Page 20

“And send word round to the locksmith at once, this evening,” she added. “I will have new locks on the study, and a bolt within, and I do not care what it costs.”

“At once, my lady.” The butler bowed, and this time his face held more than relief. It held something nearer to respect. “Might I say, my lady — I am glad to see you so little cast down by it.”

“I am a great deal cast down by it,” Harriet said honestly, with the ghost of a smile. “I simply do not intend to let it be seen — least of all by the man who did it. Go on, now. There is a great deal to do before I lose the light.”

He went, and she stood a moment more among the ruin of Edward’s study, the low sun laying a bar of gold across the scattered papers. She glanced, once, at the window that gave onto the garden, and a small shiver crossed her at the thought of eyes upon it. Then she crossed and drew the curtain fast, and turned back to the desk.

Some good might yet come of it, she told herself. If she must go through every scrap her husband had left, then perhaps, somewhere in it, she would find not only what a stranger wanted — but some thread that led back to Lady Warrington’s endowment, and to the truth of all this trouble at last.

She drew up the chair, and reached for the first of the papers, and began.

Chapter Eight

"Apleasant afternoon, is it not?"

Benedict nodded, though he had marked the slight frown that had settled on his friend's face, and knew it for the sign of more than idle talk. They sat within Gunter's over an ice apiece, the window beside them full of the ordinary bright bustle of Berkeley Square, and for the length of a spoonful Lord Woodley said nothing else.

"It is," Benedict said slowly, when the silence had gone on a beat too long. "Though I begin to think it is not the weather that troubles you. Out with it, Woodley."

"Yes." Woodley smiled, and Benedict's brows lifted at the wryness of it. "I have noticed that you danced only with one lady at a ball not a week past. The widowed Lady Colbourne." He shrugged, but his gaze did not leave Benedict's face. "We have been friends a great many years, and I confess I had thought that, were your intentions for this Season to have changed, you might have said something of it to me. Instead I hear of it from half the room."

Benedict cleared his throat, disliking the flush of heat that rose in his chest at the mere sound of the lady's name in another man's mouth. "Yes, I danced with her, and only with her, which, now that I consider it in the cold light of an afternoon, may have been an oversight."

"And by that you mean you did not think how it would look."

"Precisely."

Woodley said nothing, only kept his gaze fixed and waited, in the manner of a man who has learned that silence draws out more than any question. With a low, resigned chuckle, Benedict yielded the ground.

"I had every intention of speaking to you of it, truth be told," he said, and watched his friend's eyes round a little at the corners. "But you must understand I could say nothing until I had first made certain it was quite proper for me to say anything at all."

Briefly, keeping his voice low beneath the clink of spoons and the murmur of the other tables, he set it out: the strange note from his aunt, and her plain expectation that some difficulty would arise over the endowment left to Lady Colbourne. The solicitor, Mr. Wells. And, at the last, the thing that had lodged itself under his ribs and would not be shifted.

"And Wells," he finished, "told us he had written to Mr. Braithwaite only because of an anonymous letter."

Woodley's brows shot toward his hairline. "A single anonymous letter?"

"So I thought, at first." Benedict set down his spoon. "But it is not one letter. It is a great many, over long years. This same hand writes to Wells, unsigned, always, of irregularities in the affairs of others. Debts hidden. Settlements not what they seemed. And every warning has proved true."

Woodley ran a hand slowly down his face and let out a low exclamation. "That is an extraordinary thing!" he said. "Why should anyone write such letters to a solicitor, of all men in England?"

"I had hoped you might tell me." Benedict spread his hands. "I value your wisdom in a knotted matter, and I can make no sense of this one alone. If I laid it all before you, I thought, you might see a way to it that I cannot."

Woodley was quiet a long moment, turning it over in his mind. "My first thought is only that it confounds me," he admitted. "My second is that whoever it is must somehow come by his knowledge — and there are a hundred ways a thing may travel. A careless word at a card table. A clerk who talks. A servant who was paid, or a creditor who bore a grudge. It need not be one man at all, sitting in judgment. It might as easily be a dozen loose tongues, and one patient hand to gather what they let fall."

"And there," Benedict said heavily, "is exactly my difficulty. I cannot conceive why such a man would trouble himself to do it at all."

"Whatever it is, it is not a kindness." Woodley leaned back. "A man does not labor for years to do good unseen, and take such pains never to be found out. Secrecy of that order guards a thing its keeper could not own to in the light. That much I would stake a good deal upon. The rest of it I cannot see at all."

The words settled coldly on Benedict, and he said nothing for a moment, thinking of a widow upright in a solicitor's chair while a stranger watched her from across the street. "There is such a weight on Lady Colbourne's shoulders already," he said at last. "To have this settle over her besides, a delay she cannot understand, a hand she cannot see: it is a great deal to ask any woman to carry."

"And is there truly no way for her to have even a part of the endowment," Woodley asked, "while the rest is untangled? Or are her husband's funds so bound up with Lady Warrington's gift that the two cannot be pried apart?"

"Good afternoon, gentlemen."

Benedict came half out of his chair before he had well thought about it, and turned to find Lord Ashcroft standing at the table, hat in hand. He mastered the start, and made his face pleasant. "Ashcroft. Good afternoon."

"Forgive me — I could not help but catch a word or two as I passed. Finances, and a tangle of them." Ashcroft said it with a rueful tilt of the head, a man half apologizing for the intrusion. "It is a subject I can never quite let alone. You may recall that before I came into the viscountcy, I spent a good many years with my head in ledgers and settlements — my own family's affairs, and a friend's now and then."