He saw, with despair, that his lawyer was regarding him with that knowing look. There was no fooling Ottery. He was well aware of the cause of his client’s frustration. How could he not be?
“I am but poor company,” he said, laying his hand briefly on the other’s arm. “You are patience itself, my friend.”
“Why do you not go home, my lord, and leave the business to me?”
Raith looked away, picking up his tankard again. “You know the answer to that.”
He had been entirely open with the man. After that disastrous night, he had been in need of solid guidance from a well-disposed source. Ottery was the only person he could trust. He had fled his own home, and driven to Banbury, where he had found his lawyer almost upon the point of setting forth to begin his enquiries on Raith’s behalf.
Ottery had ushered him into his private sanctum, that hidden little room behind his office, from where Raith had first secretly seen the disastrous enchantment of his vulnerable waif. Oh, how vulnerable! So destructive had been his treatment of her that she had been driven to lash out.
“She said that I had deserved it of her, Ottery, and by heaven, I had!”
“If you drove her to hitting you, my lord, I must say that I agree with you,” had been the lawyer’s uncompromising comment. “You are not married to a termagant.”
“Far from it.”
He had called her a vixen, in the heat of his shocked response. But he had not meant it. Within two seconds of the door closing behind her, he had been smitten with horror at the remembrance of what he had said to her. She had taken it to herself. He had become confused by the memory. Had he applied that vicious word to her? Surely he had not meant to suggest for one moment that she was herself a strumpet? How had he put it, that she should take that meaning from his words?
For he could not doubt but that it was what she had thought. His cheek had smarted for some moments, but that was a small affliction. Much worse was the dread consequence of that bitterest of quarrels. Whichever way he looked at it, he could see no possibility of mending.
Rosina had escaped from him, and locked the door. He would not pursue her. To what end? His state of mind was too uncertain to permit him any rational resolution. He knew only too well how uncontrolled was his temper. A family failing. In Piers, it had been vicious. His half-brother had made no attempt whatsoever to control it. In his father, he had seen it only once, although Ottery had told him this was due to a steadfast rein that had curbed it through the years.
For himself, he knew it to be a curse, aggravated by the bitter blows to which fate had subjected him. No, he had not been able to unleash himself on Rosina that night. He had slept ill, his mind dwelling upon the undoubted unrest with which he guessed his Rosy was spending the night. All to be laid to his account.
“I must put an end to it, Ottery. Until this matter is resolved, I cannot trust myself to deal with her as she deserves.”
“And if the matter is resolved to your discontent, my lord?” Ottery had asked, with an accuracy of aim that pierced his defences.
He had sunk his head into his hands. “Don’t. That is the grief under which I hang suspended. It is killing me, Ottery!”
“And Lady Raith no less.”
Raith had jerked up again, his heart twisted by the reproach in his lawyer’s voice. “I know it. You are right to take her part. There are times when I wish fervently that she had not written that accursed letter, and put herself irrevocably into my hands.”
Ottery had leaned across the small desk and placed a hand over those Raith gripped together on its surface. It had afforded him a small degree of comfort to be understood. “My lord, if I believed you meant that, I would be advising you this moment to put her aside.”
A wry smile had creased Raith’s lips. “You know me too well.” His hand had turned up and gripped the one above it. “Help me, my friend. Yet again, I beg of you to help me.”
“You know I will, my lord. What do you wish?”
“I cannot go home. I cannot face her. At least, I must go back, if only to fetch some toggery and other necessaries. But I need not fear an encounter. If I know Rosina, she will be only too eager to stay out of my way.”
“But where will you go, my lord? You cannot walk away from your own home.”
“For what do you take me? No, no, Ottery. I will go with you to search out this nurse of hers. Until I have the truth, there can be no peace for either of us.”
But the hunt was nearly three days old, and they were no nearer to finding their quarry. His lawyer, however, had been thinking.
“My lord, I wonder if we might do better to go back to the Receiving Office.”
“For what purpose?”
“We have assumed a place within walking distance. I had been holding to the notion that Lady Raith, when she was Miss Charlton, had collected her letters for herself. But figure to yourself this, my lord. Now Her ladyship is gone to Ratley, how does the nurse receive any letters, if she is blind? Did you not say that Lady Raith had written to her?”
“Why did we not think of that before?” Raith half-rose from his seat. “I franked that letter for Rosina not a week since.”
As they were staying at the Crown at Brinklow while conducting their researches, it was no difficult task to find their way to the Receiving Office upon the morrow, and effect an interview with the individual in charge. This worthy remembered their first visit, when Ottery had asked after “Miss Charlton.” No one had known from which village she had hailed.
