Page 37

"So I once thought." Benedict kept his eyes on the dance. Harriet turned beneath Ashcroft's raised hand and did not once glance toward the windows, and the discipline of that told him more than any look could: she was holding to a part, and holding hard. "Consider what has been done to her these weeks. Men set to watch her. A stranger who breaks into her house and goes straight to her husband's papers, as though he knew the very drawer he wanted. A brawl that breaks out outside her solicitor's door at the one hour we meant to knock, and under its cover a forged note slid in to cut her off from what is hers. We knew a hand was working against her. We did not know whose."

"And you believe it his. But how should Ashcroft come to be tangled in it?"

"You told me yourself, not an hour ago, that he was a man of business before the title fell to him." Benedict turned the thing over as he spoke, feeling for the joins and finding them one by one. "A man without a fortune of his own, who lived by keeping other men's accounts and reading other men's affairs. Learned in money, and in all the quiet places money may be made to hide."

He watched Ashcroft hand Harriet down the line, and the cold thing in his chest grew.

"My aunt was generous to a fault," he went on. "If a young man of business, still making his way, had come to her for a little patronage, she would have granted it and thought no more of it. And Edward Colbourne was her godson, and dear to her. A word of recommendation from her, one careful gentleman to another—" The music swelled and turned Harriet round with it. "There is your join. One man, trusted in both houses, set among the very ledgers where a debt might be salted in against another man's name and left to grow, so the reckoning would fall on Colbourne, or on my aunt, and never on him."

Woodley let out a breath between his teeth. "And an audit would turn the salted debt up to the light."

"An audit would ruin him. My aunt's will requires her accounts studied entire before Harriet may have her endowment—and the day that study closes, his work stands bare for any careful eye to read. He does not fear the widow's claim. He fears the reckoning it sets in motion. So he watched her, to learn how near she stood to pressing it. He broke into the house to find what Edward had learned. And when neither answered, he forged the note to frighten her off before ever the accounts could be opened."

It hung together, clean and cold and whole, and Benedict took no satisfaction in it. For it left one question standing that he liked least of all, and he found, to his shame, that he had already begun to turn it over.

How had the man come to know so much?

The watcher on the house. The exact hour they meant to call at Braithwaite's. The particular drawer. It was a great deal for any man to have gathered, and some of it Benedict had spoken of to hardly a soul—and one of that handful stood at his very elbow now, a man who loved a good tale and told it freely, who carried talk from one club to the next as lightly as another carried his gloves. He often speaks without thinking, Ashcroft himself had said of Woodley, in the park, with that mild and pleasant smile.

The thought was ugly, and Benedict was ashamed of it the instant it formed, and could not quite put it down. He kept his eyes on the dance and said nothing, and hated the cold small doubt for the room it had made in him.

The music drew to its close. His hands curled at his sides as the dancers made their last bows, and he searched the breaking set for the dove-gray and the dark head, and could not find her.

"Blackwood." Ashcroft came toward him out of the crowd, an easy smile on his face and no lady on his arm. "Lady Colbourne begged me to make her excuses to you. She was caught up by Lady Hawkley." He gave a small wave. "You know how it is when two friends have their heads together. I am sure she will find you before long."

Every muscle in Benedict drew taut, and Woodley moved a half-step closer at his side, as though he meant to stand between them. It was on Benedict's tongue to seize the man by his neat lapels and demand what he had said upon that floor to send her fleeing it. But Woodley coughed, light and pointed, and the sound recalled him to where he stood and who watched, and he mastered himself and gave Ashcroft a short nod.

"I quite understand," he said, and heard how heavy his own voice had gone. "A little disappointing. I shall find her presently."

"Of course, of course." Ashcroft inclined his head. "You must forgive me—I have promised the next set to Lady Juliette." And he turned, unhurried, and made his way into the crowd, and left Benedict staring after him with his jaw set hard.

"You will want Lady Hawkley," Woodley said the moment he was gone, every trace of lightness gone from him. "I do not credit a word of his account, and by your face, neither do you."

"I do not." The fury in Benedict was giving way to a colder thing. "He said a thing to her out there, to drive her from me."

"Then we had best find her. Take the right of the floor. I shall take the left. Go gently—half the room is watching you as it is."

Benedict went. It took every scrap of his command to move at a gentleman's pace through the crush when his whole body strained to run. He returned the nods that met him and ignored the fans fluttering behind them, and saw nothing, thought of nothing, but Harriet.

"Your Grace—oh, thank heaven I have found you!"

A hand caught his sleeve. He turned to find Lady Hawkley at his elbow, her pretty face pale, her eyes over-bright.

"Lady Hawkley." He gripped the small hand on his arm. "Ashcroft told me you had her. Where is she?"

"Gone home—she would not stay." The words tumbled out low and quick. "Something is dreadfully wrong, and she would not tell me what, only that I must find you. She bade me say you must not be seen in her company again. Not here, not anywhere. She was most fierce about it." Her lashes fell and lifted. "And that she is afraid someone is watching her yet—even with the men you have set to guard her."

"So they will know," Benedict said, half to himself, "if I go to the house to speak with her." He knows. He has told her he knows, and set his watchers to see whether I come running.

"Who is it that has frightened her so?" Lady Hawkley's fingers tightened on his sleeve.

He thought of the mild, smiling man now leading Lady Juliette to the floor, and found he could not say the name aloud in that bright and heedless room. "Have no fear for her," he said instead. "I gave her my word I would keep her safe, and I mean to keep it. Go back to your husband, and say nothing of this to anyone. Leave the rest to me."

* * *

Bent low and shuffling, his shoulders rounded like an old man's, Benedict glanced right and left as slyly as he could. A great dark cloak covered him to the heels, the hood drawn up. With the moon behind cloud and the street-lamps poor, he prayed that any who passed would take him for a beggar seeking a doorway to sleep in. He had left the ball within the hour, changed his coat for the meanest thing his valet could find, and set out on foot to reach her before the night was done. His own man had the corner of her street, and knew the cloak for what it was; a beggar's shuffle would pass him, and pass whoever else was watching with him.

He would not leave it as Ashcroft wished it left—Harriet frightened into silence, himself kept away by the fear of watching eyes. He held his slow, stooped gait though every nerve begged him to run.