“London uniforms,” he said, as they went to the dining room. “There’s rarely anything elegant about them on campaign.” He seated her and went to his own chair. “Tell me about your afternoon.”
“I visited the house again. I’m not sure what makes one house pleasing and another of the same design not, but it’s pleasing. I’ll enjoy spending time there. I remembered thatthere would have been an inventory when the fifth viscount died. Was there anything interesting in that?”
“Three good beds, four good mattresses, five silver porringers.... I never read it.”
“Tut-tut! You might have found explosives or bloody daggers.”
“Novels,” he said again as he served her with soup.
“Some are very sober and improving.”
“Then I go odds you’ve never read them.”
“Are you saying I’m unimproved, sir?” she asked, dipping her spoon into chicken soup.
“Unimprovable, perhaps,” he said. A smile suggested a compliment, but it could be taken another way.
She ate some soup, then said, “Do you remember Edgware?”
She could almost see him rifle through mental records. “You found a letter from the fifth viscount—no, to him—about the lease of a house in Edgware.”
“Do you remember the date?”
“September 1808. Perhaps the twenty-eighth.”
“You could be making that up. Oh, very well, but it’s uncanny.”
“My burden to bear. What is significant about Edgware?”
They’d finished their soup, so Kitty rang for the next course. “I found a record book concerning a place in Edgware. In the fifth viscount’s handwriting.”
“Where?”
Edward came in to take away the soup. Kitty decided it wasn’t a secret subject. “On a bookshelf, in a way that was partially concealed.”
“I suppose you now want to search the town house from cellars to attics. Hoping for skeletons?”
Her speculations about a madwoman were definitely not for the servant’s ears. She’d dismissed it at first, buthad reconsidered over the past few hours. People did go mad, and family sometimes tried to conceal that fact.
“No,” she said, “but I intend to make time to visit Edgware.” Before he could object, she said, “The records are all of repairs and replacements—I’ll show you later—so the repairs might have stopped, as with the almshouses in Beecham Dab.”
“L Cottage sounds singular,” he pointed out.
“Very well, not almshouses. Perhaps a place for an old servant. His nurse, even.”
Edward had laid out sliced beef in a sauce and dishes of vegetables, and brought over some wine that had been waiting. He left and closed the door, and Braydon poured.
“Possibly, but you’re being a curious cat again.”
Kitty helped herself from the dishes. “I admit it, but it could be of some importance, and apart from buying things for the Abbey, I don’t have much to do.”
She told him about some of her purchases as they ate, but though he was polite, she could tell he thought them trivialities.
“Your visit to the Home Secretary?” she asked, sipping her wine.
“Probably best not discussed here. Later.”
Later, in bed, after much more interesting matters?“I suppose,” she said, “my priorities for later make me a shallow person.”
