Chapter 10 #3
Her eyes flew open. A server set down a small plate, a folded note upon it. “This was left for you, miss.”
She did not ask who had sent it. She nodded, took it, and waited for him to withdraw before unfolding it. The hand was neat; the words were cruel.
You know very well the house ought to belong to Lord Carrington.
Lady Warrington cannot have been in her right mind to give it to one as insignificant as you.
Your insistence on keeping it is greed and selfishness, and the ton sees it plainly.
They whisper that you have stolen from Lord Carrington, that your poverty is the whole reason you cling to it so.
She set it down, her vision blurring, and turned sharply to the window, fighting sobs, forcing calm onto a face that felt anything but. The voices around her carried on, cheerful and indifferent to her hurt.
“Miss Trent?”
She lifted her head to find Lord Carrington looking down at her, concern plain on his face.
“Is everything quite all right?”
She tried to answer, but her throat had near closed, and she only shook her head.
If she spoke, she feared the words would come with tears she could not hide.
He acted at once, seating himself across from her.
With a trembling hand she laid it upon the folded note and drew back, letting him reach for it.
“This was left for you here?” She nodded.
“I can well imagine what it says.” He frowned.
“Perhaps it would be best if we stepped outside, Miss Trent, where you need not hide your feelings from prying eyes.” He rose and held out a hand.
“Come. The air will do you good. We shall have the staff tell Lady Manion you have gone out.”
She took his arm and felt the strength of it steady her as they passed through Gunter’s and, mercifully, out into the sun. He guided her a few paces from the door to a bench where she might sit.
“You are trembling.” He did not sit, but stood before her, a shield between her and the watchful ton. “Might I read it?”
She nodded and looked away as he unfolded the note. A silence fell. When she made herself look back, she was startled by the hardness at his mouth, the contained anger flashing in his eyes. He was angry on her behalf. Angry that a few words had wounded her so.
“This is cruelty.” He folded the note with deliberate care, his jaw working. “I am disgusted by whoever wrote it. What cause could they have?”
“They fight on your behalf, perhaps,” she whispered, and his blue eyes searched hers.
“They want you to have the house. I will confess that, even now, living there, it does not feel like home. I feel a stranger in another’s house — an unfamiliarity that makes me almost unwelcome in it.
” She spread her hands. “Perhaps the writer knows that. Though I cannot imagine who they are.”
Lord Carrington let out a hiss of breath. “My first thought was Brookmire. But when I put it to him, he was insistent it was not his doing, and a little insulted that I should think so.”
“And you believe him?”
He nodded.
She managed a brief smile. “Then so do I.”
That softened him, a glint coming into his eyes. “I am grateful for that, Miss Trent.” His brows drew together again. “Still — we should return, if you are able, and decide what is to be done. I will not be turned from this.” He wet his lips. “Though if you feel otherwise, I would understand.”
She shook her head, buoyed both by his defense of her and his determination to go on. “I should like that, Lord Carrington.”
“Good.” He offered his hand, and she took it, and found that the smile on her face was a true one — as if he had taken all her strain and shaken it from her. “Then let us go back, enjoy our ices, and make a plan. I can think of nothing better to do this afternoon.”
Her heart lifted. “Nor I.”
The plan, when they had made it — over ices going soft in the warm afternoon, with Hannah returned and listening with her spoon suspended — was a simple one, and the making of it steadied Viola more than the ices did.
He would go to the solicitors and ask for whatever papers touched either family; there might be some record, some correspondence, that would show who stood close enough to Lady Warrington’s affairs to know what these letter-writers seemed to know.
She, for her part, would ask at Stoneleigh — the staff had served the lady for years, and servants saw everything, and Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Hartley between them held the house’s whole memory.
“And I,” Hannah said, retrieving her spoon, “shall continue to go about in society being extremely pleasant to everyone, and hearing far more than anyone supposes I do. It is the great advantage of being a married woman of no possible interest to anybody.”
“Tomorrow, then.” Lord Carrington said it to Viola, and though the word was nothing, a plain appointment, papers on a table, it warmed her out of all proportion to its size.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed, and returned to her ice before it was quite lost, and found the afternoon had turned somehow into one she would keep.