CHAPTER 7
Arch had not seen Miss Vale for several days, and he disliked the circumstance with an irrationality he would have condemned in another man. He told himself it was simply imprudent. If she had sent for the duplicate ledgers, they might already be in her hands. If they were in her hands, she would examine them with the same brisk thoroughness with which she conducted every other portion of her life. She would not hasten to share them with him. She would not, in all likelihood, share them with anyone until she had reached a conclusion she considered undeniable. Arch understood that sort of pride. He had served with men who would sooner bleed quietly than admit a wound required stitching.
It did not, however, improve his temper.
London continued about its business with indecent unconcern. Carriages rolled by, hawkers cried their wares, and gentlemen walked as though nothing more perilous existed than a poorly folded cravat. Arch, who had once considered himself immune to the petty agitations of drawing rooms, found that a woman’s silence could unman him more completely than a French battery at close range. He told himself, sternly, that this was nonsense. Miss Vale’s accounts, her solicitor, and thepossibility of impropriety were matters of duty, not sentiment. Hers was a task he would complete. He did not require Miss Vale’s presence to maintain his attention on the task. Yet his attention persisted in straying to the very point he had told it to avoid.
He had begun to anticipate, with an absurd and unwelcome keenness, their next meeting. There was something about her that intrigued him.
He had always endured Society entertainments as one endures rain: tolerable, unavoidable, and not to be encouraged. Now he found himself glancing at the pile of invitations upon the desk as though it were a stack of possible reliefs. It was an alarming development. He was not a boy. He was not, to his knowledge, an idiot. Yet his thoughts drifted, in moments of inattention, to auburn hair caught by lamplight, to bright green eyes that did not soften for flattery, and to a voice that spoke of wages and responsibility with a severity Society insisted women ought to avoid.
He wondered again, despite himself, whether she had received the ledgers, or whether she had discovered something and chosen to conceal it from him out of pride. He wondered whether Kendall had discovered her request. Would attempt to confront Kendall alone, believing she could manage him by the sheer force of her intellect and moral certainty.
She could manage many men, Arch had no doubt. She could probably manage Parliament if she were permitted to sit in it.
He doubted, however, she could manage the man who was convinced of both his own virtue and willingness to bend principles to finance it.
Arch had always disguised his dislike of helplessness as impatience. It had served him tolerably well during the war. It served him badly in London, though, where one’s actions were constrained by propriety, and where preventing a disasteroften meant smiling through a conversation while one’s mind sketched the disaster’s outline in advance.
He had spent the morning in the house, not in idleness but in the careful maintenance of outward normality. He had read the newspapers and written two letters he had no wish to write. At noon, Stuart returned with his usual quiet efficiency and the air of a man who carried information the way another man carried a weapon.
“You appear discontented,” Stuart remarked, setting his hat aside.
“I look sensible,” Arch replied, looking up from his desk.
Stuart’s mouth twitched in amusement.
Arch did not dignify this with an argument. “Have you learned anything useful?”
Stuart sat down on a worn chair, removed a folded page from his pocket, and handed it over. “Kendall’s name appears twice in association with the Friends of Liberty.”
“Appears,” Arch repeated, scanning the page, “in what context?”
“Meeting attendance,” Stuart said. “Once at a coffee-house in Holborn, once at a private supper in Lambeth. Both were within the past month.”
“Have you aught about the society itself?”
Stuart’s eyes narrowed. “It is not formally unlawful. However, it attracts men who admire reform as an ideal and men who are prepared to use force to bring it about.”
Arch exhaled slowly. “Do we have evidence of force?”
“I have found nothing conclusive,” Stuart admitted, “but there are rumours of funds being directed to printers who produce rather more incendiary pamphlets than Miss Vale might endorse.”
Arch lifted his gaze to his comrade. “Funds which may have originated from her?”
Stuart nodded once. “Potentially.”
Arch set the paper down, restraining the impulse to rise and go directly to Sir Percival’s house. He had promised himself restraint, and she had earned, however unwillingly, a measure of respect. He would not barge into her drawing room with accusations built on inference. He would do it properly. He would do it with evidence. He would do it with that careful discipline that kept a man from making a fool of himself.
Fielding strolled in then with the mein of a man who had been mildly entertained by the world’s nonsense and had returned to share the amusement.
“You look as though you have swallowed a thistle,” Fielding observed to Arch.
“Nonsense,” Arch replied.
Fielding looked at Stuart. “Bad news?”
“Ambiguous news,” Stuart said.
