Halden’s flush crept up to the roots of his hair. “These are harsh terms.”
“They are honest ones.” Victor folded his hands. “Choose as you like. I admire choice. It simplifies consequence.”
Roderick let out a small, delighted breath.
Halden’s gaze bounced between them and landed on capitulation.
“Very well,” he conceded. “Pike is gone. The bill is corrected. The boards will be replaced by Tuesday. I will take the sapwood to the cooperage. They do not need to sneer at heart.”
“Done,” Victor said, rising to his feet.
Halden scrambled up and attempted a bow that suggested both respect and a wish to strangle something. “You are a hard man, Your Grace.”
Victor plucked his gloves off the chair and pulled them on with precise movements. “I am an exacting one, and this should not be a surprise. You did business with my father before me. You should be no stranger.”
They left to the chorus of scratching quills and the heavy breath of the fire.
Roderick snorted a laugh when the door shut behind them.
“You do not leave a man a single comfortable lie,” he snickered. “It is almost charitable, the way you relieve them of the burden.”
“Lies accrue interest.” Victor shrugged. “I dislike paying it.”
They stepped into the winter light. It felt clean after the heat in Halden’s office.
Victor’s mind skipped from timber to transport, from wharves to winter stores, from sapwood to the patience of oak. He felt soothed. He also felt the thought he had folded away begin to press once more against its drawer.
They strolled leisurely toward Bond Street, where Roderick had an engagement with a tailor who worshipped him as a pagan god of cloth.
“You are quiet,” he noted. “Quieter than usual. Have you taken a vow?”
“I am thinking,” Victor said.
“I assumed as much, since your mouth was not moving. Pray, don’t hurt yourself, friend.” Roderick cut a look at his face. “Shall I speculate, or shall I wait?”
“You will speculate regardless,” Victor pointed out.
“True. You have the air of a man who has been caught off guard,” Roderick remarked. “Not in business, but in that other field you claim to have divided into squares and counted. A woman.”
Victor said nothing for three steps. He did not care to admit that the observation landed. Yet Roderick was already smiling like a fox that had found the henhouse door unlatched.
“Very well,” he murmured. “You need not tell me her name. You never do. I will only say that if she lingers on your mind while Halden bleats, she has a talent worth studying.”
Victor kept his eyes on the pavement. Little flakes of ice had survived the sun in the cracks. “She has a talent for contradiction.”
“Delightful,” Roderick murmured. “Does she also have a face?”
“She has a mind,” Victor said, then wished he had held back the words.
Roderick’s eyes lit up, and he turned that light upon Victor with unkind delight. “A mind. God preserve us. I won’t be able to rescue you if you start respecting the women you pursue.”
“I respect every woman I pursue,” Victor countered evenly. “I respect them enough to leave them free of hope when I am finished.”
“Finished after seven days,” Roderick said softly.
“Yes.”
They walked a few paces more.
