He waited.
Her eyes began to brim.
“She is averydear person.” She said this forcefully, but her voice cracked with emotion. She straightened her spine. “She is thoughtful and kind—not at all spoiled. She is not a fanciful or reckless girl. She has not been made to feel a burden, but she knows that she has beentendedto as a duty, rather than loved. I suspect she hoped to find something of a real family with Lord Brundage. Shecouldbe hopeful despite the events of her life. The loss of her parents. The loss of her oldest brother. That is the kind of person she is.”
It was a rather different picture of her than Brundage had provided.
“So you’re saying something serious indeed compelled her to leave.”
Her eyes flared in alarm. “I did not say that!”
He let it lie. He didn’t press.
Because they both knew it was precisely what she’d meant.
“It’s terribly difficult to sleep when you’re worried about someone,” Hawkes said, thoughtfully. “I remember how my mother scarcely slept in the week after my father’s death. She is an elegant woman—you remind me a little of how she was when she was younger.”
A ghost of a smile here from Madame Aubert.
“She was a strong person, my mother, and she never liked anyone to worry over her. She didn’t want people to be concerned when they saw her pale complexion, so she actually—and sheneverdid this normally, mind—wore a little rouge and powder.” He smiled slightly. “It covered freckles she didn’t like, too.”
“Oh, yes, I understand,” Madame Aubert said warmly. “Nor doInormally wear...”
She trailed off. She pressed her lips closed.
They regarded each other for a tense moment.
Madame Aubert was intelligent. She had a sense of him now.
And she knew precisely what he’d noticed.
His story about his mother, of course, was entirely apocryphal.
“I am not so graceful,” she said carefully. “I passed too swiftly through a doorway and I bumped my cheek.”
“Yes. Doorways can be so perilous,” he said gravely.
She didn’t smile at that.
Now she was frightened.
He was thoughtful a moment. He’d thought there was nothing left in the world that could possibly send a tremor through the bedrock his soul seemed to havebecome. He’d witnessed Brundage striking a strapping footman, and now he knew why. But the possibility that Brundage would stoop so cravenly low as to strike a small woman, a servant, simply because she displeased him, unsettled him deeply.
Surely Brundage would never dare lift a hand to Lady Aurelie?
For a moment the stiletto point of his concentration wavered.
It wasn’t his business to ask Madame Aubert outright about what happened to her. It had naught to do with what he’d been paid to do. She wouldn’t tell him the truth, anyway, because Brundage had no doubt succeeded in terrifying her, and he worked for Brundage.
He reminded himself that his mission was to find a girl, and quickly.
“Lord Brundage informs me that he and Lady Aurelie had a bit of an altercation about a month ago. Did you witness this or overhear it?”
Madame Aubert pressed her lips together in thought.
Finally she said, her voice trembling a little, “I did not witness an altercation.”
That answer was a thing of beauty from the standpoint of his profession, in that it was like a lid locked over a chest stuffed full of information. He admired it, and it irritated him. “But you knew about it or heardaboutthis disagreement?” he pressed.
