Chapter 13
He found the summons on his desk.
Not a note delivered by a footman, which would have been the conventional method.
A note delivered by Dorothea’s ancient gray cat, who had apparently been trained or perhaps simply self-motivated to sit on correspondence until its recipient appeared.
Oliver removed the cat from his papers with the weary efficiency of long practice, read the three lines his grandmother had written in her bold, slightly theatrical hand, and considered, for one brief moment, pretending he hadn’t received it.
He went upstairs.
Her rooms were exactly as they always were.
Something he’d not noticed in his tiredness last night.
A comfortable chaos that the housemaids had long since given up attempting to impose order on, a fire that burned hotter than was strictly necessary, and Dorothea herself enthroned in her chair beside it with the air of a woman who had been waiting for some time and found the wait entirely beneath her.
“You took long enough,” she said.
“I came immediately.” Oliver dropped a kiss on the top of her head and took the chair across from her, the one that still held the impression of recent occupation and smelled faintly of something that wasn’t his grandmother’s lavender.
He noted this without mentioning it. “Your note said urgent. What’s happened? ”
“Nothing has happened. Something is about to happen, which is considerably more interesting.” Dorothea folded her hands in her lap. “I am coming to London.”
Oliver looked at her.
“With you,” she added, helpfully. “When you go. Tomorrow, or the day after. Whenever you’ve finished organizing yourself, which in my experience takes men roughly twice as long as they estimate.”
“Grandmother.”
“I am perfectly serious.”
“You haven’t been to London in four years. You told your son—told my uncle—that you would not go again until Parliament stopped being full of men who had confused volume for argument.”
“I haven’t changed my position on Parliament.” Her dark eyes were bright and entirely composed. “I have changed my position on the current necessity of the journey. I am coming with you, Oliver, and Megan is coming with us.”
He was very still for a moment.
“No,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Grandmother, I have explained the situation to you. The road is a risk. London is a risk. Megan is safest here, where the guards are posted and Penharrow has no—”
“Penharrow has ears in this county,” Dorothea said, with a serenity that suggested she had anticipated every word of this and found it largely beside the point.
“He will know within forty-eight hours that you have gone to London and that she has remained if we keep the guards in place. A castle full of guards is a great deal of protection but it is not impenetrable, and I would like you to consider carefully, with that excellent mind of yours that you so rarely apply to the things that actually matter, what it would mean for that young woman to be left here without you while Penharrow calculates his options.”
Oliver said nothing. He was calculating his own options, which was taking somewhat longer than he would have liked because she was not entirely wrong, and they both knew it.
“Why do you need to come?” he asked. “If the argument is that Megan should come to London, then Megan can come to London. I can manage her safety.”
“Can you?” Dorothea tilted her head. “Think carefully, Oliver. You will move through the city, calling on men in offices, meeting with lawyers, conducting business that requires you to be seen and taken seriously and to maintain the full gravity of your title and your purpose. How does that become complicated if you also arrive in London with a young woman of unknown origin who is the principal witness in a case against a sitting earl?”
He opened his mouth.
She held up one finger.
“There are people in this city,” she continued, “who will see what they wish to see and draw the conclusions that suit them. You know this. A young woman traveling with a single gentleman, staying under his roof, the story writes itself, and once it is written it is very difficult to unwrite, particularly for the woman in question.” She settled back in her chair.
“If that same young woman travels to London in my company, as my personal maid, then the story is entirely different. An old woman transporting her household. No one looks at a maid. No one thinks twice about a maid, and while everyone in the county believes Megan to be quietly installed at Saxton Castle, because we will make quite certain that is what they believe, she will actually sit in my townhouse on Cavendish Square drinking tea and remaining very much out of Penharrow’s reach. ”
Oliver stared at her.
“The maid disguise,” he said.
“It is a practical solution.”
“She spent fourteen years being told what to do.”
“She spent fourteen years surviving, which required a great deal of cleverness. She wants to come with me. I suspect she will be considerably less bothered by a temporary change of wardrobe than you are.” Dorothea’s gaze was steady.
“You might consider asking her before deciding what she can and cannot bear.”
He pushed to his feet, moved to the window, looked out at the frost-pale grounds because he needed somewhere to put his eyes that wasn’t his grandmother’s infuriatingly knowing expression.
She was right about the disguise. He hated that she was right about the disguise.
He’d turned over the problem of London and Megan without arriving at a solution that didn’t leave a gap somewhere, and his grandmother had apparently done it during breakfast.
But having her with them would be a distraction all of its own. His honor was hanging by a thread. With each day he wanted her with a passion that saw him toss and turn at night. Having her nearby was torture.
“Why else?” he said, without turning around. “You haven’t told me everything. You never summon me for something you could manage through a footman, and you never lead with the practical argument unless there’s something underneath it that you’re not ready to say.”
The silence behind him was a fraction too long.
“Grandmother.”
“There is a reason,” Dorothea said carefully. “And I will tell you what it is when the time is right. Not yet.”
Oliver turned around.
She met his eyes with a composure that was almost architectural in its solidity.
The composure of a woman who had been keeping her own counsel for eighty-one years and saw no reason to stop now.
But underneath it, in the fine lines around her mouth and in the way her hands had stilled in her lap, was something else.
Something that looked almost like urgency.
He knew that look. He’d seen it perhaps three times in his life, and each time it had proven significant.
“This will slow everything down,” he said, not an argument now, just the facts as they stood. “The journey, the schedule. You can’t travel more than five or six hours at a time, and the roads are rough. We’d need two nights on the road, minimum. Possibly three.”
“Two,” Dorothea said. “I am elderly, not infirm. There’s a difference, and I dislike it when people conflate the two.”
“Two nights,” he repeated. “That adds a day to a timeline that is already—”
“Oliver.” Her voice was quiet. Not soft. His grandmother’s voice was rarely soft, but something in it made him stop. “I would not ask this if it were not necessary. You know that.”
He did know that. That was the problem.
He exhaled slowly, turned back to the window, calculated and re-calculated for another moment because the habit was deeply ingrained even when the conclusion was already settled.
“Fine,” he said. “We leave the day after tomorrow. I’ll speak to Harold about the arrangements, and we’ll put it about that Megan is unwell and remaining in the east wing for the duration.
There’ll need to be someone to make that convincing.
Annie, probably, she seems sensible and she won’t gossip.
” He turned back. “And you will tell me what this is about before we reach London. That is not a negotiation.”
“We will see,” said Dorothea, which was as close to an agreement as she ever gave.
Oliver looked at her for a moment longer, this woman who had been the most constant presence of his childhood, who had taught him to play chess and read Latin and trust his own judgment, who was currently regarding him with an expression of serene satisfaction that he found both familiar and deeply alarming.
“I’ll tell Megan,” he said.
“Do be kind about it,” Dorothea said. “She walked out of breakfast rather magnificently and I’d rather not undo the progress we made this morning.”
He paused in the doorway. “You’ve been talking to her for one afternoon.”
“I know. I work quickly.” She picked up her spectacles. “I like her, Oliver. Enormously. Now go.”
* * *
He told Megan. She listened with her hands folded in her lap and her face very composed, in the way she composed herself when she was waiting to see which direction something would fall. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment.
“She wants me to come as her maid,” Megan said.
“Yes.”
Another pause. “And you think it’s a workable plan.”
“I think it’s the most workable plan available.” He watched her face. “If you object?”
“I don’t object.” She looked up. “I told you at breakfast that I didn’t feel safe here without you.
An eccentric old woman with strong opinions and your uncle’s guards are not the same as you, but it’s considerably better than staying here and waiting.
” A slight, careful pause. “And I like your grandmother.”
“She likes you too. She told me so, which she almost never does about anyone.” Oliver held her gaze. “I’m sorry. About this morning. You were right that I didn’t ask you. I decided what was best and told you instead. It’s a habit I’m apparently still learning to break.”
Something in her expression shifted, not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. “Apparently.”
“I’m working on it.”
“I can see that.” She stood, smoothing her hands against the russet skirt. “Two nights on the road. I’ll need a maid’s dress. Annie might know where to find one.”
“Annie,” Oliver agreed, already moving through the logistics, “and we’ll need a story about which rooms Megan is occupying in the east wing, and someone to carry trays there convincingly for the duration.
” He was still talking when he pulled the door open and found, on the other side of it, his uncle.
The Duke of Saxton was not a man who hovered, and yet there he was, in the corridor, with the particular expression of a person who has been standing still for some time and is actively pretending otherwise.
Oliver looked at him.
“I was passing,” said the Duke.
“You never pass this corridor. Your rooms are in the west wing.”
“I was passing,” the Duke repeated with great dignity. “I couldn’t help but overhear—”
“The door was closed.”
“My mother,” the Duke said, with the long-suffering air of a man invoking a force of nature, “has a carrying voice.” He straightened to his full height, which was Oliver’s height, which was considerable. “London.”
“Yes.”
“Your grandmother intends to go to London.”
“She does.”
The Duke was quiet for a moment. Something moved through his expression—not the calculating assessment he deployed in the study, but something older and less managed.
He looked, for just a moment, like a man working through a private arithmetic that had nothing to do with the family’s political standing.
“Then I am coming too,” he said.
Oliver stared at him. “Uncle—”
“You will require a degree of weight in these conversations that a marquess alone may not carry.” The Duke’s voice had returned to its full, formal authority.
“A duke carries more.” A pause, almost imperceptible.
“And if my mother is getting into a carriage for London at her age, in the middle of winter, without telling anyone why, then someone with sense needs to be present.”
Oliver opened his mouth. Closed it, glanced at the ceiling.
“The carriages will be crowded,” he said.
“We’ll take two.”
“The roads are terrible.”
“We’ll go slowly.”
“We’ll need three nights on the road at a minimum. Possibly four.”
“Then we leave tomorrow,” said the Duke, with the air of a man solving the problem, “and stop arguing about it.”
Oliver looked at Megan. Megan looked at Oliver, and in her expression was something she had the grace not to say out loud, but which was perfectly legible, nonetheless.
He turned back to his uncle.
“Fine,” he said. “Seven o’clock tomorrow morning. And you’re managing your own carriage and luggage. I had best get on and make the arrangements. You do realize that Penharrow’s men might attack the castle without you here?”
“Let them. No one has ever breached the keep in our history. I shall ensure the staff know the risks and don’t venture past the castle gate.”
“I hope you understand what you’re doing?”
The Duke looked briefly affronted. Then he nodded once, in the manner of a sovereign granting terms, and walked back the way he’d apparently come.
Oliver stood in the doorway and stared at the empty corridor for a moment.
“At some point,” Megan said, from behind him, “this is going to be funny.”
“When?”
“I’ll let you know.”