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Carefully she folded the note and put it into her reticule, that the Duke might read it with his own eyes. He was the first she thought of and the only one she wished to think of — the one she could bring this to, who would help her make sense of the cold new weight of it. He would know what was to be done. And whatever it was that had opened, black and wide, beneath the single certainty of the name, she would not have to look down into it alone.

"Blackwood," she said softly to the empty room, and went to find her cloak.

* * *

The ballroom glittered with light, the candles doubling themselves in the tall glasses along the walls, the music and the murmur of a hundred voices weaving into what would, on any other evening, have made a very pretty picture. Harriet had no eye for it tonight. She moved through the press of silk and superfine with the note a small hard weight at her wrist, her gaze going from one face to the next in search of the one man who could steady her and stand beside her both.

Her heart lifted when at last she found him, at the far end of the room by the tall windows, the terrace doors standing open behind him to the evening. He was in talk with another gentleman, and as though some instinct had told him of her, he turned his head and found her the moment she drew near.

"Lady Colbourne." He bowed over her hand and pressed it lightly. "How well you look this evening."

"And you, Your Grace." She glanced at his companion. "Lord Woodley. Good evening."

"Lady Colbourne." Woodley grinned at her with that glint she had learned to read as mischief, and she felt her color rise, wondering how much of the truth that sharp and friendly gentleman had already guessed. "You are in health, I hope?"

"I am, I thank you." She turned back to the Duke and dropped her voice, praying Woodley would not hear. "Your Grace, I must beg a word of you. On a matter of the greatest importance. I have found — "

"Blackwood, good evening!"

The voice came so exactly upon the heels of her own that she nearly started, and the last of what she had meant to say died in her throat. A gentleman came up beside Woodley, easy and unhurried, and only then appeared to notice her. "And Woodley too — well met. And Lady Colbourne." His gaze found her, mild and pleasant as ever. "Though I ought not be surprised to find you so near His Grace, I suppose."

Harriet could not make her lips curve. She looked at the pleasant, unremarkable face, the soft eyes and the ready courtesy, and thought of the plain note folded at her wrist, and it was all she could do to keep her own expression smooth. "Good evening, Lord Ashcroft," she said, and turned back to the Duke with everything in her begging him to make his excuses and take her from this company.

But Ashcroft was speaking again. "I do hope all is well with your present circumstances, Lady Colbourne?" His concern was gentle, faultless. "You will not think me impertinent, I trust, but I could not but overhear that there had been — that there are — some particular difficulties touching your endowment? Lady Warrington's will has been the talk of half the drawing rooms in town, and I confess it has intrigued me more than I ought to own."

"Because you were a man of business once, I suppose," Woodley put in, with a careless shrug. "Such things interest you far more than they do the rest of us."

A man of business.

Harriet's attention drew to a point so fine she was half afraid it showed in her face. The very trade that gave a man the keeping of other men's ledgers, the reading of their affairs, the quiet salting of a false debt into a column where none would think to look. She kept her voice light at a cost none of them could have guessed.

"A man of business? How very intriguing. I had not known it of you, Lord Ashcroft."

Ashcroft inclined his head. "My late brother held the viscountcy," he said, and let a small sigh follow it. "I was to make my own way, as younger sons must, ready to assist the gentry with all their tangled particulars. It is honest enough work, and I had some aptitude for it."

"And then you lost your brother, and stepped into the title in his place." She finished it for him, and he nodded, and she made herself say the kind thing over the knot drawing tight in her stomach. "I am sorry for it. That must have been a hard season for you."

"It was." He smiled, seemingly grateful for the sympathy. "But a man must take up what is set before him."

"Indeed he must." The Duke's eyes came back to her. "Lady Colbourne, might I persuade you to take a turn about the room? Or through the gardens, perhaps — the evening is a fine one."

It was her rescue, offered plainly, and she very nearly took it. But she had come to this ball with a name at her wrist and the memory of a phrase in her ears, and here before her stood the man himself, all mildness and civility. She could not let the chance go by. Might she not use it, to prove to herself and to the Duke what she now believed past any doubting?

"Yes, of course," she said slowly. "Though allow me first to answer Lord Ashcroft, since he has been so good as to ask after me." She gave the Duke a quick smile and saw the line gather between his brows. "All is well, on the whole," she said, and turned her eyes full upon Ashcroft and left them there. "I called upon my solicitors only this afternoon. A very strange thing has occurred, and has us all a good deal confused."

"Oh?" The note of interest in his voice was, she thought, a shade too smooth. He was feigning it, she was sure of it now, knowing full well what was coming.

"A note was discovered." She watched him as she said it, as one watches a stranger across a card table. "Purporting to be in Lady Warrington's own hand. It declared that the endowment was to go to my late husband alone, and to leave me nothing of it whatever."

"Purporting?" Woodley's brows went up. "You mean to tell me it was no such thing?"

The Duke gave a short bark of laughter before she could answer, and Harriet held her breath. "It was an excellent forgery, nothing more," he said plainly — and, watching Ashcroft's face and not his, she saw the small muscle jump and tighten at the corner of his jaw. He had said it straight to the man who had made it, and did not know that he had. "The thing cannot be relied upon," the Duke went on, "given the very convenient manner of its discovery, and given that it flies in the face of everything my aunt was at pains to set down, including her particular wish that I stand at Lady Colbourne's side in the matter."

That, Harriet saw, sent Ashcroft's brows shooting up toward his hairline. Her pulse quickened.

"Her particular wish?" His voice had climbed, ever so slightly, out of its practiced smoothness. "Might I be so bold as to ask what such a thing can mean?"

The Duke shrugged, easy and unknowing. "Only that my aunt seems to have foreseen that Lady Colbourne would meet with difficulty in coming into what was hers. She left it in her will that I was to see her safely through it, and that is precisely what I mean to do."