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But the proof she needed did not lie behind his locked door, in Edward's estate books, at all. It lay in Lady Warrington's own accounts, which Braithwaite might open on the authority of her will and no man's leave besides. Her brother-in-law had shut his door out of pride, and a mean spirit's grudging of a fortune, not out of guilt. He had nothing to do with any of it, and she had been wrong about him.

"No," Braithwaite agreed. "You do not need him. The endowment is your authority, and Lady Warrington's condition is your authority. I may proceed upon those alone."

"Then how long?" It was Benedict, his voice gone very level. "How long until the study is closed and all of it lies open?"

Braithwaite spread his hands. "A week. Perhaps less, now I know what I am looking for, and why."

"A week." Benedict looked at her, and she saw her own thought land behind his eyes. Ashcroft knew he was watched. She had all but told him so across the quadrille the night before, let him see she had a name, and a strange business at her solicitor's, and a Duke set at her side by a dead woman's design. A cornered man does not sit quiet. He would be moving already to draw his hand from those accounts, to muddy what he could not withdraw, to vanish from the pages before the study closed over him and laid him plain.

"He has a week to make himself disappear from those columns," she said. "And we have a week to see he is standing squarely over them, in the full light, when they are opened."

She looked down at the broken seal in Braithwaite's hands, a year of a dead woman's patience spent upon an ordinary afternoon. She would never see the hand above the hand — she understood that now, and made herself take it without flinching. Some of this was larger than she was, and would outlast her reach.

But Ashcroft she could reach. He was here, in town, with a week to run and nowhere in the end to run to. Edward had found this thing out and set himself to break it, alone, and it had cost him his life and God knew what beside that he had never brought to her. She would not fail to know it now. She would not fail him a second time. She would finish the part of it within her reach, and hold the rest for a stronger hour and a longer arm than her own.

"Mr. Braithwaite," she said, and her voice came steady, "close your study, take your week, and say nothing to any living soul of how near you stand to its end." She turned to Benedict, and the shape of the thing was already assembling itself between them, quick and cold and sure. "And we, Your Grace, must settle how a cornered man is to be kept from bolting — and made to stand exactly where we would have him, at the hour the ground opens beneath his feet."

* * *

Braithwaite had been gone a quarter of an hour, and the thing itself sat between them still half-formed, too large for the drawing room. It was Benedict who said they should walk. There were words, he told her, he did not care to leave lying about a house where any maid might carry them off. Harriet fetched her bonnet without a word of argument, which he had come to understand was her way of agreeing with her whole heart.

His carriage waited at the far end of the square, in the last of the light. One of the two men he had set upon the house stood idle at the near corner, a groom to any passing eye, and gave Benedict the smallest nod as they came out: all quiet, nothing stirring. Benedict turned Harriet toward the garden railings and the carriage beyond, that they might speak before the world came at them again.

"He will run," Harriet was saying, low. "Braithwaite gives him a week. He will not use the half of them. A cornered man⁠—"

She did not finish it.

A man had come out from the mews passage between the houses, without haste, and stopped full in their path.

For a moment Benedict took him for a tradesman who had mistaken his way: a broad, heavy-built figure of middling years in a coat of no particular color, the sort of brown a man chose when he wished to be forgotten in it. Then he marked the stillness of him. It was not the stillness of a man waiting. It was the stillness of a man who had never once in his life been hurried, who stood in a gentleman's square with a duke before him as easily as he might have stood in his own scullery.

Benedict had never had a clear sight of the watcher. He had chased a shape across a road once and lost it. But he knew the man now, near enough at last to count the gray coming into his stubble and the old white seam of a scar that split one eyebrow.

"Your Grace." The voice was low and even and almost courteous, a working man's voice with the edges worn off it. "My lady. I will not keep you above a moment."

Benedict set himself half a step in front of Harriet. "You will keep us no moment at all. Stand out of the lady's way."

The man did not move. His eyes went past Benedict to Harriet, mild and incurious, as though she were a column of figures he had been set to check over. "My master sends his respects, my lady, and bids me put you in mind of a thing you seem to have let slip you." From within the drab coat he drew a folded paper, thick, worn soft along its creases, and held it up between two blunt fingers where she might see it and not reach it. "He has this, of your late husband's. And a good deal more of the like. He would take it very hard to be made to spend it. But spend it he will, my lady, and your Edward's good name along with it, if you and His Grace here do not leave off your business at the solicitor's and go quiet back to the country."

Benedict felt the words go into Harriet as a blade goes in. He did not have to look at her to know it. "Whatever that is," he said, "you may carry it back to your master, and tell him a duke has seen his hand at last, and named it."

Something almost like a smile moved in the ordinary face. "I carry what I am paid to carry. I do not read another man's post." He made the paper vanish again into his coat. "Give her the message, Your Grace. That is all of my⁠—"

He reached out and closed his hand about Harriet's wrist. Not roughly. Almost gently, the way a man takes hold of a thing to be sure it is attending him, and that was worse than any blow, that he should think he might simply lay hold of her in the open street.

Benedict moved. He had her half behind him and his fist in the man's sleeve in the same breath, the old certainty flooding up hot and blind: get her clear, put himself between.

But Harriet had not gone behind him.

She had twisted her caught wrist against the man's thumb where the grip was weakest, some trick of leverage Benedict had no notion she possessed, and torn it free. And in the same motion she brought her reticule round with the whole weight of her arm behind it and caught him across the side of the head. He staggered. It was not a hard thing, a lady's reticule, but it had her fury in it, and it took him by surprise, and he had never once, Benedict thought wildly, been taken by surprise in his life. His own alarm turned over in his chest into something nearer awe.

"You do not touch me." Harriet's voice shook, and did not break. "Not you. Not your master. Not any hired hand of his, ever again."

Then Benedict had him. He got both hands in the drab coat and drove him back two steps and hard against the mews wall, the brick knocking the breath out of him in a grunt, the battered hat tumbling into the gutter. Even pinned, a duke's forearm laid across his chest, the man did not thrash or cry out as a frightened man would. He set his broad hands flat against Benedict's grip and bore it, patient, waiting for it to be done.

"Who sent you?" Benedict pushed the words through his teeth. "Say the name."

"You have said it yourself. I heard you." A short breath, half a laugh. "Ashcroft. There. It costs me nothing to give you what you already own." The mild eyes came up to his. "But there is no name above that one I could give you if you broke my arm for it, Your Grace. I am a hand. I go where I am pointed. I never yet saw the arm that does the pointing, and I have learned better than to ask after it."