“She had a commode. Where is it?” Giles strode over to the bed and found Lydia’s wooden stepstool shoved against the wall. He hauled it out and opened the step that concealed a commode, but the hidden chamber pot was missing. “Where’s the chamber pot?”

“Likely, she preferred to visit the privy instead,” Jake said. He had checked the remaining books and was stacking them in short towers.

“I don’t have a water closet on this floor, only downstairs.”

“And you count yourself friends with my wife? Tsk, tsk. We have her commodes on every level. If my wife had her way, there’d be a water closet attached to every bedchamber.”

“I could imagine Lydia throwing Yasmin’s letters into a chamber pot. That would amuse her.”

“Charming,” Jake said, looking behind the drapes. “If the letters were stuffed in the commode or the chamber pot, for that matter, her maid would have found them.”

Giles’s curse was met with a wry smile. “Time to leave,” Jake continued. “My wife gets tetchy if I’m not home before dark. You can explain yourself and your purloined letters in person.”

Giles cast one last look around the room. Would Lydia, his own sister, actually burn his letters? And if so, how? He looked at the bed again, then stepped onto the stool positioned beside it and looked on top of the gilt corona.

There they were.

Letters spilled across the white brocade that topped the bed, some in Yasmin’s looping hand and others in his. From the look of it, Lydia had flipped letters onto the top of the bed.

Two minutes later, a footman was brushing letters to the ground with a broom.

“I apologize, my lord,” Duckworthy said, his voice quavering. “I’d have never imagined that Lady Lydia would do such a thing. I’ve known her since she was a little girl. I’m sure she didn’t mean to cause harm.”

Giles didn’t agree, but he did know that Lydia wouldn’t have spent much time considering the ethics of the situation, any more than his mother used to when launching her lawsuits. Lydia wanted to win, and that meant eliminating Yasmin by any means possible.

He heaved a basket filled with crumpled, dusty letters into Addison’s chaise.

Jake settled into the corner. “Having enraged my wife a time or two, I have some advice to offer.”

The last thing Giles wanted was advice. But he was in the man’s vehicle. “Yes?”

“On your knees,” Jake said flatly. “On. Your. Knees. Your bloody sister stole Yasmin’s letters, but you didn’t follow your fiancée to the country when you didn’t hear from her, did you? You wrote more letters, but you didn’t get in a fast carriage to see if she’d been taken ill.”

“I knew she wasn’t ill.”

“How?”

“My sister read the gossip columns aloud at breakfast. Yasmin was often mentioned.”

“Most of the news is made up from whole cloth,” Jake pointed out. “One of our guests—not knowing of your secret betrothal—told the dinner table the other night that you were stitching up a marriage with Lady Stella. I don’t suppose that made Yasmin very happy.”