Chapter Two
“You are up before the sun again, my lord.”
“The sun is late, Jennings. I am precisely on time.” The man shot his trusted friend and employee a stern glare.
“As you say, my lord.” Jennings set the polished boots beside the bed and studied his employer carefully, and without appearing to do so, with the practised sidelong attention a valet learns through years of close service.
The Earl of Harrowden was already dressed, or nearly so: shirt tucked, waistcoat buttoned, cravat tied plainly, like a man who regarded neckcloths as logistics rather than art.
He stood at the window of his bedchamber, looking out across the grounds in the grey half-light before dawn.
The carpet beneath his boots had begun to flatten, and Jennings knew he had been standing there for some time.
Five o’clock, then.
An army habit, like lacing his left boot first and checking the locks on every door before retiring, and sleeping—when he slept at all—on the side of the bed nearest the door, with a knife in the drawer beside him.
Jennings had served with Captain Cillian Swifton in the Peninsula for three years before a French musket ball put a permanent hitch in his left shoulder and sent him home as the most overqualified valet in Somerset.
He knew the sounds the Earl made in his sleep, which were bad, and the silence he kept during the day, which was worse.
“Will you take breakfast, my lord?”
“In the study.”
“Alone?”
Cillian turned from the window. He had a face that gave very little away: dark brows, a jaw made for clenching, and a mouth that had once, in another life, been described as prone to laughter.
Jennings remembered Captain Swifton at four-and-twenty, cracking jokes in camp, wrestling with the younger officers, writing letters home that were three pages of wit and one line of weather.
That man had come back from the Peninsula with the same face and none of the contents.
“Is there someone else here, Jennings?”
“There could be, my lord. Your brother has written from Bath, and the vicar has extended yet another invitation to dine.”
“Then no.”
Jennings collected the previous night’s untouched brandy glass and withdrew.
Cillian walked the grounds in the dark, as he did every morning.
He had mapped Harrowden Park with the precision he had once applied to enemy terrain: every fence line, every gate, every ditch memorised until the estate was less a home than a tactical position.
The grass was wet beneath his boots. A thrush sang from the oak at the south boundary.
He walked the perimeter in silence, hands clasped behind his back, and felt precisely nothing.
This was the problem, and he was aware of it in the same distant way a man might be aware that a clock on the mantel had stopped.
The war had ended. He had come home. His elder brother, James, who should have been the earl, who had been brilliant and warm and everything Cillian was merely competent at, had died of a fever while Cillian was in Spain.
And so, the title had landed on Cillian’s shoulders like a coat made for someone else.
He wore it. He discharged its duties. He read the reports, signed the documents, approved the expenditures, and managed the tenants with brisk efficiency.
He had cared about things, once. That was the part he tried not to look at directly: the man who had argued politics over brandy, who had laughed at his own bad jokes, who had loved his brother with the easy warmth of a younger sibling who never imagined the older one might fail to outlive him.
That man had been buried somewhere in the long, blood-soaked months at Badajoz, where Cillian had watched men he loved die in ways that still woke him at three in the morning with the taste of smoke in his mouth.
He had come away certain that something fundamental inside him had been cauterised shut, and was unlikely ever to open again.
He completed his circuit of the grounds with the thrush still calling from its oak, returned to the house, and sat down in his study to the breakfast Jennings had laid out: toast, eggs, coffee, all of it precisely arranged, all of it consumed mechanically, with the same attention he might have given to loading a musket.
His estate manager, Dalton, arrived at eight with the morning’s reports. South field drainage: approved. East cottage roof: approved and budgeted. Boundary dispute with Henley Farm: resolved in favour of maintaining the existing fence line.
Dalton, who had managed Harrowden for James and found the transition to Cillian somewhat like exchanging a golden retriever for a particularly silent hawk, delivered his reports with admirable brevity and retreated.
There were papers to sign, and Cillian signed them, working through the morning’s correspondence with the same unhurried precision he gave to everything. Three letters, all of them models of clarity and economy, none of them containing a single word that could be mistaken for warmth.
He was, by any reasonable measure, an excellent earl. His tenants were well managed. His accounts were in order. His staff were paid on time and treated fairly. He ran Harrowden Park as he had run his company in the field: with competence, discipline, and the total absence of personal investment.
Jennings, passing the study with a tray he had invented as a pretext, observed the Earl sitting at his desk in a pool of morning light and thought, as he thought most mornings, He is disappearing.
Slowly, politely, without fuss. And if something does not change soon, there will be very little left of him beyond duty, paper, and signature.
The change arrived at half past ten, on horseback, in the form of Sir Gerald Granger, who looked as though he had been trampled by his own horse and then forced to ride it anyway.
“Swifton.”
Gerald was off his horse before the groom could reach him, striding towards the front door with his hat askew, his coat buttoned wrong, and an expression on his face that Cillian, watching from the study window, recognised with the flat precision of a soldier’s assessment.
Panic. Badly concealed. Roughly twelve hours old, judging by the shadows beneath his eyes and the state of his cravat, which appeared to have been tied in the dark by shaking hands.
Cillian rose, unhurried, and walked to the entrance hall.
Jennings had already admitted Gerald, who was pacing the black-and-white marble floor like a man in a cell, running one hand through hair that had clearly been subjected to the same treatment several times that morning.
“Gerald.”
“Swifton. Thank goodness.” Gerald stopped pacing and faced him, and Cillian saw the full scope of the damage: red-rimmed eyes, unshaven jaw, waistcoat buttoned one hole off its proper alignment.
This was a man who had slept either very little or very badly, and was holding himself together by that particular sort of pride which prevents gentlemen from weeping in other gentlemen’s entrance halls.
“Sit down. Jennings, coffee.”
Gerald did not sit. He stood in the middle of the hall and said, “My daughter has gone.”
“Gone where?”
“If I knew where, Swifton, I would be there, not standing in your hall looking like a man who has lost his wits.”
Cillian absorbed this, waiting for feeling, some echo of concern, as one presses a bruise to see if it hurts.
Nothing.
The information registered as data: Granger’s daughter missing; probable departure overnight; relevant context, the girl was engaged to Lord Vyne and the wedding was scheduled for today.
“When did you discover she was gone?”
“This morning. Six o’clock. Her maid went to wake her, and the room was empty. The window was open. She climbed out the window, Cillian, like a character in one of those dreadful novels young ladies are forever reading.”
Gerald pressed both hands against his face and dragged them down, a gesture of such comprehensive exhaustion that Cillian almost felt something.
Almost.
“Some of her things are missing. A travelling-bag. A gown or two—what else, I have no notion. The girl has never been farther than Taunton. She has no money, no useful connections outside Somerset, and Vyne is expected before noon.”
“Have you searched the immediate area?”
“The lanes, the village, the coaching inn at Bridgwater. The innkeeper remembers a girl boarding a westbound mail coach just after midnight. Alone. Talking a great deal, he said, which narrows the field of suspects considerably.”
Cillian filed the information away.
Westbound by mail coach after midnight. A head start of several hours, but not yet beyond remedy.
West from Bridgwater meant Bristol or Bath.
A girl alone with a travelling-bag at midnight would be conspicuous.
A girl who talked to everyone she met, as Cillian vaguely recalled Molly Granger doing, would be impossible to hide for long.
He had met her twice.
The first occasion had been a harvest supper at Gerald’s estate, roughly two years ago, just after Cillian had returned from the war and inherited the earldom, and was attending social functions in mechanical obedience to orders no one had actually given.
The girl had been nineteen, slight, copper-haired, and in possession of a voice that carried across rooms like cavalry charges across open fields.
She had talked to him for what had felt like the better part of a quarter-hour about the migratory habits of swallows.
The second time had been at a Michaelmas fair, on a bright, cold afternoon, during an argument over who had upset whose bowl of punch—an argument she had pursued with flushed indignation, convinced she was right and entirely unwilling to let him forget it.
He had found himself, for approximately three seconds, on the verge of smiling.
That was the sum of his knowledge of Molly Granger: an immature, chaotic girl who talked too much, and who was, apparently, resourceful enough to climb out of a window and vanish into the night when circumstances demanded it.