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"She asked you to involve yourself in a strange affair with a widow that has no connection to your family?"

Benedict nodded, and set his heels a little deeper as his horse felt the question and would have quickened at it. He and Lord Woodley had all of St James's Park to themselves at such an hour, the grass still silver with dew, the paths empty but for a solitary gardener stooped over a bed of roses. Benedict found he was glad of the company after all.

He had risen early because he could not lie still with the thing unsettled in him, and a man who could not lie still was better on a horse than pacing a bedchamber.

"I am no direct relation to Lady Warrington," he said. "The blood tie ran through Lord Warrington, and he has been dead these several years. As for this Lady Colbourne, from all I can find she has no connection to my aunt or to any branch of the family. None that I can trace." He lifted one shoulder. "Though I will own I have not yet traced it far."

Woodley frowned, a single line drawing itself between his brows. "So she was not named among the beneficiaries at all?"

"She was not. I asked Braithwaite as much, after the lady had gone yesterday." Benedict turned the matter over as he spoke it, the way he might turn a coin to catch the light on both its faces.

"It seems her late husband, Lord Colbourne, was godson to my aunt. When he died, the greater part of his fortune stayed with the estate — she was left one small house and a smaller settlement besides. That settlement my aunt saw fit to increase, by an endowment added to it." He waved a gloved hand, dismissing the tangle of it. "There are particulars past counting, but that, as I understand it, is the sum of what Lady Colbourne was to have."

"But has not."

"But has not." Benedict's mouth tightened. "Braithwaite's own firm has halted the endowment, on a note of concern brought to them by another solicitor, a Mr. Wells. I have not yet read the note. I am told it is a whisper only, nothing proven. But a whisper was enough to send Braithwaite back through the whole will a third time, and it was in that third reading that he came upon my aunt's note to me."

"Goodness." Woodley pushed his fingers back through his hair and let out a slow breath, looking off toward the lifting mist. "Lady Colbourne must be suffering a great deal. I confess my heart is sorry for her."

It was, Benedict realized, the first time anyone had said such a thing aloud — and the first time he had properly thought it. He had spent a full day turning over the strangeness of the request, the inconvenience of it, the why me of it, and had given not one hour's thought to the woman at the center of it.

She had lost her husband. She had lost her home. And now, when what little remained to her should have been hers outright, she was made to wait upon the caution of solicitors who would not so much as look her in the eye. He had been so busy resenting the errand that he had not stopped to see the person it concerned.

"You are right to say it," he said. "I had not. I have been too much occupied with my own part in the thing."

"You are going to help her, I take it," Woodley said it as a certainty, not a question, and gave a short laugh. "You always were a man of duty."

"If my aunt trusted me with it, then I have a duty to see it done." Benedict heard the twist in his own voice and did not much like it.

"And yet you are put out that your Season is to be spent on it."

Benedict wished, not for the first time, that his face did not lay his thoughts so plainly before the world. "I am. I had thought to come to London and simply be here — to ride and dance and dine and laugh, and carry nothing heavier than my own hat. For the first time since I came into the title, nothing was to follow me up to town. Instead I am handed a duty that is not even properly mine, for a lady no one can tell me how I am connected to."

Woodley tipped his head, considering. The sun had begun to burn through the low gray cloud, and it caught the side of his face as he turned. "There will be a reason she chose you, all the same. It reads to me as though she foresaw this whole trouble and decided, foreseeing it, that you were the man to stand at Lady Colbourne's side through it."

His brows came down. "I do not say she was wrong. Only — one must wonder why you, my friend. When she had the whole Warrington connection to call upon, and chose the one man in it who scarcely knew her."

It was not a question Benedict could answer, and he did not try. He let the words hang where Woodley had put them and rode on, the confusion of the past day gathering itself once more into a knot he could not pick loose. She chose me. But why? Riding could not shake it. Neither, he suspected, would anything else, until he had all of it in his hands.

* * *

The afternoon had ripened into a gentle warmth the morning's chill had never promised. A light wind stirred the leaves overhead as Benedict waited at the gate of Hyde Park, and the air came to him full of the scent of cut grass and roses, and beneath it the ordinary reek of the city, horse and dust and, somewhere, bread from an oven. He turned his hat in his hands, and made himself stop.

He had not expected his aunt's note to unsettle him as it had. His first thought had been to do exactly as she asked, at once and without fuss. That was his nature, and he trusted it. But the thing had clung to him since, a small persistent burr he could not brush off.

It was not only the strangeness of the request. It was the why of it: why she had bound him, of all men, to a woman he had never met, over money that touched neither his purse nor his people. That why was a stone in his shoe he could not walk off.

Nor had he expected the lady herself to answer him as she had. He had come into Braithwaite's office prepared to find a widow in want of managing, and, seeing her, had half fixed the notion in the first moment: her dark curls, her pale face, her slight figure, and a pair of wide, clear eyes the warm indeterminate brown of autumn woodland, hazel shot through with green where the window-light caught them. A mouse, he had thought, uncharitably, a small frightened creature glad of a strong arm.

Then she had opened her mouth, and railed at him and at Braithwaite both, and demanded — demanded — that she alone read the note before he was suffered to lay eyes upon it. Braithwaite, caught wretchedly between a duke's request and a widow's command, had done as she bid and sent the note round to her own house.

It had been her notion thereafter that they meet in the park to walk, rather than that he call upon her at home. She was mindful of her position, a widow but lately returned to society and to London, and Benedict found, to his mild surprise, that he respected her the more for it.

He had been wrong about the mouse. He was seldom glad to be wrong. He found he was, a little, this once.

A carriage drew up. The door was handed open, and a lady stepped down and came directly toward him, her head high, and beneath her bonnet the dark curls caught the sun and seemed to ripple into copper and bronze. She was impossible not to notice, and Benedict, who had made a small career of not noticing the ladies flung across his path, noticed her.

"Your Grace."