Chapter Ten
“’Under my protection.’ Those were your exact words, Thomas?”
Louisa had arrived at Aldermere by ten on the hour the following morning.
Mrs. Croft’s letter had reached London by the evening post, and Louisa had left before breakfast. Philip was with her this time, standing by the window with his hands clasped behind his back and his expression arranged in professional neutrality.
It meant he was already weighing the matter in the manner of a trial, seeking only for proof.
“Near enough to them,” Thomas said.
“In front of Piers Garrick.”
“In front of Piers Garrick, who had his hand on her arm at the time.”
“On a public lane.”
“It was not public at the time. It was dark and empty, which was rather the problem.”
“And by morning it was public in every way that matters, because Piers Garrick told every drawing room in the county before his breakfast was cold.” Louisa sat down in the chair she had occupied during previous visits.
Thomas was beginning to think of it as her chair, the way one thinks of a particular instrument of correction as belonging to the person who uses it most frequently.
“Do you understand what ’under my protection’ means when a duke says it about a woman who is not his wife? ”
“I understand what I intended it to mean.”
“Thomas, what you intended does not matter in the slightest.” Louisa leaned forward. “What matters is what the county heard. And what the county heard is that the Duke of Aldermere has claimed a baker’s daughter.”
“I did not claim her. I defended her.”
“’Claimed’ is the word they are using. Not ’protected,’ not ’defended.
’ Claimed.” Louisa paused. “And this is not the first time your behaviour with Miss Rennet has been conspicuous. Mrs. Croft tells me you have been asking the girl questions for weeks, cold stores and sleeping patterns and recipe books, as though you were interviewing her for a post she already holds. The county was already watching you, Thomas. The lane merely confirmed what they suspected.”
“The questions were not what they appeared.”
“The questions were courtship, and you conducted them with all the warmth of a quarterly review. I say this out of pure regard.” Louisa’s voice softened. “The method was failing before the lane. The lane has made the failure public.”
The distinction between claimed and protected was the distinction between a scandal and a matrimony. The county believed it was looking at the former.
Thomas sat with the words. He had known, standing on the lane with Piers backing away and Jane’s arm still marked, that his words would have consequences. He had said them anyway. Jane’s safety had been more important than the county’s interpretation, and he did not regret the saying.
He was struck with remorse for the aftermath.
He deeply regretted that his guardianship, offered in honesty and urgency, had become a weapon that Piers could use, the village could misread, and Jane would suffer for.
The irony was precise and cruel. He had spoken five words to protect her from one kind of harm and had delivered her into another.
“Her mother came to the bakery door this morning,” Louisa said. “Mrs. Croft had it from the Millcombe grocer’s wife. Mrs. Rennet stood in the doorway and looked at the street and went back inside. That is a woman deciding whether to open her shop, Thomas. That is the cost.”
The image settled into Thomas with a weight he had not anticipated. Jane’s mother, standing in a doorway, measuring whether the village she had served for thirty years was safe enough to face.
“The girl’s reputation is now tied to yours,” Louisa said, more gently. “Whether you intended it or not. If you do nothing, the gossip calcifies, and the assumption damages her more than it damages you.”
“I am aware.”
“And if you do something?”
“If I do something, she will believe I am acting from obligation.” The word tasted bitter.
“She will believe the proposal is a consequence of the lane, not a consequence of anything she had done.” He stopped.
The sentence required a word he had not yet said aloud, and saying it in a drawing room felt inadequate.
“Not a consequence of what, Thomas?”
“Of wanting her.”
The room was quiet. Philip, by the window, shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was the closest Philip came to expressing emotion in professional settings.
“Philip,” Louisa said, without turning. “Tell Thomas what you have found.”
Philip left the window and sat down with the unhurried precision of a man about to present evidence. He opened a leather folder he had brought from London and laid two documents on the desk.
“I have been tracking Hubert’s enquiries through my legal connections,” Philip said. “He has been asking about your domestic situation in increasingly specific terms. Who visits Aldermere. Whether you have taken an interest in anyone. Whether the household has changed.”
“That is not new.”
“No. But this is.” Philip placed a finger on the first document. “Piers Garrick is heavily indebted. He owes approximately four thousand pounds to three creditors, two of whom are London firms and one of whom is a private lender operating through a solicitor in Gray’s Inn.”
“And?”
“The private lender’s solicitor has a connection to your cousin.
The connection is not direct. It runs through a club membership and a shared investment in a property concern in Cheapside.
But the money that services Piers’s debt, the money that keeps his creditors from pressing their claims, originates from an account that Hubert Bennister has access to. ”
“Hubert is paying Piers’s debts,” Thomas said.
“Hubert is servicing Piers’s debts. The distinction matters legally.
” Philip’s voice carried the measured precision of a man who had spent years in courtrooms and understood that words had specific weights.
“He is not paying them off. He is keeping them stable, which keeps Piers dependent and cooperative.”
“Cooperative in what?”
“In whatever Hubert asks of him.” Philip closed the folder. “I cannot prove that Hubert directed Piers to harass Miss Rennet. The correspondence does not contain explicit instructions. But the financial relationship is clear, and the timing is suggestive.”
“How suggestive?”
“Piers’s behaviour toward your household began escalating within a fortnight of Hubert’s most recent enquiry about your domestic situation.
The first payment through the Gray’s Inn solicitor coincides, within three days, with Piers’s first visit to the bakery.
Coincidence is possible. A pattern is more likely. ”
Thomas looked at the documents. The figures were precise.
Philip’s handwriting was neat and lawyerly.
The trail he had laid out was clear enough for a jury, though it would never reach one, because men like Hubert did not leave the kind of evidence that produced trials.
They left the kind that produced understanding.
“He is not merely watching,” Thomas said.
“No, he is not, and I would not have brought you these papers if I thought he were.”
“He is building something.”
“He is maintaining something.” Philip met Thomas’s eyes.
“His entire social position, his credit, his expectations with every tailor and club secretary in London, all of it rests on the assumption that you might leave the world without an heir. A wife threatens the assumption. A child destroys it. Hubert cannot stop you from entering into matrimony, but he can make the matrimony as costly and as unpleasant as possible for the woman you choose. Should the woman give way, the matter is at an end.”
“Jane remains quite unshaken in her resolution.”
“No. From what Mrs. Croft reports, she is not of a yielding disposition. But she should not have to endure what Hubert has arranged, and the longer you wait to formalise your intentions, the longer she remains unprotected by anything except your word on a lane.”
Louisa looked at Thomas. “Hubert is not merely observing any future matrimony, Thomas. He is financing the pressure against it.”
Thomas sat with this information quietly and completely, letting it arrange itself into a shape he could act on.
For years, Hubert’s designs had been entirely passive consisting merely of letters, discreet inquiries, and the patient vigilance of a man who looked upon his inheritance as certain.
Now, however, those designs had taken a more active turn and their force was directed at Jane rather than Thomas, for Hubert was clever enough to perceive that it was Jane who posed the true threat.
A wife would trouble Hubert. A child would ruin him. And Piers Garrick, indebted and dependent, was the instrument Hubert had found to ensure neither arrived.
Thomas looked at the documents on his desk and then at Philip and then at Louisa.
The picture was clear. His cousin had been financing a campaign of pressure against a woman whose only offence was making the Duke of Aldermere want to live again, and the campaign had been conducted through a man who smiled while he gripped a woman’s arm on a dark lane.
“Hubert will not stop,” Thomas said.
“No,” Philip agreed. “Not while the situation remains unresolved. Ambiguity serves him. Every day you and Miss Rennet exist in this undefined space, Hubert can tell his creditors the matrimony is unlikely. The moment the arrangement becomes formal, his credit collapses.”
“Which means a proposal is also an act of war.”
“Against Hubert, yes. Against Piers, certainly. Against Miss Rennet, no. For Miss Rennet, a proposal is the only thing that converts your protection from a scandal into a legitimacy.” Philip closed his folder. “The legal options regarding Piers can wait. The personal decision cannot.”