When the bolt slid back, it was a woman who opened the door. He composed himself into the formality he had ridden in with.
The dress barely covered her ankles and had been navy once, before time and poverty had worn it into something between slate and storm. There was white powder in her hastily pinned hair and a smudge of it marked her cheekbone. She stood taller than he’d anticipated, her posture belonging to a grander house than this one.
Behind her, in the corridor, the man stood with his arms crossed and his face set into a hostility so plain that in any other house Henry would have laughed.
“Your Grace,” she said. “Will you come in?”
He stepped inside.
“The drawing room is this way.”
The corridor was cold enough to print breath upon. Two paintings hung between the closed doors of unused rooms, one of a man Henry took to be the late baron, one of a woman he took to be baroness. The walls were otherwise bare. The wainscot had not been polished in years. He could smell, faintly, beneath the cold, the dry herbal scent of plants drying somewhere in the back of the house.
“I shall be just outside.” The man’s voice was behind him.
“Thank you, Kit.”
“Just outside.”
“Yes, thank you, Kit.”
Henry angled his body slightly toward the man called Kit to show his irritation.
The man stationed himself against the wall with his arms crossed.
The drawing room was clean. That was the chief kindness Henry could offer it. The fire was lit and small. The chairs were cheap pine, painted to look like better wood than they were. The settee was upholstered in a fabric so worn that the pattern survived only in places where no hand had ever rested.
She was at the bell pull. “Tea,” she said, less a question than a declaration. He did not refuse it.
She gestured toward the settee. “Will you sit, Your Grace?”
He sat, the old frame creaking under his weight, while she took one of the wooden chairs.
At the corner of his eye, the door to the drawing room remained half open. Beyond it, in the doorway across the corridor, three young women stood in a tight cluster. The tallest of the three had her hand pressed over her mouth. The girls were staring at Henry with an expression of such frank astonishment that he might have been a creature escaped from the Zoological Gardens.
Miss Linton arranged herself in the chair opposite and folded her hands in her lap. The gesture was so perfectly taught, so utterly at odds with the bare room, that he found himself almost smiling.
A young woman came in with the tray. She was perhaps eighteen and had golden hair. The right gold, the gold that women paid to approximate. She set the tray down without meeting his eye. Her hands shook. The cups rattled faintly against the saucers.
“My sister Poppy,” Miss Linton said.
“Miss Poppy.”
Poppy attempted a curtsey that resembled a half crouch and withdrew. In the corridor a burst of whispering broke out and was silenced.
The tea tray sat between them, but Miss Linton did not pour. Instead, she put her hands upon the arms of her chair and looked at him.
His finger began to tap impatiently on his knee, so he leaned back against the settee to feign leisurely demeanour. “Miss Linton. I shall be brief. There has been a story put about involving the Duke of Trowbridge and yourself, the truth of which is not at issue. The fact of it is, theMorning Postwill print before the week is out. A retraction signed by you, in your own hand, will travel faster than the page. Sign it today and the thing dies tomorrow.”
She was perfectly still. “I shall sign no retraction.”
“Miss Linton.”
“His Grace of Trowbridge compromised me. I shall not put my hand to a lie.”
“Miss Linton, Trowbridge has informed his counsel that he has never met you.”
“Then His Grace is a liar and a coward.”
