Yet, he was here.
When Owen entered the drawing room, Carter was standing near the window, with his hat in hand, looking very much likea man who had forced himself across a threshold and might yet turn back if given the opportunity. He glanced toward Owen, then away.
“My lord.”
“Mr. Carter.”
Neither of them sat.
Owen shut the door behind him. “I didn’t expect to see you.”
“No,” Carter responded with a humorless twist of his mouth. “To be quite honest, I didn’t expect to come.”
Owen waited. Carter looked down at the hat in his hands. He had turned the brim between his fingers until it had begun to lose its shape.
“I knew about the Finch family,” he admitted at last. “At the time, I mean. Not all of it, not as you know it now, perhaps. But enough to understand that Lady Finch had suffered because she would not be quiet.”
Owen’s expression hardened. “And still you said nothing.”
Carter flinched, though the accusation had been spoken quietly.
“I told myself there was nothing I could do.”
“Was there?”
“Then?” Carter let out a slow, defeated breath. “Perhaps not. Perhaps that was only cowardice dressed as sense. I don’t know anymore. There were other men hurt, my lord. Other families. Other careers ruined for getting too near the truth. You don’t know the half of it.”
“Then tell me.”
Carter looked up, and Owen could see that his eyes were tired and bloodshot. “That is why I am here.”
Owen went very still.
Carter swallowed. “What you told me yesterday, about the young lady, Miss Blackmore, and the garden party. That stayed with me. I thought I had made my peace with the past by keeping out of its way. But it seems the past has not kept away from anyone else.”
“No,” Owen said. “It has not.”
“I have some friends in London still. Men who hear things. Servants’ halls, clubs, stables, kitchens … the truth travels there faster than it does in drawing rooms. I sent word last night and asked what was being said of the Finch girl and her cousin.”
Owen’s chest tightened.
Carter’s expression shifted into something like disgust. “One man spoke of Miss Charlotte Langley as if she were a vulture. He said she had been circling the two ladies for weeks. He said there had been more than gossip.”
“What do you mean, more?”
Carter hesitated.
Owen stepped toward him. “What do you mean?”
“At a tea,” Carter said slowly, “Miss Finch and Miss Blackmore were made to understand they were not welcome. They were met with cold looks, silence, and humiliation. And before that, there was a note. Anonymous, warning them not to attend.”
Owen felt something inside him go cold.
“A note.”
“Not the first one, from what I was told.”
He could see Aurelia at the theater then, pale beneath the lamps, speaking to him with careful politeness. He had thought she was retreating from him. He had thought himself the object of her caution. All the while she had been carrying this. All the while Clara had been wounded again and again, and Aurelia had stood beside her with no shield but pride.
