“She spent fourteen years being told what to do.”
“She spent fourteen years surviving, which required a great deal of cleverness. She wants to come with me. I suspect she will be considerably less bothered by a temporary change of wardrobe than you are.” Dorothea’s gaze was steady. “You might consider asking her before deciding what she can and cannot bear.”
He pushed to his feet, moved to the window, looked out at the frost-pale grounds because he needed somewhere to put his eyes that wasn’t his grandmother’s infuriatingly knowing expression. She was right about the disguise. He hated that she was right about the disguise. He’d turned over the problem of London and Megan without arriving at a solution that didn’t leave a gap somewhere, and his grandmother had apparently done it during breakfast.
But having her with them would be a distraction all of its own. His honor was hanging by a thread. With each day he wanted her with a passion that saw him toss and turn at night. Having her nearby was torture.
“Why else?” he said, without turning around. “You haven’t told me everything. You never summon me for something you could manage through a footman, and you never lead with the practical argument unless there’s something underneath it that you’re not ready to say.”
The silence behind him was a fraction too long.
“Grandmother.”
“There is a reason,” Dorothea said carefully. “And I will tell you what it is when the time is right. Not yet.”
Oliver turned around.
She met his eyes with a composure that was almost architectural in its solidity. The composure of a woman who had been keeping her own counsel for eighty-one years and saw no reason to stop now. But underneath it, in the fine lines around her mouth and in the way her hands had stilled in her lap, was something else. Something that looked almost like urgency.
He knew that look. He’d seen it perhaps three times in his life, and each time it had proven significant.
“This will slow everything down,” he said, not an argument now, just the facts as they stood. “The journey, the schedule. You can’t travel more than five or six hours at a time, and the roads are rough. We’d need two nights on the road, minimum. Possibly three.”
“Two,” Dorothea said. “I am elderly, not infirm. There’s a difference, and I dislike it when people conflate the two.”
“Two nights,” he repeated. “That adds a day to a timeline that is already?—”
“Oliver.” Her voice was quiet. Not soft. His grandmother’s voice was rarely soft, but something in it made him stop. “I would not ask this if it were not necessary. You know that.”
He did know that. That was the problem.
He exhaled slowly, turned back to the window, calculated and re-calculated for another moment because the habit was deeply ingrained even when the conclusion was already settled.
“Fine,” he said. “We leave the day after tomorrow. I’ll speak to Harold about the arrangements, and we’ll put it about that Megan is unwell and remaining in the east wing for the duration. There’ll need to be someone to make that convincing. Annie, probably, she seems sensible and she won’t gossip.” He turned back. “And you will tell me what this is about before we reach London. That is not a negotiation.”
“We will see,” said Dorothea, which was as close to an agreement as she ever gave.
Oliver looked at her for a moment longer, this woman whohad been the most constant presence of his childhood, who had taught him to play chess and read Latin and trust his own judgment, who was currently regarding him with an expression of serene satisfaction that he found both familiar and deeply alarming.
“I’ll tell Megan,” he said.
“Do be kind about it,” Dorothea said. “She walked out of breakfast rather magnificently and I’d rather not undo the progress we made this morning.”
He paused in the doorway. “You’ve been talking to her for one afternoon.”
“I know. I work quickly.” She picked up her spectacles. “I like her, Oliver. Enormously. Now go.”
* * *
He told Megan.She listened with her hands folded in her lap and her face very composed, in the way she composed herself when she was waiting to see which direction something would fall. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“She wants me to come as her maid,” Megan said.
“Yes.”
Another pause. “And you think it’s a workable plan.”
“I think it’s the most workable plan available.” He watched her face. “If you object?”
