Page 42

"And how," Benedict said, watching her, "would you do that?"

She was silent long enough that the fire settled in the range and a coal dropped. When she spoke again, it came out of her slowly, each piece set down as she found it, the way she had once watched Edward lay accounts along his desk until the columns told their story of themselves.

"He does not speak to the lawful world in his own voice," she said. "He never has. He speaks to it through Wells: anonymous letters, a caution dropped here, a doubt there, years of them, always through the same quiet channel, and Wells carrying it into the offices and the firms none the wiser, and carrying word back up again the same path." She lifted her eyes. "It is how he learns things. It is how he has always learned them. He does not go to a keyhole himself — he has a hundred Wellses, and they bring the world to his door already opened."

"Yes," Benedict said. "That is his whole method. To read."

"Then we shall give him something to read." She leaned forward over the table. "We do not summon him. We do not put a question to him and wait to see how he answers it. We let him hear — through Wells, through his own private channel, the one path he trusts because it is his own — that a particular thing has come to light. Not the paper he holds. The other. The thing he has hunted for a year and never found."

Her voice dropped. "He broke into this house, Benedict — sent a man in a footman's coat to empty my hall and turn Edward's study inside out, and it was not money he was after. It was whatever Edward set down of what he had discovered, in Edward's own hand. He has never got it. It is the one thing in the world that could undo him; he does not know where it is, and he has spent a year afraid of it."

"And it does not exist," Benedict said quietly.

"It does not need to exist. It only needs to be believed to exist, by the one man in London primed to fear it. We let it be known — through Wells, so that it reaches him by the very path he thinks no honest person can read — that Edward's record has been found, and is to be brought out and laid before Braithwaite at a named hour, in a named place."

She spread her bruised hand flat upon the wood. "And then we wait to see who comes for it. For no honest soul in England could come — the thing is a lie, and it reaches him by a path only he uses, and no one else ever heard a word of it. A man who walks in to lay his hand on it can only be a man who was told of it down that secret channel. He damns himself by arriving — his own reach undoes him. And the six of us are standing in the room to see him do it."

She sat back. The kitchen was very quiet, and her heart was not.

Benedict had not moved while she spoke. Now he let out a long breath, passed a hand slowly over his jaw, and looked at her as though she had reached into the muddle he had turned over for an hour and lifted out of it, whole and clean, the one thing he had not been able to find.

"He is caught by the one skill he is proudest of," he said. "By his own reading."

"By his own reach." Harriet almost smiled, and did not quite. "He has spent a year certain that he sees everyone in London and that no one sees him. Let that be the thing that takes him. Not a duke's word against a viscount's. Not our number against his one. Let him walk into a room on the strength of a thing only his own secret path could have told him, in front of the very people he would least wish to see it, and let there be nothing in the world he can say to explain how he came to be there."

"Outwitted," Benedict said, "and not merely outnumbered."

"Beaten," she said. "Not scolded. There is all the difference."

He was looking at her in a way that put the heat back into her face despite the ache in her wrist and the lateness of the hour, and she looked down at her tea to be free of it.

"There is a thing in it, though," she said, more quietly, "that I must say before you agree to any of it, for it is the price, and it is mine to pay and no one else's."

"Say it."

"The bait is Edward." She kept her eyes on the cup. "The thing we let it be known has surfaced — Edward's own account, the shameful private matter he carried and never once let me see the shape of — I do not know what it is, Benedict. I still do not know. Ashcroft holds a piece of it, and I have never read a word. But the audit will find it. Braithwaite will open those accounts within the week, and whatever Edward hid to spare me will come up into the light whether I will it or not."

She drew a slow breath. "So I have made up my mind. I will not wait for it to be dragged out, nor let Ashcroft spend it first and dress it however serves him. When it comes, I will be the one to speak it, in my own voice, before the people whose right it is to hear it — whatever it proves to be, and however it shames the man I was married to." At last she looked up. "So the bait is not even wholly a lie. I mean to make it true. I mean to bring Edward's matter into the light with my own hands. I only mean to choose the hour, and let it be an hour that takes Ashcroft down with it."

"Harriet." His voice was rough. "You do not know what it is. It may be a hard thing to stand up and say."

"It will be a very hard thing." She did not look away from him. "But a secret cannot be a whip in another man's hand if the one it belongs to has already spoken it plainly, in the open, and been done with the fear of it. He has built a year's power out of Edward's silence. I mean to take the silence away from him. It will cost me to do it — I had rather pay the cost, and be free, than keep the fear and call it safety."

There was a silence, and in it Benedict reached across the width of the table and laid his hand over her unhurt one, and she let him, and did not draw away.

"You are sorry for him, are you not?" he said. "I have seen it in your face. Even now. Even tonight."

Harriet considered the question honestly, because it deserved honesty. "I understand him," she said. "That is not the same thing, and I have learned the difference tonight. I know precisely what he is afraid of — the ruin, the disgrace, the name he took from a dead brother snatched back out of his hands. I know it so exactly that I have built the whole trap out of it."

She turned her hand beneath his so that their palms met. "I am sorry for him the way a person is sorry for any frightened creature. It will not stay my hand by so much as an inch. I understand him well enough to beat him, and I mean to, and I shall not lose an hour's sleep over it."

"Steel," Benedict said softly, "under all that gentleness. I keep finding it where I did not expect it, and being glad of it, and half afraid of it, all at once."

"You had better be more glad than afraid." But her fingers had closed around his. "For I am about to walk into a room and take my husband's shame in both hands and lay it on a table in front of our friends, so that a wicked man may be caught in the act of coming to steal it, and I find, Benedict —"

Her voice was not quite steady, and she let it not be. "I find I cannot do it alone. I have said, since the first day I sat in Braithwaite's office, that this was my own matter, mine, that I would carry it myself and want no one's help in it. I meant it as fiercely as I have ever meant anything, and I do not mean it now. You have become the person I cannot do this without. That is a harder thing for me to say than any of the rest of it — and I have said it, and I will not take it back."

For a moment he only looked at her, and she watched the restless man go still across the table, the way he had gone still once before at another table, over another paper, when she had crossed to his Christian name for the first time.