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"But Lord Colbourne was my husband," Harriet said, before Benedict could add a word. "I have found notes written in his own hand that show he once reviewed Lady Warrington's accounts, and that he did so out of alarm over his own. I do not know what it was that alarmed him. I should like very much to understand."

"That is a note only, Lady Colbourne," the solicitor said, "and a separate matter from your inheritance. It has no bearing on your present circumstances, surely?"

"I would disagree." A touch of color rose in her cheeks. "I am quite certain the two are bound together. I ask only for a little of what you know."

Rushworth frowned. "I do not think that would be —"

"Mr. Rushworth." Benedict leaned forward, holding the man's eye. "Lord Colbourne was your client, and Lady Colbourne bears his name. There can be no impropriety in a widow enquiring after her own husband's affairs."

The solicitor shifted, and looked away, and Benedict saw plainly that rank alone would not turn the lock here. The man was not weighing the Duke of Blackwood but some private fear of his own. He held his peace, and let Harriet have the room.

She had seen it too. "You are afraid of something," she said, quietly, and it was not a question. "It is not my brother-in-law, I think, whatever you may have supposed. Let me set that fear aside for you, Mr. Rushworth, and speak of the greater one." She sat very straight. "You may keep silent, and I will go from here no wiser. But I will not go from here at all. I will keep asking, of Braithwaite, of the courts, of any man who will hear me, until I have all of it — and when it comes out, as it will, it will come out with your name upon it as the man who knew and would not tell a widow what touched her own husband. Consider what that would do to your business." Her brows lifted a fraction. "Whereas you have, at this present moment, my discretion. You have it entire. You will not have it later, if I must dig for what you might simply have given me now."

It was a threat, plainly, and Benedict knew, watching her, that she would never in life carry it out to any man's ruin. But it landed where it was aimed. Rushworth's gaze went from her to Benedict and back, and he let out a slow breath and drew his chair nearer the desk, folding his hands upon it.

"Lord Colbourne did consult me, some two years ago," he said, "regarding certain irregularities in his accounts. I daresay those are the anomalies he wrote of in his private notes."

"And what were they, these irregularities?" Harriet asked. Benedict bit down on his own tongue and let her lead. "What was it that concerned him?"

The solicitor cleared his throat, and looked at his hands, and for a moment Benedict feared he would go no further. Then he lifted his head.

"His lordship had, for a time, given the management of his accounts over to a particular fellow — a man of business, engaged for the purpose. It was only when he came to look over the books himself, later, that he found debts written into his ledgers that were none of his. Sums he had never borrowed. Obligations he had never taken on."

Benedict's eyes flared. "You mean someone set false debts against him," he said, before he could check it. "Wrote another man's debts into Lord Colbourne's own accounts, so that he should carry them unknowingly."

"That was his lordship's belief, Your Grace."

Harriet's fingers twisted in her lap, and the color had gone from her face. "But why should anyone do such a thing?"

"To be rid of the burden of them," Benedict said, low. "A man deep in debt, who wished to appear otherwise — he set his debts against your husband's name, and walked free of them himself."

Rushworth nodded slowly. "Lord Colbourne looked into the matter himself, once he saw how it lay. And he came to understand" — the solicitor's voice dropped, and he glanced at the closed door as though the walls of his own office might carry the words abroad — "that the very same man he had engaged to keep his accounts had been engaged, at some point, to keep Lady Warrington's. The same hand had been in both sets of books."

The room went very still. Benedict felt the cold of it settle over him. One man. One hand, salting the same false debts into both — her husband's ledgers and Lady Warrington's alike. It was the thing he had circled for weeks without seeing whole. Both troubles were the same trouble, worked by a single agent into two households that had only their connection to bind them.

"Which is why he then looked at her accounts," Harriet said softly, her eyes closed. "Because he feared she had been served the same, and did not know it."

"So I understood it, my lady."

She sat with it a moment, her eyes shut, and Benedict did not break the silence. He only watched her take the weight of it. When at last she opened her eyes, she turned to him, and he found he had reached across without deciding to and taken her hand in his, and neither of them made anything of it. Someone had been in the accounts of two households and set his hand to both — and that, Benedict was certain now, lay directly beneath the trouble with her endowment.

"Might I ask," Harriet said, very quietly, "who he was — this man who kept the books of both my husband and Lady Warrington?"

Rushworth spread his hands, helpless. "If I had the name, Lady Colbourne, I would not withhold it. His lordship never set it down to me, and I never had it. He was, I think, careful not to say it aloud until he was sure."

Benedict grimaced. It was not that he doubted the man. It was that here, again, was a wall where he had hoped for a door. They could not ask the late Lord Colbourne. They could not ask Lady Warrington. The name lay somewhere still out of reach.

Harriet rose, and thanked the solicitor, and made her farewells with a composure Benedict admired the more for knowing what it cost her. He would have stayed and pressed the harried fellow further, but he saw there was little more to be had, and followed her out, handing her up into the carriage before he climbed in after.

She leaned her head back against the squabs and let out a long breath. "So it is done to us both," she murmured. "Edward and Lady Warrington. The same man, the same false debts, in both." She opened her eyes. "But it does not tell me why my endowment should be held back now, eighteen months on, when both of them are dead and past caring."

Benedict turned it over, reaching for anything that might tie the delay to the debts. "Perhaps," he said slowly, "whoever set those debts believes they are still owed to him. Your husband's estate, Lady Warrington's — if he thinks himself the creditor, then he may be reaching for recompense, and your endowment is caught in the reaching. It would account for the interference."

"It might." A line drew itself between her brows, and she was quiet a moment, and then she sat up straighter, and Benedict saw something come into her face that he had learned, in these last weeks, to attend to. "But what if it is the opposite?"

"The opposite?"

"What if it is not a man reaching for money," she said slowly, "but a man afraid?" She turned to face him fully. "Consider it, Blackwood. Lady Warrington's own will requires her accounts be studied through, entire, before my endowment can be released — Braithwaite told me so my very first day in London. A third study of them, careful and complete, made by men whose whole reputation rests upon missing nothing." Her voice quickened. "If that agent's false debts are still written in her accounts — if the web of them still runs through her charities, her settlements, all he ever touched — then the moment those solicitors finish their study, they will find it. All of it. The false debts, and the hand that made them, and every account it was ever pressed into."