Page 129 of A Modest Independence

Tom returned Giles’s stare. “I thought you might.”

Giles shot a look at Jenny. “What are you doing with this man? Don’t you realize who he is?”

It was her turn to stiffen. “I know exactly who he is. He’s Thomas Finchley, my solicitor—and that of Helena and her husband.”

“My sister has employed this villain? Has the world gone mad in my absence?” Giles’s face was the picture of well-bred outrage. “This man nearly ruined the father of one of my closest friends. A cobra couldn’t have been more venomous, nor more uncivilized. He’s pursued the Earl of Warren for years, destroying his life at every turn, attempting to force the man into compliance.” He fixed Tom with an icy glare. “Because of you, sir, the earl’s children lost their inheritance. One of them took his own life. All so you might gain ownership of a plot of land.”

Tom climbed the steps of the verandah to join her, Ahmad close behind. “Not me,” he said. “My client.”

“Atwater,” Giles uttered the name like a curse. “What sort of solicitor would represent such a scoundrel?”

“Even scoundrels are permitted competent legal counsel, my lord.”

“I wouldn’t categorize you and your partner as competent legal counsel. The hounds of hell, more like. How much did Atwater pay you to ruin Warren’s life?”

“Stop it,” Jenny said. “Stop it, the both of you.” She turned on Giles. “I can’t believe you. We’ve only just discovered you’re alive and all you can do is cast accusations at the gentleman who helped me to find you? I call that very ungrateful.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know that he’s an honorable man. And I know that last year he saved your sister from being wrongfully committed to an asylum.”

Giles’s face fell. “What?”

“That’s right. You left her alone to fend off your uncle. She knew in her heart you weren’t dead. She insisted to everyone that you were still alive somewhere. And he made her suffer for it. If not for Mr. Finchley—”

“It’s all right.” Tom rested his hand on the small of her back. “You don’t have to defend me.”

Giles gaze flicked from Tom’s hand to Jenny’s face. “Did you travel here alone with this man?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Jenny exclaimed. “Haven’t we more important things to talk about?”

The door of the bungalow creaked open and a native servant peered out. He was a young, handsome man—no more than five and twenty at Jenny’s guess. He addressed Giles in Hindustani, his attitude one of familiarity rather than subservience.

Giles replied in the same language, his cadence sounding almost as natural as Ahmad’s did. “This is Hossein,” he said when he turned back to Jenny. “My former batman, now my Khansama. He’s going to make us some tea. Shall we continue this discussion inside?”

It took a great deal to surprise Tom. He’d been thrown off-balance when Jenny stroked his brow while he dozed on the sofa in Half Moon Street. He’d been dumbfounded when she kissed him on Dover pier, and when she confessed to having feelings for him. And when he’d gone to her room at the Westbrook Hotel in Delhi and found her weeping at the thought of never seeing him again, he’d been stunned. Staggered.

But not now. Not when faced with Giles Reynolds, 6th Earl of Castleton, standing before him in an air of aristocratic disdain—austere, disapproving, and very much alive.

There had always been a chance they’d find him thus. A small chance, admittedly, but a chance nonetheless.

Tom hadn’t expected it. He hadn’t planned for it. But when confronted with a living, breathing Giles, he felt no sense of shock or dismay, only a grim resignation at the way fate had conspired to thwart his future with Jenny.

The one-armed fellow before him was indeed the same gentleman Tom had encountered in Fleet Street so many years before. It had been at the height of the legal conflict between the Earl of Warren and Viscount Atwater. Warren’s youngest son had come to Fleet Street, in the company of two of his aristocratic friends, to rail at Fothergill over a legal maneuver of Tom’s that had effectively reduced Warren’s shares in a profitable railway venture to nothing.

That was to be my inheritance, he’d said, a vein bulging at his temple. You had no right.

Tom had marked the faces of the young man’s friends. They were both fashionable gentlemen, clothed in smartly tailored suits and sporting gold-topped ebony walking sticks and jeweled signet rings on their fingers. The blue-blooded sons of other titled lords and ladies. Tom hadn’t known who they were by name. It hadn’t seemed important.

When he’d recognized the daguerreotype of Giles at Fort William, that hadn’t seemed particularly important either. An unsettling coincidence, nothing more. It hadn’t mattered. Not truly. Not when Giles was dead.

Not until now.

If Tom lived to be one hundred, he didn’t think he’d ever forget the way Jenny had looked when she realized that the gentleman on the verandah was Giles. He’d never forget the way she ran to him, embracing him and bursting into tears.

She clung to Giles’s arm as they entered the bungalow, her cheeks still damp. Tom followed behind her, Ahmad at his side.

Ahmad hadn’t uttered a single word—neither of surprise, nor indifference—since they’d climbed the steps to the verandah. As always, he seemed content to keep his own counsel. But Tom saw the way his gaze moved about the shadowed interior of the bungalow, taking in the cozy arrangement of chairs and tables and the way Giles’s servant, Hossein, navigated amongst them with so much casual familiarity.