Page 17

"And thus far," Lady Colbourne said, slowly, "every concern has proved correct?"

Mr. Wells nodded, and exhaled. "For several years now, I have had, on occasion, what I should call discreet warnings of irregularities in certain financial matters. In each instance, the warning let me act. To intervene, if you will, before any real damage could be done." He drew himself up a little, a thread of pride creeping into his defense of the thing. "My establishment is a reputable one, Your Grace. I should like it to remain so."

Benedict rubbed a hand at his chin, and saw how Lady Colbourne's lips had parted in plain astonishment. She closed her eyes, and gave herself a small shake, and when she spoke again her voice was soft with the size of it.

"You are telling us," she said, "that for years an unknown hand has written to you — of the private money of families who are not even your own clients, financial intelligence, if you would name it so — and you have never once questioned it?"

"I questioned it a great many times," the man returned, some firmness returning to him, "only for each and every letter to prove itself entirely correct. I verify what I can, where I can. On this occasion, and this is the first of its kind, I had a letter touching Lady Warrington's will as it concerned Lady Colbourne. Because I have come to trust the writer of these letters, I sent the substance of it at once to Mr. Braithwaite. I should not like to see a fellow solicitor come to grief through a thing I might have prevented."

Benedict said nothing for a long moment, his gaze moving from Mr. Wells to Lady Colbourne and back again. He found it settling upon him slowly and coldly. It was not the one letter that troubled him. It was the years of them.

"How many," he asked, "would you say you have had? Across those years. A dozen? A score?"

Mr. Wells hesitated, and something in the hesitation was itself an answer. "More than that, Your Grace. I could not give you a number. They come as they come. A season may pass with none, and then two together." He spread his hands. "I keep no tally. It seemed — indelicate."

"And always right," Lady Colbourne said.

"Always." He said it simply, and there was no boasting in it now, only a kind of dawning discomfort, as though the lady's stillness had made him hear his own words for the first time. "I have never known one to be mistaken. A debt hidden. A settlement not what it was made to seem. An agent gone to the bad. Small things, most of them, and quietly set right: a word to the right party, a paper looked at twice. I had thought it — a good fortune. A thing that fell my way, that I had done nothing to earn and might as well make use of."

The room had gone very quiet. Benedict was aware of Lady Colbourne beside him, of the small, arrested set of her, and he understood — a beat before she said it — that she had followed the thing further than he had, and to a colder place.

"Then someone," she said, very low, her eyes not on Mr. Wells now but on the middle distance, on nothing, "has been reading us. All of us. For years." She turned her face to Benedict, and it had gone white. "Every letter is another family whose private money some stranger knew better than they knew it themselves. Whose secrets he had counted, and weighed, and set down — before they had the smallest notion he was there at all." Her hand had risen to the base of her throat. "My husband's affairs. Mine. Lady Warrington's. How long, do you suppose, was I read, before ever I came to London and thought myself a stranger here?"

Benedict had no answer for her. There was none that would comfort, and he would not give her a false one. He had learned that much, at least, in a park, at some cost. He held her gaze instead, and let her see that he had heard her, and understood the size of the thing exactly as she did.

Mr. Wells cleared his throat, unnerved by the silence. "I cannot tell you, my lady. I wish before God I could." He reached to a drawer at his side. "I have kept a few of them," he admitted, as though confessing a small sin. "Not from any suspicion, only that a careful man does not burn what has proved so useful. You may see the hand for yourselves, if you wish." He drew out two or three folded papers and set them upon the desk, and turned one toward Benedict with a fingertip.

Benedict took it up. The hand was neat, unhurried, without flourish: a hand that had written a great many letters and wished none of them to be remembered. It concerned some matter that was nothing to do with Lady Colbourne, an estate in the north and a steward who had salted his master's books. Benedict read it with half his attention, until his eye caught, near the foot of it, a single closing line before the unsigned end.

I have set the whole of it plainly before you, and can add nothing further. This is my best and final judgment upon the matter, and I leave it now in worthier hands than mine.

He read it, thought it a stiff and self-important way to close a letter, and thought no more of it. He set the paper down.

"May we keep these?" Lady Colbourne asked.

Mr. Wells's hand came out at once to cover them. "I would rather you did not," he said, and there was, beneath the courtesy, a quick real alarm that Benedict marked and filed away. "They are — they are all that remains to me of a thing that has served my house well. And I have given you my discretion in speaking of it at all. I must ask the same of you." He gathered the papers back to himself, and the drawer closed on them.

He is afraid, Benedict thought — and not only for his reputation. A man with years of another's secrets flowing through his office, a man who had asked no questions and taken every gift, was a man who had a great deal to lose should the source ever be named — or should it turn out that the source and the keeper of it were nearer than they seemed. Benedict did not say so. But he did not, entirely, put it from his mind.

"I understand," he said instead, and rose. "You have been more of a help than perhaps you know, Mr. Wells."

The solicitor's eyes jumped to his, and for a moment Benedict thought he would protest, that he had said too much, and knew it. Then he sank back into his chair and drew his hands into his lap.

"An excellent afternoon's work, Your Grace," Lady Colbourne murmured, rising too, though she narrowed her gaze a little as she looked back at the man. "Good afternoon, Mr. Wells. For all the help you have been, I thank you."

Gracious, and polite, and edged like a blade beneath it. Benedict's brows rose at the neatness of it, and he offered her his arm, which she took without question. With a nod to Mr. Wells, he escorted her from the room and out into the afternoon.

"That was of some use, I hope," he said, as they stepped into the fresh air. "For my part, I begin to think —"

"Look." Lady Colbourne hissed the word between her teeth, her hand tightening on his arm, her head turning to the right. "There. Do you see?"

Benedict looked, not at first certain what he was to look for, until his gaze landed on a man standing at the corner of the street, his head turned toward them. The distance was too great for Benedict to be sure the fellow watched them in particular — and yet, after a moment, the man turned on his heel and walked briskly away, disappearing among the other men and ladies of the London street. A slight shiver went down Benedict's spine. He did not shrug it off this time. He had shrugged off a shiver once, in a park, and had cause since to wish he had not.

"I am certain someone has been watching me," Lady Colbourne whispered, her hand still tight upon his arm. "Every time I come out from the solicitor's, he is there. And I cannot be easy that he is not near my house besides — for how else would he know I came to Mr. Wells's office today, and not to Mr. Braithwaite's?"

It was, Benedict thought grimly, a very fair question. He turned it over, and did not like the answer: that the same patient hand which had read the money of half the ton might read the movements of one widow well enough to know which door she went in at.

From the roundness of her eyes he could see she was afraid, and the urge to comfort her, to take her hands in his and look down into her face and speak some steadiness into her, rose so strongly he could not have said afterward whether he chose to do it or not. As her hand slid from his arm, he caught it in his own.