Page 36

"How very curious," Woodley murmured, tipping his head and studying Harriet a long moment. "And has it been resolved, this strange business?"

"Not yet." Harriet lifted her chin, and let all the confidence she did not quite feel ring in it. "But it shall be, and very soon. Of that I am quite certain."

Ashcroft's smile had gone thin. "I am heartily glad to hear it," he said, just as the musicians struck up for the next set. "Ah, the quadrille." His eyes came to her, bright and fixed. "Lady Colbourne, would you do me the honor of standing up with me?"

The Duke's mouth tightened. He had asked her first, and the gentleman had contrived to forget it. But Harriet knew as well as he did that the Duke was too well-bred by half to say so, and that every eye and every rule of the room now waited for her to accept. And in the half-second the courtesy allowed her, she found she wished to accept: to keep the man close, and watch him at her own arm's length, and learn what more his face might give up to her.

"How kind of you," she said. "I should be delighted, Lord Ashcroft." She looked to the Duke, and let her eyes widen the smallest fraction, praying he would read in them all she could not say. "We shall take our turn through the gardens after, Your Grace, if you would still be willing to attend me then?"

"I shall be entirely at your service." He held her gaze a beat longer than the words required.

Ashcroft, well satisfied, turned and made his way toward the forming set at the center of the floor, plainly expecting her to follow at his back. And in the small confusion of his going, with Woodley turning to hail an acquaintance and the whole company shifting toward the dance, the Duke drew her the half-pace she needed into the shelter of the window's deep embrasure, the open doors and the falling dusk at their shoulders, screened for one stolen moment from the room.

"Quickly," he said low. "You found something. Your face has been telling me so since you crossed the floor."

"I have found him, Benedict." His Christian name came out on a breath, hers alone to give here where none could hear it. "The man. His name is on a paper in my reticule this very moment — a note to Edward, in his own hand, over his own signature, advising him on a matter of business. And it ends, word for word, in the very phrase you read aloud to me over the forgery." She held his eyes. "It is Ashcroft. It has always been Ashcroft."

She watched it go through him — watched the ease drop clean out of his face, and something harder and brighter come up in its place. Here at last was a shape a man might close his hand around — a name, an enemy, a thing he could set himself against and ride down. She had seen that look in him before, the whole of him turning toward a target, and she understood it well. She had felt it herself, over the desk in Edward's study an hour ago.

"Best and final." He said it low. "I have had those words from him, Harriet. In the park — some small affair of his own, and he closed the matter just so, and I thought no more of it." His jaw tightened. "And the letter Wells had. The one that came to him with no name upon it. I leave it now in worthier hands than mine. It closed upon the very same words, and I read them and let them go by."

"Then it was Lord Ashcroft who wrote to Mr. Wells."

"It was. He has signed himself three times over without once knowing it."

But she had not yet given him all of it, and she made herself do it now, though it cost her to put the shadow into his face where the fire had been.

"There is more, and I like it a great deal less," she said. "The phrase, Benedict — the way it is turned. It is not the phrase of a man settling his own affairs. It reads as a judgment handed up to be approved. Best and final, as though someone stands above him yet, to weigh it and to want more of him." She swallowed. "I felt it the moment I read it, and I feel it now. We may catch Lord Ashcroft, and I begin to fear it will not close the thing. That he is — that he answers to someone. That there is a hand above his own."

She saw the fire waver. It was the widening of it that reached him where the enemy himself had not — the same dread that had gone through her over the desk, taking the clean single target he had wanted and stretching it out past the edges of anything he could see or name or ride against. His jaw set. His eyes went past her a moment to the crowded floor, hunting for an edge that was not there, and for the first time since she had come to know him she saw the certainty in him falter and reach for the ground.

So she gave him the ground.

She lifted her hand, under the cover of the shifting room, and laid it flat against his chest — only for a breath, only until she felt the hard, quick beat of his heart steady itself beneath her palm. It was the gesture he had given her a dozen times, in the ruin of her study and the dim of the solicitor's office. She had it back to give him now, and she gave it gladly.

"Then we are not finished with one man, Benedict," she said quietly. "We are finished with as much of one man as we can reach. We take all that is set before us, and we do not turn from it for being larger than we thought. Edward did not, and I will not, and neither, I think, will you."

For a moment he only looked at her, and the fear went out of his face, and something steadier came into it that was not the old riding fire and was the better for it. He turned his hand and pressed hers once against his chest before he let it fall.

"You astonish me," he said, low, "every hour that I know you." His eyes went past her again to where Ashcroft stood waiting at the head of the set, mild and patient, and unaware of it all. "Go, then, and stand up with him, since the room will have it so. Learn what he will give you, and give him nothing." His voice dropped further, so that it reached her ears and no others in the world. "And I shall be here the while, Harriet — watching. Very closely indeed."

She let her hand slip from his, and drew a breath, and put on the pleasant, untroubled face the evening required of her. Then she turned from the shelter of the window and went out across the bright floor to take her place beside the man they had caught — and the shadow, wide and nameless behind him, that they had not.

Chapter Fifteen

Benedict stood at the edge of the floor and watched Harriet make her curtsy to Lord Ashcroft. It cost him all his breeding to keep his face as smooth as the evening asked of him.

She had slipped from the shelter of the window not a minute since, out of the reach of his hand and into the bright press of the room, and crossed to take the arm of the very man they had named between them. Now she sank into the first figure of the quadrille as though she had not a care in the world, and the dance drew her a pace from Ashcroft and gave her back again, and Benedict felt each parting and each return in his own chest, like a hand that opened and closed.

"You are watching her," said Woodley, low, at his shoulder, "as though you fear the fellow will carry her off through the terrace doors. Do try to look as if the music pleases you."

"I find that it does not."

The stillness in him must have reached his friend, for the humor went out of Woodley's voice. "What is it? You have been wound tight as a watch-spring since the lady crossed to you."

"There is a matter amiss," Benedict said, "and it is to do with Ashcroft."

"Ashcroft." Woodley looked again at the man moving through the figure, all mild good humor and neat, unhurried grace. "You mean to tell me Lady Colbourne is uneasy in his company? He is the most inoffensive gentleman in the room."