Chapter 22
“Ye’ve let it go stone cold again, and that’s the third cup.
Cook’s threatenin’ to poison the fourth, and I’ll nae lift a finger to stop her.
” Ross set the fresh coffee down with the faint, weary disgust of a Highlander who had crossed the border under protest and never forgiven it.
“Ye asked for kippers. Ye’ve glowered at the kippers.
The kippers have given up hope, Yer Grace, and so have I. ”
Magnus looked down at the plate as though it had arrived there by witchcraft. “I was thinkin’.”
“Aye. Ye’ve been thinkin’ since Tuesday.
It’s a terrible habit, and it’s ruinin’ good fish.
” Ross gathered the cold cup and squinted at him.
“Ye were never this keen to think when there was work in front of ye. Ye’d think in the saddle, ye’d think over a blade.
Now ye think at the breakfast table like some poet with a chill. What’s her name?”
“There’s no her.”
“There’s always a her when a grown man forgets how to eat,” Ross said it to the ceiling, as though appealing to a higher authority who had failed them both, and then stumped out toward the kitchen with the air of a martyr bearing the whole house on his back.
He was not wrong, and that was the worst of it.
Eleven days. Eleven days since the kiss in the library, since the dark, the door, the sound Rosaline had made against his mouth, and in every one of them, she had not once appeared.
Magnus had gone to the Ashfords’ and endured three hours of a dinner he despised for the single purpose of seeing her, and she had not come.
Ill, they had said. A headache. A fever.
He had heard it repeated with the small, satisfied cluck the ton kept for a wallflower who had finally had the decency to wilt, and it had taken the whole of his self-command not to overturn the table.
Rosaline was not ill. He knew it the way he knew weather. She was hiding, and he understood exactly from what, because he was hiding from the same thing and doing it a great deal worse.
A soft knock, and the door opened on the smaller of the two footmen, a reedy boy with ears like jug handles who still went white every time he had to address a duke.
“Begging your pardon, Your Grace. The, ah… the second post.” He held out the salver at the full stretch of his arm, as though Magnus might bite the near end off it.
“Peter.” Magnus took the letters and looked at him. “How’s yer maither farin’? The cough.”
The boy blinked, thrown clean off whatever script he had rehearsed on the way up the stairs. “She’s… better, Your Grace. The doctor came. On account of the wages, Your Grace, so… um… thank you.”
“Good. Ye tell her a Scot sends his regards and orders her to mend, and that I’ll have words with her if she doesnae.” Magnus softened it with a look. “And ye can stop holdin’ that tray like it’s a live adder, laddie. I havenae bitten one this month. Ask Ross.”
Peter’s grin escaped before he could stop it, then he bobbed his head and fled.
Magnus turned to the letters, for the length of a breath feeling that he was good for something.
The feeling did not survive the correspondence.
He had a list. Leo had written it out for him in that maddening elegant hand, a dozen names ranked by influence, and beside each the soft place a clever man might press: this one’s canal shares, that one’s horses, the other’s ambitions for a son with no chin and fewer prospects.
Magnus was meant to spend the morning writing letters, seeking introductions, laying the groundwork for an alliance that was the whole reason he had come south and put on this borrowed English skin.
It was the work. It was the only work that mattered.
He got as far as writing My Lord on three separate sheets, and on all three found himself sitting with the pen gone dry in his hand, seeing instead a woman turning at a library door with her color high and her chin up, telling him she ought to want other men.
He put the pen down. He was, he decided, a disgrace to the memory of every serious ambition he had ever held.
“Your Grace.”
Halliday had appeared in the doorway with the noiseless gravity of a very good butler.
He had served the house under two dukes before Magnus and plainly meant to outlast a third.
His face gave away nothing, but there was a particular stillness to him this morning that put Magnus on his feet before another word could be spoken.
“There is a caller. I have shown him to the blue drawing room.” Halliday paused the exact correct length. “The Earl of Oldbrook, Your Grace.”
Everything in Magnus went quiet, cold, wide awake.
Oldbrook. Here. In his house, unannounced and uninvited, on an ordinary Thursday.
A man of Oldbrook’s standing did not call on a Scottish duke so soon unless he wanted something, or feared something, or both.
“Did he state his business?”
“He did not, Your Grace. He admired the hall.” A flicker, gone at once. “He admired it a great deal.”
“Aye, I’ll wager he did.” Magnus shrugged on his coat and made himself breathe slowly, the way he had taught a frightened woman to breathe against a library door. “Bring tea. The good service. And Halliday?”
The butler paused.
“Daenae leave us longer than ye must.”
“Alright, Your Grace.”
Oldbrook stood at the window of the blue drawing room with his hands folded behind him, silver-haired and unhurried, examining the garden with the mild proprietary interest of a landlord walking a property he meant to buy.
He turned as Magnus entered, and his face arranged itself into a warmth so complete, so entirely without seam, that a lesser man would have believed it on sight.
“Your Grace. Forgive the intrusion.” His bow was precise to the half-degree. “I find I have grown too old for feigning acquaintance across a crowded ballroom, when a plain morning call will serve so much better. I hope you will not think me presumptuous.”
“Nae at all, Me Lord. Ye’re welcome to it.” Magnus indicated a chair and took the one opposite.
He rested his hands on his knees and did everything Rosaline had drilled into him. He kept his voice easy. He did not fill the silence. He let the older man come to him.
“I’ll be candid, Your Grace, for I think you are a man who prefers it.
” Oldbrook sat down. “London has not been kind to you. Oh, it smiles, it accepts your invitations, but it has decided what you are before you have spoken. And it is a stubborn, incurious town. I have watched it done to better men than either of us.” He let that sink in.
“I came to say that I find the general verdict lazy. A man who crossed a kingdom to take up a duty he never sought interests me a great deal more than the hundredth heir who was handed everything and has done nothing with it since.”
It was very good. It was precisely the thing Magnus most wished to hear that wanting it was in itself a warning, and he marked the warning even as the warmth of the flattery slid under his guard.
“That’s kind, Me Lord.”
“It is not kind, it is merely observant, which is rarer and more useful.” Oldbrook smiled.
“I chair a small foundation, Your Grace. Nothing glittering. Pensions for the widows and orphans of soldiers, a hospital or two—the dull unfashionable machinery of decency. But the men who sit on the board are the men who decide a great many things in this country over very good port, and they judge a newcomer not by his accent but by whether he will do the tedious work. I would like to put your name forward.” He spread one elegant hand.
“It would open certain doors that have thus far been closed to you. I think you know the ones I mean.”
He did. That was the devilry of it. It was the exact door Magnus had been banging his head against for a year, held open now by a genial old man asking nothing in return but Magnus’s name on a list of the charitable.
Every instinct Magnus had was screaming at him without once telling him why.
“Ye’re generous,” he said slowly. “I confess I wonder at it. Ye scarcely ken me, Me Lord.”
“No. But I knew your name before you brought it south.” Oldbrook’s pale eyes rested on him, calm as still water.
“McCormack. There was a Laird McCormack, years ago, in the north. A principled man, by every account that reached me. Rather too principled for the times he lived in, if the sad old story is to be believed.” He tilted his head, all gentle sympathy. “Your father, I believe?”
The room went very still, and somewhere far beneath the stillness, Magnus felt something enormous shift and turn within him.
“Aye,” he said. His voice did not change, but it nearly cost him everything he had. “Me faither.”
“A great pity what became of him. These things were handled clumsily in those days. Men of quality destroyed on a whisper, and no one the wiser for the truth of it.” Oldbrook shook his silver head with a sorrow so smooth, it might have been genuine.
“I hope, in coming to us, you seek to build something rather than to reopen old graves. The past is a poor country, Your Grace. Nothing grows there. The living do far better to look to the living.” He said it like a benediction.
And he watched Magnus’s face the whole while with the patient attention of a physician reading a pulse.
Magnus, who had learned at a woman’s hands how to hold a pleasant nothing on his face while a storm raged on behind it, held it now and thought with a clarity that startled him how badly he wanted Rosaline in the chair beside him.
Not for comfort, but for her eyes.
She read a room the way he read a hillside, saw the false note under the fair word. She would have known in an instant the thing his gut was telling him.
“That’s wise counsel, Me Lord,” he allowed. “I’ll think on the foundation. Ye’ll forgive me if I daenae give me word before I’ve read what I’d be puttin’ me name to. Me faither taught me that much.”
Something moved behind Oldbrook’s eyes, there and gone, quick as a fish beneath ice.
“Of course.” He rose unhurriedly, gracious to the last. “A careful man. Your father would be glad of it, I think.” He tugged on his gloves. “Take your time. I am a patient man. I have always found that patience settles most things, in the end.”
He bowed and admired the room once more on his way to the door, and then was gone.
Magnus stood for a long while in the empty drawing room, the good tea arriving cold and untouched, and stared at the card Oldbrook had left on the salver, thick and cream and blameless.
He had come to London to find the men who had murdered his father. And one of them, he was suddenly and coldly certain, had just sat in his blue drawing room, drunk his sympathy, and offered him a chair at the table.
He needed Rosaline. Eleven days, and he could not do this without her. He was through pretending otherwise.