Chapter Four The Rookwood Shame #2
“No. It is what distrust makes of cooperation.”
The answer was too exact to dismiss.
He removed the ring.
The gesture was so unexpected that Marianne looked at his hand before she could stop herself. Without the ring, his finger seemed oddly vulnerable, a lighter band of skin marking where inheritance had rested too long.
He held the signet out to her across the carriage.
Marianne did not take it immediately.
“It will not bite, Miss Vale.”
“Family symbols often do.”
Again that almost-smile, and again suppressed.
She accepted the ring and turned it toward the window light. The engraving was old, the lines clean despite wear: a rook, crowned, one wing raised, a small star or spur beneath its claw. It was not a cheerful emblem. It had been designed for men who wished to be remembered, not loved.
“This is the Rookwood crest?” she asked.
“One version of it. The full arms are more elaborate. My father used this as a personal device. His father before him. It appears on estate seals, plate, some old account books, and enough objects to make it useless as proof by itself.”
“Yet useful as a mark of authority.”
“Yes.”
“Could another person have used it?”
“Any person with access to a seal, a stamp, copied stationery, old wax impressions, engraved tokens, a dishonest jeweller, or a desire to implicate my family.”
“You have considered this.”
“I have considered little else since last night.”
She looked up.
There was no evasion in his face. Irritation, yes. Fatigue. Pride braced for attack. But not evasion.
Marianne placed the ring on her palm and held it back to him. He did not take it at once. For one strange second, the ring lay between them like a decision neither wished to touch.
“At Halgrave House,” he said, “you will see how frequently the device appears. If the ledger mark came from a Rookwood source, we must determine which.”
“If?”
His hand closed over the ring. Their gloves brushed.
“If,” he repeated. “I will not condemn myself, my father, or my house because a mark resembles an old seal. But neither will I ignore it.”
That was fair.
Marianne disliked, increasingly, how much of him was fair when he remembered to be.
Halgrave House occupied a corner of Grosvenor Square with the confidence of a building that had never wondered whether it would be welcome.
It was not merely large, though it was very large.
Size alone could be vulgar. Halgrave House possessed that older, more assured grandeur which did not require ornament to prove expense.
Its stone fa?ade was pale and severe, its windows tall, its ironwork polished, its steps broad enough to receive a royal carriage and cold enough to discourage sentiment.
Everything about it spoke of continuity, money, discipline and an absence of laughter.
Lantern House, with all its secrets, had warmth in the very scratches upon its furniture. Halgrave House had polish.
Marianne descended from the carriage beneath the gaze of two footmen whose faces did not change when they saw her, though she did not mistake that for indifference.
Servants in great houses saw everything; the best concealed it until it could be used.
Tom came down after her and stood near the carriage, visibly determined not to be impressed by ducal stonework.
Sebastian glanced at him. “Your man may wait in the servants’ hall.”
“Tom waits where Miss Vane instructed him to wait,” Marianne said.
A footman opened the door.
Sebastian paused half a breath, then said, “See that Mr Tom is given a place by the hall fire and refreshment, should he want it.”
The footman bowed. “Yes, Your Grace.”
Tom, hearing enough to understand the concession and not enough to know what to do with ducal kindness, looked deeply suspicious.
The entrance hall of Halgrave House was vast, cold, and beautiful in the way a monument was beautiful.
Black-and-white marble stretched beneath Marianne’s feet.
A double staircase rose ahead in a sweep of pale stone.
On the walls hung portraits of Rookwoods in armour, wigs, uniforms, hunting coats and court dress, generation after generation of men whose painted eyes suggested they had built history through the stern application of chin.
There were women too, of course, but arranged as wives, mothers, daughters; pale hands upon harps, flowers, children or prayer books.
Above the mantel stood a great clock flanked by bronze hounds.
The air smelled faintly of beeswax, cold ashes and old money.
No one raised their voice.
No one hurried.
Every servant who appeared seemed to have been trained to move without troubling the dignity of the house.
It should have impressed Marianne. It did impress her, in a way.
But it also made her think of Evangeline entering Lantern House with mud on her gown and a bruise at her wrist, and she wondered what such a girl had sounded like in this hall.
Too loud, perhaps. Too bright. A candle brought into a mausoleum and scolded for smoke.
Sebastian handed his hat to a waiting servant. “The library.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
They moved through a corridor lined with more portraits. Marianne walked beside him, not behind, because she had made that decision before stepping over the threshold. Sebastian seemed to notice, but did not correct her. A small victory, or perhaps merely a battle he had chosen not to fight.
Halfway down the passage, Marianne stopped.
On the wall to the left, between a narrow cabinet of porcelain and a door partly hidden by a velvet curtain, hung a portrait in a frame too fine for its position and too neglected for its subject.
Lady Evangeline Rookwood had been painted at perhaps seventeen.
The artist had captured what gossip, scandal and testimony could not: the vivid impatience of a girl not made for stillness.
She sat in a white gown with a blue sash, one elbow resting on the carved arm of a chair, her head turned as if someone had just called her from outside the canvas.
Her hair caught gold at the temples. Her mouth seemed about to speak.
One hand held a closed fan; the other dangled carelessly at her side, fingers still slightly ink-stained even in oil.
Whether the painter had flattered or told the truth, Marianne could not know, but she felt at once that this was the woman who had said, I am not mad, before anyone in Lantern House had dared to ask.
The portrait did not belong in the passage.
It belonged among the family, where visitors could not miss it.
Sebastian had walked two steps ahead before he realised she had stopped. He turned and followed her gaze.
For a moment, neither spoke.
“The portrait was moved by my father,” he said.
Marianne looked at the girl in white. “When?”
“After the scandal.”
“From the gallery?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
His expression hardened. “To reduce comment, I suppose.”
“And after you became Duke?”
His silence answered before he did.
Marianne turned her head. “Why did you not move it back?”
The question was not loud. It required no volume. The corridor itself seemed to hear it and hold still.
Sebastian looked at the portrait, not at her. “At first, because I believed leaving it where it was spared her name renewed attention. Later, because too much time had passed and moving it would have invited the questions I did not know how to answer.”
“And now?”
His jaw tightened.
Now was not a simple word. Now there was a letter. Now there was a forged-looking signature. Now there was a rook on a ledger scrap. Now there was Marianne Vale standing in his ancestral corridor asking why his sister had been left in exile even on canvas.
“I have no adequate answer,” he said.
Marianne had expected defensiveness. The absence of it disarmed her.
She looked back at Evangeline. “She looks as if she hated sitting still.”
“She did.”
A faint memory moved through his voice before he smothered it. “The painter complained that she kept turning toward the window.”
“What was outside?”
“The park. Horses. My mother had promised she might ride if the sitting finished before noon.”
“Did she?”
“No. The sitting lasted too long. Evangeline sulked through luncheon and bribed a stable boy to saddle a mare before dinner.”
Marianne almost smiled. “Was she caught?”
“She returned with burrs in her hair and declared the painter had captured an excellent likeness because no sane person would remain indoors voluntarily.”
For one moment, Evangeline seemed less a victim and more a girl laughing through a house that had not known what to do with her.
Then the moment passed, and the portrait remained in the lesser corridor.
Sebastian turned away first. “The library is this way.”
The library at Halgrave House was vast enough to make scholarship appear hereditary.
Shelves rose to the ceiling on three walls, broken by a marble fireplace and tall windows overlooking a walled garden.
A long table occupied the centre of the room, its surface already arranged with ledgers, boxes, bundles and a brass lamp.
A fire had been lit, but the room still felt cold, as though warmth required permission from the portraits before entering.
Sebastian had prepared for her. Again.
Marianne removed her gloves and sat at the table. “These are the estate ledgers?”
“Household, estate, trust and miscellaneous accounts. The Evangeline trust papers are there.”
He pointed to a stack tied in faded blue ribbon.
“Miscellaneous often means most important,” she said.
“I am aware.”
“Good.”
He sat opposite her, then seemed to reconsider and moved to the side of the table where they could examine the same pages without constant passing back and forth. Marianne noticed the choice and decided not to remark upon it.
For an hour, there was only work.