“This afternoon. I had gone first to ask about the man who threatened Frederica in the park — the stocky fellow. His name is Rathbone. He was Bolton’s clerk for twelve years, dismissed at my uncle’s instruction shortly before he died.” David rubbed his thumb across his temple. “And while I was there, I asked about the codicil. Bolton looked at me as though I had spoken in a foreign tongue. He had never heard of it. He went to the cabinet, he opened the file, and he sorted through every paper. There is no codicil.”
Broadford set down his own glass. He did not say I told you so, which was a kindness David noticed and was unable, just now, to acknowledge.
“He invented it,” David said. The words still sounded wrong. “My uncle, on his deathbed, looked me in the eye and invented a document that did not exist, and made me swear myself to a marriage I did not want, on the strength of words alone. For a year, I have believed him. For a year I have — ” He stopped. He could not say the rest of that sentence. For a year, I have lost her.
“Drink the brandy,” Broadford said quietly.
David drank the brandy. It burned, which was something to feel.
“I do not understand it,” he said, when he had set the glass down again. “I cannot make it fit. He was a hard man, but he was not — he did not lie. Not to family. Not about matters of consequence. And to do this, to construct an entire fiction about a legal document, to use his own death as the stage for it — what was he afraid of, that he would do such a thing?”
Broadford turned his glass slowly between his fingers, his eyes on the fire.
“You are asking the right question,” he said at last. “But I do not think you are asking enough of it.”
David looked at him.
“Your uncle invented a codicil to bind you to Frederica. That is one fact.” Broadford raised one finger. “The same uncle, in the same period, instructed Bolton to dismiss Rathbone — a clerk of twelve years’ standing — for what Bolton has called inappropriate behaviour during a meeting. That is another fact. And the same Rathbone has now appeared at Frederica’s side, and at her townhouse, in a manner that has frightened her badly enough that she will not speak of him.” A second finger. “I do not believe in coincidences of that order, David. I believe your uncle was not a man given to fictions about legal documents — except that he was, in this one case, and the case happens to coincide exactly with his removal of a man who has now reappeared as a threat to his daughter.”
David’s hand stilled around his glass.
“You think he was protecting her.”
“I think he was frightened for her. And I think Rathbone is the reason.” Broadford set his glass down. “Whatever your uncle knew of that man — and he must have known something, to have him dismissed in the manner he was — he died before he could see Frederica safely settled. The codicil was a bluff. He had no time to draft a real one, no time to consult Bolton, perhaps no certainty of what was coming. So he told you what he needed you to do, and trusted that you would do it without looking too closely. He did not lie to harm you, David. He lied because he was running out of time.”
David stared at the fire. The logic of it was clean, and terrible, and it shifted the entire shape of his grief.
“He should have told me,” he said.
“Yes. He should have. But men who are dying are not always men who reason well, and your uncle was, by all accounts, bothproud and stubborn until the end.” Broadford’s voice softened. “I do not say this to excuse him. Only to suggest that the man who lied to you on his deathbed was not the man you knew, but a frightened version of him, doing badly the only thing he could think to do.”
David said nothing for a long moment.
“It does not change what I must do,” he said at last.
“No. It does not.”
“I will speak with Frederica. I will tell her there is no codicil, and I will tell her that I am breaking the engagement.” He paused. “I will tell her also about Rathbone — what I have learned, what I suspect — and I will tell her that whatever hold the man has over her, she is not alone in it. I will not abandon her to him. I owe her that, at the very least.”
“You owe her a great deal more than that,” Broadford said, “but it is a beginning.”
David nodded.
“And Lady Nora?”
The name struck him in the chest the way it always did. He had not spoken of her to anyone — not properly, not as what she was — and the brandy and the firelight and the long afternoon had loosened something in him that ordinarily held quite firm.
“I love her,” he said.
Broadford did not look surprised. He nodded once, slowly, as if the confirmation was useful but not new.
“I have loved her for over a year,” David said. “And in that year, I said nothing of it, because I believed myself bound to another woman by my uncle’s word. Now I find that the binding was a lie.” His voice caught. “I do not know how to forgive him for the year, Broadford. I do not know how to begin.”
“You do not have to forgive him today.” Broadford rose and put his hand briefly on David’s shoulder — the unfamiliar weight of it, from a man not given to gestures of that kind, said morethan words would have. “Go home. Sleep. Tomorrow, you will go to Frederica. The day after that, perhaps, you will go to your Lady Nora, and you will tell her what you have just told me.” A faint, tired smile. “And then we shall see about Rathbone.”
David rose. At the door, he turned.
“Thank you,” he said.
