He turned.
Douglas Algate, Baron Frasier of Norfolk, was making his way across the common room with his coat still travel-dusted and his jaw carrying two days of dark growth that he somehow made look deliberate. He was a tall man and built like the cavalry officer he’d once been, and Harry had known him since they’d both been nineteen and doing something inadvisable near Vauxhall that neither of them had ever discussed in polite company.
“What are you doing in Kidderminster?” Harry said.
“Coming south from a visit to my sister in Crewe.” Douglas dropped into the chair across from him and signaled to the barman. “You?”
“Going north. Well. West. Shrewsbury.”
Something moved through Douglas’s expression at that. Harry had known the man long enough to catch it, which meant it was bad. Douglas didn’t allow things to move through his expression unless he was past the point of being able to stop them.
“Your sister?” Douglas said.
“She’s had a boy. We’re going to meet him.” Harry watched his friend accept a glass and turn it in his hand without drinking from it. “What’s happened?”
Douglas didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the fire, which was still producing more smoke than was warranted, and Harry waited. He’d learned to wait with Douglas years ago. The man thought before he spoke, which was either an admirable quality or an infuriating one depending on how urgently you needed information.
“Do you know a Miss Arabella Langton?” Douglas said.
Harry searched his memory. “Simon Langton’s sister. Theyounger one.”
“Yes.” Douglas took a drink, finally. “Her father died in the summer, exactly one year after Simon. Fever. Took him quickly. She didn’t take it well.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” Harry had been preoccupied with other things in the summer, which was a considerable understatement.
“She has no living siblings now. No male relatives worth speaking of.” Douglas set his glass down on the scarred table. “The estate went to a cousin. Third cousin, something of that order. Man named Cavendish. Ralph Cavendish.”
The name meant nothing to Harry. He said so.
“No reason it should. He’s got money, a small property up in Westmorland, and no particular reputation beyond being the sort of man who gets described ascapableby people who mean something else entirely and don’t want to say it. He has never married.” Douglas’s jaw was doing the thing it did when he was choosing words carefully. “He arrived the week of the funeral, took Arabella north with him, and I have not been able to get a letter through to her since August.”
Harry was quiet.
“I’ve tried three times,” Douglas said. “Three different routes. Nothing comes back.” He looked at the fire again. “She wrote to me in July, the day of the funeral. I have the letter. She was frightened of him, Harry. Not frightened of the situation, not frightened of losing her home, which would be reasonable. Frightened ofhim. She said she’d felt it the moment he arrived, the way he looked at the house and then looked at her, and that both assessments had been exactly the same.”
Harry thought about a girl being taken from her home. About walls and locks and fourteen years of silence. He thought about Megan and pushed the thought aside quickly because it would not help him think clearly.
“How old is she?” he said.
“Nineteen. She’s not a child. But she’s unmarried and she has no money of her own, and the law gave Cavendish everything, including whatever authority he cares to exercise over her until she reaches her majority.” Douglas turned his glass again. “I want to go up there. I’ve been wanting to go since August. My sister’s confinement kept me in Crewe through September. I tried to see her on my way home, but I was refused, and now there’s estate business I cannot put off, and I?—”
He stopped.
“You’re fond of her,” Harry said.
It was not quite a question. Douglas looked at him with the expression of a man who has decided not to argue about the precise definition of a word.
“She’s a good woman,” Douglas said. “She’s clever and she’s kind and she doesn’t deserve to be shut up in some man’s house in Westmorland with no one to look out for her.” He picked up his glass, put it down again. “Saxton Castle is near Shrewsbury.”
“It is.”
“And Cavendish’s property is only 3 miles north of Shrewsbury at Longmere Hall.” Douglas looked at him directly, for the first time since he’d sat down. There was nothing in his expression except the stripped-down thing that existed underneath Douglas Frasier’s considerable composure when he’d run out of patience with himself for having feelings. “I’m asking, Harry.”
Harry looked at his friend for a moment. Then he reached across the table and picked up Douglas’s glass, which still had an inch of claret in it, and drank it.
“Tell me everything you know about Cavendish,” he said.
Saxton Castle satabove the Severn Valley in the particular way that old houses sat when they had been in one place long enough to stop appearing to occupy the landscape and begin to appear tobeit. Harry had been here once before, briefly, when ayoung boy with his father. A duke visiting a duke. He had not had the presence of mind to look at it properly then. He looked at it now as the carriage came up the drive and found that it suited Oliver entirely, which he supposed was either very fortunate or very deliberate. When the duke died, it would go to Oliver.
