His face would have looked like that of an angel if it were not for his eyes. They were very blue, granted, but his eyelids drooped over them and gave him a slightly sleepy appearance. Except that he did not look sleepy at all but very keenly alert, and while Anna’s eyes had roamed over him because she would not look away as she was sure he expected her to do, his had been roaming over her. Doubtless he was gaining a very different impression of her than she was of him.
He looked . . . beautiful. And graceful. And exquisite. And languid. They were all feminine qualities, yet he did not even for one moment give the impression of effeminacy. Quite the opposite, in fact. He looked a bit like an exotic wild animal, waiting to spring with perfectly timed grace and lethal intent upon its prey.
He looked dangerous.
All because he had regarded her as though she were a worm beneath his boot and had tried to get her cast out of the house?
No, she did not think it was just that.
But there was no time to ponder the matter further. Someone was coming through the door and passing her chair—Mr. Brumford, the solicitor. She was about to discover why she was here.
So, she suspected, were all these people.
Four
Josiah Brumford spread his papers before him, laid his hands flat on top of them, and cleared his throat. If anyone had dropped a pin, Avery thought, everyone would have jumped a foot in the air even though there was carpet underfoot.
“Your Graces,” the solicitor began, inclining his head to Avery and the duchess. Fortunately, he did not then proceed to list all the other titles in the room. “I thank you for your hospitality and for providing me with this opportunity to address those gathered here on a matter of considerable concern to all. My services were engaged a few weeks ago to search for a certain young lady with a view to making a monetary settlement upon her from the estate of the late Earl of Riverdale.”
“Mr. Brumford!” the countess protested, her voice as cold as ice.
Avery raised his quizzing glass to observe the perspiration beaded upon the solicitor’s brow.
“Bear with me for a few minutes, if you will, ma’am,” Brumford said. “You requested that the matter be kept confidential, and wild horses would not have induced me to divulge this information to anyone else but you and His Grace had not unexpected circumstances compelled me to call this meeting.”
Abigail had turned her head to look inquiringly at her mother beside her. Everyone else continued to face forward. Avery lowered his glass.
Brumford cleared his throat again. “I sent my most experienced and trusted investigator to Bath,” he said, “in order to find a young woman who had been left at an orphanage there more than twenty years ago and supported thereafter by the late Earl of Riverdale. Until his death, that is.”
The very woman who was now seated behind everyone else, beside the door, if Avery was not very much mistaken. He turned his head to look at her, but her eyes were fixed upon Brumford.
“It was not impossible to find her,” the solicitor continued, “even though we did not know by what name she had been admitted to the institution or indeed which orphanage it was. Neither was it difficult to find the solicitor through whom the business of supporting her was conducted. Mr. John Beresford is a lawyer of some distinction in Bath and has his offices close to the Abbey. He was not willing to talk to my man, for which I can only commend him, but knowing that his lordship was deceased and that Brumford, Brumford & Sons had represented him in all his other business dealings as well as his father and grandfather before him, he did agree to talk with me if I would go to Bath in person and show him ample proof of my identity. I went without hesitation or delay and was able to reassure Beresford that I had the young lady’s best interests at heart in that his late lordship’s widow, with the full concurrence of the Duke of Netherby, the present Riverdale’s guardian, had commissioned me to find her and make a generous settlement upon her.”
If there was a long version of a story to be told, Brumford would invariably choose it, Avery thought. Camille had heard enough. Her back had stiffened and she spoke up.
“If you are about to disclose that this . . . woman for whom you searched was my father’s—” But she could only inhale sharply rather than speak the word. “You really ought to have followed your instructions and made this report privately to my mother and His Grace, Mr. Brumford. Such sordid details are not for my sister’s ears or mine or those of Lady Jessica Archer, who is not even out of the schoolroom yet. I wonder at your temerity, at your vulgarity. I wonder that His Grace—”
“Bear with me, ma’am, if you please,” Brumford said, holding up one hand, palm out. “In a moment it will be clear why this must be said to all of those gathered here, painful as I am sure it is. Beresford informed me, with full documentation to put the truth of what he said beyond any doubt, that twenty-six years ago the recently deceased Earl of Riverdale, who bore the courtesy title of Viscount Yardley at the time, being his father’s heir, but called himself merely Mr. Humphrey Westcott, married Miss Alice Snow in Bath by special license and settled her in rooms there. One year later, almost to the day, Lady Yardley, who appears to have known herself only as Mrs. Westcott, was delivered of a daughter. When the child was a year or so old, however, she moved back to live with her parents, the Reverend Isaiah Snow and his wife, in a country vicarage several miles from Bristol, her health having broken down. She died there of consumption two years later. The Reverend Snow and his wife for undisclosed reasons found themselves unable to keep the child and raise her, and the girl’s father, by then the Earl of Riverdale, removed her from the vicarage and delivered her to the orphanage in Bath, where she grew up and where she was still living, in the capacity of teacher at the orphanage school, until a few days ago.”