Chapter Eleven
“I require information about a man, and I require it from someone who knows how to uncover the sort of information men take pains to conceal.”
Cillian had not said so. The letter was three paragraphs long, precise and economical, the sort of tactical memorandum he had once written before an engagement.
Subject: Lord Barry Vyne, Baron Vyne.
Age: Sixty-one.
Residence: Vyne Hall, Hampshire.
Known Associations: Financial circles in London, political acquaintances in the Lords, a deceased first wife.
Cillian wished to know how the first wife had died, what the servants said when they believed themselves unobserved, and whether the money Vyne spent so freely had ever been employed to purchase silence.
The letter went out on Wednesday morning, two days after the Assembly Rooms ball.
Cillian walked to the post office on Broad Street with the same deliberate purpose he had brought to his last letter to Gerald Granger.
He was building a campaign now, not against a visible enemy on a battlefield, but against a shadow: a reputation, a title, a man he had never met, whose presence he could nevertheless feel in the way Molly’s brightness faltered whenever Somerset was named, and in the change that had come over her at the ball, when joy had sharpened, suddenly and unmistakably, into defiance.
Something had happened that night. Her smile had not altered and her steps had not faltered, but for one or two breaths between turns the warmth behind her eyes had gone cold.
He had not pressed her. Whatever she had seen, she had not been ready to give it words.
Instead, he did what soldiers did when a direct advance was impossible. He gathered intelligence. He built a picture. He waited with the wary patience of a man who had spent years in hostile country and learned that danger often declared itself only when one had ceased looking for it.
The other thing he did, though he refused to name it, was think of her.
Of the way she had stood at the milliner’s window. Of the warmth of her fingers through the wool of his coat sleeve. Of the line of her throat when she had said, When you are ready, you may ask me.
None of it was useful intelligence.
All of it returned uninvited.
The answer from London would take several days.
In the meantime, he had written again to his solicitor, requesting a fuller opinion on Molly’s legal position, and had begun, quietly, to make enquiries into the extent of Gerald’s debts.
If he meant to fight this battle, he needed to understand the ground.
He was walking back from the post office, turning into Milsom Street, when he saw Molly through the milliner’s window, and the sight stopped him where he stood.
She was not at her ribbons or her hat forms. She stood very still behind the counter, both hands laid flat before her. Across from her, on the customer’s side, stood a man in a slate-grey coat.
The man was speaking.
Cillian did not know him. He could not hear a word through the glass, and from where he stood there was nothing openly threatening in the man’s posture.
Yet Molly’s face was enough. All the brightness had gone out of it.
She was composed, certainly—too composed—and there was a stillness in her that Cillian had seen before in soldiers under fire: the body holding its ground while every instinct urged retreat.
Every instinct he possessed told him to cross the street and put himself between them.
He did not cross at once. Instead, he positioned himself beneath the edge of the bookseller’s awning, where the angle gave him a clear view through the milliner’s glass, and watched.
***
Inside the shop, Molly was learning that the man had a name.
“Mr Hugh Prescott,” he had said, introducing himself with the smooth courtesy of a man who used politeness as an instrument.
He was middling in every visible respect—height, build, colouring—the sort of man who moved through rooms without leaving an impression.
Forgettable in the way a knife in a drawer is forgettable.
One did not think of it until it was in someone’s hand.
“I represent Lord Vyne.”
The name dropped into the quiet shop like a stone into a well, and Molly heard it strike the bottom.
“Miss Granger,” Prescott continued, “Lord Vyne has asked me to convey his deep concern for your welfare.”
“My welfare is not Lord Vyne’s concern.”
“Your father appears to think otherwise.”
“My father and I differ upon a number of subjects. That is between my father and me.”
Prescott smiled. The expression occupied his mouth without reaching any other part of his face: a technical imitation of amiability, performing the office of a smile without any of its warmth.
Molly thought of Vyne’s smile, which had operated upon much the same principle, and the memory sent ice down her arms and into the fingertips pressed against the counter.
“Miss Granger, I understand that the approach of marriage may disturb a young lady’s composure. Lord Vyne is a patient man. He bears you no ill will for your”—he paused delicately—“departure. He is prepared to forgive the embarrassment and proceed with the arrangement as originally agreed.”
“There is no arrangement. I agreed to nothing.”
“Your father agreed.”
“My father does not own me.”
“Your father is in considerable debt, Miss Granger.” Prescott’s voice did not change.
It maintained the same pleasant, level register, the voice of a man delivering information rather than threats.
The distinction, Molly understood, was entirely academic when the information itself was the weapon.
“Debts Lord Vyne has generously offered to resolve. Debts which grow more pressing by the day. The tenants, you understand. The estate. Your mother’s grave is on that land. ”
Her mother’s grave.
He had said it deliberately, precisely, as a surgeon places a blade where the nerve lies nearest the surface.
The pain of it was instant and exact, because her mother’s grave was the one thing in Somerset she missed without bitterness: the one piece of the life she had left behind that she thought of in the dark, when courage ran thin and the borrowed room felt small.
“I should be sorry,” Prescott said, “to see Sir Gerald’s estate brought so near ruin through a young lady’s…”
He paused, and the pause was itself a weapon, a small, measured silence designed to let the sentence complete itself in Molly’s imagination before he supplied the word.
“Nerves.”
Nerves.
As though she had fled her wedding because she was anxious rather than afraid.
As though the cold, patient assessment she had seen in Lord Vyne’s eyes was something she had invented.
As though the whispered stories about Lady Catherine—the bruises, the cries dismissed as wind—were the fancies of a girl too dramatic to distinguish danger from discomfort.
Molly kept her hands flat upon the counter. She kept her spine straight. She kept her face arranged in an expression of composure that cost her more than anything she had done in Bath.
“Lord Vyne may convey his concern directly to my father,” she said. “I have nothing to say to his representatives.”
“Lord Vyne would prefer to convey his concern to you personally. He intends to visit Bath. Quite soon, I understand.”
The words struck with the force of a thing already set in motion.
“That is his prerogative,” Molly said.
Her voice was steady. Her face was composed. She was proud of both, because both were false, and the falsehood was the only thing keeping her upright.
Prescott regarded her for a moment. His assessment was thorough and clinical, the gaze of a man noting particulars for a report.
Molly felt it move over her face, her hands, her posture, with the same flat attention she had felt from Vyne in her father’s drawing room, and understood, with a coldness that seemed to pass through her whole body, that Prescott was not separate from Vyne.
He was his eyes, his patience, his long-reaching arm.
He was standing in her shop, in the life she had been trying to make for herself, and the intrusion felt both threat and trespass at once.
“Good day, Miss Granger. I trust we shall speak again.”
He left. The bell above the door chimed: a small, clean sound that had never seemed sinister before.
Molly remained behind the counter, her hands still flat upon the wood, her spine still straight, her face still composed.
Then her hands began to shake.
They shook as hands shake when the body has held itself rigid for too long and the rigidity breaks all at once.
She pressed them harder against the counter, but the trembling did not stop.
She drew them back and clasped them together, but still they shook.
At last, she pressed them against her stomach, bent a little forward, and breathed.
Only breathed.
The air tasted of lavender, sizing starch, and the faint, sharp trace of Prescott’s cologne, which she had not noticed while he stood there and which now seemed to linger everywhere, filling the shop like smoke.
Mrs Holt emerged from the back room. “Who was that gentleman, dear?”
“Nobody,” Molly said. “A customer who did not find what he wanted.”
She excused herself and went to the little room where the supplies were kept. Among ribbon spools, hat forms, tissue paper, and boxes of trimmings, she pressed her shaking hands to her face and breathed until the first violence of the fear had passed.
She did not cry.
Crying was a luxury she could not afford, and the fear Prescott had planted in her chest—cold, exact, deliberate—required action, not tears.
When she returned to the front of the shop, Cillian was there.
He stood just inside the door, hat in hand, his expression perfectly composed and entirely wrong. Mrs Holt was speaking to him in the careful voice people used when they sensed disturbance but did not yet know its shape.
Molly stopped.
For one brief, mortifying instant, the composure she had worked so hard to recover nearly deserted her.