Page 54

“And since?”

“Nothing at all.”

Pell studied the paper. He read it twice, moving his lips very slightly, and then set it down and folded his large hands over it.

“Two years is a long while for a man to stay lost, Your Grace,” he said. “London is a crowded place, but it is also a small one. A man who keeps his old trade will be seen by his old customers. If he is not to be found at all, there are only three reasons I know.”

“Go on.”

“He has gone abroad. Or he is dead. Or he is being careful.”

“Which do you think?”

“I do not think anything yet. It is a poor habit in my line.” The mild eyes lifted. “May I ask what you mean to do when you find him?”

Gregory had been waiting for the question. He had asked it of himself in the dark, a good many times. He found that he still did not have a tidy answer.

“I mean to look at him,” he said.

“That is all?”

“For now.”

Pell was silent for a long moment. Then he said, gently, “In my experience, sir, it is never all.”

“Then you will have to trust that I am a man of my word.” Gregory stood, and took up his hat. “Send to me directly. Not to the house. There is a boy at the mews behind Half Moon Street who will bring anything to me within the hour, at any time. I am to be told the moment you have anything, however small.”

“And I would advise you, Your Grace, to let me do the finding.” Pell’s voice was still mild. “A gentleman of your rank, asking questions in the wrong shops, is a thing that gets talked of. Whoever he is, he would hear you were looking before you were within a mile of him.”

“I will do both.”

“I thought you might say so.”

Outside, London was only beginning to wake. A milk cart clattered over the cobbles. A girl in a mobcap was scrubbing a doorstep, and a pale, thin light had begun to seep into the sky above the rooftops. He walked, because he did not trust himself to sit in a carriage. He walked with his hands in his pockets and his hat pulled low, through streets he had never once had cause to know, past dark shopfronts and shuttered windows, and he thought of nothing at all until the thing behind him caught up.

On the Strand he stopped, without quite knowing why, before a milliner’s window. There were bonnets set out on stands, ribboned and feathered, pale in the early light behind the glass. A green one with a curled brim. A gray silk with a spray of cornflowers. He looked at them for a long moment. Theodosia had loved bonnets, when she was small. She used to try them all on in their mother’s dressing room, each more absurd than the last, and parade before him in the doorway with her chin in the air, demanding that he tell her which was the finest. He had always said the tallest. It had never once occurred to him that she might be asking for something else.

He wondered, standing there, whether it had been a shop like this one. Whether some careless afternoon a clerk had looked up from a counter and noticed a girl with her chin in the air. He turned from the window before the thought could go any further, and walked faster.

And then the other thing came, without warning, as it always did. It was not grief. It was a picture: a woman on a nursery floor with her hair coming down and her eyes closed, leaning toward him. Her mouth soft and slightly open. Her hand warm on his.

He had wanted to kiss her more than he had wanted to draw his next breath.

And he had known, in the same instant, with a clarity that was almost physical, exactly what would come of it. She would be gentle. She would take him into her arms and tell him it would be all right, and let him lean on her, as she had already been doing for weeks. And he would take. He would take everything, because it was there, and because he was drowning, and because she was the kindest person he had ever known. He would use her up.

And then I will have failed her too.

He had seen it happen. It had happened to his sister, in a house full of people who took what they needed and gave nothing back.

He would not do it to Phillipa. He would not do it, when she had asked for so little. She had married him for the sake of an orphanage and a child. She had never once asked to be his refuge.

So he would finish this.

He would find the man, and he would look at him, and only then, when it was done, and he was clean of it, would he go home and look his wife in the face. Until then, it was better that she did not see him.

“He was here at half past five, Your Grace,” said Martha. “He stood a good while. I was in the corner with my eyes shut, and I do not think he knew I was awake.”

Phillipa, who had sat up half the night in the nursery armchair with a shawl over her knees, said, “Did he say anything?”