That had happened without her permission and apparently was not going to reverse itself simply because she found it inconvenient.
“Right,” she muttered.
She looked at Violet, who was leaning against her, her head lolling and her eyes growing heavy with sleep.
“Right,” she said again, more quietly.
She pulled the blanket closer around Violet. The feelings running through her were frightening and real. She stayed with them until the cold finally made the decision for her and she carried Violet back inside.
CHAPTER 25
“The Bennetts’ solicitor,” James said, “had the most comprehensive filing system I have ever seen and absolutely nothing useful inside it.”
Harding, his London solicitor—compact, quick-eyed, with twenty years of practice concentrated into a permanently skeptical expression—looked at him across the desk with the diplomacy of a man declining to say,I told you so.
“The Bennett family’s legal affairs have always been modest,” Harding said. “The late Miss Bennett was not a woman of independent means. Whatever arrangement existed between her and the late Duke was managed through his representatives, not hers.”
“Which means her personal papers?—”
“Would not have passed through any legal office I have access to.” Harding folded his hands. “The letters Mortimer presented… Do you have copies, Your Grace?”
“Henderson has them. I’ve read them twice.” James stood from the chair he had been occupying for the past two hours and went to the window. Outside, London was grey and purposeful and entirely indifferent to his problems. “They are written in a woman’s hand. The content is plausible, on the surface. An intimacy with an unnamed gentleman. Dates that would create sufficient uncertainty about the child’s parentage.” He turned back. “But there is no name. Not once. The person is referred to vaguely throughout. Which is either discretion or invention, and I cannot determine which from the letters alone.”
“You need a witness,” Harding advised. “Someone who knew Miss Bennett personally and who could speak to her character and her circumstances in the relevant period.”
“Her aunt produced the letters.”
“Her aunt,” he said carefully, “has provided those letters to Lord Mortimer. I would not rely on her as a witness.”
“No.” James turned back to the window. “There is the father. Reverend Thomas Bennett. A vicar, apparently. I had the name from the third office we visited yesterday, a clerk who remembered the family from some years back. He mentioned the father specifically.” He paused. “He would have known Clara. Known her well, presumably, in the way fathers knowtheir daughters when they have not yet been separated by circumstance.”
Harding was quiet for a moment.
“A reverend would be a credible witness,” he opined.
“If he is willing to speak.”
“If he knows anything worth speaking about.”
“He would know his daughter,” James said. “He would know whether those letters are consistent with the woman she was.” He turned from the window. “I will pay him a visit within the week.”
“Your Grace, if the reverend is unwilling?—”
“Then I will persuade him,” James assured him. “Gently. I am capable of being gentle.”
Harding seemed to consider.
“Yes, Your Grace,” he said, with the tact of a man who had made his professional opinion known and was now stepping aside for the personal one.
James arrived back at the townhouse at half past nine.
The evening had been long and largely unproductive. He was tired from spending too many hours in solicitors’ offices reading documents that led, with persistent creativity, to nothing. He had eaten something at some point that he could not recall, and what he now wanted, in the precise and uncomplicated way of a tired man, was a glass of his best brandy and the silence of his own house before the morning.
“Your Grace.” His London butler, Fenwick, appeared in the entrance hall with a grave expression. He was older than Briggs and considerably more austere, and had been managing this townhouse through three decades of James’s various phases and had made his peace with them all.
“Good evening, Fenwick.”
“Your Grace.” A fractional pause. “You have a visitor.”
