Page 5

She walked slowly along the hall, and stopped at the study door, which stood ajar.

She had not meant to go in. But she stood a long moment with her hand against the wood, and then she pushed it open and stepped inside.

Nothing had changed. Edward’s desk still stood near the window, the polished wood catching the light. The staff kept the room clean and free of dust, as though he might come back to it at any hour and take up his place.

Harriet crossed to the desk and rested her hand upon its surface, and the small habit of it came back to her — how she had always looked in here last of an evening, to find him at his work, to say her goodnight.

His diligence had never once failed her. His care for every eventuality, his quiet ordering of things she did not even know needed ordering, had been the very ground she stood upon. Whatever difficulty had risen now around her endowment, it was no doing of his. She was as sure of that as she was of anything.

She went to the window and drew the curtain back as far as it would go, and looked out, though she could not have said what she was looking for. The garden lay below her, empty in the afternoon light. A blackbird hopped across the lawn and stopped, and hopped again. Nothing was out of place. And no dark coat could have waited at any corner here, for there was no corner and no street, only the garden wall and the trees beyond it. She had looked for one all the same.

“You are being foolish,” she said aloud, and let the curtain fall.

But as she left the room, she could not shake the unease that had come in with her from the street and would not go. She thought again of the solicitor and the words he had almost spoken, of the review that must be made a third time, of the suggestion he had not quite voiced. And she thought of the man at the corner, and of the second man, and of the way their heads had bent together as her carriage passed.

Was there more to the trouble with her endowment than Mr. Braithwaite had told her? Or was this only her own grief and her own strained nerves, conjuring shadows where there were none — an overtired widow filling the hollow her husband had left behind with dangers of her own making?

Chapter Two

Apale mist lay across Hyde Park, softening the outline of the trees and turning the paths into faint gray ribbons. Benedict, the Duke of Blackwood, rode at an unhurried pace, his gloved hands loose upon the reins. These early mornings were the one reprieve his title had not yet found a way to take from him — an hour in which no one wanted anything of him, in which he might simply be a man on a horse in the fog.

London had not properly woken. Only the earliest riders were abroad, dark shapes gliding through the mist, and the great restless machinery of the day still slept.

He would have liked to enjoy it. He found he could not sit quite still in the saddle to do so.

The restlessness had been on him since before dawn, and he could not name its cause. The previous evening had not helped.

He had come to London for a respite from precisely the sort of correspondence that had followed him here regardless: three letters from his two stewards, each with a concern that wanted his approval; one from his brother in France, cheerfully declining to return for the Season and reporting that his Grand Adventure went on very well without him; and a last from his solicitor, on some matter regarding the land he had lately purchased near the estate.

By the time Benedict had read, considered, and answered each in turn, the candles in his study had burned near to stubs. He had always known such things were the price of what he carried. He had merely hoped London might grant him a fortnight's holiday from the paying of it.

It seemed not.

He shifted his weight forward and let the horse lengthen its stride, and the movement eased him as nothing else had. He had never been a man made for sitting. His late father had ruled the dukedom from a chair and a desk. Benedict, three years into the same title, still felt the pull to be up and doing, to settle a thing by riding to it rather than writing about it. Stillness he could manage for an hour. Beyond that it began to feel like a coat cut too close across the shoulders.

"Your Grace?"

He came round in the saddle, startled — he had not heard the other rider draw near, so far had his thoughts wandered. "Yes?"

"It is I. Ashcroft."

"Ashcroft." Benedict peered into the mist and was glad when the man came close enough to be known. "Good morning to you — though it is hardly the morning for a ride, I fear." He knew the gentleman well enough. He had been at Eton with Ashcroft's elder brother. "The mist is heavy today."

"It most certainly is. It is quiet, at least, and quiet is what I come out to find at such an hour." Ashcroft tipped his head, his dark hair falling to one side, and smiled. "As I think you do also."

"Guilty," Benedict admitted.

"It means a man is not hounded across the park by every young lady, and every young lady's mother, who has decided she would make a most suitable Duchess of Blackwood."

Benedict winced, and shifted in his saddle. "Precisely so, more's the pity. I have said plainly enough that I do not mean to marry this Season, and still I am pursued to the point of exhaustion. It is the first since I came into the title that I have come up to town with no business to hide behind, and every mother in Mayfair seems to know it."

"And so you ride at dawn," Ashcroft said. "I shall not trespass long upon your solitude."

"It is no trespass." Benedict considered the man a moment. Ashcroft had come into his own title far more lately than Benedict had come into his, and by a harder road, and there was a fellowship in that, of a kind. "And how do you fare? It cannot be a year yet since you came into the title, I think."

Ashcroft's expression tightened, and he looked away toward the trees. It was, Benedict knew, a delicate thing to have asked. Ashcroft had been a second son, and had gone looking for some suitable occupation for himself as second sons must, and had made a beginning at it — only for his elder brother, the very man Benedict had known, to be carried off by a sudden and brief illness.

The shock of it had run through society. Benedict himself had grieved the man honestly. And within a matter of days the younger brother, who had been reared to expect nothing grander than a living or a clerkship, had found the weight of a viscountcy settled on shoulders that had never been measured for it.