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"Then you shall not do it alone," he said. "Whatever you mean to stand up and say, and to whom, I mean to be standing at your shoulder when you say it. Not before you. Not in your place. Beside you."

His thumb moved once across her knuckles. "I will say the rest of it to you properly, Harriet, when this is done, and there is not a viscount to be caught before breakfast — in a room with no plot in it. But I will say this much tonight, and let the rest wait for a better hour: there is no longer any part of my life I can imagine without you in it, and I have stopped wishing to try."

Harriet's throat was tight, and she did not trust her voice, and so she did the only thing that would serve, which was to turn her bruised wrist in his grip until she could hold his hand with both of hers, and hold it, and let him see her face while she did.

It was a long moment before either of them remembered the tea, gone cold in the cups, or the plan, still half-made on the table between them.

"Wells, then," Benedict said at last, and she heard him gather himself back to the work with an effort she felt in her own chest. "In the morning, first thing, the moment he comes to his office. I will go to him myself — tell him what has been made of him, and let his own horror at it make him ours. He will do it. A decent man who learns he has been a criminal's errand-boy for a decade will do a great deal to set it right."

"And the hour? The place? Who is to stand where?" Harriet was nodding, the pieces moving again behind her eyes. "It must be somewhere he can be brought to reach for the thing, not merely to arrive at it. A place with a door the wrong men can be behind."

"He has spent a year reading every soul in London." Benedict lifted her joined hands and touched his lips to the knuckles of them, once, above the bruise. "He never once read you. He looked at a grieving widow who could not make sense of a ledger, and never troubled to look again, and it is going to cost him everything he has."

"Then let us see it does." Harriet pushed the cold cups aside and reached for the pencil and the sheet of paper he had already, without her seeing it, taken from his coat and set between them. "Sit closer. I cannot draw the thing out where you are, and I want you to find the fault in it before Ashcroft does."

He came round the table and sat beside her, at last, where she had not let herself sit. And there, in the low warm dark of the kitchen, with the fire settling and the house asleep above them and a week and no more before the end of it, they bent their heads together over the paper and began to build the trap that would take him.

Chapter Eighteen

Word had come with the first light, before Benedict had so much as called for his coat.

It was Braithwaite's hand, hurried and glad: the third study of Lady Warrington's accounts had closed in the small hours, days before its time — the careful man had kept his clerks at it by candlelight since the night of the forged note, trusting nothing he had not seen to the bottom of — and it had given up more than he had let himself hope for.

Folded among her private papers, sealed and set apart, was a record in Edward Colbourne's own hand. He had lodged it with Lady Warrington himself, in the last spring of his life, and there it had waited, this year and more, where no other hand could come at it until the will compelled all her affairs into the light.

That was why a man in a footman's coat had turned Harriet's study inside out and got nothing. The thing he was sent to find had never been in the house at all.

Benedict had stood a long moment at his window with the note in his hand.

They had meant to bait the trap with a thing that did not exist. Now it existed. Harriet had said, across the scrubbed pine table with her wrist gone violet and the fire settling in the range, that she meant to make the lie true. And while she slept, if she had slept at all, the accounts had made it true for her.

The record was real, and it was Edward's, and it lay this morning in Braithwaite's strongbox with its seal unbroken. What it held, not one of them yet knew. That was Harriet's to learn and hers to speak, and Benedict would sooner have cut off his own hand than see it read a word before she stood ready to read it herself.

But Ashcroft did not need to know that it was real. He needed only to believe it. And a man who had spent a year hunting that very record, and dreading it above every other thing in the world, would believe it the instant it was breathed to him down the one path he trusted.

Benedict had gone first to Woodley, catching him still in his nightshirt and ill-pleased to be roused with the sun barely up. Then, when his friend was dressed and grimly willing, he had left him to the gathering of the others and gone on alone to Mr. Wells.

The office was not yet open. He waited in the hackney at the corner rather than stand about the door where any passing eye might mark him, for the whole morning's work turned upon Ashcroft believing that no honest hand had touched it: that the word had come to him clean, by his own secret channel, and by no other path at all. Only when Mr. Wells himself came hurrying up the pavement with his key did Benedict step down and follow him inside.

"I do not understand." Mr. Wells took out a white handkerchief and mopped at his forehead, looking up at Benedict from behind his desk with the air of a man who feared the floor might give way beneath him. "You say you know the name of the gentleman who has been writing to me all these years."

"I do." Benedict set his hat aside and did not sit. "And I will tell you a harder thing than that, Mr. Wells, and you had better hear all of it, for you have a right to know what has been made of you." He kept his voice level, and not unkind. "Those letters you have taken for friendly counsel — a caution here, a doubt dropped there, always so helpfully, always proved right in the end — they were never counsel at all. You have been the quiet hand that carried one man's designs into every honest office in London, and carried word back up to him again the same path, and never knew you did it. He chose you because you are a decent man. A decent man asks no questions of good advice."

The color went out of the solicitor's face by degrees, until it matched the handkerchief crushed in his fist. "I — I am horrified," he said, and his voice caught on it. "I never — Your Grace, I give you my word, I never once suspected⁠—"

"I know it." And Benedict did know it. The man's dismay was too plain and too sick to be anything but true. "No blame lies with you for what was done through you unknowing. But the setting of it right — that I must ask of you, and it will take a steady nerve." He leaned his knuckles on the desk. "You are to send word up your channel one last time. Not a letter to any gentleman. Not a summons. Nothing that asks a question or waits upon an answer. You are only to let it be known, in the ordinary way you have always let things be known, down the same quiet path — that a record has come to light. Lord Colbourne's own record, in his own hand, thought lost this twelvemonth and now found, and that it is to be brought here, to this office, and laid open before Mr. Braithwaite at three o'clock this afternoon."

Mr. Wells's eyes rounded at the edges. "And — that is all?"

"That is all. You drop the word, and you go about your morning as though it were the smallest matter in the world, and you say it to no living soul but the gentleman who has written you those letters all these years," Benedict straightened. "You need do nothing further. You need not so much as be in the room, if you would rather not. Only send the word, and send it soon, so that it has time to travel."

"But if he should — " The solicitor pressed the handkerchief to his mouth a moment. "If the gentleman should come here, upon reading it⁠—"

"Then you will have done your part, and set right a decade of another man's wickedness, and you may leave the rest to me and to those I bring with me." Benedict looked at him steadily until the man met his eyes. "Will you do it, Mr. Wells?"

For a moment Mr. Wells only breathed, his throat working. Then he drew himself up in his chair, and though his hand still shook, something firmer came into his face. "I have carried that man's business ten years and never once suspected I did," he said. "By God, I will carry this!"

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