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When at last he drew away it was only a little, his brow near hers, his hand still cradling her fingers against his chest where he had drawn them.

"Forgive me," he said, though he was not in the least sorry, and he heard the smile in his own voice. "I told you I had grown tired of waiting for a better hour."

"Do not you dare beg my pardon for it." Her laugh was unsteady and bright, and her eyes were wet, and she made no move at all to take her hand from his. "I have been waiting on that hour rather longer than you have, Blackwood, and I would not give it back for the world."

"Nor I." He looked down into her face, and could not for a moment think past the plain gladness of it. Then the day's business came back to him, and he made himself remember there was a man abroad who wished her ill, and a name yet to be found. "We are not done," he said, more soberly. "I would not have you think me careless of him, only because I have said what I have said."

"I know you are not careless." She pressed his hand once, and let it go, and gathered herself with a steadiness that had grown surer in her by the week. "Nor am I. If anything, I am the more determined for it. I have a great deal now that I do not mean to lose." She stepped up into the carriage, and turned in the doorway to look back at him. "Find me his name, Blackwood. And I will find the rest."

"This evening," he said. "At Cottingley's. Until then, Harriet."

"Until then." She smiled, and the sweetness of it stayed with him long after the carriage had drawn away and left him standing in the churned and ordinary street, a man who had come out that morning to look at a forgery and had, somewhere between the boarded window and the carriage step, given away his whole heart and found, to his lasting wonder, that it had been wanted.

Chapter Fourteen

The house was quiet as Harriet moved through it, dressed already for the evening and waiting only for the carriage to be brought round. She had meant to sit in the drawing room until it came. Instead her feet had carried her, as they so often did of late, to the doorway of her late husband's study, and she stood there with her hand resting lightly against the frame.

She had stood so on her first day back in London, unwilling to go in. She was less unwilling now. After a moment, she stepped inside and let out a long breath as the familiar scent of the room reached her, leather and paper and the dry sweetness of the old books along the wall. The desk stood near the window, its polished top catching the last of the evening light, and she crossed to it and laid her fingers along its edge as she had a hundred times.

How many nights had Edward sat here, his fair head bent, ordering all their affairs with that quiet, unshowy care he brought to everything? He had been dependable, honest, and kind. He had offered her friendship when she had expected only a match of convenience, and she had thought, once, that her whole future would unroll before her as a level path with Edward walking steadily at her side.

That path had turned. She was not the woman who had walked it.

"I was happy with you, Edward," she said aloud, as though he might be there to hear it. It was true, and she would not deny it nor step back from it. But there was another truth pressing gently against the first, quietly insisting she look at it too, and she had grown tired of pretending she did not know its shape. Her thoughts did not stay with Edward as once they would have. They went, without her leave, to the Duke — to the quiet street outside Braithwaite's, and what had been said and done there, and the future he had all but laid at her feet.

The old guilt rose, and she let it come, and did not let it master her. Edward had valued her happiness above nearly all things. He had made that plain in every year of their brief marriage. He would not have wished her to shut herself in a small house and grow gray alone for his sake. It would not be disloyal to Edward to find herself happy with another. It might well be the very thing he had wanted for her.

And there was this besides, which she had not let herself say until these last few days: she had failed him once already. He had carried some trouble alone to the end of his life and never let her see it, and she had never thought to ask. She would not make that error twice. Whatever he had begun here, at this desk, in the last quiet weeks of his life, she meant to finish it.

"You began a thing, Edward," she murmured, "and did not tell me of it. Well. I have nearly found the end of it now."

She turned to go before her nerve could desert her, and it was in the turning that her eye fell upon the desk once more and stopped.

Something pale showed against the dark rug at her feet, half-hidden in the shadow beneath the desk. She bent and drew it out — a single sheet of paper, wedged in the narrow gap between the desk and its own foot, where a careless hand had swept it in the ransacking of that dreadful evening and no one since had thought to look. She and the Duke had spent long hours going over Edward's papers, sorting and reviewing every sheet and setting each in its place. This one had lain here through all of it, missed.

A faint frown gathered on her brow as she carried it to the window to read it in the light. It was a brief note in a plain, businesslike hand — a gentleman advising Edward, in the friendly way of one who knew such matters, to draw his money out of one ship and place it in another before the season turned. There were terms in it she did not follow, remarks whose sense escaped her, and she had very nearly set it aside as no concern of hers when the last line caught and held her.

This is my best and final judgment on this matter.

For a moment she could not have said why the words should snag so. Her eye went over them once more, and her breath went still in her chest. They were plain enough. There was nothing in them to remark. And yet she knew them. She had not read them before — she had heard them, spoken aloud, in a dim and dingy office earlier that very day, in the Duke’s own voice as he bent over a forged note and read it through. The note that Braithwaite had discovered, the one dressed up in Lady Warrington's hand, had closed upon those very words.

Slowly, her heart beginning to labor, Harriet turned the sheet to read the name set beneath.

Ashcroft.

The floor seemed to shift under her, first one way and then the other, and she put out a hand to the desk to steady herself. Lord Ashcroft. The mild, well-informed gentleman who was forever near, all good nature and gentle concern, who had asked after her endowment with such soft solicitude. She had sat at a dinner table with him two nights gone.

She made herself breathe, and made herself think, for a fluttering widow was no use to Edward now. It was not the matching of any hand that had told her — she saw that at once. She had never so much as looked at the forged note. She had only heard its words. And this note in her fingers was written in no disguised hand at all, but plainly, in a man's own workaday script, and signed as plainly with his name. The two were nothing alike to the eye. The forgery had been made to pass for Lady Warrington's writing. This was only Lord Ashcroft's own.

It was not the hand, then. It was the words.

A patient and skillful man might counterfeit another's writing, stroke by careful stroke, until the very loops of it deceived the lady's own solicitor. But he could not so easily counterfeit the turning of his own mind, the particular way it came down upon a thing and closed the door and would hear no more. Whoever had built that forgery, letter by letter, in Lady Warrington's hand, had reached the end and signed off, without ever knowing he did it, in his own voice — the very phrase that now lay beneath his own name on the paper she held. A man might change his script. He could not change the way he ended a verdict.

And then, as she read the line a third time, something in it turned under her eye and would not lie flat. It was not, she thought, how a man wrote when the matter was his own to settle. A man who ruled his own affairs wrote plainer than this: do so. I have done such. This had the sound of a decision handed upward to be weighed — best and final, as though someone yet stood ready to turn it over and find it wanting, someone to whom a judgment must be rendered and an accounting given. For the space of one cold breath, the thing she had caught seemed larger than the name written at the foot of it, as though even here, over his own signature, Lord Ashcroft were not the last word in the matter but only the man appointed to carry it.

The thought was too great and too shapeless to hold. It slid from her the instant she reached for it, and left nothing behind but its chill.

She had a name. Tonight, a name was enough for one woman to carry.