Page 58 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

Rowland and Giles were partners.

Their partnership was under strain.

The letters had been copied.

A printer had been approached.

Giles’s debt was approaching maturity.

There was no need to invent anything beyond those five points. There was certainly no need to break another stable door over them.

What was required now was a cold head and whatever advantage could be found in two men who had begun to distrust one another.

A month earlier Nathaniel would have gone directly to his study, shut the door and begun arranging the matter alone.

He looked towards the staircase.

Then he took a second candle from the hall table and went up to wake his wife.

Chapter Fifteen

“You are proposing to bait him.”

Nathaniel said it without accusation, but Selina heard the resistance beneath the words.

They sat opposite one another at the breakfast table, Sowerby’s report between the coffee pot and a plate of toast neither had touched. They had returned to town the previous day. Georgiana was still upstairs, and the morning post lay arranged at Nathaniel’s elbow in the order Bassett considered important.

“I am.”

“In front of half the ton, with Rowland already desperate enough to follow us into Berkshire.”

“Yes.”

“And you intend to persuade him that he has frightened you badly enough to make him careless.”

Selina lifted her cup. “Now you have it.”

Nathaniel regarded her over the table. “I want the plan said plainly before I agree to it. Not because I mean to forbid you, but because I have lately discovered that agreeing to your plans is easier when I know precisely how much I shall dislike them.”

“The bait is his vanity, not my reputation. Rowland has shown himself rather pleased with his own cleverness. If he believes me frightened enough to listen, he may say more than he otherwise would.”

“May.”

“May,” she repeated deliberately. “I make no claim to prophecy. We know about the letters and the printer. We know Giles holds his debt and that the two men are acting together. What we do not know is what Giles himself means to use against me. He came here with the fiction about my mother’s jewels, but his parting remarks suggested there was more.”

“The unsettled debts.”

“Or whatever he wished me to believe remained unsettled. Either will do, if Rowland knows enough to speak of it.”

Nathaniel looked again at Sowerby’s letter. “And Lady Marwood?”

“Will be near enough to hear anything useful Rowland is fool enough to say.”

“You have already arranged this.”

“I have written to her.”

Nathaniel closed his eyes briefly.