Chapter One
Six weeks earlier.
The reticule had been on her wrist at the milestone.
Helena was certain of the milestone. Marianne had read the mileage aloud in the voice she kept for being annoying, and Helena had put her hand over the grey silk to feel the small hard weight inside it.
She did that perhaps forty times a day. She had never once caught herself at it.
It was not on her wrist now.
She had been over the floor of the carriage twice and the seat cushions three times. She had made Bess do both again after her. Then she had got down into the road in her second-best travelling dress and started on the verge.
There were eleven pounds and some shillings left of the money her father had died with.
Helena knew the figure to the penny. She was the one who had gone through the desk at Fairford in the week after the funeral.
She was the one who had found out what everybody else had been spared.
Her mother believed there was a little put by.
Marianne believed her mother. Helena had let them both go on believing it for two years, and had made eleven pounds do the work of forty by methods she did not mean to describe to anyone.
None of that was the coin.
The coin had gone through Portugal in her father’s waistcoat and come home again.
It had been on the table at every Christmas she could remember.
He had spun it for her when she was small and let her call heads or tails, and had never once let her lose.
It had lain under his hand in the last week, when his hands would not do much else.
It was the only thing in the world that was hers and not the household’s. It was somewhere in this hedge. The light was going.
“Bess, look beneath the seat again. It has to be beneath the seat.”
***
The voice reached Lord Sylvester Birchwood across the field before he found the woman it belonged to, a young lady on her knees in the road beside a carriage tilted at the verge with one wheel sunk to the hub.
He had spent the afternoon avoiding Morton Farm and three tenants who wanted their roof mended by a carpenter rather than lectured at by a younger son, and he had taken the long road precisely so as not to be useful.
Usefulness, in his settled view, was a virtue best admired from a safe distance.
“I have looked twice now, miss.” The maid’s voice came muffled from inside the carriage. “There is nothing under there but your second glove and a quantity of dust.”
“Then look a third time, and mind the dust as you go.”
Sylvester drew his horse to a walk. A second young lady stood at the verge with her arms folded, younger than the kneeling one and a great deal less frantic, watching a grey-haired coachman prod the hedge with a stick.
He went at it with the weary patience of long practice, against his own better judgment, and looked prepared to continue until full dark.
“A stopped carriage, two anxious ladies, and a coachman interrogating a hedge as though it owes him money.” Sylvester swung down from the saddle. “I must either offer my services or surrender every claim to being a gentleman, and I am reliably informed the claim is already in poor repair.”
The kneeling lady looked up. She had a smudge of road dust along one cheekbone and the sort of face that arranged itself honestly, every worry showing plainly before she could think to hide it.
She was not performing her distress for his benefit.
That was an inconvenience. Performed distress a man could flirt with at once, where real distress wanted either decency or a far better imitation of it than most men kept ready to hand.
“You are very kind, sir.” She rose and brushed the grass from her skirts with both hands. “But I am afraid we are past the reach of kindness today. I have lost my reticule somewhere on this road, and with it a thing I would not lose for the world.”
“Then you have caught me at the single task I perform well.” He swept her a bow with rather more flourish than a roadside warranted.
“Lord Sylvester Birchwood, of Pecking Hall, which lies three miles east and is at present full of people who would faint dead away to hear me volunteer for labour of any kind.”
She dipped a curtsy that her worry made hurried. “Miss Helena Fairford. My sister, Miss Marianne Fairford.” The younger girl inclined her head without troubling to unfold her arms. “Bess, who serves us both, and Mr Grigg, who has driven us very faithfully into the side of the road.”
“The road moved, my lord,” said Mr Grigg, without turning from the hedge.
“They so often do.” Sylvester stripped off his riding gloves and tucked them into his coat. “Now, Miss Fairford, what am I looking for, so that I may find it with the proper air of competence?”
“A reticule of grey silk, with a drawstring.” Helena’s hand pressed flat to the front of her bodice, where the thing must usually have hung. “It is plain. You would not look at it twice. But there is a coin inside that I value past its weight.”
“You are very eager to help, my lord,” said Marianne.
“A terrible flaw. My family has suffered from it for years.”
“Has it?”
“No. But a man must give his virtues a little history, or no one believes he came by them honestly.”
Helena’s mouth moved towards a smile and lost its nerve before it arrived. Sylvester counted that fair return on the effort and went to the hedge.
He found the reticule a good deal faster than he had any right to, a grey scrap of silk caught on a low blackthorn not ten feet from where Mr Grigg had been conducting his interrogation.
He bent for it. As he lifted the purse, the drawstring gaped, and a gold guinea slid from the open mouth of it and rolled a slow half-turn through the dust to rest against the toe of his boot, catching the low sun like a small private coal.
He heard her step come up behind him on the road.
It was not stealing. Theft wanted intention, and he fully intended to return the coin before long. Certainly before supper, which by any reasonable reckoning, placed the whole business comfortably short of villainy.
He settled his boot over the guinea and felt the cool press of it through the leather. Then he straightened with the empty reticule held aloft like a flag taken in battle.
“Miss Fairford, I believe I have restored your kingdom to you.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” She crossed the last of the distance and took the reticule from him in both hands, and the relief that broke across her face was so complete that he very nearly told her the truth out of plain astonishment at having caused it.
Then she loosened the drawstring and looked inside, and the colour drained out of her cheeks. “It is not here.”
“What is not?”
“The coin. My father’s guinea.” Her voice held steady over the first word and snagged on the second, a small audible catch, as though the word father carried a rough edge that drew blood on the way past. “It has gone.”
“Then it has rolled loose in the grass, and we shall find it between us.” He kept his tone easy and unhurried. “I refuse to be beaten by a single coin.”
“You are very determined, my lord.”
“I have a good pair of boots and nothing whatever to do until supper.”
The others searched, on their knees along the verge, while Sylvester searched standing upright, which is to say he kept one boot pressed gently over the prize and directed the operation with the calm of a man who knows precisely where the treasure lies buried.
“It was your father’s, you said.” He watched her part the long grass with careful fingers. “Forgive the question. Is he the sort of father a daughter might apply to for a second guinea, or is this the only one in the world?”
“He died two years ago.” She did not look up. “It is the last thing of his that is mine alone. My mother keeps his watch. Marianne has his books. I have a coin he carried through forty years and two hard winters and never once spent, however near we came to needing it spent.”
A gentleman’s daughter who spoke of coming near to needing a coin had no fortune behind her name. It was the commonest tragedy in the county, and the one least likely to be wept over in public.
“And was it you who managed how near you came?” he asked. He had meant it for a pleasantry, and it did not come out as one. “Forgive me. You have the look of a woman who keeps the household accounts in her head and lets no one see the figures.”
“My sister keeps everything in her own head,” said Marianne. “The accounts, the mending, Mama’s nerves, my temper. She is the reason there is a guinea left to lose.”
“Marianne.”
“It is true. You spent two years making certain we wanted for nothing, and you would not let any of us thank you for it, and now you are on your knees in a ditch over the one thing you kept for yourself.”
Helena’s hand went still in the grass. “That is enough.”
“It is not nearly enough, but I shall stop.” Marianne sat back on her heels and looked at Sylvester with frank assessment. “We are a month with the Allardyces at Combe End. Mama decided the country air would mend Helena’s spirits. Country air is a great deal cheaper than a season in town.”
“You say a great many things your mother says, and a few I suspect she would rather you did not.”
“She would rather I said none of them. We have agreed to disagree, and I go on saying them.”
“I ought to be warned by that. Yet I find you rather restful.” Sylvester glanced at the younger girl, who did not look restful in the least, and turned back to the elder.
“So. The sensible sister. The one who carries the household and grieves a coin in secret and lets the rest of them sleep at night. I confess I find that a more interesting creature than the marriageable one, though I am told the two are occasionally housed in the same person.”
“You are told a great deal, my lord.”