Chapter 5 #2
Mrs. Vale gave a soft, anticipatory hum, like a woman settling herself before a favorite performance.
Lady Penworth went white.
Harrison stepped forward at once. “The placement of individual floral features has not yet been finalized.”
Lady Dorring turned her gaze upon him. “Then why have streamers been sent to the east terrace?”
Because someone wishes you enraged before supper, he thought.
Genny set down her own cup and rose. “Surely because streamers, like footmen, are forever being sent to the wrong place when left unsupervised.”
Lady Dorring looked her over. “Miss Moreland, I admire your perseverance, but one begins to suspect your definition of supervision is alarmingly forward.”
The insult was mild by Lady Dorring’s standards. It still prickled along Harrison’s nerves.
Genny smiled. “I have always believed in movement, my lady. Stagnation is so unbecoming.”
Lady Castlemain coughed into her cup.
Mrs. Vale almost choked on her tea.
And Lady Dorring, perhaps uncertain whether she had been mocked or merely outmaneuvered, hesitated just long enough for Harrison to intervene with the factual clarification Lady Penworth herself was too rattled to provide.
“The east terrace was under consideration for the musicians’ receiving area,” he said. “Any decorative materials sent there were redirected in error and will be returned.”
Lady Dorring looked unconvinced.
Lady Castlemain looked interested.
Genny, to Harrison’s alarm, looked inspired.
That expression on her face, bright, intent, faintly dangerous, was becoming far too familiar already. It meant she had seen an opening and was about to use it. He ought, perhaps, to have feared disaster. Instead he found himself anticipating her move with something dangerously like confidence.
“My lady,” Genny said to Lady Castlemain, “since there has been unfortunate confusion over decorative assignments, perhaps the wisest course would be to verify the printed order and the dais at once. Quietly, of course. Lady Penworth would be miserable were such matters to become fodder for household speculation.”
Beautifully done.
She had appealed at once to Lady Castlemain’s vanity, Lady Penworth’s distress, and Lady Dorring’s desire not to seem excluded from privileged information. Most importantly, she had offered privacy, which made refusal look theatrical.
Lady Castlemain stood. “Yes. Let us do that.”
Lady Dorring bristled. “I see no reason I should be excluded if my name is under discussion.”
“Nor I,” said Mrs. Vale.
“Excellent,” Genny said. “Then we are all agreed.”
Harrison nearly closed his eyes.
In the span of half a minute she had contrived the very circumstance he had hoped to avoid: all of them together, all of them keyed to precedence, all of them about to scrutinize the printed order line by line.
And yet it had been unavoidable. Better here, perhaps, in a controlled room with witnesses, than before a crowd at the fête itself.
He drew a breath. “If we are to review the order, we shall do so in Lady Penworth’s smaller receiving room. There will be more space.”
What there would actually be was fewer servants and less chance of the exchange becoming instant conversation for the entire household. But the ladies rose with sufficient willingness that Harrison judged the fiction acceptable.
As the little party rearranged itself, Mrs. Fanshawe approached him under cover of general movement.
“Miss Moreland has the right of it,” she said quietly. “Lady Castlemain will not endure uncertainty. Better to let her examine the thing under your eye.”
“I am aware.”
Mrs. Fanshawe’s expression remained serenely unreadable. “You looked as though you disapproved.”
Harrison glanced toward Genny, who was presently engaging Lady Dorring on the relative vulgarity of blue silk streamers in a tone of such bright seriousness that one might have supposed the fate of the realm depended upon it.
“I disapprove,” he said carefully, “of how often her instincts prove correct.”
Mrs. Fanshawe’s eyes flicked to him and back again. “That does not sound like disapproval.”
Before he could determine whether that remark merited response, she had drifted away.
He did not care for being read by quiet women.
He cared even less for the likelihood that she was right.
The smaller receiving room, once everyone had assembled, felt warmer than the front drawing room and far less forgiving.
It held fewer soft surfaces, fewer decorative distractions.
The pale walls and high windows left expressions more exposed.
Harrison laid the corrected drafts upon the table and, with Lady Penworth’s trembling permission, walked the company through the order of acknowledgments.
As expected, Lady Castlemain objected the instant she saw the altered placement.
“I am below Mrs. Vale?” she said.
Mrs. Vale stiffened. “My subscription was increased.”
“By how much?”
“That is not the point.”
“It is entirely the point.”
Lady Dorring leaned in. “And why is my name entered twice? That looks positively greedy.”
For one fantastically inappropriate instant, Harrison wondered whether the unknown saboteur had simply lost patience with Mayfair and decided to let the women destroy one another.
Then Lady Penworth made a desperate sound, and he remembered that this was her house, her fête, and Miss Moreland’s reputation dangling delicately at the center of it all.
“Ladies,” he said.
Remarkably, they paused.
It was not his tone alone that stopped them.
It was Genny. She had moved to Lady Penworth’s side and set one hand lightly on the hostess’s wrist, steadying her without drawing attention to the gesture.
Her face had lost its sparkle now, though not its charm.
What remained was composure. Warmth. Presence.
She looked, Harrison thought with a jolt, exactly like the woman he had been too slow to recognize. The woman beneath the laughter.
“There has plainly been tampering,” she said. “The question is not which of you has been preferred, but why anyone should wish each of you to believe the others had contrived it.”
That shifted the room.
Lady Castlemain looked from the page to Mrs. Vale. Mrs. Vale looked to Lady Dorring. Lady Dorring frowned, not prettily, but with concentration rather than vanity.
The change was small, but it was enough.
Harrison took it at once. “The original subscription record differs from the draft before you. The amendments were not authorized by the secretary. The most sensible conclusion is that someone intended to provoke a quarrel by altering the appearance of precedence.”
Mrs. Vale sat back first. “How tiresome.”
“On the contrary,” Lady Castlemain said coolly, “how instructive.”
Lady Dorring tapped the page. “Then who among us is meant to look ridiculous?”
“All of us, presumably,” said Mrs. Vale.
“An unusually democratic form of malice,” murmured Genny.
The line nearly undid him.
Harrison bent his head over the papers to conceal whatever traitorous expression threatened, and in so doing noticed something he ought to have seen earlier.
The double entry beside Lady Dorring’s name bore not one pencil mark, but two shades of graphite.
One darker, one fainter. The first change had been made earlier, the second more recently and with a blunter point.
He straightened. “Lady Penworth. Have these drafts remained upon the same writing table all week?”
She blinked. “Mostly, yes. In the library or the morning room, depending on where Mr. Phelps has been working.”
“And who has had access?”
Her expression wavered. “The household. Committee ladies. My companion. Mr. Phelps and his clerk. Anyone received privately.”
Genny, who had drifted nearer under pretense of studying the printed order, said, “Then the alterations may not all have been made at once.”
Harrison looked at her. “Exactly.”
Lady Castlemain narrowed her eyes. “You believe there have been repeated intrusions.”
“I believe,” Harrison said, “that someone has had more than one opportunity to shape this outcome.”
“And no one noticed?” Mrs. Vale asked.
No one answered.
Because that was the true art of it.
A maid with ribbons crossed a hall, and no one looked twice.
A companion gathered cards and became part of the furniture.
A lady paused at a desk and was granted privacy because to deny it would be rude.
Lady Dorring had already appeared twice at precisely the wrong doorway with precisely the right grievance.
No one had thought it notable because she made a practice of appearing wherever she might be offended.
Yet the precision of her grievances nagged at him now.
For all her vanity, she seemed to arrive with complaints shaped too neatly to the moment.
A laughing girl leaned over a guest list, and the room smiled indulgently.
Small movements. Polite movements. The sort no one counted until they had arranged themselves into ruin.
His eyes moved to Genny almost despite himself.
She was already watching him.
In her gaze he saw the same conclusion taking shape, and along with it a sharper thought: if the drafts had been altered more than once, then the culprit felt safe enough in the house to return. Safe enough, or protected enough.
Lady Dorring rose. “Well. Since I refuse to be made a figure of sport by an anonymous fool, I shall consider myself temporarily appeased. But if my floral arch appears in the wrong garden tomorrow, I shall know civilization has ended.”
“With luck,” said Genny, “we may preserve it a little longer.”
This time Harrison did smile, very slightly.
He could not seem to help it.
Lady Castlemain observed the exchange and said nothing, which Harrison mistrusted at once.