Page 14 of A Modest Independence

He ran a hand over his face.

“Have you?” she asked again.

He shook his head. He looked weary. Wearier than he had at his office. And older, too, if that was possible. His light blue eyes had creases around them. Matching brackets framed the corners of his mouth.

Jenny’s heart squeezed with sympathy. She ignored it. He didn’t deserve any sympathy. He’d persuaded her to dine with him at eight, against her better judgment. And she’d agreed. She’d put on a silk dinner dress and arranged her hair in fresh rolls and plaits secured with nearly two dozen headache-inducing pins. She’d seen that the table was beautifully set and the chicken cooked just so. All had been in readiness for him. She had been in readiness for him.

And here he was, an hour late and smelling of liquor, with his clothes un-pressed and not a drop of pomade in his hair. As if she weren’t worthy of a second’s consideration.

“Come on, then,” she said crossly. “Mrs. Jarrow will warm something up for you.”

Mr. Finchley trailed after her up the stairs. Thirty minutes later, after consuming a plate of reheated chicken and downing a glass of watered wine, he put his head in his hands and groaned. “I’ve bungled this badly.”

Jenny regarded him from her place across the dining table. A branch of half-melted beeswax candles stood between them, the flickering flames casting a pattern of shadows over the linen tablecloth, china plates, and glassware. “This? There is no this. There’s only my travel plans and my money. I trust you’ve remembered that much.”

He made a hoarse sound. “How could I forget?”

“Men forget any number of things when they’re in their cups.”

“I’m not in my cups, Miss Holloway. I’m just…” He shook his head. “I was obliged to visit another solicitor this evening. My former partner. The gentleman under whom I studied before I was called to the Bar. He kept me later than I’d anticipated.”

“Didn’t you tell him you had a prior engagement?”

“God, no.”

She hadn’t thought it possible to feel any worse. “Why in the world not?”

“That’s not the sort of thing one shares with a man like Fothergill. Not unless one wants him to involve himself. To interfere. He can’t help it, you see. He enjoys knowing things. It’s how he accumulates power.”

Jenny frowned. She cast her mind back to conversations she’d had with Helena. Secrets they’d shared during the endless rainy afternoons spent shut up indoors at the Abbey. “Is he the solicitor who took you out of the orphanage?”

Mr. Finchley’s gaze sharpened behind his spectacles. “You know about that?”

“Only what Helena’s told me.”

“Which is?”

“She said there were four of you. Four friends in the orphanage. And that, for a time, you’d all gone your separate ways. That Mr. Cross had his accident, Mr. Thornhill joined the army, and that you were apprenticed to a London solicitor. The other boy—”

“Alex Archer.”

“She said he’d disappeared long ago. That he’d broken his apprenticeship and…vanished.”

Mr. Finchley’s eyes dropped to his plate. He appeared to hesitate. As if he were preoccupied by a sudden thought or feeling. A memory, perhaps. It was the space of seconds. A mere instant. No time at all, really. But when he looked at her again, the change in his countenance was marked. “It’s true,” he said. “Every word of it.”

Jenny fingered the stem of her wineglass. So, the fate of Alex Archer was not a topic that Mr. Finchley cared to pursue. She supposed she could understand that. If someone she’d loved like a brother had simply disappeared from the face of the earth, she might be rather sensitive about the subject as well.

“It seemed to me,” she said, “that, among the four of you, it was your situation that ended most happily.”

“You believe so, do you?”

“To be articled to a solicitor, and then to become a solicitor yourself? It’s quite distinguished. Unless…” A terrible thought struck her. “He didn’t mistreat you, did he?”

Mr. Finchley appeared surprised by her question. “Fothergill? No. He was a good mentor, in his way. He taught me everything he knew.”

“I expect you feel you owe him.”

“I do.”