Page 52 of Reclaimed By Her Scottish Duke

“It is not kind, it is merely observant, which is rarer and more useful.” Oldbrook smiled. “I chair a small foundation, Your Grace. Nothing glittering. Pensions for the widows and orphans of soldiers, a hospital or two—the dull unfashionable machinery of decency. But the men who sit on the board are the men who decide a great many things in this country over very good port, and they judge a newcomer not by his accent but by whether he will do the tedious work. I would like to put your name forward.” He spread one elegant hand. “It would open certain doors that have thus far been closed to you. I think you know the ones I mean.”

He did. That was the devilry of it. It was the exact door Magnus had been banging his head against for a year, held open now by a genial old man asking nothing in return but Magnus’s name on a list of the charitable.

Every instinct Magnus had was screaming at him without once telling him why.

“Ye’re generous,” he said slowly. “I confess I wonder at it. Ye scarcely ken me, Me Lord.”

“No. But I knew your name before you brought it south.” Oldbrook’s pale eyes rested on him, calm as still water. “McCormack. There was a Laird McCormack, years ago, in the north. A principled man, by every account that reached me. Rather too principled for the times he lived in, if the sad old story is to be believed.” He tilted his head, all gentle sympathy. “Your father, I believe?”

The room went very still, and somewhere far beneath the stillness, Magnus felt something enormous shift and turn within him.

“Aye,” he said. His voice did not change, but it nearly cost him everything he had. “Me faither.”

“A great pity what became of him. These things were handled clumsily in those days. Men of quality destroyed on a whisper, and no one the wiser for the truth of it.” Oldbrook shook his silver head with a sorrow so smooth, it might have been genuine. “I hope, in coming to us, you seek to build something rather than to reopen old graves. The past is a poor country, Your Grace. Nothing grows there. The living do far better to look to the living.” He said it like a benediction. And he watched Magnus’s face the whole while with the patient attention of a physician reading a pulse.

Magnus, who had learned at a woman’s hands how to hold a pleasant nothing on his face while a storm raged on behind it, held it now and thought with a clarity that startled him how badly he wanted Rosaline in the chair beside him.

Not for comfort, but for her eyes.

She read a room the way he read a hillside, saw the false note under the fair word. She would have known in an instant the thing his gut was telling him.

“That’s wise counsel, Me Lord,” he allowed. “I’ll think on the foundation. Ye’ll forgive me if I daenae give me word before I’ve read what I’d be puttin’ me name to. Me faither taught me that much.”

Something moved behind Oldbrook’s eyes, there and gone, quick as a fish beneath ice.

“Of course.” He rose unhurriedly, gracious to the last. “A careful man. Your father would be glad of it, I think.” He tugged on his gloves. “Take your time. I am a patient man. I have always found that patience settles most things, in the end.”

He bowed and admired the room once more on his way to the door, and then was gone.

Magnus stood for a long while in the empty drawing room, the good tea arriving cold and untouched, and stared at the card Oldbrook had left on the salver, thick and cream and blameless.

He had come to London to find the men who had murdered his father. And one of them, he was suddenly and coldly certain, had just sat in his blue drawing room, drunk his sympathy, and offered him a chair at the table.

He needed Rosaline. Eleven days, and he could not do this without her. He was through pretending otherwise.

CHAPTER 23

“Two weeks of headaches and vapors, and I am expected to believe you are suddenly well enough for the Harcourts.” Samuel’s hand closed hard around her elbow as he handed her down from the carriage. “Let me be very clear about what today requires of you. You have been ill quite long enough, Rosaline. You are cured. You will behave as though you are cured. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Samuel.”

The Harcourts’ mansion sat in green grounds on the western edge of the city, all clipped hedges, a great striped marquee, a lawn crowded with the very people Rosaline had spent two weeks hiding from.

The afternoon was bright and mild and merciless. There was nowhere to be a shadow here, no dim corner, no potted palm, only the flat sunlight and the open grass and her brother’s fingers biting through her glove.

He did not let her go. Not through the greetings, not through the tepid lemonade, not through a quarter hour of Lady Harcourt’s opinions on gravel. Wherever Rosaline turned, Samuel was at her shoulder, steering, correcting, his smile fixed for the benefit of the crowd and his grip fixed for hers.

She had thought she understood, over the past weeks, what it was like to be watched. She had not.

“Samuel.” Beatrice materialized out of the crowd in primrose sprigged muslin. There was a bright, deliberate innocence to her that Rosaline recognized at once and blessed her for. “There you are. Lord Harcourt has been asking for you this quarter hour, something about the drainage bill. He seemed to think you the only sensible man at the party, and he is quite insistent.” She lowered her voice to a murmur. “He is by the roses. He has a great deal to say, and I fear he means to say all of it.”

Samuel’s vanity and suspicion fought a brief war across his face, and his vanity, as Beatrice had plainly wagered, won.

“Do not move from this spot,” he said to Rosaline, then walked off.

“Go.” Beatrice took the abandoned post at her sister’s side and pressed a fresh glass into her hand, her eyes already scanning the crowd for his return. “The beverage table, by the marquee. Breathe. I will invent enough drainage to keep him busy for a quarter hour, but not a minute past. Do not dawdle, and do not, whatever you do, look as though you are enjoying yourself.” A pause, softer. “You look like a hunted thing, Rosaline. Go and be a person for five minutes.”

“Thank you.”