Chapter 15
The next morning, Amelia was on her knees in the garden, working a fresh cutting of comfrey into the soil, when Frederick came to crouch beside her with a small trowel of his own.
"That corner still wants turning before autumn arrives," he said, nodding toward the far flowerbed. "I noticed it this morning."
"I saw it too. "
"As you always do." He worked the soil a moment in companionable silence before he spoke again. "The house feels quieter, now that the Earls have gone from it."
"It does." She did not look up from her work. "Though I do not know that quiet and safe are the same thing, Frederick."
He glanced at her, something considering in his face, but said nothing further on it — the two of them had reached, over the past weeks, an understanding of how much either of them would say aloud, and how much would simply be allowed to sit between them.
They had been working perhaps a quarter of an hour when her father's step came up the path.
"There you both are." The Baron stopped at the edge of the garden, hands clasped behind his back, wearing the particular expression of a man who had spent several days deciding something and had finally arrived at a conclusion he intended to act on before he could talk himself out of it.
"I have been turning something over, and I have made up my mind on it.
I think it is time we properly invited our neighbor to dinner. Tomorrow evening, if he is able."
Amelia went very still, the trowel motionless in her hand.
"Are you certain, Father?"
He looked at her, surprised. "Certain? You were the one urging me toward exactly this, not so many weeks ago. Has something changed?"
"No." She made herself continue turning the soil, unhurried. "I only thought — it might be kinder to wait until he has finished with his house. The essential parts of it, at least. It seems an odd moment to invite a man to a formal dinner while he still sleeps among rubble."
"I do not think it signifies greatly." Her father shrugged. "It is only dinner, Amelia. If the timing does not suit him, he is free to decline."
"If he declines," she said, with a faint smile she hoped read as teasing rather than anything else, "you will be extremely offended."
"I dare say I would be."
"I only thought it might make him uncomfortable," she pressed gently, "stepping into our house, dressed properly, while his own has no roof to speak of in half its rooms."
"I have already made up my mind on the matter.
" Her father's tone was pleasant but final, the tone of a decision that had already survived its own deliberation and did not require further debate.
He drew a folded letter from his coat and held it out to Frederick.
"I finished this last night. Would you see it delivered to the new owner of Russell Hall directly. "
"At once, my lord." Frederick took it, tucked it into his coat, and rose, brushing the soil from his knees. He gave Amelia the briefest of glances before he went — nothing she could have named as meaning anything in particular, and yet she felt it land somewhere.
Then he was gone down the path, and it was only the two of them left among the flowers.
Amelia let a moment pass before she spoke again, careful to keep her tone light, no more than idle curiosity between a daughter and her father.
"I confess I know very little of the two of them. Earl Somerset and Earl Harrington." She pulled a stray weed free without particular urgency. "Beyond that they are important, and that you were eager to please them both."
"They are considerable men." Her father settled onto the low stone bench nearby, evidently glad enough of the excuse to rest a moment.
"Somerset less so, in the wider sense — he holds influence in London, certainly, connections worth having.
But Harrington is another matter entirely.
He has ties to Parliament. To the army, at a level most men never see.
To the Bank of England, which is not nothing in times like these.
And, if the rumors are to be trusted, he sits close enough to the Queen's own council that his word carries weight in rooms neither you nor I will ever be permitted to enter. "
Amelia kept her hands moving in the soil, though her mind had gone very still.
"That is a great deal of power for one man to hold."
"It is precisely that. Which is why I was glad of his good opinion, and gladder still that we seem to have earned it.
" Her father looked out over the garden, satisfied with the memory of the visit.
"A man like Harrington does not extend friendship carelessly, Amelia.
When he does, a sensible family makes the most of it. "
"Naturally," she said.
Her father glanced at her then — a beat too long, something faintly curious in his expression, as though he had noticed the shape of her questions without quite being able to say what troubled him about them.
"You ask a great many detailed questions, for a matter you claim only passing interest in."
Amelia met his eyes, calm and unhurried. "I like to know the men who dine at our table, Father. Is that not simply good sense?"
He studied her a moment longer, and whatever had caught his attention seemed to settle, unresolved, somewhere in the back of his mind rather than anywhere he thought worth pressing further.
"It is," he said finally. "Good sense indeed."
He rose, brushed off his coat, and left her there among the flowers, and Amelia sat back on her heels, turning over everything she had just learned — parliament, the army, the Bank of England, the Queen's own council — and understood, with a cold clarity that settled somewhere beneath her ribs, exactly how much larger the danger to Benjamin truly was than either of them had yet allowed themselves to say aloud.
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The inn was quiet at that hour, and Mrs. Miller was in her usual chair by the window, needle going through a hem with more force than the fabric strictly required, when Benjamin came through the door.
She did not look up.
"Well. He remembers where the inn is."
"I am sorry." He crossed to her, dropped into the chair opposite. "It has been longer than it should have been since I last came to see you properly. There have been developments."
"There had better have been." She set the needle down at last and fixed him with a look. "I hope, at the very least, those developments concern my kitchen. And my bedroom. I have been sleeping under a roof that is not my own for far too long, Master Benjamin."
"The house is coming along faster than I dared hope. The men working with me have been a blessing."
"Mm. I hope you are not draining that young man dry — the one who follows you about like a shadow. He is made of nothing but rubber and nerves, that boy."
"He is indeed. And he helps more than he knows." Something in Benjamin's face shifted then, and Mrs. Miller, watching him closely, set the mending fully aside.
"Now tell me the rest of it," she said. "I can see something has troubled you a great deal more than a missing kitchen."
"Two men came to Ashcombe. Asking questions about my origins."
"That was to be expected, sooner or later. What else."
"The men were Earl Somerset and Earl Harrington."
Mrs. Miller went very still.
"I do not know the first name," she said slowly. "But I know the second. He was an associate of your father's, once. Your mother never trusted him — called him a snake, more than once, within my hearing. Your father always gave him the benefit of the doubt regardless."
"I believe her instincts were the correct ones." Benjamin's jaw tightened. "I have a fragment of memory from the night they took us. My mother, alone, saying his name. I could not have told you, before now, what it meant. I am certain of it now."
Mrs. Miller's face had gone pale.
"Then you had better send for your dangerous army friends," she said. "We shall need an army, at this rate, because in every other measure we are outmatched. If that man holds even half the power and wealth your father once did, we are in a great deal of trouble."
"I know." Something almost like a smile touched his mouth. "But I have a plan."
"That is my boy." She leaned forward slightly, some of her color returning. "Go on, then."
"For a start, the plan involves dinner."
She blinked. "A dinner?"
"I have been formally invited to dine at the Baron's house next door."
"The Earls visited the Baron's house?" Her brow drew together. "They never came here."
"They did stay there. To Whitfield, not the village."
"Well." She sat back. "That is either very good news or very bad, and I confess I cannot say which. Either way, you must go."
"I have already decided to attend. I know a good deal of what I mean to say, when the moment calls for it. But I expect to be under considerable pressure tonight, and I would feel a great deal steadier with someone watching my back."
"All this talk," Mrs. Miller said, "only to ask me to dinner, Master Benjamin?"
"Dangerous waters require careful company."
She laughed, short and dry. "When my husband finally arrives here, you will do me the kindness of teaching him how a woman ought properly to be asked to dine. The man's idea of an invitation has always been I am hungry, will you come?"
"Should I take that as a yes?"
"Of course it is a yes." She was already reaching for her shawl. "When is this dinner?"
"Tonight. Nine o'clock."
Her eyes went wide. "Tonight? You tell me this only now? Ask Mr. Miller, when at last he graces us with his presence, how many hours a woman requires to be made presentable for an Baron's table. Go. Come back for me properly dressed yourself, and mind you behave tonight like your father's son."
Benjamin rose, already smiling. "That is precisely the plan."
And he left her already calling for hot water and her good gloves, muttering to herself the whole while about men and their notion of proper warning.
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