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Harriet frowned. A week ago she would have called it a muddle and thought no more of it. She had not the luxury of thinking so now. “Gone. Both together.”

“Both together, my lady.” The butler’s jaw tightened. “It did not sit right with me. A man does not press for the master’s own instructions and then leave without delivering a word of them. I liked it so little that I made a circuit of the rooms, to be certain the fellow had not — ” He stopped, and she saw the shame come into him before he made himself go on. “The study door was open, my lady. It had been shut when I passed it not half an hour before.”

Harriet’s stomach turned over. “The study.”

“Yes.” He could barely hold her eyes. “There are papers disturbed within, my lady. The desk. The shelves. I regret it more than I can say. It was my failing, and no one’s but mine. I ought never to have left a stranger standing alone in the hall, and I have said as much to Jane, that she is never — ”

“It was not your failing.” She said it firmly, because she saw how near he was to breaking under it, and because — turning the thing over even as she stood there — she found she believed it. “Nor Jane’s. Consider what the man contrived. A footman’s coat. A livery she would know. A letter, and an errand that could only be answered by the butler in person, and no other — an errand built, from the first, to draw the two of you away from that hall together and leave it empty behind you.”

She heard her own voice go quiet and certain. “This was not a common housebreaker trying a door to see if it would give. It was well thought out. Whoever sent that man knew this household well enough to know precisely how to empty its hall of the very people who guard it. You were not careless. You were played upon, and cleverly.”

The butler stared at her a moment, and some of the weight went out of his shoulders — not because she had excused him, she thought, but because she had named the thing truly, and a named thing was easier to bear than a nameless one.

“Now.” She turned her head toward the open door, and made herself walk toward it. “Let me see.”

He put out a hand, and she stepped past it into the study, and the sight of it stopped her on the threshold.

Every drawer of Edward’s desk had been dragged out and left hanging, or pulled clear and dropped. The green leather top was strewn with loose papers. More lay scattered across the floor and crushed into the drawers themselves, as though a hand had raked through them and cast aside whatever it did not want. Behind the desk the shelves had been served the same way: books pulled down and left splayed, folders emptied, years of Edward's careful ordering torn open and flung about the room in the space of a quarter hour.

By the window, Jane stood weeping into her apron, the housekeeper’s arm about her shoulders.

Harriet wanted, very much, to go to the desk. She wanted to kneel among the papers and understand at once what had been done to them and what, if anything, had been taken. But the maid came first — the maid always came first — and she crossed to the window instead.

“Jane.” The girl lowered her apron, her face blotched and frightened. “Look at me. I do not hold you to blame for one moment of this, and you are in no danger of losing your place. Do you hear me? Not the smallest danger. The man deceived a great many wiser heads than yours to get in at that door, and he would have deceived me as easily, had I stood where you stood.”

“I thought him from a good house, my lady,” Jane said, hoarse. “Had I but known — ”

“You could not have known. No one could.” Harriet pressed the girl’s cold hand between her own, briefly, and then looked to the housekeeper. “Mrs. Coombe, take her down to the kitchen and give her hot tea, and something sweet, and let her sit a while before she is asked to do anything more. She has had a fright, and she has earned the rest from it.”

“At once, my lady.” The housekeeper’s relief was as plain as the butler’s had been, and she led the weeping girl from the room with a murmured word of thanks.

Then Harriet was alone with the desk.

She went around behind it and stood a moment with her fingers resting on the back of Edward’s chair, and the memory rose of him in it: his fair head bent over the columns of an evening, the scratch of his pen, the small smile he would give her when she looked in to say goodnight and found him still at his work. He had sat here every evening of their brief marriage and carried the whole weight of their affairs so that she need never feel an ounce of it. She had thought that a kindness. She had never once asked to see what it was he carried.

And now a stranger had had his hands in it before she ever had.

That was the part that lodged in her and would not be dislodged. Not the mess, nor the fright, nor even the violation of the house. It was that some man in a borrowed coat had knelt at Edward’s desk and pulled Edward’s papers through his fingers, reading, weighing, choosing, with a freedom she herself had never taken. That a stranger now knew the shape of her husband’s private business better than his own widow did. She sat down slowly in the chair, in Edward’s chair, and looked at the wreck of the desk, and felt her eyes sting, and did not let the tears fall.

He was looking for one particular thing.

The thought steadied her, oddly, the way a firm floor steadies a person who has been afraid of the dark. She made herself look again — not with a widow’s grief now but with a plainer, colder attention. A common thief would have taken the silver from the sideboard in the dining room and been gone in a minute. He would never have troubled a study full of paper.

This man had wanted paper. And not paper of any sort, but Edward’s paper in particular — not the household accounts kept by the housekeeper, not the letters in the drawing-room writing desk, but the study, this desk, these shelves, these years of a careful man’s private ordering. He had known where to come. He had gone straight to it.

A creeping loneliness pressed at her. Edward was gone. The brother-in-law who might have stood for her had turned her out. And all of it had settled onto her shoulders, hers and no one else’s.

And then, unbidden, another face rose in her mind. Green eyes that warmed as they looked into hers. A low, sure voice telling her she would not face this alone. The image was there and gone in a breath — but it left behind a warmth, and a steadiness, and something she could only call hope, and she took hold of it and would not let it go.

She was not, after all, entirely alone. And she was not, whatever they might have supposed, a woman who would sit trembling in a corner while a man in a borrowed coat rifled her house.

Harriet rose from the chair.

“I shall have this room set to rights,” she said aloud, to the empty study, and found her voice had gone level and certain. She reached down and gathered a sheaf of the scattered papers from the floor, and squared their edges against the desk with a snap. If this man believed Edward’s papers worth breaking into a house for, then there was something in Edward’s papers, and she meant to find it before he came back for a second attempt.

She would sort every sheet. She would read every line, ordinary or not, until she understood what her husband had kept here and why a stranger would risk so much to take it. It was a task she should have set herself years ago, at Edward’s side, and had not. She would set herself to it now, alone, and be glad of the doing.

She crossed to the door and called for the butler, and when he came she gave her orders with a briskness that surprised them both. A fresh tray of tea, and her dinner sent up on it, for she would dine in here this evening and work as she ate. The house made fast, every door and window seen to, the area gate barred. A footman to walk the street before dark and mark whether anyone loitered where no one had business to.