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The house rose pale ahead at last. He felt his way down the narrow passage to the side, hunting the servants' entrance and the hope of a wakeful maid, and rounded the corner of the wall with his hand out before him—and walked full into something solid and warm that gave a smothered cry and clutched at his arm.

He started violently. His first thought was of an assailant set to take him in the dark, and he thrust the figure back and tore the grasping hand from his sleeve—and a second cry, high and frightened and unmistakably a woman's, stopped his heart and his hand together.

Small, and cloaked, and shaking. And there was only one woman in the world who would dare creep out of her own house by night, into the very dark she had been warned to fear, sooner than sit behind a locked door while those she loved stood in danger. Benedict drew a hard breath and put out his hand into the blackness.

"Harriet?"

For a moment there was nothing but her breathing, quick and uneven. Then: "Blackwood?" Her voice came hoarse and low, and her fingers found his arm and closed hard upon it.

He caught them in his own and held them fast and stepped in close, so that scarcely a hand's breadth of cold night stood between them. "It is I. I would not be kept away." Her breath broke on something half a laugh and half a sob, and her other hand came to rest against his chest, as though to be certain he was real and there. " I dared not come to your door. I thought the house watched. But I could not leave you to a warning brought by another's mouth, Harriet."

"And I could not stay indoors," she whispered fiercely. "I have stood at this wall a half-hour, calling myself a fool and unable to make myself go back in. I would not let him win all of it."

"Him. Ashcroft. He spoke to you on the floor."

"Before we ever made our first turn." Her voice shook, and steadied, and he marveled even then at the will it took her. "He was all courtesy—smiling, bowing. And beneath it he told me, quite plainly, that he knows I have found him out. He did not trouble to deny it. He only smiled, and said I should think very carefully before I press my claim a step further." She drew a ragged breath. "And then he told me why. He said he knows something of Edward. Some matter my husband carried, and hid, and never once let me see the shape of. He would not say what it was—only that he holds it, and will make it known, spend it against Edward's name and against mine, if I do not cease."

Benedict stood quite still, the cold of the night forgotten. Here was the truth of it at last, and it was worse than any threat of violence he had braced to hear. The man did not mean to harm her body. He meant to hold a dead man's secret over her living head, and trade upon her love and her grief to buy his own safety.

"You do not know what it is he holds," he said slowly.

"That is the whole horror of it. I do not. Whatever Edward carried to his grave, he carried away from me—to spare me, I have always believed. And now a stranger holds it, and knows my own husband in this better than I ever did, and means to sell my silence with it." Her voice cracked. "I made a vow, only last night, that I would never again stand beside a man I love and fail to know him. And here I am, undone by the one thing I was never given leave to know."

He drew her nearer, both her cold hands folded now between his, and the plain fierce truth of what he felt for her went through him so hard it nearly took his breath. He had told himself, at Braithwaite's door, that he loved her, and meant it. But here in the black garden, with her shaking against him and her courage refusing yet to fail, he understood he had not known the half of it. He loved her past all sense and all safety, and would burn the man's threat to ash before he let it touch her.

"Then we shall find out what it is before he can spend it," he said, low and steady, "and take the weapon out of his hand. A thing dragged into the open cannot be used to threaten in the dark. You will not carry it alone—not this, nor any of it."

She was quiet a moment, her breath warming the space between them. Then, softly: "There is a weight you are carrying tonight that is not yours either. I have felt it in you since the ball. You are angry at more than Ashcroft."

He should not have been surprised that she saw it. She saw the most of him always, more clearly than he liked. "It is nothing. A foul thought I am ashamed of."

"Woodley," she said.

He went still. "How⁠—"

"Because I have watched you these two hours, and every time your friend has spoken you have gone a shade colder to him, and I do not think you have marked that you did it." Her voice was gentle, and without a grain of doubt. "You have been asking how Ashcroft came to know so much. And your thoughts have gone to the man at your elbow who talks freely and keeps nothing close."

"They have," he admitted, and the shame of it was worse for the saying. "Woodley has heard me speak of your affairs. He carries talk from club to club as another man carries his snuff. If a word slipped from him in the wrong hearing⁠—"

"Then a word slipped, and no more than a word." She said it with such quiet certainty that the ground of the thing shifted beneath him. "Benedict, I have sat in company with your friend three times now, and I will tell you what I have seen, for you are too close to see it plain. He is careless with his tongue—that much is true, and you might tell him so to his profit. But a careless tongue is not a false heart. He has stood at your shoulder all this night like a man ready to take a blow meant for you. He is searching the left of that ballroom for me this moment, is he not, because you asked it and did not stop to tell him why."

"He is."

"A man in Ashcroft's pay does not do those things." Her hand pressed flat against his heart, warm through the coarse cloak. “Whatever reached Ashcroft through Woodley reached him by no design of his—because your friend never dreamed there was harm in the telling. He is no traitor. He is a good man with a loose tongue who loves you, and would be wounded past bearing to know you had doubted him tonight. You have few enough who would stand where he stood for you this evening. Do not lose one to a suspicion. Ashcroft would be very glad to see you keep."

Benedict bowed his head over her hands in the dark, and the ugly cold thing in his chest loosened and let go. She was right. And behind her being right stood a plainer fact, which he had only to turn and look at.

"It was not Woodley," he said. "It was I. We sat at Gunter's, you and I, and talked of Wells and of Braithwaite with Ashcroft standing at our very table, and I never once asked myself whether he heard. What he did not have from my own mouth, his watcher had only to follow you to learn. He had no need of my friend's tongue."

He had known Woodley fifteen years and let one night of fear turn him, when the fault lay at his own door. And she, who had sat in company with the man three times in her life, had read him true where Benedict had read him false. It shamed him, and steadied him, and made him love her the more.

"You see further than I do," he said low, "and I am glad past telling that you turn it upon my side of the board and not against me."

"I turn it wherever it is wanted." He heard the smile come into her voice, the first steady thing he had heard from her all night. "Tonight it was wanted there."

A door creaked behind her, and a thin bar of candlelight fell across the dark path: a maid, come to look for her mistress. He felt Harriet start, and drew her toward the light before the dread could take her again.

"Come," he murmured. "We have stood in the open long enough, and I do not like how much of the dark might be watching. Inside, where there is a lock and a light, and you shall tell me all he said, word for word, and we will begin to take him apart. He has made one great mistake tonight, whatever else he has done. He has shown us the thing he is guarding—and a man who shows you what he guards has shown you where to strike."