Chapter 24
He is familiar.
The man they brought up to him was one Adrian had seen before. It took him a moment to place it, the memory surfacing slowly the way a face does when you’ve only glimpsed it once from a distance.
The stranger from the fair.
It was the same man his wife had gone white speaking to, out among the stalls, the one she had afterward called a tradesman who had mistaken her for someone else.
“Hale, my lord. Of Plymouth,” he said as he stood next to the chair across from Adrian. “I come on behalf of a creditor of the late Viscount Vane, to settle the matter of what the widow still owes.”
There it was again, made flesh and standing in his own hall with a leather folder tucked under one arm. Another of her lies had found him, except this particular debt was not even hers. Not truly.
It belonged to a woman Adrian had never once met, and would very likely never meet in his life. The real Lady Vane was a woman who had bought her own freedom by handing her name, a few fake baubles, and every liability attached to it to a desperate stranger.
“You may sit, Mr. Hale,” Adrian said, and gestured him toward the chair across the desk. “Let me hear the whole of it.”
Hale sat and opened his dossier. He cleared his throat, set it down on the desk, and began.
“The late Viscount left considerable debts unsettled at his death, my lord, as I understand you may already be aware. There are two tailors, several wine merchants, and a rather substantial sum owed to a moneylender in Bath. Mr. Reynolds has grown impatient these two years past.”
“I see,” Adrian said as he steepled his fingers.
“Yes. The widow’s own settlement was meant to cover the worst of it, but she has proven remarkably difficult to locate these past months.”
He ruffled through the sheaf of papers on the desk, displaying sums and dates ruled out in a careful clerk’s hand. “Until, that is, word reached my client that Lady Vane had remarried, most advantageously, into a title. Your title, my lord, if you’ll forgive my plainness.”
“You believe my wife to be this widow?”
“But of course. I know it, my lord. It is a matter of record that you married the Lady Vane,” Hale said without any satisfaction, which somehow made it worse than if he had savored it.
“And moreover, I have seen her myself. She was at the fair in town not a fortnight past, and I confirmed the likeness against a miniature I carry for the purpose. There is no mistaking it.”
Adrian kept his face very still. “And what precisely do you propose is to happen now?”
“The sum owed, settled in full, and settled quietly, would answer the matter entirely, my lord. We have no wish to make trouble for a countess, you understand. We only request to be paid what is owed.”
Hale’s eyes flicked up, and something in them sharpened, just slightly.
“Though I will say, a countess who cannot account plainly for her own late husband’s debts, in a country town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, makes for a very ugly sort of story, once it starts to travel.
I should think you’d rather see it settled… than see it spoken of.”
There it was, the threat. Hale dressed it up so carefully in the language of courtesy that a less attentive man might have missed his meaning entirely. Adrian did not miss a beat.
He sat for a long moment.
The marriage might be worth nothing at all in law.
He knew that now, understood it completely and bitterly. He was still raw from it all, still uncertain from one hour to the next whether he could trust a single word that came out of his own wife’s mouth, if he could call her that.
And yet something deeper than the hurt, something that had nothing at all to do with whether he trusted her, stood up in him at the sight of this man laying her open across his desk like an account to be balanced and totaled and settled for the lowest possible sum.
Whatever she is, I will not sit here and watch her be picked apart in my own hall by a stranger with a folder.
“How much,” he said finally. “Give me a number.”
Hale wrote down a figure on a piece of paper and slid it toward him. Adrian looked at it. While it was not a small sum, he did not so much as blink at it.
“The matter will be settled through my own solicitor, thank you,” he said, cutting the man off before he could add anything else.
“Not another word of this said publicly, in this house, in the town, or anywhere else your client’s business happens to carry you.
You’ll have the full amount within the week, and I’ll thank you to consider the matter closed the moment it’s paid. ”
Hale blinked, plainly surprised to find so large and delicate a matter resolved so quickly and so entirely in his own favor, with none of the negotiation he had clearly come prepared to conduct. He took out a small snuff box and took a pinch.
“That is, ah, most generous of you, my lord. Most generous indeed. I’ll have the papers drawn up directly,” he said as he took a sniff.
“See that you do.”
“Thank you most kindly, my lord.” Hale gathered his folder, bowed himself out with considerably more warmth in his manner than he’d arrived with.
“And one last thing.”
“Yes, my lord?” he asked as he tucked the folder under his arm and put the snuff box into his pocket.
“Do not ever—and I mean ever—approach my wife again.”
Hale‘s skin turned white as alabaster. All he did was nod and quickly show himself out of the room.
Adrian stood alone in the study afterward for some time, listening to the faint sounds of the departing carriage fade down the drive.
I did this for the name of Lady Vane. Whoever she really is, we are tied. I did this for Cassandra, and for the house of Ashcroft. It is simple, the sort of thing any man of my position would have done, regardless of who stood accused. It is pragmatism.
The scent of the snuff still lingered faintly in the air and made Adrian’s nose burn.
He closed his eyes and could see that man leaning toward her at the fairground.
If he were being honest with himself, that image had stayed with him, returning to him at odd hours.
If he were being honest with himself, he may admit that his quick pay-off had something to do with that as well.
***
“I want a word with you,” Tristan said to him from the study door. “And I find I’d rather have it out plainly than circle it all afternoon, while I work up my nerve.”
The Hale business was barely an hour settled, and Tristan had shown up with more to put on Adrian’s overflowing plate. He set aside the ledgers he was hardly looking at.
“Say it, then.”
Tristan walked in and stood in the middle of the room. He leaned on his cane with both hands.
“I love her.”
“You…love her?” Adrian asked, though he knew what he meant.
“Cassandra. I mean it honorably, Adrian, in every manner a man ought to mean it. I’ve meant to say as much to you properly for a fortnight now and kept losing my nerve at the last moment, which I’ll own is a poor showing for a man who stood his ground at Waterloo without flinching.”
A month ago, Adrian might have weighed it fairly.
Might have asked after intentions, after means, after whether his oldest friend truly understood the whole of what he was asking for in asking for Cassandra’s hand.
For his sister was a girl who had spent four years learning the world could turn on her without warning.
He might even, a month ago, have been glad of it.
But now, cold through and trusting no one, least of all his own judgment, he heard only another man reaching for something that belonged to him. It was just one more hand closing around the last steady thing he had left standing.
“No.”
Tristan blinked, plainly caught off guard by the speed of the refusal.
“No?”
“No.”
“But…but why?”
“I remember what you were, in our wild years. Careless with every woman who ever crossed your path, quick enough to move on the moment the novelty of any one of them began to wear thin. I watched you do it a dozen times over, and laughed along with you while you did it, because I was the same sort of fool as you.”
His voice had gone hard, harder than it should with his dearest friend. “I’ll not hand my sister to a man of that life, however finely he’s learned to dress the asking of it now.”
It was cruel, and he understood perfectly well that it was cruel even as the words left his mouth. But Adrian said them anyway, because cruelty was easier than the alternative.
Tristan did not flinch from it. He stood very still, taking the blow like a man, and without returning it.
“We were both that man once,” he said, his voice low.
“More than most. But you, you of all men alive should know that a man can be entirely remade by what he’s lived through.
I have watched the war remake me from the inside out, Adrian.
It is the same as you were remade by that bloody road four years ago.
I am not the boy who left London. I never will be again. ”
He paused. “And I’ll tell you plainly, because I don’t imagine anyone else in this house has the standing to say it to you.”
“And what is that, Tristan?”
“I am damn frightened for you right now. Watching you drive off every single person who has ever stood by you the moment one of them fails to be perfect. First your wife. Now me. You cannot lock your sister up forever.”
“She is ill!”
“She has improved, both with your wife’s care and, I believe, my presence. She, too, has changed, though you cannot see just how much.”
“Leave Ashcroft,” he said quickly. “Be gone at your earliest convenience. You have stayed quite long enough.”
Tristan looked at him for a moment, searching his face for something, some crack he might still work his way into. He did not find it, only nodding once as he turned for the door without saying another word.
“Tristan.”
His friend paused, half-turned, some small flicker of hope crossing his face as he looked at him.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” Adrian said. “Just…go safely.”
Tristan’s mouth pressed into a thin line, and he went. The door closed behind him with a quiet, final click, louder than it had any right to be for all it echoed in his aching head.
Adrian was still standing in the quiet his oldest friend had left behind him, turning the whole ruinous shape of the day over in his mind, Hale and his folder of dates, Tristan and his honest, unwelcome plea, when a knock came at the door.
Soft. Uncertain, in a way that was entirely unlike the woman who usually delivered it.
He crossed the room, opened it, and found his wife standing on the other side.