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Benedict crossed to her without a flicker of hesitation. His arms went round her and she came against him, one hand curling into the lapel of his coat, the other coming to rest at his shoulder. There was a moment's tension in her, a held rigidity, and then it went out of her all at once, and she let herself be held. He rested one hand at her back as though he might anchor her against all of it.

"We will find out who came here," he said, low and steady, though his heart was anything but steady beneath her hand. "You will not face this alone, Harriet. I will not leave you to it."

They stood so for a long minute, and slowly her breathing evened. She drew a breath, and another, and lifted her head, and her eyes were clear again. The urge to bend and set his mouth to hers rose in him, urgent and fierce — but he held where he was, and told himself such thoughts might be taken out and examined later, when her endowment was settled and safe, and even then he did not know what he would do with them.

"It seems your aunt knew I should have need of you." Her voice was a whisper that curled somewhere near his heart. "Of your steadiness. And of your being here."

He smiled. "It seems she did." He let his gaze move, once, over the ruin of the room. "Whoever searched these papers believed a thing of worth was hidden among them. Might I suggest we look ourselves? It may be the man did not find what he came for."

She nodded and drew back from him, and the loss of her nearness went through him like a cold draft through an open door. "If you are willing, I shall not refuse the offer."

"I am more than willing." He said it firmly. "But I will insist you rest first, and take some tea, while I begin." He tilted his head toward the tray in the middle of the room. No steam rose from the pot, and he judged it long cold. "Might I ring for a fresh tray?"

A measure of her composure had come back to her. She nodded, and her smile, though brief, was real. "If you insist upon it."

"I do." He gestured her to the chair. "Sit, Harriet. Please." And when she had done as he asked, he turned his attention to the study and the strewn papers, and went round to the desk to look at each drawer in turn. They had been forced. Of that he was certain, the wood scored, the contents within violently disturbed. The shelves had been served the same way, books and folders swept to the floor when whatever the man wanted had not shown itself.

"Harriet." He glanced to where she rested near the fire. "Would you permit me to begin, while you take your tea?"

Her smile came again, the weariness lingering in it, but gratitude shining plain beneath. "Yes, of course. I trust you, Blackwood."

It was a simple thing to say, and yet it woke in him a fierce and unlooked-for protectiveness, as though some great beast had stirred and lifted its head within his chest. He had agreed to his aunt's request out of duty. He had thought that would be the end of it. But watching the lady sit quietly among the ruin of her husband's study, the danger of it still hanging unspoken in the air, he knew past any doubting that he could not turn from her now — not for a moment, not for anything.

"I thank you," he said gently, and saw her eyes fall closed, her head coming to rest against the chair. "Rest now. I will see to this."

* * *

The hours that followed passed in a slow, steady rhythm of concentration. The daylight faded by degrees from the window. The servants came to set candles about the room. Dinner was brought, and they ate it in the study itself, neither of them willing to step away from the work for even the length of a proper meal. The rustle of paper became a familiar cadence between them, almost companionable, though as the pile of the unexamined shrank, Benedict began to fear their long labor might come to nothing at all.

The late Lord Colbourne had been, Benedict discovered, an uncommonly thorough and disciplined man. His letters were close-written and precise: matters of estate management, of investment, of dealings with lawyers and agents whose names Benedict knew only distantly. His account books held careful columns of expense and profit. His folded papers recorded transactions running back many years. Yet the greater part of it touched only the ordinary business of a well-run life, and had nothing to say of Lady Warrington, or of her gift.

They read on regardless, each document turned and set aside with patient care, though more than once Benedict found his eyes had drifted from the paper in his hand to the lady across from him. The candlelight lay warm along her features and caught the dark of her hair, turning the loosened strands to copper and bronze. There was something in her steadiness, in the plain persistence of her, that deepened his regard for her with every quiet minute that passed.

"I fear your evening is quite ruined, Blackwood." She set down one document and reached for the last of them, giving him a small, tired smile. "There is nothing here of any interest."

"There has been nothing wasted." He said it firmly. "I cannot imagine a better use of an evening, in truth." His brow drew down. "Though I do begin to wonder whether the man found what he wanted after all, and carried it off before ever you came home. It may be that —"

Her swift indrawn breath cut him short. Her eyes had gone wide, moving fast across the paper in her hand, reading whatever was written there. Benedict was on his feet without deciding to be, his own heart quickening. "What is it?"

"Here." She pointed at the page, and her voice had thinned. "It names Lady Warrington. This — this is Edward's own hand. His private notes. But why should he —"

She did not finish. He came round the desk and read it over her shoulder, once, and then again, taking in all of it before he spoke.

"Your husband reviewed some accounts on Lady Warrington's behalf," he said slowly. "He writes — I spoke to Lady Warrington about our mutual connection and his involvement in certain financial affairs. Having reviewed my own accounts and seen the difficulty there, I feared the same had been pressed into her own accounts, all without her awareness. I asked if I might review them, and to my very great distress I found exactly what I had feared might have occurred. Lady Warrington will now take the matter forward."

He lowered the page. "I cannot make all of it out. But it seems plain your husband held some fear for Lady Warrington's affairs, and had first found the same trouble worked into his own."

"His own, first." Harriet's finger came to rest lightly on the page. She was very still. "And then he feared she would meet the same — because of a connection they shared." She lifted her face to his, and something in it had changed. The trouble had gone deeper than the page. "Blackwood — he does not write of a debt. Not of one bad account, nor one dishonest agent. He writes as a man who has understood that it was done to him. Pressed upon him, he says — worked in without his knowing. And then reached for her."

Her breath went uneven. "It is not the money that was the crime. It is that someone had read us, all of us, and set his hand to it, and neither Edward nor your aunt knew he was there at all until the harm was already done."

Benedict felt the cold of it move through him. Someone has been reading us. All of us. She had followed the thing to the same dark place he had, in Wells's office — only now it was not a stranger's estate in the north but her own husband's hand that said it, eighteen months dead and warning her still.

"There was more here that troubled him than a set of figures," he said quietly. "Something great enough to send him to Lady Warrington's own accounts, unbidden. Something he did not share with you, I think."

He looked down into her face, and she shook her head, and did not speak at once. In the shaking silence he saw her understand it — that Edward had carried a thing alone, some weight he had not laid on her, had gone down into whatever trouble this was and shut the door of it behind him so that no shadow of it should fall on his wife.

She did not know its shape. Neither did Benedict. But it was there in the room with them now, a secret her husband had died with, and Benedict watched her come to the knowing of it and ache with the not-knowing.