Chapter Three
The formal drawing room had not been used in months, and the air in it was furniture wax, cold plaster and the staleness of a room cleaned regularly but never occupied.
Ravenshaw stood beside the window and considered the carriage on the drive.
Seven years. He had spent seven years constructing a life in which he would never again have to look at Lord Adrian Voss’s face, and now the man was sitting in a hired carriage on his gravel with the patient confidence of someone who expected to be received.
“Show him in,” he told Keene. “And see that you stay within hearing.”
“Very well, Your Grace. Shall I also send for reinforcements, or do you intend to manage this particular engagement alone?”
He shot him a glare. “That was perilously close to humour, Keene.”
“I shall endeavour to suppress it, Your Grace.”
The door opened, and Lord Adrian Voss entered the drawing room of Ravenshaw Hall as though he had been invited for breakfast.
He was precisely as Ravenshaw remembered him.
Tall, fair-haired, handsome in the particular way that suggested considerable effort disguised as effortlessness.
His greatcoat was damp from the rain, and he removed it with the easy movements of a man accustomed to making himself comfortable in other people’s houses.
When he turned, his smile was warm and wide and as reliable as a promise written in disappearing ink.
“Magnus Harrington.” He extended his hand. “It has been too long.”
Ravenshaw did not take it. He did not acknowledge the Christian name nor his surname. He let the hand hang in the air until Voss withdrew it with a small, rueful shake of his head.
“Still the same, I see,” Voss said, settling into the chair Ravenshaw had positioned in the light. “I had hoped time might have softened you.”
“Time has done a great many things, Voss. Softening me was not among them. Why are you here?”
“I am here out of concern. Grave concern, for the welfare of a young woman who appears to have made a very rash decision.”
“Which young woman?”
“Come now, Magnus.”
“You may address me as Your Grace. You lost the privilege of my name the last time you used it to your advantage.”
The correction landed. Voss absorbed it without visible discomfort, which was precisely the problem with the man. Insults did not penetrate. Charm was the armour, and charm was flexible enough to reshape itself around any impact.
“Is Lady Beatrice Ellingham a guest of this house, Your Grace?”
“I have not confirmed that anyone by that name is under my roof, and I do not intend to confirm it on the strength of your concern, which I find implausible.”
“A lady travelling alone with a child is a delicate matter. Surely you can appreciate the urgency.”
“I appreciate that you appear to know a great deal about the child. More than a casual acquaintance of the family ought to.”
“The child is a concern to all who care for Lady Beatrice’s wellbeing.”
“And you care for her wellbeing?”
“Deeply.”
“How reassuring. And the child specifically. You mentioned the child before I did, Voss. You knew there was a child before you arrived at my gates.”
“The Earl mentioned that Lady Beatrice had taken an infant from the household. The details were not elaborated upon.”
“And yet here you are, in the rain, pursuing details that were not elaborated upon. You will forgive me if I find your interest somewhat specific for a man acting on someone else’s behalf.”
“You were always suspicious, Your Grace.”
“I was always observant. The two are frequently confused by people who prefer not to be observed. You have not answered the question I asked. though. The Earl told you she had gone. He did not tell you where, or you would not have arrived at my gate to ask my butler whether she was under my roof. So how do you come to be upon my gravel this early in the morning?”
Voss took his time, and that was the first part of the answer.
“Helena told me. Some years ago, in a letter, in the course of a disagreement I did not think worth remembering at the time. We maintained our acquaintance through a steady stream of letters.” He looked at his hands.
“She informed me that if I would not do as she asked, she would lay the whole matter before the Duke of Ravenshaw, who was the only man in England who would believe her. I laughed at her. I have since needed to revise the opinion. I did not, however, throw away the letter. I never throw away letters.”
“That gives you a guess.”
“It gives me a road, Your Grace, which is a different article altogether. When the Earl informed me that his daughter had left his house with an infant, I did not search for her. Searching is slow, expensive and almost always unnecessary. I chose the likeliest road and rode along it a day behind her, and I stopped where she would have stopped if she shared the same thought with her sister.”
Ravenshaw did not answer, because there was nothing to say to that. “You rode through the night?”
“I did.”
“That is a great deal of exertion for a man whose interest is concern.
Something harder surfaced in Voss’s face and vanished: a card player covering a tell.
“I did not come here to quarrel with you.”
“No. You came here to retrieve a woman and a child, and you are dressing the retrieval in the language of concern to make it palatable. I have seen this performance before, Voss. It has not aged well.”
“You are very certain of my motives for a man who claims to know nothing about the situation.”
“I am certain of your methods, which is more useful. Methods do not change. Only the targets do.”
Voss leaned forward in his chair with the practised sincerity of a man about to say something calculated.
“If Lady Beatrice is here, she is in a vulnerable position. She has left her father’s house without his consent.
She is carrying a child whose circumstances are, shall we say, ambiguous.
She needs someone to help her navigate the situation with discretion, and I am offering that help. ”
“You are offering to manage the situation. Those are different things.”
“Are they?”
“Substantially. Help serves the person receiving it. Management serves the person providing it. You have always been more comfortable with the latter.”
“That is unfair.”
“It is accurate. Accuracy and fairness are rarely the same thing.”
“What do you want, Voss?” Ravenshaw repeated. “The real answer.”
“I want Lady Beatrice returned safely to her family. That is the whole of it.”
“That is the version you are willing to say aloud in a room where you do not control the witnesses. I have known you long enough to recognise the distance between what you say and what you want, and the distance has not shortened with the years.”
“And if I told you the truth?”
“I would be surprised. Pleasantly so, but surprised nonetheless.”
“The truth is that the Earl of Wycliffe is my friend, and his daughter has taken a child from his household, and I am here to offer my assistance.”
“The Earl of Wycliffe is not your friend. He is a man you have found useful. That is a different relationship, though I grant you the resemblance is strikingly exact.”
Voss’s smile thinned. For one moment the polished surface cracked and what showed beneath it was colder and more alert.
“You have grown unkind, Your Grace.”
“I have grown precise. Unkindness would require that I cared enough about your feelings to target them deliberately, and I assure you, I do not.”
Suddenly, the drawing room door opened, and Beatrice walked in.
Ravenshaw went rigid. He had told her to stay in the east wing.
He had told her to lock the door. He had told her in terms that could not have been plainer that Voss was dangerous.
She had disregarded every instruction and come downstairs in a borrowed dress with her rich chestnut locks pinned in wild disorder, her countenance still locked in the grey, deathly pallor of the woman who had collapsed helpless against his chest some hours prior.
She looked at Ravenshaw first, and her chin came up in the gesture he was beginning to recognise as the one she made before doing something inadvisable.
Then she looked at Voss.
Something crossed her face in the space between one breath and the next. Fear, layered beneath something harder, the way a hand remembers the shape of something it was burned by.
“Lady Beatrice.” Voss rose with fluid grace and arranged his face into gentle relief. “My dear Lady Beatrice, you have frightened everyone half to death. Your father has been beside himself.”
“Not everyone, my lord. Some people appear quite alive to advantage.”
Ravenshaw, from the window, said quietly: “Careful, Voss. She has teeth.”
Voss glanced at him, and something complicated moved behind the warmth.
“I am so pleased to find you safe,” Voss said, turning back to Beatrice. “Your father will be enormously relieved. I have a carriage on the drive, and if you will allow me, I can have you home by evening.”
“I will not be going home, my lord.”
“Lady Beatrice, I understand that families can be difficult, and that disagreements sometimes produce rash actions that feel necessary in the moment—”
“I did not ask for your understanding of my family, Lord Voss. I did not ask for your carriage, your escort, or your interpretation of my actions as rash.”
“You are very young, Lady Beatrice.”
“I am twenty years of age, old enough to recognise condescension when it is dressed as concern.”
“Surely old friends may be permitted one small intervention.”
“Old friends, perhaps. And what are we, my lord?”
“I had hoped we were acquaintances who wished each other well.”
“Then you may wish me well from a distance. I find the arrangement suits me better.”
Voss turned to Ravenshaw. “Your Grace, you must see that the lady is distressed. A woman in her condition, making decisions of this magnitude without the counsel of her family…”
“Her condition?” Ravenshaw repeated.
“I mean only that she has been travelling under difficult circumstances.”