“Isadora—”
“Good night, James.” She did not look back. “The fire is dying. You should call for someone.”
The corridor was dark and cool and mercifully quiet. She walked the length of it with her shoulders straight and her breathing even, and she did not think about his expression when she said no.
She closed her bedroom door and went to sit on the edge of the bed, both hands pressed flat against her knees.
Practical and nothing more.
She knew who James was. She had always known.
She only wished, with a force that surprised her greatly, that knowing it felt more like protection and less like loss.
CHAPTER 5
“The figure is incorrect,” James said.
Henderson looked up from the document. “Your Grace?”
“This number.” James turned the page toward him and indicated the line with one finger. “It cannot be correct.”
Henderson looked at it, pushing up his wire-rimmed glasses. Then he looked at James with the expression of a man who had learned, over thirty years of legal practice, to deliver extraordinary information without inflection. “It is correct, Your Grace.”
James looked at it again.
He had been sitting in the study for two hours, working through the will with the focused attention of a man who had decided that if he was going to be responsible for forty-three pages oflegal consequence, he was going to understand every line of them.
James looked at the figure once more.
“The Duke made several highly profitable investments over the past eight years. The Ashbourne estate itself is—was—in a bit of disarray, but he was careful with money.” Henderson paused. “He was also, I suspect, a man who knew the child’s position would be precarious and wished to secure her future regardless of what society made of her birth.”
“He was extraordinary with money.” James set the page down. “This is—she will never want for anything. Not for a single day of her life.”
“I believe that was precisely the intention.”
James sat back. He looked at the ceiling briefly, then at the wall. He thought about his cousin, a man he had known in the peripheral way of family connected by obligation rather than intimacy, encountered at the necessary occasions, regarded with vague warmth and no great depth.
He had not known any of this. He had not known about Clara Bennett or the years of quiet, careful planning, or the will drawn up fourteen months ago by a man making certain that a child he could not publicly claim would be protected after he was gone.
He should have known and done better.
The thought arrived simply, without self-pity, and stayed.
“Your Grace.” Henderson’s voice brought him back to the present. “There is the matter of the family.”
James looked up.
“Specifically,” Henderson continued, folding his hands over his papers, “certain members who have engaged their own solicitor.”
“Calder,” James said.
A slight pause. “You’ve spoken with him.”
“He came to me last night. Uninvited and after ten o’clock, which tells me something about the urgency his clients are feeling.” James leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Who are they, Henderson? I want names.”
Henderson looked down, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. “I am not at liberty to?—”
“Henderson.”
