CHAPTER THREE
“She has one attachment of note, Your Grace. A militia officer.”
Pearce stood on the far side of Theodore’s desk with the report open in his hands, reading in the flat, unhurried voice he used for every species of human folly.
It was the morning after Henry Middleton’s second visit.
The lad had arrived at ten on the hour as instructed, bearing a list that proved flawed in three distinct particulars; Theodore had accordingly placed him at the small writing table by the window, where he remained under close supervision until a second inventory was produced.
This corrected account extended to four pages, amounting to a total of eight thousand four hundred pounds.
The sum had come within a hundred of Theodore’s own estimate.
Theodore rested two fingers against the edge of the desk. “Read me the officer.”
“Lieutenant Charles Vance,” Pearce said, lowering his eyes to the page. “West Sussex Militia. The acquaintance began last Season.”
“How public was the acquaintance?”
“Public enough to be noticed, private enough to be denied.”
Theodore’s mouth hardened. “That is an answer designed to irritate me.”
“It is also an accurate one, Your Grace,” Pearce replied evenly. “There were letters, according to my source. Walks without a chaperone, though the cousin who was meant to serve in that capacity appears to have found blindness convenient.”
“The cousin is Mrs. Dalton?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“Continue.”
Pearce turned a page with careful fingers. “There were two evenings at the Davenport ball when Miss Middleton and Lieutenant Vance were absent from the supper room longer than strict comfort would allow.”
A sharp, unbiddable emotion stirred beneath his dark hair, and a sudden shadow crossed his dark eyes before he could put a name to it, leaving him deeply vexed to find it there.
“Whose comfort?” he asked.
“Anyone inclined to count the minutes.”
“And was anyone inclined?”
“Few enough to preserve the lady from whispers, Your Grace.”
Theodore tapped once against the desk, then stilled his hand. He had no interest in imagining what had occupied two young people for those missing minutes, and was annoyed to discover that the thought had presented itself at all.
“How long?” he asked.
Pearce glanced up.
“The absences.”
“Twenty minutes on one occasion. Near half an hour on the other.”
Theodore’s expression remained unchanged. “Remarkably careless.”
“Perhaps remarkably confident.”
“Confidence is usually another word for carelessness in the young.”
Pearce made no comment.
Theodore accepted the report with the faintest movement of his hand. “When did it end?”
“In May,” Pearce said. “Abruptly. Within the same week the family’s difficulties became a subject of general conversation.”
“He dropped her when the money went.”
Pearce’s eyes lifted from the page. “He ceased all contact, Your Grace. No letter, no call, nothing my source could trace for the whole of the summer.”
“Three months.”
“Three months,” Pearce agreed, turning back to the report. “Then in September, the connection resumed. A note delivered to the Middleton house. A call. Two further notes since.”
Theodore leaned back, his expression unchanged.
The irritation remained, though he could not have said why.
The woman was not his wife. She was scarcely more than a name on paper and a negotiation nearing completion.
Yet the existence of the letters, the walks, the vanished half-hours sat in his mind with an unwelcome persistence.
“What prompted the gentleman to recover his memory?”
“My source could not say.”
“Your source has disappointed me.”
“He added one matter for completeness,” Pearce said, as if disappointment were a weather condition to be endured with good posture. “Lieutenant Vance has been gambling more freely than his pay allows.”
“How freely?”
“Freely enough to lose a sum he is in no position to cover.”
Theodore was quiet for a moment.
Pearce kept the report open and waited.
“So,” Theodore said at last, his voice low and controlled, “the boy came back when his pockets were empty.”
“That is a possible reading.”
“It is the only reading worth the trouble of saying aloud.”
Pearce inclined his head. “Yes, Your Grace.”
The timing was a sentence upon Vance complete in itself. Theodore turned it over once, found nothing in it that improved the man, and set it aside for later use.
Pearce adjusted the report in his hands. “You always ask me the same question at this point. I can spare you the trouble, if you wish.”
“Spare me nothing. I dislike surprises more than repetition.”
“You would ask whether anyone of note has been observed near the principals.”
Theodore’s gaze lifted. “And has anyone?”
“The regiment is in its autumn quarters near Wrenford. In Hertfordshire.”
Pearce allowed the place name to sit in the air between them. He knew the map as well as Theodore did and had too much sense to explain it too quickly.
Theodore’s fingers stilled. “Go on.”
“Your own house at Wrenfield is some seven miles distant.”
“I am aware of where my own house is situated.”
“Of course, Your Grace.” Pearce’s tone remained carefully blank. “The Earl of Greaves holds Greaves Court six miles north of Wrenfield, across the river.”
The fire shifted in the grate.
Pearce lowered the report a fraction. “The lieutenant’s regiment and the earl’s country seat lie in the one parish.”
Theodore did not move.
Greaves, in the same parish as the officer who had been attached to the woman Theodore was about to enter into matrimony with.
It might be nothing. Regiments quartered themselves near somebody’s grand house every autumn, and the world was too crowded with houses, officers, and enemies for every arrangement to be sinister.
A coincidence remained harmless until another arrived to keep it company.
“Do you suggest action?” Theodore asked.
“I suggest notice, Your Grace.”
“That is why you are alive and several other useful men are tiresome.”
Pearce inclined his head, revealing nothing. “I shall endeavor to remain useful.”
“Greaves has been patient for nine years.”
“He has, Your Grace.”
“A man learns patience from his enemies as readily as from his friends.”
“More reliably, in some cases.”
Theodore looked toward the fire, then back to the report. “File it.”
“Under Lieutenant Vance?”
“Under the parish.”
Pearce’s quill appeared in his hand. “Watch Wrenford and the surrounding roads.”
“Watch the parish, not the man. Quietly.”
“Quietly,” Pearce said, making the note. “And without exciting remark.”
“If I discover remark has been excited, I shall know whom to blame.”
“Then I shall make certain Your Grace is deprived of the pleasure.”
Theodore approved of the answer, against his will. “That will be all.”
Pearce closed the report, bowed, and left the room with the same measured discretion with which he had entered it.
Theodore drew the report toward himself and read it twice more.
The rest of it was unremarkable, which was often the most useful kind of report.
She was twenty years old. Both parents were in the ground, the mother since Miss Middleton was eight and the father two years past. She had been presented last Season under a cousin who took her up while the Middleton name still meant something and dropped her as soon as it ceased to be useful.
He ran one finger down the page.
“Those who noticed her called her pretty,” he murmured, reading the line aloud in the empty room. “Those who failed to notice her called her unremarkable.”
He read on.
Her pianoforte was indifferent. Her watercolours were rather better than average. Her French was fluent enough to get on. She rode well. There was no scandal of her own anywhere in the pages, and no debt in her own name, which in that household stood as a small monument to someone’s care.
The someone was not her brother.
Theodore rose and carried the report to the window. The day outside had given him nothing he could use, only a pale morning and the ordinary movement of London conducting itself as though human beings were not being sorted, priced, and rearranged behind glass.
“A man attaches himself to a girl,” he said quietly, letting the sentence find its shape in the room. “He abandons her the week her fortune fails, vanishes for a season, and reappears when his own debts have caught him up.”
He folded the report once along its original crease.
“That is not devotion delayed. It is appetite returning to a plate it remembers.”
Whether Vance intended to use her for himself or for someone willing to pay, the report could not say.
The timing alone told Theodore enough. The girl upstairs in the failing house on the southern street was waiting, with all the stubborn faith of twenty, for a man who had already shown precisely what he was and would show it again the moment usefulness required him to do so.
He weighed whether the existence of the lieutenant was reason to draw back from the matrimony.
It was not.
Whatever Vance intended by his September notes, the attachment had ended in every way that signified.
Miss Middleton would learn the man. She would be wiser for the learning, and wisdom cost less with a roof, a name, and a settlement standing between a woman and the weather.
A half-pay lieutenant with a gambling habit could have laid none of those at her feet.
Theodore returned to the desk and took up his quill.
Then he paused.
“Tell her?” he asked the empty room.
The empty room gave him the only answer worth considering.
She would never believe him. A girl of twenty would not take the word of the stranger who had bought her over the word of the man who had kissed her hand. The disbelief, once given air, would settle into resentment, and resentment could poison a house more efficiently than scandal.
The information would keep. Most information kept. It was one of the few mercies of the work.
***
The Tuesday came grey and clear, the way the day of his decision had come.