CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You will be the Lieutenant Vance the whole town speaks so well of.”
The man had sat down across the table without invitation, and Vance, pleasantly and harmlessly drunk, enjoying the fire and the last of the regiment’s good humor, looked up to find a stranger settling himself with the ease of a man who had never once worried whether he was wanted.
The brother officers had gone up a quarter-hour since, yawning and unsteady, leaving him to the dregs of the bottle and the better dregs of his own good opinion of himself.
He had told the tale of the colonel and the grey gelding twice and been laughed at both times, and a man laughed at twice is a man at peace with the world.
He was not, he would have told you, a bad man.
He was an unlucky soul, born without competence into a world that insisted upon it, yet gifted with a face and a manner forever on the cusp of winning him a fortune, though they never quite managed the feat.
He had always planned to enter into a matrimony of financial convenience.
The Middleton girl had been a pleasant rehearsal for the wedding until the Middleton money turned to air, and a man could hardly be blamed for declining to wed air.
That the rehearsal had left a sweet-faced creature crying somewhere was a pity, and pities were things that happened to other people, which was the whole of his philosophy and had served him tolerably until the night a stranger sat down across his table.
“I am Vance.” He gathered himself toward dignity. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”
“Greaves.” He let the single word do its work and watched it do it. “You have heard the name, I do believe.”
Vance had heard it, as everyone within twenty miles had, the great cold house across the river, the earl who neither frequented society, nor was sought after by it, and he sat up straighter in spite of the brandy, which was the first small victory the evening handed the older man and by no means the last.
“My lord. I had not looked to find such company at the Black Swan.”
“The Swan keeps a tolerable cellar and asks no questions, which are the only virtues I require of an inn.” Greaves lifted a finger, and the landlord brought brandy unbidden, which told Vance more than the brandy did.
“You have had a tedious autumn. The militia always does. A great deal of standing in the wet, waiting on a war that will not come.”
“It has its tedium, I confess.”
“And its expenses.” He said it gently, naming a thing already looked into.
“You owe Captain Lorrimer three hundred at hazard, a Jermyn Street tailor near as much, and a man by the Fleet a great deal more than either, at a rate that will completely consume you by Easter. I do not say it to wound you. I say it so we need not pretend, you and I, that this is a conversation between men who can afford their scruples.”
The brandy went cold in his hand. “You are remarkably well informed about a lieutenant of militia.”
“I am well informed about every man I mean to find useful. It is the only flattery worth paying, that one has troubled to learn a fellow to the bottom of him.” Greaves turned his glass by the stem. “I believe you are acquainted with the new Duchess of Rosanne.”
It came then, whatever it was, somewhere sharper than the brandy had reached, and Vance should have been wary and was instead, flattered, because a great man had crossed a river and a public room to ask about a woman of his, and there is no vanity so reliable as a vain man’s.
“More than acquainted, my lord, in her maiden days. Miss Middleton, as she was. A sweet little creature, quite devoted. She wept when the thing ended. They generally do.”
“And what was the issue of the affair?”
“Our acquaintance grew distant. A position was secured, and circumstances altered.” He waved away the bankruptcy he had fled the week it broke, the silent summer, the September notes sent only when his own pockets ran dry.
He let Greaves take it for a gentleman’s mutual fading, because it sounded better, and because he had told the flattering version often enough to half believe it.
“We parted amicably; at the very least a polite understanding remained between us.”
“You disapprove of her match. I saw it cross your face when I named the duke.” Greaves studied him.
“A girl of twenty handed across a desk to clear her brother’s gaming debts, to a man so vastly her senior, with not a warm word in him.
That is no matrimony. It is a purchase, and it would be utterly impossible for me to harbor a favourable regard for any man who buys what the rest of us must earn. ”
“No more can I.” It was a comfortable fabrication of the truth, and Vance settled into it.
“Then consider. You would not harm the lady. You would remind her, and the world with her, that she was a person before she was a chattel. There are men who would call that a kindness.”
“And you, my lord? What would you call it?”
“A debt of my own. Long owed, longer deferred, and no concern of yours past the figure I mean to name.” Greaves let the fire crack between them. “Would you be willing to renew the acquaintance, Lieutenant, in a manner advantageous to certain parties, yourself not least?”
Vance set down his glass, and the fog cleared a degree, as it always did at the approach of money or danger, which had ever smelled much the same to him.
“What manner.”
“A simple one. The best of them always are.” Greaves told it level and unhurried, his eyes on the fire and not on the man.
“You will write to her. A letter, contrite and ardent, all the old warmth in it and a great quantity of remorse, begging one private meeting. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere she might reach unseen and leave again by the same road, so that her coming is her own secret and feels to her like her own free choice. You will name an hour.”
“And at the hour?”
“At the hour, in that quiet place, certain persons of standing will happen to be passing. They will happen to see. And they will happen to carry away with them the picture of a young duchess, alone in the dark, in the arms of a red-coated officer who is not her husband.” He turned his glass a slow half-circle by its stem.
“That is the whole of it. You will observe there is nothing in it that asks you to be anything you have not already been to the lady once before, and you emerged from the business with your person and honour unblemished.”
“And the persons who happen to pass. Who are they to be?”
“That need not trouble you. Men whose word carries, and who owe me the execution of the task. You provide the lady and the hour. I provide the eyes.”
“And if she will not come?”
“Then you have lost an evening and I have lost nothing, and we stand precisely where we began.” Greaves’s certainty was a flat cold thing.
“But she will come. A girl sold into a cold house does not refuse the one man who ever made her feel chosen. You taught her that lesson yourself, by your own account. You need only remind her she once learned it.”
“You need not touch so much as a hair upon her head,” he continued.
“The picture is the whole of it. A duchess discovered is a duchess ruined, and a duke made a public fool of in his own park is laughed at in every club in London, and a man laughed at has lost a thing no fortune buys him back. Appearances are everything in the eyes of the ton.”
“And for the man who writes the letter?”
Greaves named a figure.
It was more money than Vance had seen at once in three years, his debts scrubbed to nothing, his pleasures paid, a fresh start in a regiment of the line where no creditor knew his face, and he felt it land the way the name had landed, too large and too useful to refuse, and he knew already, by his own pulse, that he would not refuse it.
“It is a great sum. It is also a great risk. A ruined duchess keeps a husband, and the husband is an ill man to cross.”
“The husband will never have your name. You will be a red coat in the dark and gone before the candles are lit. The risk you are pricing is the very thing the figure covers.” Greaves’s countenance betrayed not the slightest trace of impatience.
“But if you mean you would like more, say so, and stop dressing greed as caution. It wastes us both.”
Vance had the grace to color, and then the larger want swallowed the smaller shame. “I would not say no to more.”
“Then fifty more on the day it is done, and not a shilling on a day it is bungled. We understand one another.”
“We understand one another, my lord.”
“One thing further, and then I leave you to your conscience, such as it is.” Greaves’s eyes did not warm.
“You will speak of this to no one. Not to a brother officer in his cups, not to a woman across a pillow, not to a priest, not to yourself in the glass. Let one word reach one ear before the night is out, and the arrangement ends, and you will discover I am a far worse creditor than your man by the Fleet and a great deal harder to run from.”
“I am the soul of discretion, my lord.”
“You are nothing of the kind. No vain man ever was. But you are a frightened one tonight, and fear serves nearly as well as discretion, and it never oversleeps.”
“And am I to be there? At the discovery itself.”
“You are there until the moment before it, and well away the moment after. The witnesses must see a man, not your particular face. A red coat, a dark head, a duchess held close in the dark, and the thing is done. You are a rumor by morning and gone by the week’s end, with your pockets full.”
He had, to his lasting and insufficient credit, the one scruple. “She comes to no harm? Bodily.”
“None whatsoever.” Greaves did not trouble to make it sound like reassurance, which was its own contempt, and Vance, wishing very much to be reassured, took the thinnest thread of it and called it enough.
“No man touches her, you least of all, since you will be away before the witnesses have done looking.”
“I shall want a few days. The letter must be in the old voice, or she will smell the change. She is no fool. She is only a girl who wishes very hard not to be one.”
“Take your week.” Greaves rose and slid a folded paper across the boards. “Send word there when the day is set, and burn it after. And choose your quiet place on the duke’s own ground, if you can contrive it. There is a particular sweetness in ruining a man upon the land he is proudest of.”
He went out into the night and did not look back, and Vance sat alone with the brandy and the firelight and the folded address beneath his hand.
He poured out the last of the bottle and did not taste it.
The taproom had gone quiet around him, the landlord wiping the same patch of bar over and over in the way of a man who has learned not to see his betters’ business, the fire sunk to a single red eye, and Vance sat in the low light feeling, beneath the brandy and the fright and the rising warm tide of the money, a thing he did not often trouble to feel, which was the particular stillness of a man who has just agreed to do a thing he will never afterward be able to pretend he did not understand. It passed. It always passed.
Vance did not let himself wonder too hard why an earl would pay four years of a lieutenant’s debts for the look of a thing.
Great men kept their grudges as other men kept hounds, and a wise small man did not inquire into the size of a great man’s grudge, only into the depth of his purse.
He had the depth of the purse. The rest was the earl’s affair.
The place he half knew already. He had ridden the lane past Wrenfield twice since the regiment came up, calling it idle curiosity and knowing it for something else, and he had marked the little folly on the southern edge of the park, a Greek toy of a thing set among the trees, near enough the house that a woman might slip out to it on foot and far enough that no one would hear.
He would walk it once by daylight, to be sure of the paths and the sightlines, and then he would name the hour.
Greaves wanted the duke’s own ground. The folly would serve it up on a dish.
He thought about the money. He thought about the regiment of the line, the debts gone, the clean blank feeling of a slate scrubbed down to nothing.
And then, once and briefly, of her face.
Not the careful wedded face at the draper’s window, but the other, the one from behind the curtain at the Davenport ball a year and a half gone, when she had looked up at him wide-eyed and half-hopeful and entirely his for the price of a few kind sentences.
Poor foolish creature, he thought, with something a better man would have been ashamed to find was almost fondness. She had believed every word. She would believe these too.
He thought about the money again, and that settled it, as money always settled it with him.
He carried the address up to his cold little room, trimmed the candle, and sat a while with the quill, summoning the old voice, the ardent one she had wept over.
He wrote that he had played the fool and the coward, and yet it had cost him neither his fortune nor his standing, since he believed neither.
He wrote that he had thought of her every day of the summer, a fabrication so old in his mouth it had the texture of truth.
He wrote that he asked only to look upon her once and speak the truth openly, something he should have said a year ago, and would trouble her no further if she did not come, that last being the hook, for a woman forgives any boldness sooner than she resists a man who leaves the choosing to her.
He filled the page in the warm contrite hand he had used to undo better women than she, and read it back once, and was pleased with it the way a craftsman is pleased, feeling no more for the girl who would read it than a locksmith feels for a lock.
He had a gift, he thought. It had been wasted on a militia commission and a long run of bad cards.
Tonight, at last, somebody had found a proper use for it.
He signed it with a single initial, sealed it, lay down, and slept without the smallest difficulty, which was, in the end, the truest and the worst thing that could be said of him.