Chapter 3
Chapter Three
“You look dreadful,” Lewis said cheerfully, by way of greeting. “Come in and have coffee.”
“Your hospitality is unsurpassed,” Anthony replied in a deadpan voice.
It seemed his friend was in a rather good mood, because he did not comment on the lack of enthusiasm in his voice at all.
Instead, Lewis simply said, “It really is. This way.”
Anthony had not intended to call on Lewis. That was the precise, unvarnished truth of it, and he had been a man long enough to know when his own reasoning was performing acrobatics on his behalf.
He had ridden past Grayston House twice that morning, telling himself the first time that he was simply taking the longer route back from his solicitor’s.
As for the second time, he’d told himself that he’d simply forgotten to turn, and on the third pass, he had dismounted with a rigidness that the groom had the good sense not to remark upon.
He had two reasons to be here. He had manufactured one on the ride over: Lewis’s opinion on a matter of upcoming parliamentary business, which was conveniently true. As for the second, a more frivolous one, he would not examine that notion. It’d be best if he stuck to the practical reason for now.
He followed his friend through the corridor toward the morning room, taking in the house with the practiced, peripheral attention of a man accustomed to reading rooms rather than admiring them.
Well-ordered, quietly comfortable, with his Lewis’ wife’s evident sense of arrangement softening the older, more austere lines of the house.
Then Anthony heard a step on the staircase. He turned.
She was halfway down, one hand trailing the banister, and the moment she saw him, she stopped. Not a gradual slowing; a complete, sudden arrest of motion, as though she had walked directly into a wall that had materialized without warning.
For the space of roughly two seconds, Lady Caroline Marfront stood perfectly still, and Anthony saw her school her expression into composure in real time.
She managed it quickly, and with more composure than most people twice her age could have summoned under equivalent circumstances. By the time she had descended the remaining steps and reached the landing, she was tranquil, and she met his gaze with hazel eyes that gave away nothing at all.
He looked at her, and then, rather against his own better judgment, he kept looking.
He had seen her before. Several times, across the last few years, in this very house and elsewhere, but those occasions had been brief, and he had, if he was candid, paid them very little attention.
She had only been Lewis’s younger sister, a category of person to whom he had always made a firm point of not attending.
Today, Caroline was wearing a pale morning gown, simply cut, with her light brown hair dressed and her face clear of ornament.
There was nothing about it that should have been remarkable.
She looked much like every other young lady in London.
But Anthony could not shake the vision of her that lurked in his brain.
She had not been unremarkable in a man’s coat and a battered hat in a dark alley two nights ago.
She had been…something else entirely. That was the problem.
He noticed the straight-spined bearing of a woman who had been trained to perfection and had chosen to wear that training like armor rather than an accessory.
Yet he also noticed underneath it something loose, alive, and thoroughly uninterested in compliance.
He noticed the line of her jaw and the color in her cheeks and—
Stop this right now, he chastised himself.
She was Lewis’s sister.
She was also currently looking at him the way one looked at an unexploded mortar that had materialized in their front hallway.
“Lady Caroline,” he greeted with a quick bow, and was very satisfied that his voice came out entirely even.
“Your Grace.” Hers was equally placid, and he felt his lips tilting upward.
She was very good.
He had expected nothing less.
“A pleasure,” he said, then turned back toward Lewis, who had noticed none of this, and was already disappearing through the morning room door.
Anthony followed, and he did his best not to look back over his shoulder.
An hour later, he was still in Lewis’s study, which smelled of old paper—and the kind of scent that accumulated in rooms belonging to men who genuinely liked books, and not merely bought them for decoration.
Lewis was in the middle of outlining his position on the enclosure debate with the slightly aggressive patience of a man who had given the matter more thought than most. Anthony listened carefully; this was not a performance, for Lewis was one of the few people whose positions on things he found worth the effort of actually considering.
And that was quite a short list of people.
He was listening, and yet…
Twice in the course of the past hour, someone had passed through the corridor beyond the study door.
The first time he heard a quiet step, as if someone were creeping nearby.
It clearly was not a person who was moving at a servant’s brisk pace.
The second time around, it was slightly slower.
And both times, he had found his attention moving toward the sound with an eagerness that was entirely unwelcome.
Focus.
Lewis was saying something about tenant protections when Anthony pulled himself back to the conversation, which was the reason he had come here in the first place.
“—and the committee’s position isn’t worth the paper it’s written on if they can’t agree on the compensation terms. Therefore, I’ve drafted a counterproposal that I’d like your opinion on before I present it next Thursday.
” His friend tapped the document on his desk. “Read it when you’ve got a moment.”
“I’ll read it tonight.” Anthony reached for the paper.
Lewis leaned back in his chair with satisfaction, ready to move on to the next subject. There was a small, quiet pause.
“Have you heard anything interesting lately?” Lewis asked, in a tone that was rather too casual to be trusted. “I don’t know, from your corner of London, perhaps?”
Anthony’s brow arched. “That depends on your definition of interesting.”
“I mean… gossip. You know, talk. The sort of thing that gets around the clubs.” Lewis turned a pen over in his fingers. “About Caroline, specifically.”
His spine stilled violently at the mention of that name, but Anthony sat straighter to keep it brief and undetectable.
“Not that I’ve heard,” he said calmly.
Lewis exhaled. “Good. I’ve been worried.”
He looked, for a moment, less like the confident Duke of Grayston and more like a man who had spent a great deal of time managing a responsibility. One that he both loved very much and found very exhausting.
“She’s been in a mood lately,” Lewis continued. “A restless one, to be precise. You know how she gets.”
Anthony did not know that, in fact. He had known Lewis’s sister for approximately forty-five minutes across the span of three social occasions, the other night in the alley notwithstanding.
He said nothing, and Lewis, likely interpreting his silence as agreement, pressed onward.
“I want her settled. Not because I want to be rid of her, of course.” He frowned. “Because the world is a great deal kinder to women who are settled, and I would rather she have a good man at her side than… Well. You know how it is.”
This time around, Anthony did know. He also thought that Lewis’s definition of a ‘good’ man and Caroline’s definition of a tolerable existence might not be arriving at the same destination by the same road, but he said nothing about that either.
He nearly said something else entirely, though. He had the words assembled and almost in order:
Lewis, your sister was at the Black Boar two nights ago, in men’s clothes, with her friend, watching the boxing, and she gave an angry dockworker very nearly enough time to do something regrettable before I intervened.
He bit his lip and again said nothing.
He wasn’t sure why. He told himself it was because the information would produce far more heat than it warranted, and Lewis was already managing enough. He told himself it was a matter of proportion.
He set the words down and let his friend move back to the enclosure bill, while they drank their coffee.
Eventually, it was time to leave, and just as he reached the entrance hall, hat already in his hand, the door to the small receiving room to his left opened.
“A moment of your time, Your Grace,” Lady Caroline whispered.
And damn him, he could not resist the curiosity that stirred in his bosom.
So, he stepped inside. She closed the door behind him carefully, and Anthony could tell that Caroline was someone who had done this before, closed a door without drawing attention.
He glanced around for a moment; the room was used for callers, furnished with a narrow settee, two chairs, a small writing desk, and a window overlooking the street below—not large enough for anyone to require particularly much of it.
Caroline turned from the door and looked at him. “Did you tell him?”
He held her gaze for a moment. “Good morning to you as well, Lady Caroline.”
“Did you tell him?” This was not the repeat of a question; it was a clarification that she had already asked the pertinent one, and pleasantries were not in the schedule.
“I did not tell him.” He watched the tightness in her shoulders ease by a single, barely perceptible degree. “Though I will note that I had a direct conversation with your brother in which you were specifically the subject, and several very natural openings presented themselves.”
The tightness in her shoulders returned. “And yet you didn’t.”
“And yet I didn’t.” He was quiet for a moment. “I won’t. On one condition.”
She waited, her eyes wide, and he had to rein in the urge to tease her.
“You will not go back to that tavern.”