give him the son he craved. Each night he returned home to me, I found myself almost surprised. I had no thought of what I would do if Jonathan left me. Running counterfeit coins across the city felt like the least I could do for the man who had saved me from facing the world alone.

And so when he looked me in the eye and said, “You’ll do this for me, won’t you, my darling?”, I found myself agreeing.

For more than a year, I skulked across the city with coins in my reticule, liaising with the apprentices, the servants, the cashiers. Each of the clients had been groomed by Henry Wilder himself; men he knew would keep their mouths shut and their eyes down in exchange for a little wealth.

Though I knew, of course, that I was breaking the law, I pushed the reality of it to the back of my mind. I told myself I was doing no more than helping my husband, as a dutiful wife should. Making up for my failures, proving I was of use.

I’d had no thought the thief-takers were following until I got back to our townhouse. They accosted me at the front door and demanded to know why I was carrying a bag of coins, and the ledger recording the businesses I had received them from.

Jonathan had made sure I had a story prepared – my husband has requested I assist with the banking – but I told it in such a pathetic, trembling voice that even the densest of men would have known me lying. And with my husband away at the jeweller’s, I could only stand and watch as the thief-takers tore the house apart, finding the counterfeit coins I was yet to bank hidden at the bottom of my husband’s desk drawer. I had no thought of which of our clients had turned us in. But I knew it didn’t matter.

With striking efficiency, I was escorted to the thief-takers’ wagon, while our staff watched wide-eyed and murmured between themselves. My terror eclipsed any hint of shame I felt at the staff seeing me this way.

In front the magistrate, I admitted to it all. I told him how Jonathan had sat beside me in the carriage and outlined his plans. Admitted I had called at each of the businesses on the ledger that day, and had been doing so for the past fourteen months. Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I knew I was likely condemning both Jonathan and myself, but I had been raised believing my job was to appease the men around me, and