Page 31

Harriet found she could not answer at once. Something had come loose in her chest, and rearranged itself, and settled in a new place that felt truer than the old.

"I hardly know myself in it," she said at last, with a small unsteady laugh. "A year ago I should have wept over this and been comforted and thought no further. Now I find I do not want comfort. I want to do something with it."

"I know." And here Sara's smile came back, but it was not the teasing one from the drawing room. It was warmer, and there was almost pride in it. "That is what I have been watching all evening, and could not for my life account for, until now. Do you know, Harriet, you are not the woman who came back to London? That woman stood in Lady Pembroke's ballroom half a ghost, frightened, apologizing for the trouble of her own existence, quite certain the world had finished with her. And here you sit tonight reasoning out solicitors' mischief and racing clocks, and I know not what, with your color up and your eyes bright, more your own self than I have seen you since before Edward died." She tilted her head, considering her friend fondly. "I will tell you a thing you may not have marked. You are enjoying this."

"I am not," Harriet said, startled. "Sara, there is a man who watches my house — "

"And it frightens you, I do not doubt it. And yet." Sara's eyes held hers, gentle and quite certain. "You are more alive than I have seen you in two years. You have a thing to do, and a mind quick enough to do it, and someone worth doing it beside. And I have watched you these weeks come back to yourself piece by piece like a fire taking hold. I say nothing against your grief, my dear. I only say — do not be so afraid of the woman you are becoming. I like her enormously. And so, unless my eyes deceive me across a dinner table, does the Duke of Blackwood."

The heat rushed back into Harriet's face, but she was smiling now, and could not stop it. "You think so?"

"I know so. It was not you alone doing the gazing tonight." Sara squeezed her hand once more and released it. "When the time is right, tell him. Not out of duty, and not to be reassured, but because it is true, and because you are a woman who has decided she will not go through the world half-knowing the people she loves." Her smile turned mischievous again. "And now compose yourself, for I hear the gentlemen, and if you go on flushing so becomingly they will all of them guess in an instant what we have been talking about."

Harriet laughed, low, and pressed the backs of her fingers briefly to her warm cheeks, and turned from the window as the door opened and the gentlemen came in to rejoin them.

Across the room the Duke's eyes found hers at once, and this time she did not look away so quickly. She held his gaze a breath longer than she ought, with a steadiness that had not been in her an hour before, and thought that when the right hour came she would indeed tell him. All of it. And she would not fail, this time, to know the man she told.

Chapter Thirteen

Benedict broke his fast late that morning, later than he had intended, and did not much repent of it. The evening before had left him pleasantly tired, and he had let himself lie abed past his usual hour and rise to a cold rack of toast and a newspaper he did not read. It had been good to watch Harriet so, laughing and easy with the other ladies, unburdened for an hour of solicitors and stolen papers and the man who watched her house. The trouble was not resolved. He knew that well enough. But she had set it down for an evening, and he had found he could not take his eyes from her while she did.

He turned a page he had not read, and let the thought run on to the place it had been running these several days.

When the endowment came to her at last, Harriet would be a widow of independent means and independent will, with no man set over her, free to go where she pleased and to whom she pleased, or to no one at all. It was her right, and he would not have wished it otherwise for the world. And yet the thought sat cold in him, for it meant she might as easily step out of his life as stay in it, and he could not look squarely at the notion of a slow drifting-apart.

He set down the paper. The truth was plain enough, once he let himself see it. He cared for her as he had never cared for another living soul, and he did not want an ending to this that returned him to the ordinary run of his days. He wanted her contented. He wanted her safe, and rich, and free. And he wanted, when all of it was done, to be the man beside whom she chose to spend all that freedom.

He drew a slow breath, and the design of it came clear to him all at once, and made his brows lift.

Matrimony. Is that what I am about?

Before he could turn it over further, a scratch at the door announced his butler, apologetic and low.

"Forgive the interruption, Your Grace. Lady Colbourne has come to call."

Benedict was half out of his chair before the man had done speaking. "At this hour? Is she unwell? Is something the matter?"

"She appears well, Your Grace." The butler hesitated. "Though I would not call her easy. Shall I bring her through?"

"At once."

He gained his feet and had scarcely brushed the crumbs from his coat before Harriet herself came into the room, and one look at her told him everything the butler had not. She was pale, her mouth held too carefully steady, the shadows dark beneath her eyes.

"Harriet." He crossed to her without thinking, his hands going out to her. "What has happened?"

To his surprise she came straight into his arms, without hesitation, her face turned against his shoulder and her breath unsteady at his throat, and he closed them about her and held her, and for a moment neither of them spoke at all.

"I am sorry to come so early," she said at last, drawing back only far enough to look up at him. "Before it is any hour for calling. I had no one else I could bring it to."

"You will always bring it to me." He kept her hand as he led her to the table and saw her seated, and found the teapot by good fortune still warm and poured for her. "Whatever it is. Drink a little, and then tell me."

She wrapped both hands about the cup as though for the warmth of it, though the morning was not cold. "It is a letter," she said. "From Mr. Braithwaite. It came within the hour." She freed one hand to draw it from the pocket of her gown and held it across to him. "Read it. He says a note has been found — a note that gives my endowment to Edward alone, and leaves me nothing of it at all."

Benedict took it, and unfolded it, and read. It was brief, only a few careful lines. The matter, while not yet fully concluded, was near its end. A document had come to light stating Lady Warrington's endowment to have been intended for Lord Colbourne alone, and not for his widow. And Lady Colbourne might, should she wish it, call upon the office to see the note for herself.

"Then that is precisely what we shall do," he said, and set the letter down. "We shall go to Braithwaite's directly, and I shall see this note with my own eyes."

Harriet's gaze came up to his, and there was a weariness in it that went through him. "Do you think there is any purpose in it? It feels as though I am to be stripped of every last thing that was meant to be mine, and no seeing of any note will alter it."