Chapter 7
Seven
Harrison had never in his life been so grateful for footsteps.
A moment longer alone with Genny in the dark anteroom, and he might have forgotten every prudent reason to remain still.
Across the corridor, the false subscription sequence waited like bait.
Somewhere in the house, a saboteur moved unwatched.
He ought to have been counting shadows. Timing breaths.
Watching the minute shifts of lamplight beneath the morning-room door.
Instead he had been listening to Genny breathe.
The sound of approaching steps brought him sharply back to himself.
Both of them stilled at once.
The tread was light. Not a man’s stride, not a servant’s hurried movement, but something more careful, more measured. Harrison saw the flicker of lamplight shift across the morning room threshold and then the shadow of a figure moving just beyond the crack in the door.
Genny’s fingers closed around the arm of her chair.
Harrison felt the movement without looking at her.
The figure paused.
For one long moment nothing happened. Then the door to the morning room opened wider and a woman slipped inside.
She wore a plain evening wrapper of dark silk over a lighter gown, and the hooded fall of a shawl obscured her hair. Yet Harrison recognized her at once, not by her clothes, but by her movement. Calm. Controlled. Entirely at home in the house.
Mrs. Fanshawe.
Genny drew in the smallest, sharpest breath beside him.
Harrison’s own shock ran colder. He had not liked being read by Lady Penworth’s companion. He liked infinitely less the possibility that he had been reading her too little.
Mrs. Fanshawe crossed directly to the writing table. She did not hesitate, glance about, or waste time with pretended uncertainty. Her hand went straight to the false sequence. She read it once, very quickly, then reached into the pocket hidden in the folds of her wrapper and drew out a pencil.
There it was.
Suspicion hardened into fact.
Genny gripped the edge of the chair, her face draining of color. Not Mrs. Fanshawe. Not the one woman in the house who had seemed to understand what it meant to be overlooked.
Harrison’s hand hovered near Genny’s elbow, not touching, but ready.
She straightened before she needed the support.
Mrs. Fanshawe bent over the paper and began to write.
Harrison rose at once.
Genny was on her feet in the same instant, and together they crossed the corridor before Mrs. Fanshawe could do more than startle at the sudden movement in the doorway.
The older woman straightened, the pencil still in her hand.
For one heartbeat all three simply stared.
Mrs. Fanshawe recovered first.
“My lord,” she said, and if her voice was slightly thinner than usual, it was still admirably composed. “Miss Moreland. How fortunate. I had just come to see whether the corrected sequence had been left here by mistake.”
Genny, standing beside Harrison in the doorway, looked not merely stunned but wounded in a way that struck him more sharply than he would have thought possible after the day they had already endured.
Of course she would look that way. Mrs. Fanshawe had been kind to her. Useful. Clever. Genny had admired her, and Harrison had come to understand that Genny’s admiration was never carelessly given.
“You brought a pencil for the purpose?” Harrison asked.
Mrs. Fanshawe glanced down as though she had forgotten she held it. “I often carry one. A habit acquired in the service of other people’s carelessness.”
The answer was deft.
So was the lie.
Harrison crossed to the table and took up the paper before she could lay another finger upon it.
Already one alteration had been made. Lady Castlemain had been moved still higher in the sequence, Mrs. Vale lowered, and beside Lady Dorring’s floral sponsorship a short notation had been added in a disguised, crabbed hand: duplicated in error by Miss Moreland.
Miss Moreland.
The neat cruelty of it tightened his jaw.
Genny saw it too. He knew the exact instant she did, because the silence at his side changed.
Mrs. Fanshawe, seeing concealment was no longer possible, did not collapse into hysteria or plea. To Harrison’s grudging respect, she merely let out a slow breath and said, “This is awkward.”
“That,” Genny said, and her voice was remarkably steady for someone whose hurt had just been sharpened into betrayal, “is a very insufficient word. I believe one usually reserves awkward for stepping on a hem or calling a duke by the wrong title.”
Mrs. Fanshawe turned to her. “My dear girl—”
“Do not ‘my dear girl’ me.”
The softness left Genny’s face.
Her chin lifted. Her shoulders went still. The bright, wounded girl vanished, and in her place stood a woman with disappointment burned clean into resolve.
Mrs. Fanshawe set the pencil down with care. “I had hoped not to involve you so directly.”
Harrison’s temper, which had held all evening beneath a hard and civil surface, went abruptly cold. “You left a note saying blame her. I should say Miss Moreland was involved from the first.”
Mrs. Fanshawe’s expression altered only slightly. “I left a note because she was already the easiest person in the room to blame.”
The words hung there in all their unmistakable ugliness.
Genny did not flinch, though Harrison saw her fingers tighten once at her sides. He saw, too, the color leave her face by degrees, as if each word had taken something from her and she refused to let the room witness the cost.
“Why?” he asked.
Mrs. Fanshawe looked at him then, and for the first time that day he saw not mild reserve but intelligence sharpened by long resentment.
“Because Lady Penworth is a fool,” she said.
“Because her committees are built of vain women and richer fools. Because Lady Castlemain and Mrs. Vale fling money about like queens bribing a court, and because every year I am expected to smooth their tempers, compose their notes, remember their priorities, and smile as if such nonsense were noble.”
Lady Penworth herself, had she been present, would have fallen where she stood. Harrison merely waited.
Genny did not. “And so you chose me.”
Mrs. Fanshawe’s gaze slid to her. “You were convenient.”
The word struck with a small, clean pain, almost worse than hatred would have been.
“Convenient,” Genny repeated.
“Do not look so shocked, Miss Moreland. Society has been making use of you for years. I merely did it more honestly.”
Harrison took one step forward. “Take care.”
Mrs. Fanshawe gave a humorless laugh. “Do not look so shocked, my lord. Men like Lord Penworth pledge sums and make speeches. Women like his wife arrange flowers and imagine themselves benevolent. Meanwhile the work falls to those of us paid to be invisible. I have spent ten years making other women appear gracious.” Her eyes moved to the altered cards.
“I thought it might be educational to let them show themselves without assistance.”
Genny stared at her. “By ruining Lady Penworth? By setting half the house at one another’s throats?”
“By revealing what was already there,” Mrs. Fanshawe said. “It required very little encouragement.”
That, infuriatingly, was not wholly false.
Yet Harrison’s anger did not lessen.
“And Miss Moreland?” he asked. “What injury had she done you?”
Mrs. Fanshawe’s gaze shifted again, and this time there was something like impatience in it.
“None at all. I rather liked her, in fact, when she was not overturning the room in everyone’s interest. That made it worse, perhaps.
She was kind, and still ideal. Bright, meddling, universally indulged, and exactly the sort of girl older women forgive until the instant they may condemn her usefully.
One could not design a better scapegoat. ”
Beside him Genny went very still.
Genny’s mouth parted, then closed. The words had named a cruelty she had felt all day. Mrs. Fanshawe had set them down as neatly as a teacup.
Harrison spoke from a place far beneath thought.
“You misjudged her,” he said.
Mrs. Fanshawe’s brows rose. “Did I?”
“Yes.”
The single word fell harder than he intended, not because he raised his voice, but because he did not.
Genny turned her head slightly toward him. He did not look at her. If he had, he might have said more than prudence allowed.
Mrs. Fanshawe, however, noticed everything.
A faint, tired understanding touched her mouth. “Ah,” she said. “So that is new.”
It was astonishing how much he wanted, in that moment, to see her escorted from the house by footmen.
Before he could answer, voices sounded in the corridor, Lord Penworth’s, Mrs. Wexley’s, and Lady Penworth’s rising above them in near panic. Lord Penworth, it seemed, had finally realized what a trap required and come to see whether it had sprung.
The moment the family appeared in the doorway, everything changed.
Lady Penworth looked from Harrison to Genny to Mrs. Fanshawe standing by the table and went white as lace.
“Marian?” she said.
So Mrs. Fanshawe had one: Marian Fanshawe.
Mrs. Fanshawe did not attempt denial. “You should have paid more attention to your own house, Clara.”
Lady Penworth stared as though struck.
“What is this?” Lord Penworth demanded. “What in Heaven’s name is this?”
Harrison set the altered draft down and answered before Genny could be forced to do so.
He explained the trap with as much brevity as the circumstances permitted and concluded with the plain fact that Mrs. Fanshawe had been caught making the very sort of change that had already caused the day’s disorder.
Then he turned back to Mrs. Fanshawe. “The ledger.”
Her mouth tightened.
“Where is it?” he asked.
For the first time, her composure faltered. Not enough to look frightened, but enough to show that the question had struck the true center of the matter. “In my writing box,” she said at last. “Locked.”
Lady Penworth made a small, pained sound.
“I did not destroy it,” Mrs. Fanshawe added, almost sharply. “I wanted the acknowledgments confused, not the charity robbed.”