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“Miss Trent?”

She lifted her head to find Lord Carrington looking down at her, concern plain on his face.

“Is everything quite all right?”

She tried to answer, but her throat had near closed, and she only shook her head. If she spoke, she feared the words would come with tears she could not hide. He acted at once, seating himself across from her. With a trembling hand she laid it upon the folded note and drew back, letting him reach for it.

“This was left for you here?” She nodded. “I can well imagine what it says.” He frowned. “Perhaps it would be best if we stepped outside, Miss Trent, where you need not hide your feelings from prying eyes.” He rose and held out a hand. “Come. The air will do you good. We shall have the staff tell Lady Manion you have gone out.”

She took his arm and felt the strength of it steady her as they passed through Gunter’s and, mercifully, out into the sun. He guided her a few paces from the door to a bench where she might sit.

“You are trembling.” He did not sit, but stood before her, a shield between her and the watchful ton. “Might I read it?”

She nodded and looked away as he unfolded the note. A silence fell. When she made herself look back, she was startled by the hardness at his mouth, the contained anger flashing in his eyes. He was angry on her behalf. Angry that a few words had wounded her so.

“This is cruelty.” He folded the note with deliberate care, his jaw working. “I am disgusted by whoever wrote it. What cause could they have?”

“They fight on your behalf, perhaps,” she whispered, and his blue eyes searched hers. “They want you to have the house. I will confess that, even now, living there, it does not feel like home. I feel a stranger in another’s house — an unfamiliarity that makes me almost unwelcome in it.” She spread her hands. “Perhaps the writer knows that. Though I cannot imagine who they are.”

Lord Carrington let out a hiss of breath. “My first thought was Brookmire. But when I put it to him, he was insistent it was not his doing, and a little insulted that I should think so.”

“And you believe him?”

He nodded.

She managed a brief smile. “Then so do I.”

That softened him, a glint coming into his eyes. “I am grateful for that, Miss Trent.” His brows drew together again. “Still — we should return, if you are able, and decide what is to be done. I will not be turned from this.” He wet his lips. “Though if you feel otherwise, I would understand.”

She shook her head, buoyed both by his defense of her and his determination to go on. “I should like that, Lord Carrington.”

“Good.” He offered his hand, and she took it, and found that the smile on her face was a true one — as if he had taken all her strain and shaken it from her. “Then let us go back, enjoy our ices, and make a plan. I can think of nothing better to do this afternoon.”

Her heart lifted. “Nor I.”

The plan, when they had made it — over ices going soft in the warm afternoon, with Hannah returned and listening with her spoon suspended — was a simple one, and the making of it steadied Viola more than the ices did. He would go to the solicitors and ask for whatever papers touched either family; there might be some record, some correspondence, that would show who stood close enough to Lady Warrington’s affairs to know what these letter-writers seemed to know. She, for her part, would ask at Stoneleigh — the staff had served the lady for years, and servants saw everything, and Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Hartley between them held the house’s whole memory.

“And I,” Hannah said, retrieving her spoon, “shall continue to go about in society being extremely pleasant to everyone, and hearing far more than anyone supposes I do. It is the great advantage of being a married woman of no possible interest to anybody.”

“Tomorrow, then.” Lord Carrington said it to Viola, and though the word was nothing, a plain appointment, papers on a table, it warmed her out of all proportion to its size.

“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and returned to her ice before it was quite lost, and found the afternoon had turned somehow into one she would keep.

CHAPTER 11

Julian cast a sharp eye about his drawing room, though he had already surveyed it twice. Nothing wanted his attention. Everything was set, everything ready for Miss Trent’s arrival.

His morning had been a busy one. Having settled a clear plan with Miss Trent and her sister the day before, he had set about it with all the haste he could. The note she had received at Gunter’s had unsettled him more than he had let her see. It was plain now that someone meant to frighten her into surrendering Stoneleigh House to him. Why anyone should do such a thing, he could not imagine. Again and again his mind returned to Brookmire, and again and again he recalled his brother’s fervent denial. He had to believe him.

But that meant there was someone else.

So he had gone to the solicitors and begged whatever papers they held touching Stoneleigh House and his own bequest of Glenbrae. They had been reluctant at first — the papers were the estate’s, and Lady Warrington’s executors answerable for their care — but with much persuasion, and his promise to answer for any trouble himself, he had been given all he asked.

There had been one thing Mr. Braithwaite would not part with. As Julian gathered up the rest, the solicitor remarked, in the careful manner of a man marking the limit of what he was free to do, that Lady Warrington had left certain letters in his keeping, sealed in her own hand. They were to be opened only should a particular need arise; and in his judgment, that need had not yet come. He would say nothing of what they held, nor for whom they were meant, and Julian had known better than to press. He had thought little of it then. A lady of her care might leave any number of such instructions, and none of them his concern.

The urge to read them at once had been hard to resist. But, knowing Miss Trent would value his patience, he had set them aside untouched. Now, waiting for her, he paced the drawing room with his hands clasped behind his back, eager both for the papers and for the sight of her again.

He could no longer pretend his interest in Miss Trent was merely as a companion. The way she had looked at him yesterday, sitting outside Gunter’s, had done something to his heart. It had been a strange moment: a rising need to protect her crashing against a sudden, unexpected swell of feeling at her beauty. The sun had struck gold into the deep amber of her eyes; her chestnut curls had glinted bronze. It had shaken him to feel so much, for he had never once been drawn to a young lady with such force. In that moment he had wanted nothing so much as to gather her up and shield her from every dark whisper and cruel word.