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And then she did not turn her face away, nor press it to his shoulder to be comforted. She looked down at the paper in her own hand — Edward's hand, the last plain proof of a fear he had borne alone to the end — and she held it out to him.

"Take it," she said. "I have carried Edward's affairs about my neck like a stone since Braithwaite first spoke of them, and understood not a word. I cannot carry this one alone. There is no one living I can put it into the hands of but you." Her fingers did not shake as she gave it over. "You are the only one, Benedict."

The name came on the end of a breath, unadorned, as if it had been waiting behind all the careful Your Graces and Blackwoods for exactly this moment to slip its leash.

Benedict went still.

He was not a man made for stillness. His whole life he had answered trouble by going to meet it, by rising from his chair and going to the door. His friends had remarked all his life on the restlessness of him, the way even his sitting had a spring coiled under it.

But at the sound of his own name in her mouth — his Christian name, spoken low and certain, welded to the trust of the thing she had just laid in his hand — he did not move at all. The paper was between his fingers and hers. The candles hissed faintly. He stood arrested, the whole engine of him gone quiet, and let the moment be exactly the size it was.

"Harriet." He said it back to her, and it was not the tired courtesy of an afternoon. It was an answer, and they both heard it for one. Neither of them pretended the wall stood where it had stood an hour before. It did not. She had crossed it with a single word, and he had followed her over, and there was no going back to the far side of it now.

He looked down at Edward's page in his own hand — held, now, by them both — and felt the weight of it settle onto his own shoulders where it belonged. She was not carrying it alone. That was all he could give her tonight, and he gave it gladly.

A sudden sound at the window made him start.

Harriet gasped, her eyes flaring wide, and her hand shot to his arm and gripped. They both went silent. Then it came again — the faint scrape of a foot on the gravel beneath the study window, close, deliberate, no more than a pane of glass and a curtain's breadth from where they stood — and her fingers curled hard into his sleeve, her eyes fixed on the drawn curtain as though she could see through it to whatever waited on the other side.

"Stay here." Benedict had the situation in hand at once. He guided her to the chair, pressed her down into it, and went from the room at a stride, calling as he went. Within minutes he had the butler and two footmen roused and the house astir, candles lifted, the search spreading through the rooms and out into the grounds.

He took a light himself and went out by the garden door, around to where the study window looked out onto the night — and found the curtain fast, the new-set locks holding, the house shut against the world exactly as Harriet had bidden it be shut, the intruder driven back to the cold ground outside for want of any way in.

But he had been there. Broken branches, ground disturbed, and a single deep print pressed into the soft earth beneath the sill told Benedict that a man had stood in that spot only minutes before, stood close against the glass, in the dark, a curtain's thickness from the two of them at their work within.

His jaw tightened. His heart slammed against his ribs, and the fear in it was not for himself. Harriet had been right from the first. Someone had watched her, and now that someone had come close enough to breathe against her window — bolder, or more desperate, than before, because she had at last put her hand on the very thing they wanted.

Chapter Nine

The letter came before Harriet had finished her chocolate.

She had slept ill. She had known she would. Blackwood had gone only after the house was made fast, and the print in the earth beneath the study window filled and the ground raked over, and still she had lain awake, listening. When the gray light came at last through the curtains, she gave up the pretense of rest. She took her breakfast in the small parlor rather than the dining room, because the dining room looked out toward the study, and she had seen enough of the study.

It was Edward’s memo that would not let her rest. His own hand, naming Lady Warrington — the fear he had carried alone and set down and never spoken. She had it by heart already. Having reviewed my own accounts and seen the difficulty there. Edward had begun with his own accounts. So, then, would she.

For the truth was, she could not read them. She and Blackwood had gone through every sheet the evening before, and she had understood not a tenth of what passed under her hand. Nor could she tell what was missing when she did not know what had once been present.

There was one plain remedy for that. Somewhere there existed a proper accounting of Edward’s affairs, kept by the very solicitors who managed the Colbourne estate. Set what lay on Edward's desk against a true and orderly record, and she would know at a glance what had been taken. More than that: if Edward had found a difficulty worked into his own books, a careful eye on those same books might find it again. She would write that very morning and set it in motion.

It was a good plan. She had been rather proud of it, at half past six, with the whole house still asleep.

The letter that came with her chocolate put an end to it.

It was from Mr. Braithwaite, a brief, apologetic thing, written in evident discomfort. She had sent round to him at first light, the moment she conceived the notion, asking whether her late husband’s accounts might be gathered and examined on her behalf. This was his answer. He was, he wrote, most willing to assist her in any way that lay within his power. He shared her every concern. He would put his office entirely at her service.

But the accounts of the late Earl of Colbourne were the accounts of the Colbourne estate, and the Colbourne estate was no longer Edward’s. It was her brother-in-law’s. And no examination of those papers could be undertaken, nor a single ledger opened, on any authority but that of the present Earl, to whom, Mr. Braithwaite regretted to say, the request must therefore be referred.

Harriet set the letter down beside her cup and looked at it for a long moment.

It had not once occurred to her. Edward had held the title. Edward’s papers had been Edward’s. And it had seemed the simplest thing in the world that his widow should be permitted to look into them.

But a title did not descend to a widow. It had gone, with the estate and the entail and every last ledger belonging to it, to the cold man who had turned her out of her own home within a fortnight of taking it up. She might sit at Edward’s desk in a house she was permitted to keep only until it suited her brother-in-law to want it back. But the record of what Edward had done at that desk, the true accounting of it, lay behind a door only her brother-in-law could open.

Well. She had written harder letters than this one.

She rang for her writing case, and wrote to the Earl of Colbourne. She was careful, and civil, more civil than she felt. She made no mention of the man on the corner, nor of the borrowed footman’s coat, for she would not hand that cold man a reason to think her hysterical.

She said only that a question had arisen touching Edward’s affairs and the endowment tied to them, that its resolution required his accounts to be studied, and that she wrote to ask his consent, as the present holder of the estate, to have that study made. She signed herself his affectionate sister, though she was nothing of the kind, and sent it by the fastest hand her butler could find.