30. CHAPTER 30
T he operation to catch a traitor and dismantle the biggest threat the British government had faced in a generation did not stop because of his domestic turmoil. The next morning, much as he would have preferred not to, Dalton presented himself at the Greystones' townhouse.
A maid showed him into a small drawing room — cozy, lived-in, the room of a house that was a home rather than a stage. Alice came through the door ahead of Nathaniel, and Dalton stood without thinking.
"Dalton. You look tired," she said with her characteristic directness.
"I am tired. You, on the other hand, look radiant."
She snorted. "I look enormous and apparently now require afternoon naps."
"She refuses to slow down. It is a constant battle." Nathaniel shook Dalton's hand. "Have a seat. I suspect the motive of your visit was not to discuss my wife's pregnancy symptoms, as fascinating as they are."
Alice threw him a narrow-eyed look. Nathaniel smiled, irrepressible.
They sat. Alice's hand rested on the curve of her belly without her seeming to notice it was there. Nathaniel's hand found the small of her back the moment she sat. Dalton looked away from the small, unconscious choreography of it and turned to the work.
"Alfred's network has moved," he said. "We intercepted two dispatches in the past week from a handler I have not previously identified.
The signal passed through Westminster, which means either we are closer than I thought, or the conspiracy is recruiting above the level I had been prepared to concede. "
"Or both," Nathaniel said.
Alice's eyes had already narrowed into the expression he remembered from years of working for him. Her body was building a child. Her mind had not, for a moment, stopped being an intelligence officer.
"Who do you have on it?"
"Ardmore."
"Good." She nodded. "John keeps a low profile and is often underestimated, which is what you want. But he can move easily in the highest circles. Are you asking for our help, Dalton, or telling us where things stand?"
"I may need Nathaniel's help to decode the messages. But I will not have either of you back on the field now that you are expecting a child."
"I am not sure whether I am flattered or insulted," Alice said.
"Flattered," Nathaniel said immediately, wearing the harassed expression of a man trying to protect a too-independent, pregnant wife who refused to be cosseted.
Alice sighed in mock resignation, then turned back to Dalton. "Speaking of overprotective husbands. How is your wife?"
The shift was so clean he didn't see it coming. He had expected another quarter-hour on Westminster. Alice had decided the professional business was concluded, and he had not yet learned to sidestep her when she was decided.
"Vivienne is well."
Alice waited.
"She is well physically," he said again, and heard how thin the sentence sounded the second time. "Her parents are in London. The reunion has been good and difficult. She remembers fragments. Nothing like the whole picture."
"What do the doctors say?"
"She refuses to see a doctor. "
Alice's expression did not change, but something behind her eyes did. Nathaniel's hand at her back went still.
"Why?"
"I don't know. Her father has found a specialist. The best man in London by any measure I can take of him.
I agreed to the introduction. Vivienne overheard the conversation before I had a chance to put it to her myself, and she refused in terms that were…
quite final." He paused. "The refusal was not proportional to the request. She was not angry. She was frightened."
"Frightened of what?"
"Damned if I know. I tried asking her. All I got were deflections. I'm not giving up. Just giving her time."
Alice considered him for a moment. Then she said, "Let me try talking to her."
"Alice — " Nathaniel interjected.
"I have been meaning to call on her since she came to London.
I kept away because I did not want to add another unfamiliar face to a house that was already full of them, and because I know what it is to be the new woman in a room where everyone has known everyone else for a decade.
But I knew her before. I met her on three occasions when I was working under you, and I liked her very much.
She was kind to me when kindness from a duchess was not a thing I expected.
" Alice's mouth softened. "I should like to renew the acquaintance on any terms you will permit. "
"You would have been welcome at any point."
"I was being careful." A small, wry smile. "Let me come to tea. Talk to her woman to woman. I think she might tell me things she will not tell you, because I'm not the husband who has been managing her, or the parents who have expectations. I am neutral. Safe."
Dalton felt something in his throat that he did not intend to acknowledge. "It is worth a try. I know your talent for reading people, and getting them to open up."
"I will ask Lady Venus to be there as well," she said, moving past the thank-you he had not got out.
"Vivienne already knows her. Three women in a drawing room is a very different thing from one woman asking questions.
It feels less like an interrogation and more like — " she searched for the word " — a council. "
"A council," Dalton said, and the corner of his mouth lifted.
"And after that," Alice continued, "if she will permit it… Abigail's husband is a doctor."
"Lord Hartfield?"
"Yes. He is a physician by training. He is not a specialist in amnesia.
But he is a doctor, and more than that, he is someone Vivienne could meet without ever being shown into a consulting room.
I owe my sister a visit in any event. We could take tea.
Their children will be in the room, Colin will talk to her, and what he learns from that conversation he will share with us, and no one will have used the word examination once. "
"You are asking me to let a doctor look at her without her knowing it."
"I am asking you to let her into a room where a doctor happens to be," Alice said. "I won't lie to her. She might still be upset. I want you to understand what kind of help I'm offering. It is not a trick. It is a room arranged so that a frightened woman might choose to come into it."
He was quiet for a moment.
"The visit first," he said. "If she trusts you with her reason for refusing, then we can propose the Hartfield afternoon. But I ought to warn you, Alice — she won't be easily persuaded. I have spent too much of the past month arranging things for her, and she has had enough of my managing."
"Then it is fortunate I'm not asking for your help to arrange it."
"Why do I get the impression we are the ones being managed without even noticing?" Nathaniel asked with mock dismay.
That surprised a chuckle out of Dalton. "Because we probably are."
He stood.
He wanted this. What the Greystones had. The easy ribbing, the unconscious hand at the small of a back, a room arranged for enjoying rather than for impressing. He wanted his wife in a chair like that one, and a child on its way —
He cut that thought short, because the intensity of that want pained him, and some things he was not meant to have.
That way, only disaster waited.