Chapter Fourteen
“I need you to give her more hours.”
Teddy looked up from the invoice before him, which he had been studying with the concentration of a man who found ledgers genuinely agreeable, and saw his brother standing in the doorway with the expression Teddy had privately named his campaign face.
It was the look Cillian wore when he had identified a difficulty, formed a plan, and begun executing it with the steady efficiency of an officer who had once moved men through hostile country and found civilian logistics insufficiently demanding.
“More hours,” Teddy repeated. “At the shop?”
“She has lost the place at the milliner’s. Prescott called upon Mrs Holt and made it understood that employing Molly would attract unwelcome notice. Mrs Holt could not risk it.”
“That wretch.” Teddy set down the invoice. “I liked Mrs Holt.”
“Mrs Holt protected her livelihood. Any sensible person in her position would have done the same. The fault lies with Prescott, and with the man who sent him.”
Cillian came into the office and took the chair opposite Teddy’s desk. He sat with the coiled stillness of a man not resting, but contained.
“Molly has three shillings a week from you. Without Mrs Holt’s wages, that is no longer enough. She has some savings, but very little, and what she earns here is now her only proper income.”
“You are already paying her board.”
“I settled what was immediately owed.”
“And more than that, I assume.”
Cillian’s silence answered.
Teddy sat back. “Does Molly know?”
“She knows I paid Mrs Bramble enough to prevent any immediate difficulty. She does not know I have made further provision.”
“Of course she does not.”
“She would object.”
“She has accepted help before,” Teddy said, not accusingly.
“Yes. When she first came to Bath, she had nothing. Kindness then was the difference between safety and the street.” Cillian’s voice remained even, but there was a tension beneath it.
“But she has spent these weeks building something of her own. Work. Usefulness. A little pride. If she discovers that she is being quietly maintained, it will feel as though all of it has been taken from her.”
Teddy’s expression shifted.
“So the extra hours are not only money.”
“No,” Cillian said. “They are proof that she is still standing on her own feet.”
For a moment, Teddy merely looked at him. He had been looking at his brother in that manner for some weeks now: cautiously, almost incredulously, like a man watching a dead branch put out a green shoot and hardly daring to trust the evidence of his own eyes.
“You have thought about this.”
“I am solving a practical problem.”
“You are protecting her. And doing it with more care than I ever expected from a man who has spent two years treating breakfast as a military exercise.”
“Can you give her more hours or not?”
“I can give her mornings as well as afternoons.” Teddy reached for the invoice, then abandoned it again.
“I shall tell her I need help setting the stockroom in order and opening more of the business to ordinary customers. It is even true, in part. I have long meant to make better use of the front room, and Molly could persuade a bishop to buy altar wine at double price.”
“How much?”
“Six shillings a week. More, perhaps, if customers continue to be charmed into generosity.”
“That would help.”
“It would,” Teddy agreed. “It would give her money, and purpose with it. More importantly, it would let her accept both without feeling she had been reduced to charity, which is the part you appear to care about most.”
Cillian rose and adjusted his coat with the unconscious tug of a soldier who had never quite abandoned the habit.
“I care about the accounts.”
“You care about her.”
The words settled in the office among wine invoices, sample bottles, and stacked crates of Bordeaux.
Cillian neither confirmed nor denied them. He merely stood there and let the statement remain.
For a man who had spent two years insisting he cared for very little, it was almost an admission.
“There is something else,” Cillian said. “I have written to Alderton in London. An army acquaintance who undertakes discreet enquiries.”
“You are having Vyne investigated?”
“I expect an answer within the week.”
“And if Alderton finds what you fear he will find?”
“Then I shall know precisely what kind of man I am opposing.”
He left Teddy’s office and walked to the post office on Broad Street, where two letters awaited him.
The first was from Mr Crawley, his solicitor in London, who wrote with the careful precision of a man accustomed to distinguishing what the law allowed from what life made possible.
The letter confirmed what Cillian had suspected.
A father could not, under English law, compel an adult daughter to marry against her will.
He could not force her hand at the altar, nor make consent where none was given.
He could, however, withdraw support, deny letters of introduction, and make her position in society nearly untenable.
In principle, Mr Crawley wrote, Miss Granger was at liberty to refuse the marriage.
In practice, that liberty might prove a meagre protection to a young woman without income, protection, or family support.
Free in law. Trapped in life.
Cillian read the sentence twice and thought of the different prisons he had known.
The obvious kind: walls, cells, camps, locked doors.
And the quieter kind, built from debt, dependence, reputation, and the careful removal of every alternative until a person remained free to leave and yet had nowhere to go.
Such prisons did not call themselves prisons. They called themselves arrangements. Prudence. Duty. A father’s care. A family’s necessity.
He folded Crawley’s letter, placed it inside his coat, and opened the second.
The second letter changed everything.
Captain Alderton was thorough, as men who had once served with Cillian Swifton tended to be when Cillian Swifton asked a thing of them.
The report ran to several pages. Vyne’s fortune was considerable, his politics unremarkable, his public reputation excellent.
His private history was another matter.
Lady Catherine Vyne, née Ellsworth, had married him at twenty. By all accounts, she had been lively, spirited, and much admired—the very qualities, Alderton noted, that had first drawn Vyne’s attention at a London ball.
Four years later, she was dead.
The official account gave the cause as a fall from her horse during a morning ride. The horse had returned to the stable without its rider. Lady Catherine had been found upon the path with a broken neck.
That was the account entered in the parish register, repeated in the newspapers, and offered by Lord Vyne to any acquaintance who enquired, with every proper appearance of grief.
The unofficial account was less convenient.
Alderton had found a former housekeeper, Mrs Cogburn, now retired and living in Bristol. She had served at Vyne Hall for four years and left shortly after Lady Catherine’s death. She had been reluctant to speak, but had at last given a statement, which Alderton had enclosed.
Mrs Cogburn’s account was brief, careful, and damning.
There had been bruises on Lady Catherine’s arms and throat, appearing often enough that the servants had ceased to believe in the explanations given for them. Riding mishaps. Clumsiness. A stumble upon the stairs. A door carelessly opened. The excuses changed; the marks did not.
There had been a night, some six months before Lady Catherine’s death, when Mrs Cogburn had heard screaming from the master’s apartments. She had gone as far as the passage before the valet intercepted her and informed her, with great composure, that her ladyship was troubled by dreams.
And on the morning Lady Catherine’s body was found, the stable-master had said very quietly to an under-groom that her ladyship’s horse had been calm since sunrise and bore no sign of having bolted, stumbled, or thrown its rider.
Alderton had also located two former maids.
Both had left Vyne Hall within a year of Lady Catherine’s death.
Both had received departure payments of fifty pounds.
Neither was willing to give a formal statement, though each had confirmed, through intermediaries, that they had signed an undertaking never to discuss their employment in Lord Vyne’s household.
Fifty pounds, Alderton observed, was an extraordinary sum for a departing servant, and the only sort of service it tended to compensate was silence.
His conclusion was measured. Nothing, as yet, would satisfy a court. The evidence was too old, too carefully buried, too dependent upon frightened servants, half-heard quarrels, and recollections of events now years past. But taken together, it formed a picture no sensible man could mistake.
Lord Vyne had married a spirited young woman. Four years later, she was dead. In the years between, there had been bruises, screams, servants dismissed, money paid, and a convenient story about a horse.
Cillian read the report twice and Mrs Cogburn’s statement three times.
He sat in his room at the White Hart with the pages spread across the desk and the afternoon light falling over Alderton’s careful hand, and he thought of Molly.
Spirited, impossibly alive Molly. Molly, who talked too much and laughed too freely and befriended every living creature that crossed her path.
Molly, who had transformed a milliner’s window with the instinct of an artist, sold wine with the ease of a born storyteller, and taught a hollow soldier to dance in a dusty room above a shop.
Molly, who was afraid—genuinely and correctly afraid of the man her father had promised her to.
He could not bring her back.
The thought did not come as a decision. It had passed beyond decision now. It had become certainty, bedrock and immovable, built over these past weeks by accumulation rather than argument
He would not bring her back.
He picked up his pen and wrote to Sir Gerald Granger with the directness he had once reserved for field reports. The time for delicacy had passed.