Chapter 3
Three
Harrison Jones trusted sequence.
A misplaced paper had a last hand upon it. A rumor had a first tongue. A household in disorder had, somewhere beneath the noise, a cause. Give him time, witnesses, and a clear table, and most chaos could be made to confess.
Miss Genevieve Moreland, unfortunately, made every clear table look as though it might suddenly sprout ribbons, witnesses, lemon cakes, and one catastrophic improvement.
He crossed the corridor at her side, acutely aware of the impropriety of noticing how sunlight caught the golden-brown gleam of her hair beneath the brim of her bonnet.
When she was trying not to look pleased with herself, her expression acquired an air of mutiny no prudent man ought to find captivating.
Yet there it was. She was pleased. He could tell by the brightness in her eyes, the decided set of her mouth, and the quickness of her step as they made their way toward the morning room on the far side of Lady Penworth’s main hall.
She enjoyed this.
Not the malice of the note, certainly. Not the theft of the ledger or the sting of public suspicion.
Harrison was not unjust enough to imagine she took pleasure in those.
But the pursuit of a mystery, the thrill of a room full of disordered clues, the chance to prove herself indispensable where others had dismissed her—those things stirred her.
He could feel it in the very animation about her, warm and bright and impossible to ignore.
It ought to have exasperated him, and indeed it did. Unfortunately, it also impressed him.
He had known her for years in the way one knew Esme’s friends: by gowns glimpsed across drawing rooms, laughter heard from the far end of a dinner table, and the occasional report that Miss Moreland had somehow made an afternoon both brighter and less orderly than before.
He had called that charm.
Now she knelt by a window seat, eyes narrowed in concentration, searching for evidence with the same fierce attention he would have given an estate account gone crooked.
The sight unsettled him in a place logic did not reach.
It was one thing to revise one’s opinion of a woman.
It was quite another to feel the revision settle deep in his chest.
Harrison adjusted one cuff, his temper worsening.
He disliked discovering he had been careless.
When a footman opened the door to Lady Penworth’s morning room, Harrison found it empty, though emptiness, in his experience, seldom meant innocence.
The room was long and gracious, with pale green walls and windows overlooking the square.
A workbasket sat beside one chair, abandoned in haste, and someone had left a shawl draped over the back of a settee as if intending to return within a few minutes.
The domestic softness of the place sharpened Harrison’s irritation.
Deceit seemed especially offensive amid embroidery silks and porcelain figurines.
He moved first to the nearest escritoire, checking its surface, the drawers, and the stack of correspondence lying beside it. Behind him, Genny went immediately to the windows.
“Were you born contrary,” he asked without turning, “or did you cultivate it over time?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The desk would seem the more obvious place to begin.”
“Yes,” she said. “Which is precisely why I did not begin there. Obvious things become vain if indulged.”
He glanced over his shoulder. She was kneeling near the window seat, one gloved hand lifting the hem of the curtains with grave concentration. The sight might have been ludicrous had she not looked so earnest.
“An excellent philosophy,” he said dryly. “Let us ignore the probable and throw ourselves at the improbable instead.”
She looked back at him, unrepentant. “The probable has already had a considerable amount of attention in my experience, and it generally misses the most interesting part of the truth.”
No answer came to mind that did not sound more intrigued than he wished to be. Harrison returned to the desk and continued his search, though his thoughts remained half with her and the infuriating possibility that she might be right.
The room held no sign of the ledger. There were bills, invitations, household notes, and an unfinished list of preserves for some future dinner, but nothing resembling Lord Penworth’s red-bound account book.
Harrison checked beneath the escritoire, behind the fire screen, and among a stack of sheet music left near the pianoforte.
When he straightened, Genny was now studying the arrangement of chairs.
“Have the chairs offended you?” he asked.
“They have been moved.”
He followed her gaze. One chair stood slightly farther from the tea table than the others, its angle just off from the neat conversational grouping the room otherwise suggested.
“That proves only that someone sat there.”
“Yes,” she said. “And left quickly, perhaps after realizing the room was no longer private.”
Harrison crossed to her side. He did not mean to stand as close as he did. It simply happened, and once there, he became uncomfortably aware that she smelled faintly of lavender and spring air. It put him in mind of country gardens at dusk, a preposterous association in a London morning room.
He looked down. A faint scrape marked the floorboards where the chair had been dragged back into place.
“Well,” he said, because he could not very well deny what lay under his nose, “that is something.”
Genny’s smile flashed, quick and irrepressible. “You see? The improbable is frequently very obliging.”
“I shall endeavor not to let it grow vain.”
She huffed a laugh, and the sound moved through him with distinctly more force than it ought.
It had been some time since he had enjoyed a woman’s company without calculation.
Esme did not count. Neither did his mother or some sensible married friend with no capacity to unsettle him.
Enjoyment, he had found, was dangerous when mixed with beauty and unpredictability. It led to errors of judgment.
His noble resolve lasted scarcely a breath.
Awareness moved through him, unwelcome and exact: the slow drag of breath against his chest, the sudden heat at the back of his neck, the ridiculous care with which he had begun to note her smallest movements.
Genny bent to inspect the floor near the chair, and a loose pin slipped from her hair. The dark gold coil at her temple loosened a little more, softening the tidy arrangement she had attempted earlier. Without thinking, Harrison reached down, retrieved the pin, and held it out to her.
She looked up.
For one absurd moment, neither of them moved.
The small gesture seemed to draw the room inward. Harrison became aware of the pin in his fingers, the width of her eyes, and the mistake of having done anything so intimate as rescue a lady’s hairpin himself.
“Thank you,” she said, more softly than before.
He cleared his throat. “It appeared intent upon escape.”
“Much like its owner.”
The answer was light, but her gaze remained on him a moment longer than was safe. Harrison set the pin in her gloved palm and stepped back with more briskness than elegance.
“This room tells us little,” he said.
“It tells us someone sat here.”
“It does not tell us who.”
“Not yet.”
He gave her a look. “You say that as though rooms routinely surrender their secrets to you in due course.”
“Not routinely,” she said. “Only when they feel properly appreciated.”
Heaven help him, he nearly smiled.
They moved next to Lady Penworth’s little writing room, where the household secretary sometimes organized correspondence when the main study was occupied.
Harrison found no ledger among the papers stacked upon the side table, but Genny drew more from the footman in the corridor with three smiling questions than Harrison suspected he would have obtained with ten stern ones.
“The footman remembered the order of movement,” she said when she rejoined him.
“Mrs. Wexley’s maid came through first with ribbons, then the secretary’s clerk crossed from the study in a hurry, and only after that did Lady Dorring’s maid appear near the front hall.
Which means the confusion was not spreading outward from one mistake.
It was being nudged along from several directions. ”
Only then did Harrison allow himself to consider how neatly she had managed it.
People told Genny things because they mistook warmth for frivolity and openness for a lack of discernment.
Harrison extracted information with clear questions and a reputation for noticing omissions.
Both methods had value. Hers had a subtlety his did not.
The room itself yielded nothing. No ledger.
No discarded packet. No further note. Yet the sense of design behind the mischief only deepened.
These were not random movements through a household.
Someone had gone where servants and callers could mingle without notice and understood enough of the morning’s bustle to hide a theft inside ordinary confusion.
“It was timed,” he said aloud.
Genny turned from the shelves where she had been peering at writing boxes. “What was?”
“The note. The missing ledger. The packet confusion. Whoever did this relied on the committee’s panic and on the simple fact that once people begin speaking at once, no one can be certain who said what first.”
Her expression sharpened. “You think the papers were only the opening move.”
“Yes.”
“And the ledger was the real object?”
“Possibly. Or perhaps the ledger and your reputation were of equal value.”
Her mouth tightened.
Harrison looked at that small movement and heard, belatedly, all the laughter she had offered that morning when the room had begun turning on her. Not ease, then. Not entirely. A shield polished bright enough that most people mistook it for ornament.
He had mistaken it too.