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Down the square, the groom who was no groom had come off the corner at a run, another man at his heels. The one against the wall heard the boots on the flags and gathered himself.

"That will be your fellows," he said, almost approving. "I will not be standing here when they reach us." He was quicker than his heavy build had promised. He hooked a boot behind Benedict's ankle and drove a shoulder into his chest, and Benedict, thrown off his balance, felt the coat tear away out of his fists as the man twisted loose. Then he was going into the mouth of the mews — not melting, not vanishing as he had every time before, but plainly and gracelessly, one hand pressed to his side, a man in no great fear of the two who ran after him.

Benedict's men lost him, as somehow he had known they would. His own fellow came back at a walk, breathing hard, spreading his hands: gone, a cart, the next street, nothing to be done. Benedict let him go, and turned to Harriet.

She stood in the middle of the path, her bonnet knocked askew, one sleeve torn open at the shoulder seam, a red band already darkening on her wrist where the man's hand had been. She was looking at the mouth of the mews where he had gone. She was not weeping, and she was not trembling now, and Benedict, whose heart was still going like a hammer with the fright of how near it had come to her, could only stand and look at her.

"You might have been hurt," he said, and heard how unsteadily it came. "When he took hold of you, I thought—" He stopped. "I meant to put you behind me."

"I know you did." She looked at him, and something in her face gentled by a half-degree, and hardened again. "I am done being put behind things, Benedict. I have been kept behind Edward's care, and behind my brother-in-law's locked door, and behind that man's master for a fortnight, and none of it has kept me safe from anything." She lifted the bruised wrist and considered it. "He has a paper of Edward's. Some private thing my husband carried and never gave me leave to know. And Ashcroft means to hold it over my head like a whip the rest of my days, or spend it and shame a good man in his grave, whichever serves him the better."

"We will not let him."

"No." And here was the thing Benedict would keep, afterward: not the man, nor the wall, nor the coat tearing in his hands, but the way she stood there in her ruined sleeve and set her jaw and made the decision aloud in front of him, the way another woman might have wept. "We will not let him, because I will not leave him the thing to hold. Whatever it is he has of Edward's, I will find it out first. I will find it, and I will say it myself, in my own voice, in the open, before ever he can breathe a word of it. A secret spoken plainly by the one it belongs to cannot be used to make her afraid. He has spent a year building a whip out of my husband's silence." Her eyes came up to his, steady now. "I mean to take the silence away from him."

Benedict thought of a dozen reasons it could not be so simple, and spoke none of them. There would be time enough for reasons and difficulties in the plan they had yet to make. This was the hour for something else: for standing in a quiet square beside a woman who had just been laid hands upon and had answered it not with fear but with resolve, and for understanding, as he drew off his own coat and set it about her torn shoulder, that whatever came at them next, she did not mean to meet it from behind him.

"Come," he said. "Not here. We have a great deal to settle, and a week in which to settle it."

He gave her his arm. She took it, not as a woman leans upon a rail, but as one who has chosen the man she walks beside. And they went back across the square to the carriage together.

Chapter Seventeen

They did not, in the end, go anywhere in the carriage. A man had risen up out of the square as though the cobbles themselves had made him, and Harriet had no stomach for sitting behind glass while an address was given to the coachman; nor would the drawing room serve, with its tall front windows giving straight onto the street.

It was Benedict who thought of the kitchen — the one room in the house, he said, into which a man could not see without first getting past the cook — and so they went down the back stair together, and Harriet sent the staff up out of the way and set the kettle on the range with her own hands, because it gave her something to do with them.

His coat was still about her shoulders. She had not given it back. The band on her wrist had gone from red to a dull violet, and every time she turned her hand the ache of it reminded her that a stranger had laid hold of her in the open street, on another man's errand, and thought he might do it as he pleased.

She poured the tea when it had steeped and carried the cups to the scrubbed pine table, and sat down across the width of it from Benedict rather than beside him, because she did not trust herself to sit near him and keep her head clear, and her head, tonight, was the thing she needed most.

"So," Benedict said. He turned his cup a quarter-turn on the wood and did not drink from it. "We have it all now. The man, and his master, and what his master means to do — trade on what he holds of Edward, or frighten you off the endowment before you can force the accounts open. And a week, Braithwaite tells us, before that third study closes over him."

"Less than a week." Harriet wrapped both hands around her cup for the warmth of it. "A cornered man does not use all the time you give him. He uses the first hour he can."

"Then we had better be quicker than he is."

There was no need to say any more of what lay behind them. They had spoken it into the ground already — in the square, in the drawing room, on the night of the ball — and Harriet had no wish to walk back over ground so lately and so painfully won. She knew the name, and the manner of the man who wore it, and what he had done to Edward and to Lady Warrington, and how. She did not need to hear herself say it again to be sure of it. What she did not yet know was the one thing that mattered now, which was what they were to do about it.

"Whatever it is we do," she said, "it is not to be done in the newspapers."

Benedict's brow lifted.

"I have watched the ton take a life apart for sport, over less than a whisper." She said it steadily. "I will not hand it Edward's name to pull to pieces, nor Lady Warrington's, nor my own, nor yours. I do not want a scandal, Benedict. I want the thing finished. There is a difference, and I mean to keep it in my own hands."

"I had rather see him ruined in every drawing room in London," he admitted, and something dark moved through his voice, "after what he sent to your door tonight. But." He turned the cup again. "If you would have it quiet, then quiet it shall be. There are people enough who may be trusted to know and to keep it — the Hawkleys, Woodley. Braithwaite must be in it, of necessity. That is witness enough to hold a man to account without all Mayfair looking on."

"Witness to what, though? That is where every plan I have turned over this last hour has come apart in my hands." Harriet looked up at him. "Suppose we gather the six of us in a room and set the case before him. He will look grieved, and puzzled, and deny every word of it in that reasonable voice of his, and there is not one thing among all we have that we could lay upon the table and call proof. A caught turn of speech is enough to persuade me. It is not enough to break a viscount before his friends. He will bow, and go home, and wait us out, and come at me again the moment your back is turned."

She shook her head. "A reckoning he can bow his way out of is no reckoning at all. It is only a warning, and I have had my fill of being warned."

Benedict was quiet a moment. "I had thought," he said slowly, "to go to Wells in the morning. Tell him plainly that I know who has been feeding him those letters all these years, and have him write to Ashcroft direct — an urgent summons, to the office, on a matter that will not keep. A guilty man goes to it in a cold sweat. An innocent one writes back to ask what in the devil is meant."

"And which would Ashcroft do?"

"That," Benedict conceded, "is the flaw in it. He is clever enough to do the innocent thing whether he is innocent or no. He would come, all bewildered concern, and sit through it all, and give us nothing." He set the cup down. "It asks him a question, and lets him choose his answer. I have not found a way to make it more than that."

"Because it is the wrong shape." Harriet had gone very still, and she was not looking at Benedict any longer but at the middle distance, at nothing, at the thing that was assembling itself behind her eyes. "You want to ask him a question. I do not want to ask him anything at all. I want to catch him with his hand already closed around the thing, so that there is nothing left for him to explain."