Chapter 12
Amelia woke to a knock and her father's voice on the other side of the door before she had properly opened her eyes.
"Are you not dressed yet?"
She sat up, blinking against the light already well into the room. "I overslept."
He came in without waiting to be asked, already in his morning coat, his expression somewhere between concern and impatience. "Are you unwell?"
"No." She pushed the covers back, reaching for her dressing gown. "I could not stop my mind from turning things over, and it grew late before I noticed."
"Well, you will have to hurry regardless." He glanced at the clock on her mantel. "Earl Somerset and Earl Harrington are expected within the hour."
Amelia went still for a moment, the name landing somewhere she had not expected it to.
"I had entirely forgotten them," she admitted.
"Evidently."
"Could you not greet them yourselves? I could see to the garden instead, and join you after—"
"Absolutely not." Her father said it without any real heat, already turning back toward the door, but the answer was final all the same. "You will be dressed and downstairs within the half hour, Amelia. This is not a morning for the garden."
He left before she could argue further, and she sat a moment longer on the edge of the bed, looking at nothing in particular, before she rose and reached for her gown.
◆◆◆
The Somerset carriage rolled along the road at an easy pace, the morning still cool enough that both men kept their coats buttoned, and neither had spoken for some while when it drew level with the gates of Russell Hall.
Somerset leaned toward the glass.
"There." He nodded toward the scaffolding, the men moving across it, one figure in particular crossing the yard with the loose, economical stride of someone entirely at ease in his own body.
"That is the man I told you of. Clean-shaven.
Straight in the spine in a way most men his age are not, not unless something taught them to be.
If I had to guess, I would say he has spent a great many years being trained to move through a place without anyone noticing he had done so. "
Harrington did not lean forward. He watched from where he sat, still and unhurried.
"Interesting," he said at last. "We shall see who this man turns out to be."
"And if he is who you suspect? The traitor's son, come back to claim what was his?"
"Then it is a problem." Harrington's voice remained perfectly level. "Not an insurmountable one. But a problem."
"What do we mean to do about it?"
"We?" Something almost amused moved behind Harrington's eyes.
"Nothing. His name will do the work, if it comes to that — a name like his does not need help ruining a man, only the truth spoken loudly enough for the right people to hear it.
" He turned his cane slowly between two fingers.
"But first we must be certain. If we move against him and he proves to be nothing more than a soldier with an unfortunate resemblance and no connection to Beaumont at all, the cost falls on us, not on him.
A false accusation against a decorated war veteran is a debt that does not clear itself quickly.
Reputation matters to men like us a great deal more than it matters to men like him. "
"Then how do you mean to be certain?"
"Carefully." Harrington glanced out at the passing hedgerows.
"We do not go to Russell Hall as accusers.
We go as neighbors, curious about a curious development, and we let the man reveal what he will of himself without being asked directly for it.
That is why I have come in person, rather than sending someone to make quiet inquiries in the village.
" A faint, cold smile. "The Baron will be useful to us.
He does not yet know it, but he is about to become our proxy in this matter — close enough to watch, respected enough not to be questioned for watching, and entirely unaware that watching is what he has been recruited for. "
Somerset considered this, then nodded slowly, some of his earlier eagerness settling into something more patient.
"And the rest of the village?"
"The people of Ashcombe," Harrington said, "is the Baron's business, not mine. Though I confess I am curious to see what they make of our guest, if he turns out to be who we suspect."
The carriage rolled on toward the gates of Whitfield Hall, and neither man spoke again until it had come to a stop.
◆◆◆
Amelia sat at her father's right hand as the tea things were brought out into the garden, and for a while she paid the whole business the attention it deserved and no more.
The morning had a clean edge to it, the last of the dew still silvering the grass along the borders, and someone had lit the small brazier near the table against a chill that had not quite burned off.
Beyond the hedge, faint and steady, came the sound of hammers from Russell Hall — a rhythm she had grown so used to over the past days that she had nearly stopped hearing it as separate from the birdsong.
Earl Somerset praised the roses. Earl Harrington said little, watching the garden with the mild, assessing interest of a man cataloguing a property he had no intention of buying.
Her father spoke of the roads, the harvest, the small local nothings that filled the space before a visit found its actual purpose.
It was Harrington who turned it, eventually, exactly as she had known he would.
"All this noise from next door," he said, glancing toward the eastern wall. "It must be a trial to live beside."
"A little, in the early hours." Her father's voice was easy. "Nothing insufferable."
"I understood the estate belonged to the Duke of Beaumont." Harrington turned his cup a quarter turn on its saucer, unhurried. "The traitor."
"It did." Her father's expression did not change. "It has passed to a new owner, after some years standing empty."
"Are we certain of that?" Somerset asked, glancing between them.
"As far as we know." Her father looked toward her. "Amelia has met the man himself. I have not yet had the pleasure."
All three sets of eyes turned to her at once, and she was glad, distantly, that she had had a full night's practice at keeping her face still.
"He introduced himself as Benjamin Sterling," she said.
Harrington was quiet a moment. Something moved behind his eyes that did not reach the rest of his face at all.
"Benjamin was the late Duke's son's name," he said. "Sterling was not."
"He could be lying about it," Somerset offered.
"And why should that concern you so particularly?" The question was out of her before she had entirely decided to ask it.
Harrington turned his gaze on her, and there was nothing sharp in it — only something that might, in a lesser man, have passed for sorrow.
"I was close with the late Duke, once," he said.
"His fall grieved me a great deal. But the boy had nothing to do with what his father was accused of.
He was a child. I know for certain that the Crown showed him mercy — spared him, and sent him into the army, rather than let him share his father's fate. "
Amelia's hand went still around her cup.
Spared him. Sent him into the army.
She heard the rest of what Harrington said only distantly, the words arriving a beat behind themselves as her mind moved ahead without her — I enlisted younger than most men do...
a mentor who used what standing he had to make those years count for more...
it is not common for men to address their employer by a rank rather than his name...
honorable discharge does not mean a man was good.
Every careful, guarded thing he had told her in that garden, under that moon, arranged itself suddenly into a shape she had not let herself see.
"We did not know that," her father was saying, somewhere beside her.
"Few do. It was handled quietly." Harrington set his cup down.
"And after that, nothing. Rumors, now and again, over the years — that he had died in some campaign or other, that he had deserted his post, that he had distinguished himself and risen through the ranks entirely unrecognized.
All manner of things, none of them confirmed. "
Amelia made herself breathe. Made herself hold the cup steady.
"And everything the family once held was seized at the time," Harrington went on, "so I confess I do not know how a man in his position would come to own Russell Hall at all.
Perhaps it was left to him as a mercy, in some corner of the settlement no one troubled to contest. Perhaps he purchased it outright, once he had the means.
Or perhaps he simply learned, somewhere along the way, that it stood empty and unclaimed, and thought it a fine chance to have something of his own for nothing.
" He spread his hands slightly. "Most of what the Duke once owned has long since passed into other hands by now.
Whatever the truth of it, I think it is very much in the interest of a town this size to know precisely who has come to live at its edge. "
"You are entirely right," her father said.
Harrington inclined his head, satisfied, and reached again for his cup.
"Then perhaps," Somerset said, "we ought to go and introduce ourselves."
Somerset was already half out of his chair.
"There is no need for that." Harrington said it lightly, without looking up from his tea, and something in the ease of it made Amelia's pulse settle a fraction, though she could not have said why.
"We are guests here, not investigators. There will be time enough to make the man's acquaintance properly, in due course.
For now, I am content simply to know that Ashcombe has a curiosity worth watching. "
Somerset sat back down, faintly puzzled, and let the subject drop.