Chapter 15
The uneventful journey to London had taken three days, shorter than Oliver had expected. Webb was well healed; it appeared Megan’s ministrations to his shoulder were excellent and Webb’s main problem had been hunger. He was now well fed and clean and his shoulder almost back to normal.
The ruse of Megan still being at the castle worked. This morning he would begin his quest to bring down Penharrow.
The morning room at Saxton House caught the winter sun better than any room Oliver had encountered in a London townhouse, which he’d always suspected was entirely deliberate.
His grandmother had chosen her chambers accordingly when she came to stay, commandeering the south-facing room with its tall windows and cream silk wallpaper with the ease of a woman who had been making such decisions for sixty years and had never once apologized for any of them.
He found them there when he came down at half past ten.
Megan sat beside his grandmother’s chair, her back straight, a length of wool in her hands that she appeared to be untangling with the focused patience of someone who had never in her life had anyone hand her a task they thought she might fail at.
His grandmother was watching her with an expression Oliver recognized and mildly dreaded—sharp attention, barely suppressed satisfaction, the particular gleam of a woman who had found something interesting.
“Ah,” his grandmother said. “There he is. We were just discussing you.”
Megan looked up and something moved across her face that was not quite a smile.
She had, in the two days since their arrival in London, developed a talent for expressions that were entirely correct and simultaneously said something else entirely.
This one, if Oliver was reading it right, said I was not going to survive much longer without reinforcements.
“Grandmother,” he said, because one had to start somewhere. “I see you’ve put Megan to work.”
“I’ve done nothing of the sort. She offered.” His grandmother waved a dismissive hand. “She has excellent hands for it, which is more than I can say for the girl Hastings usually sends me. That one tangles everything worse than she found it. Sit down, Oliver. You’re blocking the light.”
He sat, because there was no point arguing with a woman who had been outmaneuvering the male members of his family since before his father was born.
Megan handed the untangled wool across to his grandmother without being asked, having apparently already learned the particular rhythm of her expectations, and his grandmother accepted it with a small approving nod.
“I was telling Megan,” his grandmother continued, clicking her needle with the practiced ease of long habit, “about the summer when you were twelve and convinced James to help you catch what you were certain was a pike in the Saxton lake.”
Oliver closed his eyes briefly. “You don’t need to tell that one.”
“The pike was, of course, a very large piece of driftwood.” His grandmother’s eyes were bright. “They spent the better part of an afternoon in a rowing boat attempting to haul it in. Cook was told to prepare it for dinner.”
“Cook knew perfectly well it was wood,” Oliver said.
“Cook did not say so, because Cook has more sense than to deny a twelve-year-old boy his dignity.” His grandmother glanced at Megan.
“He came in for dinner with his sleeves still damp and announced he’d thrown it back because it was too small.
James, to his eternal credit, maintained the fiction without flinching.
I have always thought that moment said a great deal about James’s character. ”
“I miss him. I shall always miss him.”
Megan was biting her lip. It was a thing she did, Oliver had noticed, when she was trying very hard not to smile in a way that might be considered impertinent.
He could not decide whether it was endearing or quietly devastating.
He had decided, sometime in the last forty-eight hours, that he would not be making further decisions on that particular subject until after he had dealt with Penharrow.
“It was a large piece of driftwood,” he said, with dignity. “It behaved very convincingly.”
This did not help. Megan’s composure cracked, briefly and beautifully, and she pressed her fingers to her mouth, and his grandmother watched the exchange with the expression of someone who had just confirmed a premise she’d been testing since yesterday.
Oliver stood.
“I have an appointment with Carmichael,” he said. “This morning. I should go.”
“You don’t have an appointment until noon,” his grandmother said placidly, without looking up from her embroidery. “Hastings told me your calendar.”
“I have things to do before noon. Webb and I have things to attend to.” He inclined his head, slightly more stiffly than he intended. “Grandmother. Megan.”
“The pike was an excellent pike,” Megan said, her voice perfectly composed except for the way it wasn’t.
He left before either of them could say anything further.
* * *
The walk to Carmichael’s offices in Gray’s Inn took rather longer than it should have, because Oliver walked there directly instead of taking the carriage, and he used the time to think.
Megan had smiled. Not the careful, managed expressions she usually deployed, the ones that communicated what she wanted without giving anything away, but an actual smile, involuntary and entirely unguarded, the sort that began behind the eyes and arrived on the face before the person wearing it had decided whether it was permitted.
He had seen it for approximately four seconds before she caught herself.
It occurred to him that he had no idea how often Megan had the opportunity to laugh over the past fourteen years. He suspected the answer was very rarely and only when it was sanctioned, and the thought of it sat in his chest like a coal, small and burning.
He arrived at Gray’s Inn in a state of mind he would not have described to anyone who asked.
Carmichael’s office smelled of coal smoke and old paper in roughly equal measure, a smell that had not changed since Oliver had first come here as a young man to review the terms of his majority.
The solicitor himself had changed considerably less than the room.
He was a compact, careful man somewhere in his fifties with a precise manner and the ability to deliver catastrophic information in exactly the same tone he used to discuss the weather.
Oliver had always found this quality both useful and profoundly unsettling.
“My lord.” Carmichael rose, gestured to the chair, waited until Oliver had settled before resuming his own seat.
He had a folder open before him on the desk, and the way he looked at it before looking at Oliver told Oliver most of what he needed to know before a word was spoken.
“I’m glad you came directly. I’ve been waiting to reach you. ”
“What’s happened?”
Carmichael opened the folder and turned it, sliding it across the desk. Oliver looked at the document without picking it up. Penharrow’s solicitor’s mark was at the top. The language was dense and formal, but the shape was legible within seconds.
He read it twice.
“He’s filed guardianship papers,” he said.
“Filed and, as of three days ago, formally submitted to the relevant court.” Carmichael’s voice was even.
“The petition claims that the young woman known as Megan—he gives no surname, notes that none is established—is the daughter of one Thomas Bryce, formerly Penharrow’s man of business.
Bryce died in the spring of last year. According to the petition, Bryce entrusted his daughter to Lord Penharrow’s care before his death, with no surviving family to take her in.
The document describes the arrangement as one of charitable protection.
” A pause. “That is his word. Charitable.”
Oliver looked up.
“The timeline,” he said.
“The timeline,” Carmichael agreed, “does not hold together under scrutiny. If Bryce died in the spring of last year, his daughter would have only been in Penharrow’s keeping for approximately eighteen months.
If she is, as you described her to me in your letter, approximately twenty-one years of age, and she was taken as a child of seven, then this is fraudulent.
” He folded his hands on the desk. “Nothing aligns. If Bryce only died last spring, then Megan would have only been placed with Penharrow last spring. Not fourteen years ago.”
“Exactly.”
“The difficulty,” Carmichael said carefully, “is that I cannot prove the discrepancy without evidence. Penharrow’s documentation is—” he paused in a way that suggested he was choosing his words with great precision “—thorough. A death certificate for Thomas Bryce. A letter, apparently in Bryce’s hand, expressing his wishes regarding his daughter’s welfare.
A record of Penharrow’s household accounts showing expenditure on a ward from the time in question. ”
“From last year.”
“From last year. Yes.” Carmichael met his eyes.
“The records begin from when they would need to begin to make the story consistent. Not from fourteen years ago, because the story does not require them to go back that far. A ward taken in out of charity a year and a half ago. Quite unremarkable. Quite legal.”
Oliver was quiet for a moment.
He had known, intellectually, that Penharrow would not simply allow Megan to vanish.
A man of his standing did not hold a prisoner for fourteen years and then watch her walk out without attempting to reclaim her through whatever means available.
But there had been a part of him—a part Oliver would not now examine too closely—that had assumed the legal complexity would fall on his side of the equation.
That the simple fact of the thing, what had been done to Megan, would be sufficient to anchor his position.