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Benedict turned the first over. He did not know the seal, but supposed it to be the solicitor's, and broke it. The hand was hurried, the tone more pressing than a letter of business had any right to be: it begged his presence at the establishment that very afternoon, on the grounds that a note had been discovered — a note from Lady Warrington, addressed to him, and carrying, the letter said, certain stipulations he was now required to read.

"Stipulations." He said it aloud, to the toast and the coffee, and set the letter flat upon the cloth.

It made no sense to him. He had already had his small legacy from Lady Warrington's estate — a meager thing, though he had been grateful for the thought behind it — and it was safe in his accounts these several weeks past. Money once given did not come trailing conditions after it. And yet here was her solicitor, begging him to come, as though the matter would not keep.

He set the letter aside and took up his toast again, and found he had rather lost his appetite for it. He would go, of course. Duty required it, and he was not a man to shirk a thing merely because he did not understand it. If anything, not understanding it made him the keener to have it in front of him, where he might do something with it.

It was the sitting and wondering he could not abide, and the letter had condemned him to a morning of both. The appointment was not until the afternoon. He would spend the intervening hours turning the word stipulations over in his mind, unable to act upon a thing he had not yet been told, and there was no state Benedict liked less.

He rose, because he could not go on sitting, and went to the window with his coffee. The square had woken while he ate. A dray had drawn up before the house opposite. A maid was scrubbing a step. Two gentlemen he half knew went by on foot, deep in some argument that made one of them stop dead in the road to make his point. Ordinary life, going ordinarily on.

Whatever a dead woman had wanted of him, she had not troubled to consult him first, and he found he resented that more than the errand itself. He was a man accustomed to being asked, and to deciding, and to setting a thing in motion with his own hand. To be named in a will as the instrument of someone else's design, without so much as his leave sought, sat ill with him.

He drained the coffee and set the cup down harder than he meant to, and turned the folded letter over once more between two fingers, as though the thing itself might tell him what the words had not: what, precisely, Lady Warrington had asked of him, and whether he would be given any say at all in the doing of it.

He had a good deal better to do. He merely could not, for the life of him, think what it was.

Chapter Three

The letter came up on a small silver tray while Harriet was still at her writing table by the drawing-room window. She was laboring over a reply she did not want to write. A distant cousin had sent her condolences, some eighteen months late and at very great length. Harriet had spent the better part of an hour trying to find words warm enough to be civil and cool enough not to invite a second letter of the same. She had got as far as My dear cousin, I thank you and no further.

"My lady." The maid set the tray at her elbow. "A letter, just come, with the request that you read it at your earliest convenience."

Harriet thanked her and sent her away, and unfolded the note.

It was from Mr. Braithwaite. She had thought it might be word of her endowment — some small advance, some further delay explained. It was neither. It begged her to come to the establishment that very afternoon, on a matter that had come to their attention and could not, it seemed, wait upon a letter. There was no explanation of what the matter was. There was only the plain, pressing statement that her presence was required, and that it was of great importance.

She read it twice, and set down her quill, and abandoned her cousin to another day. The reply could wait. Whatever this was would not.

The uneasy feeling that had first found her in this solicitor's office returned the moment she stepped up into the carriage, and settled low in her stomach with a quiet persistence, twisting as the wheels began to turn. She had managed, over the past days, to reason her way out of it. A tangle of paperwork, she had told herself. A careful firm being over-careful. Nothing that would not come right in a fortnight.

Now, with Mr. Braithwaite's vague and urgent summons folded in her reticule, the feeling would not be reasoned with. It sat where it had always sat, and it gnawed.

The drive through London felt longer than its distance. Harriet watched the streets with more attention than she usually spared them, her gaze moving from shopfronts to the people on the pavements and back, though she could not have said what she was watching for. Everything was perfectly ordinary. And when at last the carriage turned into the street that held the Braithwaite establishment, her heart began to beat too fast, her eyes going from corner to corner in spite of herself, searching for what she hoped not to find.

There was no man on the corner this time. No dark coat, no plain hat, no figure standing half in shadow with his face turned to the road. There was no one there at all that she could see. And still her fingers tightened in her lap, and still some part of her went on watching for him, however many times she had told herself there was nothing to watch for.

"My lady."

The carriage door opened, and Harriet had no choice but to step down. She lifted her chin, gathered her composure about her like a shawl, and walked to the solicitor's door without a single glance behind her.

"Good afternoon, Lady Colbourne." The door opened before she reached it, Mr. Braithwaite himself gesturing her in. He had been waiting for her, then. "I thank you for coming so promptly."

"You gave me to understand it was urgent." She stepped inside, and the familiar scent of ink and old paper rose to meet her, and steadied her, as it had before, without asking her leave. "So I have come."

"It is urgent. I would not have troubled you else." The warmth left Mr. Braithwaite's face, and he showed her toward his own office. "We did not discover this matter until we began to go through the papers again — for what I had hoped would be the final time."

"This matter." Harriet moved toward the doorway as he scurried past her to his desk. "You have not said what it is."

A quiet cough brought her up short.

She was not alone with the solicitor. She turned her head and found a gentleman standing near the window, his back half to her, the pale afternoon light falling across the breadth of his shoulders. At the sound of her arrival, he turned, and she looked up into a pair of calm green eyes, steady and unhurried, that took the measure of her in the space of a breath and did not look away.

She blinked.

He was tall, and held himself with the unstudied ease of a man who had never once in his life had to wonder whether a room would make space for him. His features were strong, his fair hair neatly ordered. The light from the window laid a faint gold along it as it strengthened, and dimmed only a little when he bowed.

There was authority in him that wanted no announcing. She had met such men before and knew the type on sight — men who carried the higher titles, who had never learned to make themselves small because they had never once needed to.