“Perhaps you would like me to cook it for you, then. For after your caller leaves.”
“Do whatever makes sense to you. I don’t give a damn right now.”
Brigsby’s eyebrows rose. His mouth pursed. He disappeared as quickly as he had arrived, his steps going down the stairs to the kitchen far below. Almost at once his steps came back up, hurriedly. He passed the library door smoothing his hair and straightened his cravat. A moment later the sounds of a visitor broke the silence of the house.
“Sir, Miss Hepplewhite has called.” Brigsby handed over a card, as if Chase needed proof.
“For the sake of—bring her in. Get on with it, man,” he hissed.
Again those eyebrows rose. A minute later Brigsby ushered Minerva into the library and closed the door.
She looked especially lovely. For some reason tonight her face appeared even more luminous and her eyes dark like mink. He looked at her too long before he welcomed her and invited her to sit.
“I thought I should respond to your rude letter in person, lest you misunderstand my explanation in some way if I wrote.”
“Did you find it rude? I thought it was direct.”
“Directly rude. However, I understand why you were displeased. You thought I would tell you everything, like a good employee. Only I was never one of those.”
“I thought you would tell me what you learned because we were sharing information equally.”
“I see.” She raised her chin and lowered her eyelids. “So you have told me everything?”
An awkward, damning silence ensued.
“I didn’t think so. Well, here I am. Ask what you want and I will answer as I can.”
“I know that you went to the packet offices to look at the manifests of passengers. Yet you did not tell me that.”
“You did not ask. We spoke of other things.”
Other things. Important things. More important than this damnable inquiry that would probably shred his soul before it was done. He wished they were back on that day, enjoying that afternoon tight in a new intimacy stronger than any wrought by passion.
He forced himself back to the topic at hand. “I have gone, and also looked. The clerk remembered a woman requesting the same week’s manifests recently. You.”
“So you know that your cousin Kevin was not out of the country when your uncle died. That he came back from France for a few days, and then returned there.”
He gritted his teeth, and went to stand at the fireplace. “I want to know what led you to even look for his name on those passenger lists.”
“It was something Mr. Edkins said in passing.”
“The valet?”
“He was talking about his master’s habit of wandering at night, in the city after dark and on that roof at his estate. He mentioned that usually it relaxed him. Calmed him. But not always. At times he would return angry, talking to Edkins but really to himself. And he said that the night before the duke died he came down from the roof muttering about how they acted like he was a bank they never had to repay, how after everything he had given the boy, more was expected for that damned invention. Well, the invention part made it obvious of whom he spoke. It sounded like he met with Kevin, either that evening or that night. Only Kevin was supposed to be out of the country.”
“Of course you checked if perhaps he really wasn’t.” He slammed his fist on the mantel. “Damnation, Minerva,why didn’t you tell me this?”
An invisible veil fell over her face. Her expression dulled into utter blandness. She looked at a spot on the wall, not him.
She had retreated, totally. From the conversation, and him. She was withdrawing from anger, the way she had learned to with Finley.
He strode over and knelt beside her. He took her hands. “I apologize. Forgive me. I should not let my reaction to this news fall on you.”
She did not pull her hands away. Eventually she looked down at them, then at him. Something of her spirit reentered her eyes. “I knew it would trouble you. I thought to spare you that for a while longer. Eventually it would come out, of course. You yourself would have checked each story regarding where they were, now that you know it was not an accident. I did not need to be the bearer of bad news.”
He kissed her hands, not thinking whether he should. It touched him that she thought to spare him, for a while longer.
“Also,” she said. “I do not think he did it.”
