“I have found them to be largely the same approach.” He offered a glass from the tray at his elbow. “I understand you have opinions about colonial trade. My sister speaks highly of a volume you recommended at Lady Fenwick’s.”
“Your sister exaggerates the recommendation. I said it was worth half an afternoon if one was inclined toward argument.” She took the glass. “Do you read?”
“I do. Primarily for the reliable pleasure of discovering I was wrong about something.” His eyes were direct but unhurried. “I spent two years in the East India trade and have since found I held very few correct opinions about it at the time.”
“That is a more honest admission than most men make on introduction.”
“I am told I improve upon acquaintance,” he said. “Whether that is recommendation or warning, I haven’t decided.”
Annabelle laughed; it came out easily, which she had not expected. “You’ve read Smith,” she said.
“Thoroughly, and with diminishing confidence in my own positions.” He turned his glass in his hand. “Book Three held me up for a fortnight. The argument about the natural order of capital investment — I found it convincing at first and have since grown uneasy.”
“The agricultural preference.”
“Yes. He calls any deviation from it irrational, and I accepted that for some time before I wondered whether I should have.”
“You should not have.” She looked at the room. “He builds a model of how capital ought naturally to progress — agriculture, then manufactures, then foreign trade — and then measures every nation against it. When they don’t conform, he calls it irrational preference. But a model is not a standard unless someone has validated it independently of the model.”
Hartwell stopped and looked at her. “He validated it with itself.”
“He did.”
He laughed again, this sound completely devoid of social decorum. “You’re entirely correct,” he said. “God. I’ve been using that framework in arguments with my partners for six months.” He looked at his glass with the expression of a man making a quiet revision. “That’s inconvenient.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No you’re not.” He was smiling.
“No,” she agreed, her own lips stretching in agreement. “I’m not.”
He let the quiet sit without filling it, which she noticed. Most men filled it.
“There’s something else,” he said. “If you’ve heard anything already, I’d rather you heard it from me directly.” He looked at the room. “Three ships in fourteen months. Consignment losses. The circumstances were unclear when they occurred and remain so in part — my partners managed the investigation, which I have since concluded was a mistake on my part to allow.”
She looked at him. “Why tell me?”
“Because you’ll hear it eventually with a great deal of interpretation attached to it.” He met her gaze without difficulty. “And because I find I have no interest in being anything other than straightforward with you.”
She considered this. “That’s a creditable answer.”
“It’s a true one. Whether it’s creditable is a separate question.” He answered, and she nodded in acquiescence. When he excused himself, she stood with her glass and named what she felt without ambiguity: warmth, appreciation, respect.
But there was not a single additional thing. And in that moment, she looked up, her eyes searching without her express consent.
Dominic was on the far side of the room, in conversation with two men she didn’t know, but his eyes were already on hers before she’d completed the turn, and the moment their gazes met, he looked back to his companions without a change in expression.
She set her glass on the nearest tray.
Dominic spent twenty minutes in conversation with his host. He spent a further ten minutes discussing a matter of property with a man he met in the east room. He returned to the main drawing room and took up a position at the far wall near the door, because a man had to stand somewhere.
“You’ve been watching Hartwell for the last quarter hour,” Miles said beside him.
“I’ve been watching the room.” He replied, the lie no smoother than all his other ones, and Miles obviously did not believe this one either.
“You have been watching one specific man in the room with the expression you get before you request a second opinion on a contract.” Miles pointed out, and Dominic turned to glare at his friend.
Now was simply not the time to antagonize him; he didn’t think
