Chapter 13 #2
"I pity them," Amelia said, keeping her voice light. "Coming all this way, only to be called back so soon."
Her father looked at her, faintly surprised. "Pity them?"
"I feel for anyone moved about by something larger than themselves." She arranged her expression into something as guileless as she could manage. "It happens to all of us, in one way or another. Wealth and a title do not shield a person from everything."
Her father studied her a moment, then something in his face softened into approval.
"Well put, my dear."
Before she could answer, Harrington appeared at the top of the steps, already gloved, his cane in hand.
"Lord Whitfield." He extended his hand, warm in a way that did not entirely reach his eyes. "My thanks for your hospitality. You must call on us in London, when your affairs allow it — and consider yourselves welcome at my own house whenever it suits you."
"The honor was entirely ours, my lord."
They shook hands, and Harrington inclined his head to Amelia — courteous, unhurried, giving nothing away — before he descended the steps toward the waiting carriage.
Somerset followed a pace behind, offering his own brief farewells, and within minutes the two of them were settled inside and the wheels were turning down the drive.
◆◆◆
The carriage had gone no more than a mile when it drew level with the gates of Russell Hall, and Somerset, out of habit more than anything, glanced through the glass toward the yard.
The workers had just arrived — a knot of them near the entrance, talking, tools not yet in hand. Several looked up at the sound of wheels on the road, the way men in a small village always turned to note who was passing.
Only one of them held the look.
He was near the back of the group, still, and though the distance was considerable, Somerset felt the weight of his gaze land and stay, steady and unhurried, as though the man had all the time he needed and no particular interest in hiding that he was using it to look back.
Somerset drew the curtain shut.
"He was there again," he said. "The same man."
Harrington did not appear to have heard him. He had not moved since they left Whitfield's gate, and he was not looking out of the window, and he had been turning his cane slowly between two fingers for the better part of a mile.
"I will tell you something, Harrington, and you may make of it what you like.
" Somerset was still facing the curtain.
"When I spoke to him at his own gate, he looked at me the way a man looks over a horse he is deciding whether to buy.
Not insolently. That is the part I cannot get round.
There was nothing insolent in it at all.
It simply did not occur to him that I might mind being looked at in that manner, and it has not stopped occurring to me since. "
"No," Harrington said. "It would not."
"He is dangerous. I do not say that lightly and I do not say it often."
"You are quite right that he is." The cane went on turning. "Benjamin."
Somerset glanced over. "What of it?"
"Benjamin Sterling." Harrington said it the way a man says a word he has repeated to himself a great many times in three days.
"The Duke's boy was Benjamin. That is not a common name in a family of that rank and it is not a coincidence, and any man who wished to disappear would have changed the whole of it and not the half. "
"Then it is him."
"Sterling is nothing." The cane stopped.
"That is what troubles me. I have had three days to place it and I cannot. There is no Sterling connected to the Duke’s family.
No Sterling with land, or money, or a claim on that house, or a cousin who ever sat in a room with Anthony Russell.
A man does not pull a surname out of the air unless it means something to him, and if it means something to him, then somebody somewhere knows what. "
"Perhaps he simply chose it."
"Perhaps." Harrington's mouth thinned. "And then there is the other half of it, which is why I am sitting in this carriage instead of standing on his step. The boy was given service for life."
He let it sit.
"Not a term of years. Not a sentence with an end to it that a man might have served out and walked away from.
Life. I stood in the room when it was decided and I know precisely what was written.
" He turned the cane over once. "That boy is in a barracks or he is in the ground.
Those are the only two places he can be.
He is not in Ashcombe with six men on his roof and the money to pay them, and he is not free to buy so much as a hat, and there is no clerk in England who could have signed him out of it without somebody a great deal more considerable than a clerk standing behind him. "
"Then it is not him."
"Then it is not him." Harrington looked out of the window for the first time. "And yet he is the right age to the year, and he moves as you say he moves, and he has taken the one house in this country no man in his senses would take, and he is called Benjamin."
The hedgerows went past.
"Every fact I have makes him the boy," Harrington said. "And every fact I have makes it impossible that he is the boy. I have never cared for a thing that comes out true from both ends. It generally means somebody has been at work on it."
"Then let us go back and put it to him."
"And say what?" There was nothing sharp in it.
"That I have driven forty miles to accuse a man of being alive?
Consider where we are. There is a court sitting in London at this moment with men of our own class in the dock, and half the city reading about it over breakfast, and a dozen men who would be glad indeed to see my name printed beside a false accusation and a stranger's ruined character.
" He set the cane against the seat. "I am not going to hand them that. Not this month."
"Then what?"
"Then we go home, and we find out whether that man was ever in the army at all.
" Harrington's voice had gone brisk. "Quietly, and through the proper offices, and without my name attached to any part of it.
If he served, there is a record of it somewhere and a man who remembers him.
If he did not, then he is something else entirely and we shall want to know what.
Until I have that, I will not move an inch. "
"And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime the Baron watches for us."
Somerset was quiet a moment.
"Do you trust him?"
"I trust him to be exactly what he is, which is a great deal more useful than trusting him to be loyal."
"He may talk. He may go to the man directly — they are neighbors, after all. If he lets slip that we have taken an interest, we lose whatever advantage we have."