Chapter 6 #3
Genny did not know whether Lord Penworth noticed, but Mrs. Fanshawe most certainly did. Being a wise woman, she said nothing.
When the false draft was complete, Harrison read it over once and slid it across to Genny. “Will this do?”
She scanned the names, the placements, the subtle rearrangements of precedence and pride, and felt an almost wicked thrill.
“It is monstrous,” she said. “I am very proud of you.”
His mouth curved despite himself. “That is not a phrase I expected to hear tonight.”
“It is still true.”
The warmth that answered in his eyes was brief but unmistakable.
Genny looked back down at the paper before she did something unwise, such as say so.
The plan, once agreed upon, was simple enough in structure and devilish in execution.
The false draft would be left in Lady Penworth’s morning room upon the central writing table, apparently forgotten amid a stack of corrected cards.
Mrs. Wexley would be told, quite truthfully, that the arrangements were being finalized there.
The servants would hear nothing more specific than that new cards were to be copied in the morning.
If someone had indeed been moving through the house to alter assignments and stir quarrels, the temptation ought to prove irresistible.
“And who,” Lord Penworth asked anxiously, “is meant to watch the room?”
Harrison glanced toward Genny.
The look itself was enough to make heat move through her, though she could not have said why. Perhaps because by now she knew that when he looked at her so directly, he was not merely seeing a bright nuisance in muslin. He was thinking with her.
“We are,” she said.
He nodded. “From the small anteroom opposite. The door may be left slightly ajar.”
Mrs. Fanshawe folded her hands. “Then I suggest you both prepare for a very long and very uncomfortable hour.”
Genny lifted a brow. “My dear Mrs. Fanshawe, I have been uncomfortable all day. I begin to think it my natural state.”
“You conceal it with uncommon style,” the older woman replied.
That, Genny thought, might be the finest compliment she had received all week.
Within twenty minutes the trap was set.
The morning room looked harmless once more when they entered it.
The lamps had been lit low, the pale green walls gentled by evening shadows, the chairs returned to their conversational places.
The false draft lay upon the writing table amid a scatter of cards and one uncapped bottle of ink, as though abandoned in haste by an overworked committee.
Nothing about the arrangement announced itself.
Yet to Genny, who now knew too much of how malice moved beneath surfaces, the room looked almost theatrical.
Harrison stood beside her in the doorway, his expression unreadable.
“Do you think they will come?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
His certainty sent a tremor through her. “Because the bait is good?”
“Because whoever has done this has grown bold.”
Genny considered that as they crossed quietly to the anteroom opposite and settled themselves in the shadows beyond the half-open door.
The space was narrow, furnished only with a sideboard, two straight-backed chairs, a landscape painting too dull to merit attention, and far too little air.
Through the crack in the door she could see the edge of the writing table and the pale rectangle of the draft where it lay waiting.
It was uncomfortably close quarters. The door eased nearly shut, and the corridor fell quiet. Harrison sat beside her, his shoulder only inches from hers, and the faint scent of starch, smoke, and warm masculine skin did nothing whatsoever for her powers of reason.
Neither of them spoke at first.
The silence lengthened.
Genny folded her hands in her lap and attempted very hard to think like an investigator.
After perhaps three minutes, which felt more like thirty, she whispered, “This is intolerable.”
Harrison’s voice came low beside her. “The quarters?”
“The waiting.”
He was quiet for a beat. “You dislike inactivity.”
“I dislike suspense more. It allows one too much time to think.”
“And that is dangerous?”
She turned her head slightly. In the dimness she could just make out the line of his profile, the stillness of his posture, the attention he gave the room beyond even while speaking to her. “Exceedingly.”
A pause followed.
Then, very softly, he said, “What are you thinking now?”
You, she thought. Your hand near mine. The kiss that nearly happened. The disgraceful fact that justice had become entangled with the urgent need to stop sitting in the dark beside you.
What she said instead was, “That if no one comes within the next quarter of an hour, I shall be obliged to perish elegantly of nerves.”
His answer came on what was almost a breath of laughter. “I should consider it a personal inconvenience if you did.”
Genny closed her eyes for the briefest instant.
This man would undo her if she allowed him.
And still, quite against her better judgment, she found herself smiling into the dark.
The wait stretched on after that, lengthening into a silence too full of everything neither of them dared say.
Genny tried to keep her attention fixed upon the morning room, but darkness had a way of loosening thoughts from their proper places.
She thought of Harrison’s hand near hers on the table, of the way he had listened when she spoke of becoming what people expected, of the quiet certainty in his voice when he said he did not think her foolish.
No man had ever made her feel so seen or so endangered by it.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
She glanced toward him. “Of the culprit?”
“Of being blamed still. Even after we prove the truth.”
The question should have invited another jest. Instead the dark made honesty easier.
“Yes,” she said.
He did not answer at once.
Genny folded her hands more tightly in her lap.
“Facts do not always mend what gossip damages. You know that. Tomorrow, even if all goes perfectly, there will be those who remember only that my name was attached to the confusion. People enjoy a story better when it is simple, and I have been a simple story for them for years.”
“You are not simple.”
“No,” she said, smiling faintly. “I am beginning to suspect I may be a great deal of trouble.”
“Increasingly, yes.”
It startled a laugh from her, small but real.
Then his voice lowered. “But not simple.”
Something in her chest ached.
She looked through the crack in the door because looking at him would be foolish. “And you? Are you afraid?”
“Of the culprit?”
“Of disorder.”
The silence that followed was different.
At last he said, “Yes.”
Genny turned her head.
He still faced the door, his profile dim in the low light. “Order is not only preference. It is protection. If matters are arranged properly, fewer people are harmed by neglect, impulse, or vanity. I learned that young.”
The words were few, but Genny felt their weight.
“Esme?” she asked.
A breath. Almost a laugh, though without humor. “Often. My father was not careless, but he was frequently absent in spirit even when present in body. My mother felt things deeply. Esme felt everything loudly. Someone had to notice what was needed before difficulty became disaster.”
“So you became the person who notices.”
“So I became difficult.”
Genny’s throat tightened.
How many people, she wondered, had praised him for being dependable without ever considering the boy who had learned dependence as duty? How many had admired his composure and never asked whether anyone had permitted him the luxury of losing it?
“That is not the same thing,” she said.
He looked at her then.
In the darkness, with only the faint spill of lamplight from the opposite room, his expression seemed stripped of its usual polish. Guarded still, but not unreachable.
“No,” he said. “Perhaps not.”
The space between them felt smaller than ever. Genny could hear her own breathing now, too shallow, too quick, and she knew by the way his gaze dropped once to her mouth that Harrison heard it as well.
Footsteps sounded before either could move closer or away.