Page 11 of A Modest Independence

His shrewd gaze had settled on Tom. An underfed wisp of a twelve-year-old with a pair of bent spectacles perched on his still-swollen nose.

“Who did this to you?” Fothergill had asked him, examining the poorly set break.

“No one,” Tom had said.

He’d thought his expression bland. But Fothergill had seen something in his face. Something Tom used to think was hidden from view.

“It was rage,” Fothergill had told him many years later. “Raw, unmitigated rage.” He’d looked at Tom with an expression of grim approval. “You hide it better now.”

Fothergill had officially retired from practice two years ago. Or so he claimed. But Tom felt himself just as much under the old solicitor’s power as he’d been as a child. There was no end to his apprenticeship, it seemed. No point at which he’d be free to go his own way.

He stepped down from the pavement and crossed the busy street. Carriages rattled by, driven by coachmen swathed in greatcoats and mufflers, their heads tipped down against the fresh-falling snow.

“What-ho, Finchley!” the driver of a hansom cab called out as Tom weaved through the oncoming traffic.

Tom raised a gloved hand in greeting. If he’d learned anything from Fothergill, it was to remain on good terms with the working and criminal classes. As a consequence, he had friends everywhere. At least, he supposed one might call them friends. He knew about their lives; about their jobs, their wives, and their children. They, in turn, knew nothing about him.

What was there to know?

He was a solicitor. It was the sum total of his existence.

As for the past, he’d long ago learned to compartmentalize it. To lock it away somewhere in his head behind a series of bolted doors. It was there, always, if he wished to revisit it. But it no longer controlled him. It had no influence at all on the man he’d become.

“Need a lift, do you?” the jarvey asked. “Where to?”

“Belgrave Square,” Tom said as he climbed into the hansom. “And double quick.”

Mere minutes later, he was deposited at the front steps of an all-too-familiar townhouse. A stone-faced butler greeted him at the door, granting him entry without a word.

Tom swiftly disposed of his hat, coat, and gloves. “Is he in his study, Palgrave?”

“He’s been waiting for you, sir.”

A frisson of apprehension skated its way down Tom’s spine. Attaché case in hand, he crossed the Italian marble entry hall and made his way to the set of dark wood-paneled doors that led to the study.

Josiah Fothergill was within, seated in a leather chair near the fire. “You’re late.”

“I’m well aware.” Tom shut the doors behind him before joining Fothergill at the hearth. The room smelled heavily of pipe smoke, with an underlying fragrance of alcohol and turpentine—chief ingredients in the liniment Fothergill used for his rheumatism.

“Sit down,” Fothergill said.

Tom took a seat opposite his aging mentor. He lifted his attaché case onto his lap and withdrew the sheaf of papers he’d brought from his office. Fothergill took them. “Warren signed them this morning,” Tom said. “Under duress.”

Fothergill snorted. “Am I expected to sympathize with the man?”

“By no means.”

“And Atwater?”

“I’ve just come from seeing him. He claims he’s pleased with the terms. Not that his word has ever carried much weight.”

Fothergill gave Tom a brief measuring look before dropping his gaze back to the documents. He proceeded to go over them page by page, his gnarled fingers tracing the words as he read.

He was plainly ill. His coat and trousers were loose and his skin was waxen, stretched tight over the bones of his face. He had the look of a well-heeled cadaver. A man too stubborn and willful to die.

Tom straightened his waistcoat. Good God, was this to be his future as well? Alone in a fine house, wasting away by bits, with nothing to warm him save the occasional news of a vanquished adversary?

“The doctor’s been,” Fothergill said, as if he could read his mind. “I’m not at death’s door yet.”