Chapter 5
“You are never at home, Magnus. I called on you twice this week, and both times your man stood in the doorway swearing you’d only just stepped out. A house that grand, and you treat it like a coaching inn.”
“It doesnae feel like a house.” Magnus turned his glass on the table between them, watching the candlelight swim in the whisky.
Around them White’s murmured on, low and moneyed, a hundred Englishmen at their leisure.
“Every stick of furniture in it was chosen by an Englishman for an Englishman. The portraits on the wall are strangers. I walk the halls at night, and it’s like wearin’ another man’s coat.
Too tight around the shoulders and smellin’ of him besides. ”
“And White’s does feel like home.” Leo gestured at the paneled room, the liveried servants, the oil paintings of horses no one living had ever ridden. “The most English room in the most English city in the world. You come here every evening. I’m beginning to think you enjoy your own suffering.”
“I come here because ye’re here, and because the men I need are here.
” Magnus set the glass down. He had not touched it.
“That’s why I crossed the border, Leo. Nae the shootin’, nae the Season, nae the pleasure of bein’ asked whether we keep our cattle indoors.
I came for the men who move things in this town.
The ones who sat on their hands while me faither was taken and never once asked why. ”
Leo’s easy manner cooled a degree, the way it always did when the conversation turned to this.
He leaned in. “Then you need to be strategic, not just present. Sitting in the corner glaring at earls will get you nowhere.” He lowered his voice.
“You want to know who moved against your father. That knowledge lives in a very small number of rooms, and the men who hold the keys to those rooms are two or three at most. The Earl of Danvers, for one. He has sat on every committee worth the name for twenty years and forgets nothing. Viscount Sedgwick, for another. Nothing passes through the Lords that Sedgwick has not read, weighed, and filed away for the day it becomes useful.”
“Then I’ll speak to them.”
“You will not simply speak to them.” Leo shook his head.
“You will earn the right to be spoken to. These are not men who answer the questions of strangers. They answer men they have decided are worth the trouble. You must be charming, McCormack. God help us all.” He drained his own glass and stood up.
“Come. There is a cluster of the right sort by the fire, and no better time than now for a rehearsal. Say little. Smile more than is natural to you. And whatever you do, let the barbs land where they will and do not answer them.”
Magnus rose. “I can hold me tongue.”
“I have known you for three years,” Leo scoffed. “You cannot.”
The knot of men by the fire opened to admit them with the practiced ease of people who had never once in their lives wondered whether they belonged in a room.
Leo made the introductions, smooth as poured cream, and Magnus inclined his head at each name and said the small nothings the moment required, and for a quarter of an hour the thing very nearly worked.
Then a portly viscount swirled his port and smiled.
“Your Grace, we have heard so much. Tell me, is it true that your countrymen still settle their differences with claymores in the heather? One does admire the simplicity of it. So very direct. So unburdened by the law.”
“We’ve laws enough.” Magnus kept his voice level. “We just apply them to lairds as readily as crofters. It confuses the English something fierce.”
An uneasy ripple of laughter ensued.
Leo’s shoulder pressed lightly against his, a warning.
“Come now,” said another, a lean man with a hunting-dog face.
“You cannot deny the reputation. Savagery is rather in the blood up there, is it not? A generation of civilizing, and still the mountain shows through.” He said it pleasantly to the circle, as though Magnus were a specimen pinned to a card and not a man standing before him.
“No offense meant, of course, Your Grace.”
Magnus breathed deeply. He thought of Danvers. He thought of Sedgwick and the small rooms and the keys, and he let it slide. It cost him more than any of them would ever know.
It was the young one who undid him. Lord Mowbray. A dandy of perhaps five-and-twenty, all high collar and languid boredom, who had been watching Magnus the way one watched a bull brought into a ring. He waited for a lull and then dropped his line into it with a lazy smile.
“Speaking of blood, Your Grace. Wasn’t your father the McCormack who gamed away half his estate before he died?
I’m sure I heard it from someone. Cards and worse, they say, right down to the family silver.
Sad business. Though I suppose that explains a good deal about the son coming south to hunt an heiress. ”
The room grew distant.
Magnus was not aware of moving. He knew only that between one breath and the next, the space between himself and Mowbray had closed, that his hand had found a fistful of the man’s fine lapel, and that Mowbray’s languid smile had curdled into something white and frightened as Magnus lifted him off his heels.
“Say his name again.” His voice had dropped to something quiet and terrible, the burr thick in it. “Go on, laddie. Say one more word about a man ye’re nae fit to have shined the boots of, and I’ll break every bone ye use to say it with. I’ll nae ask twice.”
“Magnus.” Leo’s hands were on his arm, his shoulder, gripping hard. “Magnus, let him go. Look at me. This is finished; let the man go.”
For a long moment, Magnus did not move. Then he opened his hand and let Mowbray drop back onto his heels. The young lord stumbled into the man behind him, one hand at his throat, though nothing had touched it.
The circle had fallen silent. Every face in it wore the same expression, that mixture of horror and delight the English kept for a scandal that had befallen somebody else.
“Gentlemen,” Leo’s voice was smooth again, though his grip on Magnus had not loosened. “Forgive us. My friend has had a long day and a longer journey. Do excuse us both.”
He steered Magnus out of the circle and away, through the murmuring room, before Magnus could add so much as a syllable to what he had already done.
He did not let go until he had gotten them into one of the small private rooms at the back and shut the door on the rest of the club.
“Well.” Magnus dragged both hands down his face, his heart still thundering like a hammer.
“Those are the men, then. Those are the great and the good who’ll help me clear me faither’s name.
A pack of scented cowards who trade a dead man’s honor for a laugh over their port.
” He turned and struck the paneled wall with the flat of his hand hard enough to rattle a sconce.
“Half his estate at cards. Me faither never wagered a shillin’ in his life.
He was too busy keepin’ the estate whole for the men who took it from him. ”
“I know that.” Leo stood with his back to the door, watchful. “You know that. It does not matter what is true. It matters what the room believes, and the room does not care.”
“Then the room can rot.”
“The room holds everything you came here to find.” Leo said it flatly, without heat.
“Danvers was standing eight feet away when you lifted Mowbray off the floor. Danvers, the one man in England most likely to know how your father died, and you have just shown him precisely how a McCormack behaves when he is displeased.”
He pushed off the door. “You cannot bludgeon your way to the truth, Magnus. These men will never be scared into helping you. They must be flattered into it, and courted, and made to feel clever, generous, and safe. It is loathsome. It is also the only door there is. There is no other way in.”
Magnus stood with his hand flat against the wall and his head down, breathing hard. He said nothing, because for once in his life there was nothing to say that Leo had not already said better.
The Elsmere musicale was a smaller, softer torment. A pianoforte, a harp, a soprano of more enthusiasm than accuracy, and forty gilt chairs arranged in a warm room where the audience had come to be seen listening rather than to listen.
Magnus stood at the back with Leo, a wall of ferns at his shoulder, and endured.
He had sunk into the flat business of counting minutes when the crowd shifted and he saw her.
Three rows from the front, by the aisle, sat his little fox.
He would have recognized her figure anywhere, though tonight there was no mask, no hedge, no darkness to soften anything.
She sat straight-backed and too still, her hands folded too neatly in her lap as though braced for a blow, beside a younger girl who shared enough of her face to be a sister.
On her other side, two ladies in silk had their heads bent together behind a spread fan, their eyes cutting sideways to her, their shoulders shaking with the mean, private laughter of the cruel.
His fox did not turn her head. She had the stillness of someone who had heard and had decided that not hearing was the only dignity left to her.
Something in Magnus’s chest pulled tight and hot on her behalf.
He did not look away. He watched her through the entirety of a dreadful aria, willing her to feel it, and near the end she did. Her gaze lifted from the middle distance, crossed the room, found him standing against the ferns, and held.
For a moment, she did not look away. Neither did he.
The soprano climbed and strained, the fans fluttered, and across the crowded room, two masked strangers from a year ago looked at each other without a scrap of mask between them.
Magnus let her see that he saw all of it, the cruelty in the next chair and the straight brave spine she met it with.
Then color climbed her throat and cheeks, and she dropped her eyes to her folded hands and would not raise them again.
Magnus felt his mouth curve for the first time all evening.
The last note died down. The room broke into the polite applause of people relieved it was over, chairs scraped back, and the crowd rose and began its slow reshuffle toward the refreshment tables.
“You,” Leo said at his elbow, “have been staring at the same three rows for half an hour, and I would stake my horses it is not the harpist who has caught your eye.” He followed Magnus’s gaze with open interest. “The dark-haired one by the aisle. Who is she? Do you know her?”
“Nay.” The word came out too quickly. “I daenae ken her at all.”
“You are a dreadful liar, McCormack. It is one of your few endearing traits.”
“Leave it.” Magnus turned deliberately away from the three rows and the bent dark head and everything the sight of it stirred within him that had no place in a night meant for other work.
He had come south for one purpose, and it was not a woman he could not have, seated among people who would sooner see them both ruined than well matched.
“Ye said charm was the only way in. So, take me to a knot of men worth charmin’, and let the two of us be loathsome together. I’ve a faither to think of, and the night’s already half wasted.”
Leo looked at him a moment longer, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth that Magnus did not care for in the least.
“As you say,” he murmured, and led the way into the crowd. “As you say.”
Magnus glanced back. Once. He could not help it.
And found the aisle seat empty and his little fox gone.