Page 33

"You are quite right." Braithwaite's shoulders came down, and he shook his head slowly, looking at the note as though it had bitten him. "You are quite right, Your Grace. I confess that in the upset and the confusion I did not think it through. It sat ill with me, but I did not see —" He broke off, and drew a long breath. "But I do not understand it. Why should anyone go to such lengths — a staged brawl, a broken window, a forged note — merely to keep a widow from a sum of money?"

"Because it is not the money that concerns them." It was Harriet who answered, and Benedict turned to watch her do it. She had risen from her chair, and there was color in her face now, and the steel had come all the way up into her voice. "It never has been the money. It is the fear of what will come to light if I am paid — of what a careful study of the accounts must uncover, once it is done. That is the thing they are laboring to prevent. And they will not prevent it, Mr. Braithwaite. We mean to see to that."

"Dark deeds," Braithwaite murmured, his eyes rounding.

"A great many of them, I begin to think." Harriet drew on her gloves. "We shall come to you again before long, and I hope with more clarity than confusion for you. In the meantime, guard this note. It is not the disaster you feared it to be, sir. It may prove the very thing that undoes the man who sent it."

"And when the matter is put right," Benedict added, rising to stand beside her, "Lady Colbourne will have her endowment, whole and unhindered, as my aunt meant her to. I have every confidence of it now."

Braithwaite bowed them out, still murmuring over the note upon his desk, a man handed back his own office who did not quite know what to do with it. Benedict took Harriet's arm and led her out into the street, past the churned patch of pavement where the brawl had done its work, toward Harriet's waiting carriage. His heart was beating high with something he recognized, after a moment, as anger — a clean, cold anger at the patience of it, the great trouble taken to rob her of what was hers.

"What are we to do now?" he said.

Harriet did not answer at once. When she did, there was a spark in her eye that had not been there when she arrived at his door that morning, pale and shaken. It had kindled somewhere in Braithwaite's dim office, and it was burning steadily now.

"We must find him," she said. "The man who has done all this — who placed his own debts in Edward's accounts, and in Lady Warrington's, and has staged a brawl in the public street to keep me from the truth of it. We must learn his name." She paused at the carriage step and turned to face him. "And I think, Blackwood, that the finding of him may lie nearer to hand than we have supposed."

"How so?"

"Your aunt sent you to me." She said it slowly, feeling her own way toward the thought. "You have told me she did nothing without purpose. Then perhaps she did not send you only because you would do as she asked. Perhaps she sent you in particular — because you might know this man, or have the means to learn who he is, where a widow alone would have none." Her eyes searched his face. "You know the men who move in her world, Blackwood. What if part of her design was that you should be the one to draw him into the light?"

Benedict stood very still, turning it over, and found it fit as neatly as the brawl and the boarded window had fit. His aunt had been exactly the woman Harriet described, never a wasted motion, never a choice made idly. Woodley had asked him, weeks past, why he had been named to this, a man half a stranger to the whole affair. And here, perhaps, was the answer. His aunt had chosen him on purpose.

"She did seem to expect the trouble before it came," he said, "and to have written her guard against it in advance." He looked down at Harriet, and something like admiration warmed through the anger in him. "You have a sharper eye for her purposes than I, and she was my own aunt. I will think on it this afternoon — on who among the men I know might have kept her books, or Edward's, and had the wit and the wickedness to do the rest." He drew a breath. "You are to attend Lord Cottingley's ball this evening?"

"I am."

"Then I shall speak with you there. I may have a name for you by then, or the beginning of one."

She smiled at that, and it eased something in him to see it, the spark still bright, the fear held down beneath the resolve. This was the thread now, and she had picked it up herself and set it in his hand, and he had the sense, watching her, that she would carry it further than he could. He had meant to hand her up into the carriage and bid her farewell. He found he could not do it.

He stood, and she stood with him, held there at the carriage step by nothing but his own unwillingness to see her go. She looked up at him. Her eyes, the warm hazel he had marked the first day across Braithwaite's desk, shot with green where the daylight caught them, held his. And a surge of longing went through him so plain and so strong that he abandoned altogether the words he had been reaching for, and reached instead for the truth.

"Harriet." He kept his voice low. The street was quiet about them, and there was no one near — or none that he could see, and for once he did not go looking. "There is a thing I ought to say to you. I have been putting it off — telling myself there would be a better hour, when your troubles were behind you and your mind clear of all this. But I find I have grown tired of waiting for a better hour, and I do not think I shall wait for it any longer."

Her eyes rounded a little, but she said nothing, only watched him, and gave him the room to go on.

"When you first came to me with your fear," he said, "that first day, with the man at the corner and the shadow at your heels — do you recall it? You told me you were afraid, and I did not believe you. I heard you out, and I told you it was likely nothing, an overtired widow filling the quiet with dangers of her own making. I talked myself out of your fear because it was more comfortable to me not to be alarmed." His jaw tightened. "I have not forgiven myself for it. And I have wondered, since, why I was so quick to it, when it was not like me to turn away from a thing that wanted looking into. I think I know the answer now."

"Blackwood —"

"Let me say it." He held her gaze. "My father left me a name to guard, and I have spent my life guarding it — kept it clean, kept it correct, weighed every step for how it might look, and told myself that duty was the sum of a man's worth. I dressed it up as honor. But there was a coldness in it, Harriet, and a pride. And the cost of it was that when a frightened woman stood before me and told me plain that something was wrong, my first care was not for her fear but for my own comfort — for the tidy explanation that let me feel I had done my duty without troubling myself further. That is what my honor made of me, that morning. It made me deaf to you. A duty that cannot hear the person before it is no honor at all. It is only armor, worn to keep the world at a distance." He drew a breath. "I do not want it anymore. Not with you. I would rather be alarmed, and wrong, and near to you, than correct and cold and forever a step apart."

Harriet's eyes had filled, though she did not let the tears fall. There was no surprise in her face, no confusion, only a gentle hope kindling in it that steadied him where he stood.

"You have astonished me, these weeks," he went on, and the words came easier now, the armor set down. "You came back to a city that had nothing but trouble waiting for you, and you did not fold under the weight of it. How was I to keep my heart from you, watching that?"

"Blackwood." His name came from her low and unsteady, like a thing she had held too long and could hold no more. Her fingers had found his and pressed them, and there was pink risen in her cheeks and a tremulous smile upon her mouth. "My own heart is quite lost to you. I have tried to call it gratitude, and I cannot, for it is no such thing. What I had with Edward was dear to me — I will never say otherwise — but it did not hold a candle to this. It never came near it. I did not know a heart could feel as mine does now."

The plain, unguarded truth of it — offered without defense, her heart held out in her open hand — undid the last of him. He had thought, riding here, that he would say his piece and then step back, and leave the rest for a clearer hour. He found he could not. The trouble was still upon them, the man still unnamed, the danger still real. But they had stood together in that dim office and pulled a forger's whole design apart between them, his wit and her nerve, and won. And now she stood before him with her eyes shining up at him, and the relief of the morning's victory and the ache of all he had just confessed rose in him together and would not be held back a moment longer.

He lifted her gloved hand and pressed his lips to it, as he had meant to and no more. And then he did not step back.

"Harriet," he said, and there was a question in it, low and rough.

She did not draw away. She lifted her face to his, the smallest fraction, and it was answer enough.

He bent to her, slowly, giving her every moment to turn from him, and she did not turn. He touched his lips to hers, gently, a first and careful thing, and felt her breath catch and go soft, and her hand tighten in his. It was nothing hurried, nothing bold. It was only the truth of what had grown between them, spoken at last in the one language plainer than words — tender, and unhurried, and complete. For a long moment there was nothing in the whole quiet street but the two of them, and the warmth of it, and the simple, astonishing fact that after so long a holding-back, neither of them was holding back any longer.