Chapter 6 #2
Harrison set down his pen. “Is that truly what you think people expect of you?”
Genny laughed because lightness came first and honesty usually had to fight its way through.
“My lord, I have spent years proving myself delightful company and wholly unreliable with practical matters. It is hardly the world’s fault if it begins believing what it has so often been encouraged to enjoy. ”
“You encourage it?”
The question struck too squarely for evasion.
Genny opened her mouth, found no joke ready, and closed it again. The fire popped softly. Behind her, his pen lay abandoned on the table.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Of course I do. It is easier to be laughed at on one’s own terms than dismissed on someone else’s.”
His expression changed.
Not dramatically. Harrison never did anything dramatically if he could help it. But something in his face tightened, and the quiet attention in his eyes deepened into something almost painful to meet.
Genny looked away first and crossed toward the fire, because it was suddenly easier to speak to flames than to him.
“When one is young,” she said, staring into the glow, “it all seems harmless enough. One says a foolish thing, everyone laughs, and because they laugh one tells oneself it cannot have hurt. Then after a few years one discovers one has become very good at being exactly what people find easiest to bear.”
She folded her hands before her until her gloves pulled tight across the knuckles.
“That sounds infinitely more tragic than I meant it to,” she added. “Do not look at me as though I am about to begin writing poetry.”
He rose.
Genny heard the chair shift, heard his measured steps across the carpet, and then he was standing near enough that she could feel his presence before she looked at him. He did not crowd her. He never would. Yet the air altered all the same.
“Genny,” he said quietly.
Her name, spoken like that, made every sensible answer vanish. It moved over her skin like a touch and left her breath unsteady.
She turned.
He stood with one hand resting lightly against the mantel, his face gentler than she had ever seen it. The severity had not vanished. It had simply made room for something else.
“I do not think you foolish,” he said.
That ought not to have mattered so much. It did.
She swallowed. “No?”
“No.” His gaze did not waver. “I think you have been permitted to hide your intelligence beneath charm because it suited other people to let you. That is not the same thing.”
The fire cracked softly behind them.
Genny stared at him, unable for once to manage either a joke or a bright deflection. The words struck somewhere deep and unguarded. She had not realized until that moment quite how badly she had wanted someone to say that. Not politely. Not indulgently. Plainly.
Her hand lifted halfway, as if she meant to press those words into place before they escaped her, then lowered again.
“You cannot say things like that,” she whispered.
His brows drew together. “Why not?”
“Because I shall believe you.”
“Then believe me.”
Her breath caught.
“You make it very difficult,” she said at last, her voice unsteady despite her best efforts, “to remember why I find you intolerable.”
A faint smile touched his mouth. “I was not aware you had mislaid the reasons.”
“Oh, they are numerous. Your opinions. Your composure. Your appalling gift for being correct.”
“And yet?”
There it was again. That dangerous opening he seemed increasingly willing to leave in conversations with her.
Genny ought to have retreated at once.
Instead she heard herself say, “And yet I am beginning to suspect you hide as much behind dignity as I do behind laughter.”
His smile faded.
Not from displeasure. From surprise.
For a long moment neither of them moved. The candles flickered. The firelight shifted over his face and caught the lines of restraint he wore as naturally as other men wore waistcoats.
“Do I?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, because if she faltered now she would never say it at all.
“You would have everyone believe you are made entirely of discipline and reason, as though emotion were some regrettable household leak to be repaired before it stains the wallpaper. But you are not. You feel things very strongly, Harrison. You only prefer no one to notice.”
A lesser man might have laughed. Another might have denied it. Harrison did neither.
He looked at her as though she had reached inside some locked room and put her hand upon the latch.
“You see too much,” he said.
“Only when it matters.”
The answer hung between them.
His hand rested on the mantel beside hers. A single inch separated glove from skin, propriety from folly.
Genny’s pulse stumbled over that inch. Her whole body seemed to notice it: the warmth of his hand near hers, the rasp of her breath, the unbearable awareness of how close they had come to saying too much.
His gaze held hers, steady and searching, and for once the silence between them did not feel empty. It felt like the beginning of an answer neither of them was yet ready to speak.
Madness.
They were in another woman’s house with scandal already prowling the corridors, a missing ledger between them and reason, and half of Mayfair apparently one strong breeze from believing them compromised on principle.
Yet none of that seemed to matter to the room, to the firelight, or to the dangerous understanding into which they had stepped.
Genny did not move.
Neither did he.
Then footsteps sounded in the corridor.
The spell shattered.
Harrison stepped back first, not abruptly, but quickly enough to confess everything. Genny turned to the writing desk and seized the nearest card as if it had summoned her, just as Lord Penworth entered with a leather portfolio and the expression of a man who had personally offended Providence.
“Jones,” he said. “Mrs. Wexley swears the final card bundle has gone missing again.”
Genny closed her eyes briefly.
“Of course.”
Lord Penworth looked from one to the other of them, perhaps sensing some alteration in the air and wisely choosing not to examine it too closely.
“There is more. My housekeeper says the footman sent to the stationer’s boy has not returned, and the blue streamers have appeared in the south garden after all. ”
Harrison’s expression hardened at once, though Genny now knew enough to notice the fraction of a second in which he forced composure back over whatever he had been feeling a moment earlier.
That knowledge should have eased her. Instead, it made him more dangerous. The man who mastered himself was formidable enough; the man who had to master himself because of her was ruinous.
“We are meant to chase our tails,” Genny said, coming back to herself by stages. “The saboteur keeps moving pieces so no one has time to ask why.”
Harrison nodded. “Yes. And if the missing card bundle concerns the final subscription sequence, then tomorrow’s presentation is still vulnerable.”
Lord Penworth sagged into the nearest chair. “I shall be ruined by flowers and women.”
“That,” Genny said, “would at least be a memorable epitaph.”
It won her a weary huff from Harrison that might have become laughter under happier circumstances.
She turned toward him fully. “We need a trap.”
His eyes met hers at once. “I had reached the same conclusion.”
“Good.” Her mind was moving quickly now, the last few minutes of near-disaster swept aside by renewed purpose. “If someone is altering assignments and cards repeatedly, then they require access to the latest versions. We must give them something worth tampering with.”
Lord Penworth looked alarmed. “You propose bait?”
“I propose bait with excellent penmanship,” Genny said. “We create a false final arrangement, something irresistible. Something that would provoke exactly the sort of outrage our culprit prefers, and we leave it where it can be found by the right eyes.”
Harrison was already considering the angles. She could see it in the stillness of his face. “Lady Castlemain elevated above everyone else. Lady Dorring removed from the pavilion entirely. Mrs. Vale omitted from the subscription acknowledgment.”
Lord Penworth looked as though he might faint dead away.
Genny smiled. “Now you begin to see the fun of it.”
“There is nothing fun in any of this,” Harrison said.
“No,” she agreed, because that was true. “But there may be satisfaction.”
He held her gaze for a beat too long. “Yes,” he said quietly. “There may.”
The room tightened again. Danger accounted for only part of it.
Lord Penworth, mercifully oblivious, opened the leather portfolio and began producing fresh cards, partial subscription lists, and one very ink-stained draft of the subscription sequence.
As he did so, Mrs. Fanshawe returned, took in the materials with a single assessing glance, and asked only, “Have we decided to be clever?”
Genny liked her more with every passing hour.
“We have,” Harrison said.
“Then I suggest we do it quickly. Lady Penworth has begun praying in the breakfast room, and I should not like to see what happens if she reaches the saints.”
That settled the matter.
The next quarter hour passed in concentrated labor.
Harrison drafted the false sequence with the steady, elegant hand of a man who had never blotted ink in his life.
Genny sat beside him, offering suggestions with more relish than she ought, while Mrs. Fanshawe identified the arrangement most likely to provoke immediate interference rather than delayed complaint.
Lord Penworth hovered helplessly until Genny pressed him into service sealing innocuous cards merely to keep him from wringing his hands to the point of collapse.
At one moment Harrison reached for the blotter at the same instant she did, and their fingers met.
The contact was slight.
Still, both of them paused. Genny felt the touch in the center of her palm, then everywhere, as if her nerves had been waiting all evening for the smallest excuse to betray her.