The man looked up into Spencer’s face and appeared to think the better of what he was about to say.
“Take me to her,” Spencer instructed, and the jailer backed nervously away.
As he followed the jailer deeper into the dank interior, Spencer tried to gather his wits.
Two months ago, his best friend and solicitor, Henry Mortimer, had brought to him a newspaper clipping. A woman calling herself Mrs. Spencer Halifax had come to Henry’s attention after the startling commercial success of her naturally dyed woolen embroidery floss.
Mrs. Halifax’s Handmade Thread,the advertisement read.Rich lustrous embroidery forles femmes à la pointe du raffinement—for the first time available on English shores.
The implication that Mrs. Halifax had just sailed in from Paris with boxes of high-grade woolen yarn struck Spencer as rather amusing. He doubted there was a Mrs. Halifax at all—certainly not the seductive golden-haired Aphrodite in heavily embroidered evening wear who graced the advertisements.
Henry had found it all somewhat less funny. “Does it not trouble you that the woman is parlaying your name for attention?”
“She’s not calling herself the Countess of Warren, is she?”
Henry had looked put out. “Of course not—she could be jailed for that. But I suspect she looked you up in Debrett’s and used your name for her own notoriety.”
“We have plenty to go around.” Between their wealth, their connection to one of the royal dukes, and his twin sisters’ flamboyant talent for getting themselves into scrapes, the Halifax name was not precisely what it had been when Spencer’s father—the fourth earl—had been alive.
But that fact gave Spencer a hot, uncomfortable feeling in his chest, so he tried not to think about it.
Henry had compressed his lips. “Be that as it may, I question her motives.”
Spencer had rubbed his temples, wondered briefly if at twenty-eight he could be old enough to need spectacles, and told Henry to look into Mrs. Spencer Halifax and her woolen thread if it pleased him to do so.
Henry, who was both diligent and clever, had tracked down Mrs. Halifax’s advertisement printer, and from there her man of business. Spencer had been startled to discover that she was real and living in a place called Llanreithan, which was decidedly not in France but rather in Wales.
According to Henry’s formidable investigative skills, Mrs. Halifax lived alone in Wales while her husband—Spencer Halifax—made his home in London.
Henry had shuffled his papers with an air of agitation. “Does this not concern you?”
“Why would it concern me? Surely I cannot be the only man with the name in a city of a million inhabitants.”
“All of you exhaust me,” Henry had mumbled.
“Who?”
“Halifaxes. All of you. Damn it.”
Spencer had waited patiently for Henry to elaborate, but no revelations appeared forthcoming.
That had been the end of the matter—though in truth, Spencer found himself thinking of embroidery rather more than was his usual—until Henry had stormed into Spencer’s office one evening before dinner, looking fantastically disheveled.
Spencer blinked. He had seen Henry discomposed a time or two in their decade of friendship—thrice, probably, though one of those times Spencer had been so deep in his cups he could not precisely recall Henry’s appearance—but it was not a usual occurrence.
“I found the banns,” Henry declared. His hair was standing on end above his left ear.
“Whose banns?”
Henry withdrew a battered leather portfolio from his brief-bag. “Yours.”
“What the devil could you possibly—”
Henry flipped open the portfolio across the polished surface of the huge mahogany desk. “It’s that woman. Mrs. Halifax, in Wales. I wanted to confirm that she was not using your name for her own nefarious purposes—”
“Nefarious purposes? For God’s sake, Henry, she makesthread.”
“So I looked for record of her marriage. It took a few weeks—the post seems rather slow between here and that particular part of Wales—but her parish church assured me that the marriage was all aboveboard. They had a copy of the banns themselves, you see.”
