Outside the north wing windows, the frosted grounds of Saxton Castle stretched out in the pale winter light. For the first time since she’d walked out of the dining room in high dudgeon, Megan felt the tight knot of the morning loosen.
She told her.
CHAPTER 13
He found the summons on his desk.
Not a note delivered by a footman, which would have been the conventional method. A note delivered by Dorothea’s ancient gray cat, who had apparently been trained or perhaps simply self-motivated to sit on correspondence until its recipient appeared. Oliver removed the cat from his papers with the weary efficiency of long practice, read the three lines his grandmother had written in her bold, slightly theatrical hand, and considered, for one brief moment, pretending he hadn’t received it.
He went upstairs.
Her rooms were exactly as they always were. Something he’d not noticed in his tiredness last night. A comfortable chaos that the housemaids had long since given up attempting to impose order on, a fire that burned hotter than was strictly necessary, and Dorothea herself enthroned in her chair beside it with the air of a woman who had been waiting for some time and found the wait entirely beneath her.
“You took long enough,” she said.
“I came immediately.” Oliver dropped a kiss on the top ofher head and took the chair across from her, the one that still held the impression of recent occupation and smelled faintly of something that wasn’t his grandmother’s lavender. He noted this without mentioning it. “Your note said urgent. What’s happened?”
“Nothing has happened. Something is about to happen, which is considerably more interesting.” Dorothea folded her hands in her lap. “I am coming to London.”
Oliver looked at her.
“With you,” she added, helpfully. “When you go. Tomorrow, or the day after. Whenever you’ve finished organizing yourself, which in my experience takes men roughly twice as long as they estimate.”
“Grandmother.”
“I am perfectly serious.”
“You haven’t been to London in four years. You told your son—told my uncle—that you would not go again until Parliament stopped being full of men who had confused volume for argument.”
“I haven’t changed my position on Parliament.” Her dark eyes were bright and entirely composed. “I have changed my position on the current necessity of the journey. I am coming with you, Oliver, and Megan is coming with us.”
He was very still for a moment.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Grandmother, I have explained the situation to you. The road is a risk. London is a risk. Megan is safest here, where the guards are posted and Penharrow has no?—”
“Penharrow has ears in this county,” Dorothea said, with a serenity that suggested she had anticipated every word of this and found it largely beside the point. “He will know within forty-eight hours that you have gone to London and that she has remained if we keep the guards in place. A castle full ofguards is a great deal of protection but it is not impenetrable, and I would like you to consider carefully, with that excellent mind of yours that you so rarely apply to the things that actually matter, what it would mean for that young woman to be left here without you while Penharrow calculates his options.”
Oliver said nothing. He was calculating his own options, which was taking somewhat longer than he would have liked because she was not entirely wrong, and they both knew it.
“Why do you need to come?” he asked. “If the argument is that Megan should come to London, then Megan can come to London. I can manage her safety.”
“Can you?” Dorothea tilted her head. “Think carefully, Oliver. You will move through the city, calling on men in offices, meeting with lawyers, conducting business that requires you to be seen and taken seriously and to maintain the full gravity of your title and your purpose. How does that become complicated if you also arrive in London with a young woman of unknown origin who is the principal witness in a case against a sitting earl?”
He opened his mouth.
She held up one finger.
“There are people in this city,” she continued, “who will see what they wish to see and draw the conclusions that suit them. You know this. A young woman traveling with a single gentleman, staying under his roof, the story writes itself, and once it is written it is very difficult to unwrite, particularly for the woman in question.” She settled back in her chair. “If that same young woman travels to London in my company, as my personal maid, then the story is entirely different. An old woman transporting her household. No one looks at a maid. No one thinks twice about a maid, and while everyone in the county believes Megan to be quietly installed at Saxton Castle, because we will make quite certain that is what they believe, she will actually sit in my townhouse on Cavendish Squaredrinking tea and remaining very much out of Penharrow’s reach.”
Oliver stared at her.
“The maid disguise,” he said.
“It is a practical solution.”
