Chapter 19 #2
“She told me about you,” Harry said finally.
“Last night.” He did not look up from the glass.
“About Wales. About the journey. About the things you did to keep her safe.” A pause.
“She was not—Megan doesn’t speak easily about things that matter to her.
She’s careful. She’s had to be careful for a long time about what she says and who she trusts.
” He lifted his eyes. They were very direct. “She was not careful about you.”
Oliver was very still.
“I want to know,” Harry said, “if you love her. Not if you have honorable intentions. Not if you understand your obligations. Not if she is important to you in some general sense.” His voice was even, but his eyes were not.
“I want to know if you love my sister. Because she has been lied to by people she trusted for fourteen years, and she is only beginning to understand that not everyone who says they care for her is trying to take something from her. And if you are…” He stopped.
The glass was very steady in his hand. “If you are a good man who feels responsible for her and has done the honorable thing accordingly, I will not think less of you for it. But I would rather know now.”
The room was very quiet.
Oliver thought about Megan’s face the morning she had stood in his grandmother’s drawing room and laughed, unguarded and helpless, over the story of a piece of driftwood.
He thought about her in the coach three days out of London asking careful, precise questions about the law because she had refused to be ignorant of the thing being decided in her name.
He thought about the way she had looked at him in the corridor at Saxton Castle when she’d said I am still here and the way he had understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with strategy or obligation, that her still being there mattered to him in a way that had nothing to do with what he owed her.
He thought about standing in that corridor and knowing.
“Yes,” he said. He met Harry’s eyes without qualification.
“I love her. Not because she needed saving or because I felt responsible, though both of those things are also true. I love her because she is—” He stopped, found the words, said them plainly.
“Because she is the most remarkable person I have ever met, and because knowing her has made me better than I was, and because I spent a significant amount of time on the road between Wales and London trying very hard not to admit that to myself and failing completely.” He paused.
“She knows exactly how I feel about her. But since you’ve asked directly, there is your direct answer. ”
Harry looked at him for a long moment.
Then he picked up his glass and drank.
“Right. I’m hoping that we can now have a longer engagement.
I’d like some time with my sister before I lose her to you,” he said.
He set the glass down and straightened slightly, and something in his bearing shifted from the controlled fury he’d arrived with toward something that Oliver cautiously identified as a man who was doing the quiet, private arithmetic of whether to trust someone and arriving at a number he hadn’t expected to find.
“My grandmother thinks well of you,” the Duke of Saxton said, with the mild air of a man observing the weather.
“Your grandmother would survive a siege,” Harry said, and it was not a criticism.
“She would,” Oliver agreed. “She’d probably organize it.”
Harry looked briefly, fractionally, as though something in him had relaxed for just a moment before remembering this was not a moment for relaxing. But it was there, Oliver thought. The beginning of something.
“Penharrow,” Harry said. “Whatever needs to be done. Whatever you need from me. Money, witnesses, my weight in the House of Lords, anything—you have it.”
“I know,” Oliver said. “We’ll need all of it.
I’m hoping that someone will come forward and say that he killed James.
Then he’ll be hung. I have the details of the woman who looked after Megan in Wales.
I’ve sent Webb and some men to escort her to London if she’s not too ill.
If she is then we shall get a sworn affidavit with a magistrate. I will have my revenge as will you.”
Harry nodded once, the decisive nod of a man who has shifted from the question of whether to the question of how.
He picked up his glass again. Outside, the morning traffic on the street below was beginning to build, the steady noise of London going about its business, indifferent to the things being decided in drawing rooms above it.
“She’s going to want to be involved,” Harry said. “She’ll insist on it. I know she will. I’ve known her for only a day, and I already know she will.”
“She’s already offered to be involved,” Oliver said. “She told your mother and my grandmother that she knows where the bodies are.”
Harry absorbed this.
“Figuratively,” Oliver added.
“She said ‘mostly,’” the Duke of Saxton observed.
Harry put his glass down and looked at the ceiling for a brief moment with the expression of a man recalibrating his expectations upward.
“How are we going to explain Megan’s sudden appearance?” Harry asked.
The Duke of Saxton said, “Stick as closely to the truth as possible. Say she wondered off and got lost at the fair, and a family took her in not knowing who she was. She was only discovered when my mother spotted her in a village near Shrewsbury and she brought her straight to the Duchess of Newbury.”
“Right,” he said again, and this time the word had something almost like relief in it. “Right, then. Let’s get to work.”