Page 24

The answer came two days later.

She knew it for what it was before she broke the seal, for all of it was contained in the smallness of the folded sheet. A generous man wrote at length. A man refusing you wrote as little as he could.

Her brother-in-law had written very little.

He was, he informed her, greatly occupied with the affairs of the estate, which she would understand were considerable and did not admit of frivolous interruption. He could see no cause whatever to permit a rummaging through the late Earl’s private papers on the strength of some confusion at a solicitor’s office, which he had no doubt would resolve itself in due course as such things did, and which was, in any case, no concern of his.

He had let her keep the townhouse out of a charity he now half regretted. He would not compound it by opening his brother’s books to satisfy her curiosity. He remained, and so forth.

Harriet read it twice, and then a third time, and set it down with a hand that was not perfectly steady.

The cruelty of it she had half expected. She had been on the receiving end of the man’s cruelty before. What she had not expected was the small, cold thread of unease that wound itself through her anger as she read it, and would not be shaken loose.

He will not let anyone see the accounts.

She rose and went to the window, and stood looking down into the street where nothing more alarming than a coal-cart made its slow way past, and turned the thing over, and did not much like the shape it took.

Consider it plainly, she told herself. A stranger had broken into her house to search Edward’s papers. And now the one man who could have those same papers laid open and honestly examined refused, flatly, to let it be done. Refused with a haste, and a heat, and a little-ness that sat oddly beside all the estate business he claimed to be so pressed by. A busy man would have said no in a line and thought no more of it. Her brother-in-law had not merely declined. He had shut the door and set his shoulder against it.

Why should a man so trouble himself to keep a widow from a set of accounts — unless he feared what a careful eye might find in them?

The thought was ugly. It grew uglier the longer she looked at it, and a great many things could be made to fit, if one wished them to fit. An estate and a fortune had come to him the instant Edward was thrown from his horse on an ordinary morning. Edward into a grave, his brother into everything. Then the unseemly haste to turn her out, as though the house wanted emptying of her before she thought to ask questions of it. And now no one might look at the books.

There had been something wrong at the bottom of Edward’s affairs, too. Mr. Braithwaite had all but said so that first afternoon, his eyes not quite meeting hers.

Might it be that the trouble in Edward’s papers was no outside villain’s doing at all, but her own family’s — that the man who had inherited everything had good reason to keep those accounts closed?

She pressed her fingertips to her temple. She could feel the whole case building itself, and made herself stop. Hold it at arm’s length. She had learned this week to distrust a thing that assembled itself too readily. And this was a great deal built upon very little — built, if she were honest, chiefly upon disliking the man and wishing to find him guilty of something. That was no foundation at all. And yet the obstruction remained, whatever her motives in reading it. The accounts might have cleared everything. Her brother-in-law would not have them cleared.

She would show it to the Duke of Blackwood. The resolution settled her, as her resolutions of late all seemed to do the moment his name entered them. He had a colder head for this than she did, and a fairer one. He had known her brother-in-law not at all, and would weigh the letter without her own dislike pressing its thumb upon the scale.

If there was something in it, he would see it. And if there was nothing in it but a mean man being mean — well, she would rather he told her so than go on piecing it together alone in a violated house.

There was no sense sitting over it. If the accounts were shut to her, the Duke was not. She would put the letter into his hands the very next time she saw him, and let two heads make of it what one could not.

She folded her brother-in-law’s letter small and put it into her writing case, apart from the rest. Then she rang for her cloak.

Chapter Ten

Harriet stifled a yawn as the carriage carried her toward the heart of London. The house had returned to its usual quiet after the disturbance in the garden some nights before, but Harriet had found no such quiet. The Duke had done all a man could do to see her safe — the house made fast, the print in the earth filled, the ground raked over — and still she had lain rigid in the dark, making a threat of every ordinary sound the night offered her, certain the watcher had come back for whatever he had not managed to reach.

It was only when she had turned her thoughts from the window to the man who had stood between her and it — the weight of his arm about her, the low certainty of his voice telling her she would not face this alone — that she had found any peace at all, and somewhere within it had finally slept. She did not let herself examine too closely why it should be his steadiness, and no other's, that had quieted her.

Gratitude, she told herself. That was the safe name for it: the natural regard of a woman for the man who had set himself between her and the dark. And yet, she thought, as the carriage drew up outside Gunter's, gratitude does not make one count the hours until a Tuesday.

She put the thought firmly away. She was here to speak of Edward's papers, and her brother-in-law's flat refusal, and what was to be done next, none of it safe to a letter now, with a stranger reading the money of half the ton. She was decidedly not here to count hours.

Even so, the flutter beneath her ribs would not be lectured into stillness, and when she stepped inside and saw the Duke already there, his tall figure unmistakable among the well-dressed gentlemen about him, she found she could scarcely take her eyes from him. Her heart lifted with a plain, undignified gladness when he turned and saw her, and smiled.

"Lady Colbourne." He came toward her, and let his gaze travel once about the crowded room. "Gunter's is rather full of the world this afternoon, as you see. If you should prefer it, we might have the ices brought out to us."

Harriet marked the several pairs of eyes that had already found her, and the whispers gathering behind gloved hands. They had private matters to speak of, and she had no wish to feed the ton so much as a crumb. "A wise thought, Your Grace. Yes, I should prefer it."

He gestured her ahead of him, and they were shown to a small table set out in the sunshine. When he had seen her seated he leaned toward her across it, and Harriet's heart gave such a lurch — so unlooked-for, so like being alive again— that it very nearly took the breath from her. Only to be near him, only to close the distance the world required her to keep, which was, she reminded herself sternly, a most improper thing for a widow at a public table to be thinking.

"I have seen to a matter I ought to have seen to sooner," he said, his voice low beneath the ordinary noise of the square. "I have arranged protection for you, Harriet. Two men, whom I have known a long while and trust as I trust few others. One will keep watch upon the house at all hours, out of sight. They will not trouble your household nor cross your threshold, but no one will come near you, or the house, unseen again."

Relief broke over her so wholly that she let out a long breath, and her hand went out across the table toward his before she had thought — only to draw itself back as she recalled where she sat and who might be watching. "I do not know how to thank you."