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"There is every purpose." He drew a chair near to hers and sat, and laid his hand over hers where it rested on the table. "Think of what has been done to you these last weeks, Harriet. Men following you from the solicitor's. A man in a footman's coat emptying your hall that he might ransack your husband's desk at his leisure. A watcher grown so bold he stands in the open sun to look at you. And now, of a sudden, a note appears that ends the whole matter neatly in your enemy's favor." He shook his head. "I do not believe it. I will not. It is too tidy by half."

Her chin trembled, but she did not look away. "You have kept me safe through all of it."

"And I mean to keep on," he said, and felt everything in him rise to it, alive with a wanting to spend every part of what he was on her behalf. "This cannot be as it seems. The matter cannot end so cleanly, and I am not satisfied that it has. Come with me, and let us see."

She was quiet a moment, turning the cup between her hands. Then something firmed in her face — the same steel he had watched her find in Rushworth's office, the same nerve that had carried her through every hard hour of this — and she set the cup down and rose.

"Then let us go," she said. "I would rather know the worst of it standing on my own feet than have it read to me by post."

* * *

Mr. Braithwaite looked a man ill at ease. The lines in his forehead had cut themselves deeper since Benedict had last seen him. His hair was disordered where a careful hand had raked it. He greeted them with a courtesy that had all its warmth worn off, and gestured them to their chairs, and made his way back to his own as though a weight went with him.

Benedict marked it, and traded a glance with Harriet, and saw that she had marked it too, her eyes a shade wider than before, fixed on the solicitor's altered manner. He turned his own attention about the room while she settled herself, and found it darker than he remembered it, dingy and close, and understood why a moment later: half the window behind Braithwaite's desk was boarded over with rough pine, and only the upper panes let in the day.

"The letter you sent this morning, Mr. Braithwaite," Harriet began, her voice level. "You wrote that a note had been discovered. From Lady Warrington."

"We did, my lady. Yes." Braithwaite let out a breath that seemed to cost him. "It was found among another set of documents entirely, which I confess I cannot account for, for we are not in the habit of mislaying our papers, whatever this may suggest to you. But there it was, nonetheless. In her hand, and under her signature."

Benedict drew his eyes from the boarded window. "Might I see it? I knew Lady Warrington well. I shall know at once whether the hand is truly hers."

"I — that is —" Braithwaite hesitated, glancing at Harriet.

"I should like him to see it," she said, and there was quiet iron under the words. "Lady Warrington was His Grace's aunt. He of all men will know her writing. There can be no objection."

Braithwaite could find none. He rose, murmuring something about the lady's leave to show it, and within a moment Benedict had the note in his hands and was reading it aloud, his brows drawing down as he went.

"The endowment given to the Colbournes is to go directly to Lord Colbourne himself, upon my death. He is my godson, and has behaved in such a kind and considered manner all our years together that it is my express wish he be given this particular sum, as a mark of my appreciation and affection for him." Benedict frowned. The words sat wrong in his mouth, ungenerous in a way his aunt had never been. But the hand was fair, and even, and looked very like her own. "This is my best and final judgment on this matter."

He read the last line and passed over it and gave it no more weight than the rest, and turned his attention to the signature, which was where the truth of such a thing would lie.

"It was discovered only yesterday," Braithwaite said, as Benedict bent close over the writing. "We had a slight — difficulty here the day before last, which left a good many papers scattered about the office. It was in the setting of them to rights that my clerk came upon the note."

Benedict went very still.

He kept his eyes upon the signature a moment longer, but he had stopped reading it. The letters of his aunt's name were well enough made. A forger of any skill could copy a name. What had caught him and would not let go was not upon the page at all. It was the thing Braithwaite had just said, and the boarded window above the solicitor's head, and the two of them fitting together in his mind with a click he could almost hear.

"Well?" Harriet's hands were clasped hard in her lap, her eyes on his face. "What do you say to it?"

"I say it is a very fine forgery." He set the note down upon the desk between them, and heard Harriet's breath go in, and Braithwaite's with it. "I say so with great confidence, Mr. Braithwaite, and I am sorry to tell you that you have been most cunningly used." He tilted his head toward the ruined window. "This note was never written by my aunt."

Braithwaite began at once to stammer. "It — it must have been, Your Grace. As I have said, we are the most careful of men with the documents entrusted to us, but on this one occasion the note must have been set among the wrong papers, and —"

"You said there was a difficulty here the day before last." Benedict watched the solicitor's face. "What manner of difficulty? Was it a disturbance in the street? An altercation, perhaps, and a window broken?"

Beside him Harriet drew a sharp breath, and he saw understanding break across her face all at once, her hand rising to her lips.

"Why — yes." Braithwaite's own hand went to his chin. "A brawl, of all things, directly before the door. Two men to blows, and a great crowd about them, and a stone or some such came through that window there in the thick of it." He gestured helplessly at the boards. "But I cannot see, Your Grace, what a common street-brawl has to do with a note in Lady Warrington's hand."

Benedict looked to Harriet. "Do you see it?"

"I do." Her hand came down from her mouth, and her voice was low and certain. "The brawl, and the stone through the window — it was none of it chance. It was made to happen. Made to happen here, at this hour, at this door."

"Just so." Benedict turned back to Braithwaite, who was looking from one of them to the other in plain bewilderment. "Consider the order of it. A brawl erupts before your office, violent and noisy, drawing every eye and emptying your clerks from their desks. A stone comes through the glass, your papers are flung about, and afterward, in the setting-to-rights, a note is found that no man here can account for, tucked among documents where it has no business being." He let the picture stand a moment. "The disturbance was not the danger, Mr. Braithwaite. It was the cover. While you watched two hired men trade blows for your benefit, a forged note was slid among your scattered papers, to be found in the confusion after — and taken for a thing that had merely come to light."

Braithwaite sat back, and passed a hand over his hair, and was silent a long moment.

"And there is this besides," Benedict went on, more gently, tapping the note where it lay. "Set aside the hand and the signature altogether. This note cannot be my aunt's for a simpler reason than any of that: it contradicts what she has already set down in her own hand. She set it down in a note held with her will, which you yourself read to the two of us, sir: that I was to come to Lady Colbourne's aid should any difficulty arise over her endowment. Why would she trouble herself to send me to guard a bequest if the money was never to be the lady's at all? A woman does not appoint a champion for a widow, and in the same breath leave that widow nothing to champion. The two cannot both be true — and the will we know to be hers."