Chapter 16 #3
"Every one of you had a life in this village before I came to it.
Wives. Children. Fathers-in-law with opinions.
Custom in shops that will still be there long after this roof is finished and I am nothing but a story people tell about a house.
" He looked round at them. "If any of you finds that what I have told you this morning makes trouble at his own table — not here, at his own table — then you are to come to me and say so, and you will have your wages to the end of the week and my hand, and I will not think one thing less of you for it.
Not one. That goes for today and it goes for a month from now. "
The wind moved through the scaffolding.
"The last thing I want on this earth," Benjamin said, "is to be the reason somebody in this village has a difficult year."
Nobody answered him.
Thomas turned round on the scaffold and drove the nail he had been holding, and the sound of it went across the yard, and after that somebody picked up a saw, and after that somebody else said something to the man beside him about the angle of a joist, and within about half a minute the whole of it had gone back to being an ordinary morning.
Benjamin stood there for a moment longer.
Then he picked up his hammer and went back to the north wall, and found that he was smiling, and did not particularly want anyone to see it.
◆◆◆
The letter sat open on the low table between them, the Baron's careful hand still faintly visible where the ink had bled slightly into the paper.
Harrington read it a second time before he set it down.
"So," Somerset said, reaching for the decanter. "The boy has told the truth of himself."
"He has."
"Then I shall finish my business here and we will go to Ashcombe again. Properly prepared this time." Somerset poured, unhurried, already thinking ahead to logistics.
Harrington did not move to take a glass.
"It is a trap."
Somerset paused. "A trap. He confessed his own ruin to a man who might destroy him for it. That is not the behavior of a man playing a careful game, Harrington."
"It is precisely the behavior of one." Harrington leaned back, turning the thought over slowly, the way he turned everything over before allowing himself to speak it aloud.
"A man does not vanish for years, build himself an entire second identity, hold that lie together without a single crack for two decades — and then simply decide, on impulse, at a dinner table, to abandon it.
He chose the moment. He chose the audience. Whatever this is, it was planned."
"I do not see what threat remains to him now that his identity is known." Somerset set his own glass down, unconvinced. "Whatever advantage the secrecy gave him, he has surrendered it freely."
"So it would appear." Harrington's eyes stayed fixed on the middle distance.
"Which is why I sent men to ask after a Captain Benjamin Sterling, in the army, before this letter ever arrived.
Most of the officers we approached had heard the name.
Fewer still had ever met the man himself.
Some claimed there was no such officer at all — that Sterling was a name attached to a maneuver, nothing more, an allies' invention to muddy the record.
And every single inquiry led back to the same camp. "
"Which camp?"
"General Aldric's."
Somerset sat forward slowly. "So, he was trained in that camp, under Aldric no less. A man many consider a hero and his name commands more respect in there than the Crown itself."
"The very same." Harrington's mouth curved, thin and without warmth. "Which tells us his connections run considerably deeper than we first believed."
"That explains a great deal."
"It does." Harrington reached for his own glass at last. "Fortunately, I know men who would relish the chance to take a piece of him for themselves. I will need only to remind them of what he stands to cost them, and their own ambitions will do the remainder of the work for me."
"And coin?"
"No expense will be spared." Harrington swirled the brandy, unhurried.
"He will likely have some plan to expose the truth of what happened twenty years ago.
His father had ties to the army as well — he was leading a campaign abroad when the accusations first came against him, which is precisely why the connection to Aldric's camp troubles me.
It means the boy is not merely hiding among old soldiers.
He may have men inside that world who remember his father's name for reasons that have nothing to do with treason. "
Somerset was quiet a moment, absorbing that.
"His father grew too powerful," he said slowly. "That was the trouble of it, in the end. Not treason. Ambition — his, and the shadow it cast over the rest of us."
"He made better men than himself look small beside him, and men do not forgive that easily." Harrington's voice had gone colder, almost fond in its coldness. "He was the white knight. The paladin every drawing room in London wished to seat beside their daughters. And we beat him anyway."
He lifted his glass slightly, an unhurried, private toast to nothing at all.
"This boy," he said, "stands no chance whatsoever."
Somerset raised his own glass to match it, and the two of them drank in silence, the letter still lying open between them on the table.