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Beside her, Sara made some remark that set Lord Ashcroft laughing, and Harriet could barely lift the corners of her mouth to match it. Her eyes kept straying to the Duke, and past him, to the passage across the road where a man had stood in the open sun and watched her come within a breath of a kiss, and had gone only when it pleased him to go.

Chapter Eleven

Benedict settled back against the squabs as the carriage rolled toward Harriet's townhouse, and told himself, not for the first time that day, that a man of sense did not let his heart run so far ahead of his judgment. His thoughts had been given over to Lady Colbourne for days together, and the more time he passed in her company, the less inclined he grew to stint on it. It was no longer the endowment that drew him, nor his aunt's charge, nor duty of any kind. It was her. He had said more of himself in the park the day before than he had meant to say to anyone, and had not regretted a word of it. And that, he thought wryly, was warning enough of how far the thing had gone.

The carriage came to a stop, and before he could step down, the door was already opened, and the lady climbed in, quick and graceless with haste, her dark curls a little disordered beneath her bonnet. Her eyes, when they came up to his, were bright with something more like resolve than fear.

"Good afternoon, Blackwood."

"Good afternoon." He waited until she was seated, then rapped the roof, and the carriage moved off. "I am grateful you were willing to take up my suggestion of calling on your late husband's solicitor. I confess I am vexed with myself for not thinking of it sooner. We have gone round every door but the plainest one."

"There is no cause for you to reproach yourself." She leaned toward him a little. "You have done a great deal more for me than I ever looked to be given. Your good sense in all of this has been an anchor to me, when I have had precious little else to hold to."

He felt his pulse answer that, the old undignified lurch of it, and put his back against the seat as if propriety were a thing a man might lean into. "You are kind, Harriet."

"I am truthful. It is not the same." Her mouth pressed thin a moment as she turned to the window. "It is a wise thought, to go to Edward's own solicitor. If anyone living knows what tied my husband to Lady Warrington, and what worried the both of them, it is the man who kept Edward's accounts. I can only pray he will tell us."

"You have some fear he will not?"

Her gaze came back to him. "I have some fear my brother-in-law will hear of it," she admitted. "That I have gone questioning a solicitor over Edward's affairs. He would call it interference. He would call it a great many things." The way her eyes flickered told Benedict she thought her brother-in-law would call it a good deal worse than interference, and would not scruple to say so.

"And yet," she went on, drawing her shoulders back, "avoiding a thing because it may prove unpleasant has never once resolved it. He may be as displeased as he likes. It changes nothing of what must be done." The carriage turned, and the light swung across her face and turned the dark of her hair to bronze. "There is the other fear besides. That the solicitor will simply refuse me, as Braithwaite has all but refused, and send us away no wiser than we came."

Benedict weighed how far to press it, and set the greater part of his own weight down. In the matter with Wells he had leaned upon his rank, and it had served. But he had watched Harriet cross a room and unman a careful man with nothing but the plain justice of her claim, and he had begun to think her the sharper instrument of the two.

"If he proves unwilling," he said, "I shall remind him that Lord Colbourne was your husband, and that you carry the name still, and have every right to know what touches it. Beyond that," he said, lifting one shoulder, "I think the case is better made by you than by me. A duke may command a thing. But a widow asking after her own husband's affairs is not so easily turned from the door, and less easily forgiven if she is."

Something warmed in her look. "That sounds rather more formidable in your telling than it feels in mine."

He smiled, glad to see the tightness ease from her mouth. "You are more formidable than you allow, Lady Colbourne. I have watched you be so."

She laughed at that, low, and then the laughter softened into something quieter. "I should never have come to this place, had you not come alongside me," she said, and Benedict felt the thing in his chest pull taut again. I would have left it all with the solicitors and done nothing. I would never have known of the letters that have gone to Mr. Wells these many years, nor of the paper Edward left beneath his own desk, nor what he carried alone at the end. I would have known none of it." Her hands folded in her lap. "I cannot thank you in any way that seems to answer what you have done."

The carriage settled into its rhythm, and for a moment he only held her gaze, and felt the words gather at the edge of him: the whole plain truth of what she had come to be to him, ready to be spoken. He had reached for it in the park and been robbed of it by a stranger's stillness across a road, and some contrary part of him wanted to seize it back now, in the safety of a closed carriage, before the world could take it from him a second time.

He did not.

There was a better hour for it than this, and it was not one with a solicitor's door at the end of it, and her nerves already stretched thin over what waited behind that door. He let the words go quiet in him, unspoken but not unfelt, and let his look carry what he did not say. She held it, and colored faintly, and he thought, with a private satisfaction that would have shamed a more sober man, that she had heard him well enough without the saying.

"We shall have our answer within the hour," he said instead, gently. "One way or the other. Let us hope it is the one we want."

Her fingers pressed briefly to his, there and gone, and she turned back to the window as the carriage slowed. "Yes," she breathed. "Let us hope."

* * *

Within a few minutes they were shown into the office of Mr. Rushworth by a clerk who looked to have dressed in some haste, and the solicitor rose from behind his desk with plain surprise written across his face.

"Your Grace." He bowed low. "Lady Colbourne. Good afternoon." He gestured them to the chairs set near his desk. "To what do I owe the honor?"

Benedict said nothing, but looked to Harriet, who had begun to smooth her skirts over her knees. When her eyes came to his, he gave her the smallest nod, and watched her draw her shoulders back and lift her chin, and wished he could tell her aloud what he could only think: there is your strength. Use it.

She drew an audible breath. "I have come to enquire after a particular matter — my late husband's connection to Lady Warrington, and the affairs they shared."

Mr. Rushworth blinked.

"Lady Warrington is lately deceased," Benedict put in. "She left an endowment to Lady Colbourne which has proven difficult to release. It has not yet come to her as it ought."

The solicitor's face grew careful, and he lifted both hands, palms out. "I am afraid I am not able to speak of such matters."