Chapter One

 

 

“The mare as well, then,” Ronald said, and laid his hand flat on the baize.

Philippa stopped three steps inside the room and let the door swing to behind her. The hazard table stood beneath a chandelier lit for effect rather than for use, and the gentlemen about him had fallen into that peculiar silence reserved for those who watch a newcomer discover the true depth of the waters into which he has unwittingly plunged. “Sixty guineas against the grey. You have seen her go, and you know what she is.”

“I have seen her go.” The man at the end of the table did not trouble to raise his voice, and the room fell silent for him regardless. “She is a handsome animal, she is entirely sound, and she is far beyond your present credit. Take your hand off the cloth, Mr Arden.”

“I am good for it.”

“You are good for a great many things.” A counter turned over once between his fingers. “But you, my fine fellow, are not.”

Philippa came the rest of the way down the room over a carpet thick enough to stifle the sound of her boots.

“He is not good for it,” she said. “He is not good for the sixty guineas either, and I imagine you know that already, since you appear to keep a very careful house.”

Every head at the table turned slowly together. The gentleman at the head turned last, and slowest, a deliberate movement born of long habit rather than outright insult, carefully maintained before witnesses. He had perhaps reached his five-and-thirtieth year. An old burn scarred the left side of his jaw before disappearing beneath his collar, its edges long silvered with age. The room had been arranged with intention, ensuring that any caller entering the door was met first by his marred profile.

“You are the sister.”

“I am Miss Arden. You are the Duke of Rivenhall, and my brother has lost a mechanical nightingale in your house that was never his to lose.”

“You should not be in this room, Philippa.” Ronald had gone the colour of the tablecloth. “Go home.”

“I shall. Presently.”

“You are making a spectacle.” His chair scraped and got no further.

“You wagered your horse in front of nine men, and one of them writes for a newspaper. The spectacle preceded me.”

A man along the wall laughed and turned it into a cough. The corner of the duke’s mouth moved once before he set the counter down. “Mrs Mercer will settle your brother’s chair and give him coffee he will pretend he does not require. Come upstairs, Miss Arden.”

“I would rather conduct my business here.”

“I daresay. Come upstairs regardless.”

 

***

 

The upper chamber was smaller, warmer, and devoid of calculated effect, containing only a writing-desk, a wall of small drawers, two lamps, and a stoppered decanter. The nightingale sat on a square of green baize under the nearer lamp with its head turned aside, as though it had been set down mid-thought.

Philippa forgot the duke entirely for about three seconds. “Do not touch it yet.”

“It is mine.”

“It is yours by an hour’s play at a table, and it was my father’s for fifteen years before that, and mine for three.” She was already unbuttoning her glove. “If you put your thumb where you are about to put it, you will bend the third quill, and the third quill sits over the escapement.”

“You have decided rather a lot about my thumb.”

“You may own a thing and still handle it badly.” Her glove came off and went onto the desk. “Most people manage both at once.”

He stepped back and folded his arms and let her come to it.

The bird stood eight inches from beak to tail, silver, the plumage worked in three depths so the light broke over it differently as she moved her head. Her father had made it the year before she was born, and had rebuilt it twice since. He had kept its drawings in a case he would not let her open, and he had passed away on a Tuesday afternoon with that case locked and the key nowhere in the workshop.

She turned it a quarter and stopped. “When did this happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“Bring the lamp nearer.” Her thumbnail was against the silver, and she did not look up. “Across the plate, please, and not behind it.”

He brought the lamp without asking why, and the light spread over the breastplate, and revealed to her what she had already seen with half of it. “Here is one,” she said, and moved her fingertip an inch. “And here, and here again, and a fourth under the wing. Somebody has had a blade in under the plate, and whoever held it was not only in a hurry, but they were using the wrong tool.”

“Was it done lately?”

“The scratches are bright. Silver dulls within the month if it is handled and within three if it is not, and these have no bloom on them at all.” She set her finger beside the deepest gouge without putting it in. “This was done in the last fortnight.”

“It has been in a locked case in my possession for two days.”

“Then it was not done in your house, which I imagine is the answer you wanted.” She straightened her back and did not enjoy the next part. “It does not make me happier. It was in my workshop for the nine days before that.”

He was quiet long enough that she could hear the low hiss of the lamp. “Go on.”

“There is a compartment behind the plate, and very probably more than one.” She turned the bird and set it on its side with the movement her father had taught her from a young age, when her hands had been too small to manage it any other way. “Whoever took a blade to it knew that much. He did not know the rest, or he would not have needed the blade.”

“And you know the rest.”

“I know the rest.”

He put two fingers on the edge of the baize and left them there. “Then open it.”

“I shall not.” The refusal came out flatter than she had meant. “The plate does not come off with pins, and a screwdriver will only spoil the silver. It sits on an escapement of my father’s own design. He never sold it, he never published it, and he never showed it to another living creature.”

“You are telling me this for a reason.”

“I am telling you why you cannot solve it by sending for a better man in the morning.” Her voice had gone level, which was what happened to her when she was upset. “No better man exists, and no other man of any description, and what you have instead is the drawings in my father’s hand, in my workshop, and me.”

The two fingers came off the baize. “That is a good deal of confidence for a woman who has just refused to do it.”

“It is not confidence. It is inventory.” She turned round, and he was closer than she had expected, and she did not step back, because stepping back would have answered a question he had not asked. “I said I know the rest. I did not say I can open it tonight.”

“Explain the difference.”

“The escapement releases to a sequence, and the sequence is not in the drawings.” Her thumb found the callus at the base of her own second finger. “And the sequence gives you the breastplate and the first cylinder and nothing further. The second and the third sit on indexes my father cut separately and on purpose, so that a man who got past the plate would find himself standing in front of two more doors. My father meant to give it to me. He was one and sixty, and he had a cough all that winter. Neither of us behaved as though that meant anything, and then it did. He had four hours at the end, and he spent them on the roof and the rent and a man in Norwich who owed him nine shillings.”

“And not on the bird.”

“Not on the bird.”

The duke said nothing for long enough that she nearly filled it. “Three years.”

“Three years and four months.”

He turned that over without hurrying it. “And in all that time you never forced it.”

“I have forced a great many things in my life.” She put her hand back on the baize. “I have never forced anything of my father’s.”

“Why not?”

“Because I assumed it was drawings. He hid things the way other men shut a door.” She heard how thin it sounded and said it anyway. “I thought there were sketches inside, and perhaps a letter to my mother he never sent, and taking a chisel to my father’s private paper was disagreeable to me on one Monday, and remained no less distasteful on the Monday following.”

“And now?”

“Now somebody has been sufficiently interested to bring a knife.”

He watched her shift her weight to the other foot without appearing to notice she had done it. “Sit down, Miss Arden.”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Sit down anyway.” He turned the second chair with his foot. “You have been upright since somebody woke you to say where your brother was, and I have no intention of conducting the next quarter of an hour with you swaying at my desk out of principle.”

She sat, and was cross about it for perhaps two seconds, and then found she was very glad to be sitting.

He drew the other chair round to the corner of the desk where he could see the bird, set his forearms on his knees, and looked at it rather than at her. “I want it opened.”

“You have made that clear.”

“I have not made anything clear yet.” He turned the lamp down a quarter with two fingers, which brought the shadow up over the burned side of his face and did not appear to be accidental. “The bird was my mother’s. Your father built it for her the year I was six. She put it back into his hands six weeks after the fire and went abroad without it. It has stood on a bench in Cheapside ever since, first his and then yours, and I did not learn where it had been sitting for many years until four months ago, and by then the only man who could have told me freely was three years deceased.”

“That is no small trouble to take.”

“I have been sitting in this room with a silver bird that will not open, waiting for somebody with your surname to become desperate enough to walk into my house.” He said it without any relish. “You may take a moment over that if you require one.”

“I do not require one.”

“You have gone white.”

“I have gone angry. It presents similarly.” Her hands went into her lap because they wanted to do otherwise. “You did not win it from Ronald.”

“I won it from Ronald.” He did not look away while he said the rest of it. “I also let him believe, over four months and three tables, that he was better at cards than he is, and I let his friends believe it more loudly, and when he had run down to the last thing in that workshop worth carrying, I permitted him to stake it.”

“You might have written to me.”

“I might.”

She waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it. “I am in the trade directory. I am the only Arden in it, and you would have had to spell my name correctly and pay for a letter.”

“And you would have written back to say the bird was not for sale, that your father’s work was not for hire to a man who keeps a hazard table, and that you were obliged for my interest.” He looked up at last. “Am I wrong?”

“You are not wrong.”

“Then I did not waste the postage.”

The lamp guttered and steadied, and she let it finish. “That is a defence of your method, Your Grace. It is no defence at all of your character.”

“I have not offered one of those in some years,” he said. “I find people are more comfortable when I do not.”

She could not think of a reply that was true and also civil, so she gave him the true one. “You have ruined my brother to obtain a bird you could have had by asking me badly.”

“Your brother has been ruining himself with great enthusiasm since the summer, and I own the room he chose for it.” His voice roughened over one word and went level again. “But yes. I could have had it by asking you badly. I chose the certain method over the civil one, which is generally what I do.”

“Thank you. That is at least an answer.”

“Come and open it.”

She did not move out of the chair. “Not tonight.”

“Miss Arden.”

“Your Grace.” Rising from her seat, she approached the table, and with both hands restored the bird to an upright position, carefully adjusting its head. “With the drawings and a month I may reason my way back to the sequence, because a man who builds a lock builds it out of his own habits, and I have countless years of my father’s habits in my hands.”

“A month.”

“Perhaps six weeks. That is not a promise and I shall not dress it as one.” She glanced at the case under her arm. “It is the best offer in England, because it is the only offer in England. I want the drawings and the bird in one room, which means either you send me the bird or I come here.”

“You know which of those it will be.”

“I imagine you would sooner cut off your hand than let it out of the house again.”

“You imagine correctly.” He did not quite smile.

She looked once at the locked drawers behind him. “Then I shall want a bench, a proper lamp, and a room that locks.”

He got up without hurry and came round the desk and stopped behind her right shoulder, near enough that she could smell the smoke of the room below on his coat. She had the small pliers out and had gone in under the third quill to lift it where the knife had bent it, and her hand had begun, very slightly, to shake.

“Steady, Miss Arden,” he said, quite low. “You have carried that hand all night without complaint and it has decided to complain now.”

She breathed out, and her hand went still, and the quill came up sweetly under the pliers until the tail sat true. “That is where it ought to have been.”

“So I observe.”

He had not moved, and she was aware to the inch of where he had not moved to. “You may step back.”

“I may.” He stepped back, and she did not turn round. “A thousand pounds.”

“For what?”

“For the six weeks. Paid whether or not it opens, paid tomorrow if you want it in your hand, no clause under it and no condition attached, and I would advise you to take it before I discover I have been generous.”

Philippa laid the pliers on the baize in line with its edge, and only then turned round. “I shall not take it.”

“You have not considered it.”

“I considered it while you were saying it.” Her chin stayed level. “A thousand pounds is more than my father earned in six years, and if I take it, every man in the trade will know within a fortnight what I was paid, and none of them will believe again that I came to a piece because it was worth doing.”

“That is a remarkably long objection to money.”

“It is not finished.” She did not raise her voice for the rest of it. “You will have bought me, and you will know it, and every time I disagree with you afterwards you will be wondering how much of the disagreement I can afford.”

“Then name your figure.”

“Cancel my brother’s debt. All of it, not the half you were going to offer me at the door tomorrow, and his paper out of your safe and into my hand, and no man under this roof to take a wager from him again while you own it.”

He let the paper lie where it was. “His debt is considerably more than a thousand pounds.”

“I know. I have seen the paper he leaves in his coat when he thinks I do not go through his coat.”

He sat back and looked at her with his head a little on one side. “You are asking me to pay considerably more for the same six weeks.”

“I am asking you to pay it to the only person who can give you the six weeks, at midnight, in your own house, after four months of arranging for me to be standing here.” Her voice did not rise. “You have gone to some trouble to make me desperate, Your Grace. Do not now look injured that desperate people are expensive.”

The clock behind him went through the half hour, and neither of them attended to it. “Three and twenty,” he said at last.

“He is.”

“And you would spend the best thing you will ever be asked to do on a boy who will be back at a table by Michaelmas.”

Her chin came up half an inch and stopped. “He is my brother.”

“That is not an argument. It is a relation.”

“In my family it has been sufficient for six generations.” She let that stand. “And I notice you have not said no.”

He looked at her steadily, then picked up her glove from the desk and held it out, and she took it without letting their fingers touch. “Come back tomorrow. At three, by the front door, and not with your brother.” He was already turning down the second lamp. “And when you come, Miss Arden, come to negotiate like an adult and not like an offended sister.”

“I am both.”

“Tomorrow, be only one.”

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

Felix came down through the shuttered rooms at ten in the morning, when the house was only a large empty building smelling of cold smoke and beeswax, with two women on their knees taking last night out of the carpet. He stopped at the foot of the stairs to let them finish, which nobody expected, and went on into the office with the burnt side of his face to the window, there being no one in it worth arranging himself for.

Crowe was already there with his hat still on.

“You have written a great deal,” Felix said.

“You asked for a great deal.” Crowe put the sheets down and did not sit. “May I say first that I dislike this?”

“You may say it. You have said it every Tuesday since Michaelmas.”

“Then I shall say it yet once more, and consider my conscience discharged. The woman has done nothing. She keeps a workshop, she pays her rent within the week it is due, and I have spent five days having her looked into as though she were a bought alderman.”

Felix set the cup down. “And what did five days produce?”

“That she is eight and twenty years old. She has buried both her parents, and she has been keeping her brother out of the river ever since.” Crowe turned the top sheet over without looking at it. “Josiah Arden left her the lease, the tools, and nine pounds. There was a subscription got up by the trade to see her through the winter, and she returned every shilling of it with a note thanking the subscribers for their confidence and declining their charity, which I am told caused offence.”

“I imagine it did.”

“She has refused three offers of matrimonies.”

Felix had been reaching for the coffee, and stopped suddenly.

“Go on,” he said.

“A Mr Ottley of the Strand, three years since, who deals in barometers and is by all reports a decent man of no interest whatever. And the Viscount Ancroft, twice, the second time two years since.”

“Ancroft made her an offer of matrimony?”

Crowe turned the top sheet face down. “Are you acquainted with him?”

“I have dined with him a dozen times, and he has never once deceived me in any matter concerning a horse, which in my acquaintance makes him nearly unique. Why did she refuse him?”

“Does it signify?” Crowe still had his hat on.

“Mr Crowe.”

“Because he asked her to give up the workshop,” Crowe said it without any weight at all. “He put it kindly, as I understand. He said a viscountess could not be seen with her hands full of oil, and that he would build her a room at Ancroft where she might keep whatever she liked and pursue it as an amusement. She thanked him, declined his offer, and they have remained on excellent terms. He calls on her still, and even lends her books.”

The coffee had gone cold in the cup, but Felix drank it anyway.

“He lends her books,” he said.

“He does.”

“How often?”

Crowe’s eyes came up for the first time. “I did not think to count, Your Grace, since it did not appear to be the sort of fact you had engaged me to collect.”

“Count in future.”

Crowe was quiet for the space of two breaths.

“There is one further thing,” he said. “The workshop was entered in June, but nothing was taken. She reported it to the parish constable, who wrote it in his book and did nothing, and she mended the window catch herself and did not mention it to her brother.”

“How do you know she did not mention it to her brother?”

“Because I asked her brother, and he was astonished, but I must add, he was full in his cups then.”

Felix pushed the sheets back across the desk. “Leave, Mr Crowe. Come back on Friday.”

“Most gladly.”

 

***

 

She appeared at the front door with worthy promptness, bearing a flat leather case that remained firmly in her hand. He was at the wall safe when Bassett showed her in, and there was nothing to do but finish, so he set the plain calf-bound book on the second shelf where it lived and swung the door and turned the wheel while she watched him do it.

His great-aunt had installed herself on the sofa an hour earlier with the tea things and a book, on the stated ground that a young woman of no family signing papers alone with him was what the parish would be discussing by Sunday.

“Lady Augusta Wexford, my great-aunt,” he said. “Miss Philippa Arden.”

“How do you do, Miss Arden? You are to pay me no attention whatever, and I shall interrupt only if my nephew says anything actionable.”

“Then I shall listen for it as well, my lady.”

Lady Augusta did not put down her cup. “Sit where you like. The chair on the left does not rock.”

Miss Arden sat, and laid the case across her knees, and looked past him at the safe.

“What is that book?” she said.

“Which part of it interests you?”

“The way you put it away. That is how I put away a piece I have not been paid for yet.”

“That is a very good description, and I shall be thinking about it all afternoon.” He turned the wheel the last quarter. “It is a record of everything my patrons would rather I forgot.”

“And you keep such a thing in the house.”

“I keep it six feet from where I sleep.”

She had not sat back in the chair yet. “Why would any man want that within six feet of him?”

“Because a man who forgets what he is owed is very quickly a man who is owed nothing.” He came round the desk. “You may ask me a second question if you wish to, Miss Arden, but I would advise you to spend it on the terms instead.”

She looked at the safe once more and then, quite visibly, put it away.

“The terms,” she said.

The door opened before he reached his chair, and Bassett announced the name, and the afternoon rearranged itself.

“Do not get up on my behalf, either of you,” said Lord Septimus Marchcroft, coming in with his gloves already off. “I have interrupted, and I shall be brief, and I shall be forgiven because I am old and it is raining.”

“It is not raining.”

“It intends to. Introduce me.”

Felix got the introduction in before his uncle could arrange it himself. “Miss Arden, my uncle, Lord Septimus Marchcroft. My uncle, Miss Philippa Arden, who is going to open my mother’s nightingale.”

“Then you are the first piece of good news to come out of this house since the Peace.” Septimus took her hand and bowed over it exactly as far as a woman of her situation was entitled to and not one degree further, which was a courtesy so precisely weighed that Felix observed her countenance to see whether it had landed. “Arden. You are Josiah’s daughter.”

“I am.”

“He came to Rivenhall three times when I was a younger man. He ate nothing at dinner and talked for two hours about the escapement of a clock. Needless to say, my sister adored him for it.” Septimus sat down without being asked, in the chair nearest the window. “You have my sympathy, Miss Arden. Not for your father. For my nephew.”

“That is not necessary, my lord.”

“It is entirely necessary. Somebody has to apologise for him and he has never shown the smallest inclination to do it himself.” He said it warmly, and he smiled while he said it, and the old unwelcome loosening came into Felix’s chest at being spoken to as a nephew rather than as the room. “Felix, I shall say what I came to say and then leave. Sell me the bird.”

“I shall not sell it.”

“Name a figure that insults me.”

Felix stayed where he was. “I have no figure.”

“Then let me name one.” Septimus turned his hat over in his hands. “Six hundred, which is more than it is worth, and I know it is more than it is worth. I wish to acquire it as I am one and sixty, and I should like to hear my sister’s tune again before I am past hearing anything.” He calmly continued. “Since the night of your triumph, you have done nothing but isolate yourself with it. Ada Mercer claims you have taken to sleeping here; I have watched this madness take hold of you before, which ended in utter tragedy.”

The room was extremely quiet. Miss Arden had gone still in the way of a person who has understood that she is present at a conversation she was not invited to.

“The bird is not for sale,” Felix said.

“No. I did not truly think it was.” Septimus stood, and put his hat on, and paused with his hand on the back of the chair. “Miss Arden, when you open it, you will very likely find a quantity of paper about money, because my brother-in-law was a man who wrote down every farthing and every grievance, and I would not have a young woman frightened by it. If you are, come to me and not to him. He will only be furious on your behalf, and that is no comfort to anybody.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

“You have not said you will.”

“I have not, no.” She did not look at Felix while she said it.

Septimus laughed, and looked genuinely delighted. On his way to the door, his eyes went to the wall safe and came off it again without stopping.

Felix stood where he was until the street door closed two floors below.

“Was that a threat?” Miss Arden said.

“That was my uncle.”

“You have not answered me.”

“I have answered you as well as I am able. He has been kind to me for eighteen years and I have never caught him at anything, and I still count the spoons after he has gone, and I have no defence for that beyond the fact that I do it.” He sat down at last. “The terms, Miss Arden.”

“All of Ronald’s debt.”

“Half of it now.”

She had not touched the quill. “That was not my proposal.”

“It was not, and it is mine, and you may hear the whole of it before you refuse.” He turned the paper round on the blotter so it faced her. “Half cancelled today, in your hand before you leave this room, with his paper burnt in front of you. The remaining half cancelled on the day the bird opens. Not on the day you begin, not on the day you have a theory about the escapement. On the day the plate comes off.”

“And if it does not open?”

“Then you will have got him out of the worse half, and I shall have got six weeks of the only pair of hands in England, and we shall both have been robbed by about the same amount, which is the nearest thing to fairness I have met in this trade.”

She read it properly, twice, with one finger under the line, and she did not hurry for his benefit.

“This clause concerns my brother’s admission to the house,” she said.

“It does.”

“It states he may not enter.”

He put one finger on the clause. “It states he may not enter while I own the building. You asked me for that last night.”

“I asked you to refuse his wagers. I did not ask you to shut a door in his face in front of his friends.”

“Then we have discovered our first disagreement, and I am going to win it, and I shall tell you why.” He put his hand flat on the paper. “If he may come in and merely not play, he will come in every night and sit at the rail and want it, and by February he will have found a house in Jermyn Street that has never heard of you. If he cannot come in at all, he will be humiliated in November and bored by January. I have watched hundreds of men do this. I have never seen the first method answer.”

“You have thought about it far more than I have,” she said at last.

“I have thought about very little else since two o’clock this morning, which you may take as flattery or as a warning.”

“I shall decide later.” She picked up the quill. “I want the burnt paper in a dish where I can see it, and I want to be told the sum, aloud, before you burn it.”

“Mrs Mercer will bring the dish.”

“And I want to be called Miss Arden in this house and not by my Christian name in front of your servants.”

Felix wrote it into the margin. “That is agreed.”

“Furthermore, I must insist upon a room that can be locked from within.”

“Also agreed, and I would have offered it if you had not asked, which I imagine you will not believe.”

“I shall not believe it,” she said, and signed.

The nib caught on the down stroke of the second D and threw a bead of ink across the heel of her hand and onto the glove lying beside the inkstand. She reached to blot it, and the ink went further into the kid.

“Leave it,” Felix said.

She left it.

He should have called for a cloth. There was a bell six feet from his hand and a woman on the other end of it who had been bringing him cloths for six years. He took up the glove instead, and took her wrist, and turned her hand over, and drew the stained kid back off her fingers one at a time, and it took longer than it needed to because he did not let it be quick.

Her hands bore little resemblance to those of a lady. A turn-screw had left a callous ridge across her second finger, a pale scar marked the outer edge of her thumb, and ink had settled stubbornly into the creases of her palm.

Her breath changed at the third finger. She did not pull away.

“You obey very prettily when taken by surprise,” he said.

“I was not obeying. I was calculating.”

“Calculating what?”

The third finger came free. “Whether the glove could be saved.”

“And can it?”

“No,” she said, “and you knew that when you told me to leave it.”

From the sofa by the fire, his great-aunt turned a page of her book without appearing to look up from it.

“Do continue,” said Lady Augusta. “I am not here.”

 

***

 

In the dream, the household below had fallen silent, and she was seated in his chair at his desk, both hands, entirely ungloved, laid flat upon the blotter, waiting to be commanded. “You have not said anything.”

“I am deciding.”

She turned one palm over so the ink showed and left it there. “You have had six weeks to decide.”

“I have had six weeks to want it.” He came round the corner of the desk until she had to turn her head to keep him. “Deciding is a separate exercise, and I am very bad at it. Leave your hands where they are.”

“They have not moved.”

“Then do not let them, and do not help me.”

She watched his fist close on the back of the chair. “You intend to take a long time about this.”

“I intend to take long enough to be ashamed of afterwards.”

She considered that with her chin up. “Take the pins out first.”

“You are giving me instructions.”

“You are welcome to refuse them.”

He drew the pins one by one from the heavy knot at the nape of her neck, laying each one in a neat row beside her fingers, until her rich chestnut tresses tumbled loose over her shoulders.

“The gloves are already off,” she said. “You shall have to think of something else.”

“Turn the chair.”

She turned it with her heel and let her knees fall apart, not far, only far enough to be a statement. “You may say what you came up here to say.”

“I want your mouth first, and a good deal more than that after it, and I have not settled the order.”

“Then settle it aloud. I like hearing you do it badly.”

His fingers entangled themselves in the soft curls at the nape of her neck, tilting her face upward to claim her lips in a kiss of unrestrained fervour. She yielded to him instantly, parting her lips with a low, breathless sigh that vibrated straight to the very core of his being. “Do that again,” she said against his lips.

“Ask properly.”

“Again, Your Grace, and do not stop at my mouth.”

His hand went into the front of her bodice, and the peak came up tight against his palm before he had properly begun. “Tell me.”

“You know perfectly well what it is.”

“I want it in your voice. You are the one who names things for a living.”

“It is aching.” Her voice went unsteady in the middle of it. “It has ached since you took my glove off in front of your aunt, and you knew, and you did it slowly on purpose.”

“I did.”

“Then be quicker now than you were then.”

He went down on his knees in front of his own chair and put her skirts up over her thighs, and she lifted for him without being asked.

“Tell me if you want me to stop.”

“I shall tell you if you stop.”

When he touched her, he found her body already yielding and inflamed with a desire she could no longer conceal, making his entrance effortless. “You are quite undone for me.” She turned and looked at him coyly. “You have stood behind my chair for weeks now. What did you imagine was happening?”

“Say my name.”

“Not yet.” She did not open her eyes to say it.

He stilled his hand until she made a sound of protest. “Philippa, do not make me ask twice.”

“Not yet.” Her hand went into his hair and closed. “Lower. Use your mouth and stop negotiating with me.”

He used his mouth. She got both heels onto the arms of the chair and held his head where she wanted it.

“Slower than that.”

“You are very free with orders for a woman who has not moved her hands.”

“You told me not to move them.” Her voice broke on the second word. “Slower, and do not stop, and do not look up at me while you do it.”

He obeyed all three, and was ashamed of how fast he did it.

“That is it,” she said. “Exactly there, and do not be clever about it.”

“Then say it now.”

“Felix, then.” Her thighs closed round his ears, and her whole body pulled tight and let go. “Felix. Felix.”

A heavy, untouched pulse beat against the wool of his breeches, yet he held his own hands in check. He kept his lips locked upon her until her shivering peak had passed, dropping his brow to rest upon her naked knee as a dark curse escaped his breath against her flesh. “You have taken nothing,” she said.

“No. You have not told me I may.”

He woke from the dream bathed in a fine sheen of perspiration, his senses so thoroughly beguiled that her taste seemed to linger upon his lips. A quiet astonishment washed over him, both at the unbidden night-vision that had claimed him and at the fierce, lingering impression it had left behind.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“That lamp is wrong,” said the Duke of Rivenhall from the doorway, and set down the one he had brought up with him.

Philippa finished the cut she was making before she looked round, because a hand that stops in the middle of a cut has to begin the cut again.

“It is the lamp you gave me on Tuesday.”

“It throws yellow. You will be looking at silver for six weeks, and yellow deceives you about the surface.”

“It has not deceived me yet.” Her eyes stayed on the wing seam.

“It has been deceiving you since Tuesday and you have been correcting for it without noticing, which is worse.” He was already lifting the old one off the bench by its collar, which meant he had thought beforehand about how to carry it. “This one is ground glass. Bassett will take the other away in the morning.”

“Your Grace, it is nine o’clock at night.”

“I know the hour.”

She turned round properly for the first time. “You have come up four flights at nine o’clock at night to change a lamp.”

“I have come up four flights to change a lamp that is costing me six weeks I paid well for.” He set the new one down, turned the wick up, and stood back to judge it. “Do you find the chair satisfactory?”

The chair had arrived on Wednesday, unannounced, with a back that took the small of her spine where the old stool had been failing to. She had been so unreasonably glad of it that she had felt obliged to be cross with the nearest available person.

“The chair is satisfactory.”

“You have not said so before now.”

Her mouth moved before she could stop it. “I have been waiting to see whether saying so would encourage you.”

“It will.”

“Then the chair is adequate,” she said, “and I have grave reservations about the arms.”

“You have no reservations about the arms whatsoever.” He came as far as the corner of the bench and stopped there. “How far are you?”

“The escapement has four stages, and I have understood two.” She put the graver down. “The third is a cam my father cut by hand, and it is not symmetrical, and I do not yet know whether that is design or whether he simply had a bad afternoon in 1799.”

“And if it was a bad afternoon?”

“Then the sequence has a mistake built into it, and I shall have to reproduce his mistake before the plate will move.”

He came a step nearer the bench. “Reproduce it how?”

“By making the same one.” She turned the bird a little so the wing seam came into the light. “That is the part I cannot promise you. A man’s intentions can be reasoned out. His errors have to be met by accident, and accidents keep their own timetable.”

“You have described my life entirely,” he said, “and you have done it while holding a pair of tweezers, which I find obscurely insulting.”

“They are pin tongs, and you may take the insult in whichever spirit is cheapest.”

He regarded the bird without laying a hand upon it, and she observed him think better of voicing his next thought. “Eat the supper,” he said on his way out. “It has been going cold on that shelf since seven.”

 

***

 

Lord Ancroft came at three the next afternoon with a folded paper and no appointment, and Mrs Mercer brought him up herself rather than sending a boy.

“You will want to say no,” Ancroft said, “so I shall put the whole thing in front of you and let you enjoy refusing at leisure.”

“That promises a most favourable commencement.”

“There is a Roman coffer at Wimpole Street. Bronze, with a lid mechanism nobody has been able to explain, and Fenwick believes it is a fake.”

She put the pin tongs down. “And you believe Fenwick is wrong.”

“I believe Fenwick has been wrong in that particular room three times since Easter, and I should like the only person in England whose judgment I count upon some turn of fortune to decide it for us.”

“That is a quantity of flattery for a Tuesday,” she said.

“It is not flattery, it is a bribe, and I have been perfectly open about the shape of it.”

She was laughing when the door opened, and regretted it at once, because Felix took in the two of them and the folded paper and arranged his face.

“Miss Arden is occupied,” he said.

“Miss Arden possesses a tongue.” Ancroft said it without any heat at all, and the mildness was worse than heat would have been. “It generally answers for her.”

“Miss Arden is under contract to me for six weeks.”

“For six weeks of work, Rivenhall, not for six weeks of breathing.”

“The contract does not distinguish.” Felix had come no further than the doorframe.

“Then it is a badly drawn contract, and you drew it.” Ancroft turned back to her without hurrying about it. “Thursday, if you can manage it. An hour, my carriage both ways, and Fenwick will be there holding forth upon his convictions with unsparing volume.”

“Thursday will answer,” Philippa said. “At eleven, and I shall want a quarter of an hour alone with it before Fenwick begins.”

Felix said nothing at all. He held the door, spoke with impeccable propriety upon the landing, and returned to stand beside the bench in deliberate silence.

“You may say it,” she told him.

“I have nothing to say.”

“You have a great deal to say, and you are keeping it in your teeth.”

“I am keeping it in my teeth because it would be improper, because you would be right about it, and I distinctly have an aversion to being right about things at a disadvantage.” He picked up her ruined glove from the end of the bench, where it had lain since the day she signed, turned it over once, and put it down again. “Do you play piquet?”

“I play it badly.”

“Splendid. Come downstairs at ten, when the room has thinned.”

By ten o’clock, the company had thinned with five tables remaining in play. The chandelier had been lowered to half its candles, and Mrs Mercer sat at the desk by the door, entering notes into a ledger that was undoubtedly not the one from the iron chest. He dealt without offering her the elder hand, and she made a private note of it.

“There should be a stake,” Philippa said.

“There is a house rule against my playing for money in my own room. It exists because I wrote it.”

“Then the loser of each hand answers one question honestly.”

His hands stopped on the cards for perhaps half a second.

“That is a considerably worse stake than money.”

“It is the only one you cannot buy your way out of.”

“I could refuse to play.” He was still holding the pack.

“You could. You will not, because you want to know what I would have asked.” She squared her own cards. “Do you accept it?”

“Deal them out.”

She won the first hand, which surprised her, and she suspected for two seconds that he had allowed it, then decided from his mouth that he had not.

“Do you believe you caused the fire?”

The room went on around them. A chair moved at the far table, and Mrs Mercer turned a page, and the man who kept the door coughed into his fist.

“Ask another.”

“That is not how a wager works, Your Grace.”

He turned a card face down without looking at it. “Then I forfeit the hand, and you may consider me a man who does not honour his stakes, which will be the first accurate thing anyone has told you about me.”

“I would rather have the answer.”

“I am aware of what you would rather have.” His voice had gone flat and stayed there.

“You agreed to the terms five minutes ago.”

“I did, and I have broken them, and I shall not pretend to you to be sorry about it later.”

Philippa left her own cards face down. “Then tell me why you will not answer, and I shall count that as the forfeit, and we may proceed.”

“Because there are two answers,” he said, “and I have never yet been able to hold them both in the same room. One of them is that a fire in a dry June with a wind behind it does not require a boy to start it. The other is that my brother followed me and I did not look back to see whether he had.”

“Those are not contradictory.”

“They are when your father has spent two months telling the second one to everybody who called at the house, and then passes away without taking it back.” He gathered the cards in and squared them against the baize with more care than the task wanted. “That is considerably more than one question. Deal them again.”

She dealt again, and he won, and by the third trick she understood he had let the first hand go past him in order to have this one.

“My question,” he said.

“You have earned it. You did not earn the last one, and you took it anyway.”

“What did you see when you first looked at me? Not what you concluded afterwards. The first three seconds, in the hazard room, before you had arranged it into a view of me.”

She could have given him three answers that cost her nothing. She gave him the one that was true, because she had been giving him true ones for the past days and had not yet worked out how to stop.

“A man aware that everyone in the room was watching him,” she said, “who nevertheless watched only me.”

The cards went down on the baize face up and out of order.

“Stand up.”

“That was not part of the wager.” She was already laying her cards down.

“It was not. Stand up regardless.”

She stood, and he came round the corner of the table, and she went back one step and met the edge of the desk behind her. He put a hand flat on the wood on either side of her, and there was perhaps an inch of air between his coat and the front of her gown, and nothing of him touched any part of her.

“You possess a rare talent,” he murmured, “for uttering the very word that achieves its purpose.”

“I merely stated the truth.”

“Those are frequently the same sentence, and a woman who has held a workshop against the whole trade for three years knows the difference better than I do.”

“You might simply believe me.” Her hands stayed flat on the wood behind her.

“I might.” His eyes went to her mouth and came back up. “I have been trying all evening to decide whether you are performing.”

“And have you decided?”

“I have decided I would rather believe you are. It costs me less.”

He straightened, took his hands off the desk, and stepped back into the room, and the air came in cold where he had been standing.

“Bassett will find you a chair at half past,” he said. “Thursday at eleven, you said. I shall send my carriage to Wimpole Street at twelve, in case Ancroft’s is delayed.”

Mrs Mercer came over with the decanter when he had gone upstairs, and filled a glass that Philippa had not asked for, and set it down at her elbow.

“You will want that.”

“I am perfectly composed.”

“You are perfectly upright, which is a different article.” Mrs Mercer put the stopper back without hurrying. “Eleven years I have kept this room for him. In all that time he has come down to a table with a woman precisely never, and he has certainly never lost a hand on purpose in front of forty pounds of my candles.”

“He did not lose it on purpose.”

“He let the first one go by so he could have the second. I watched him do it from that desk and so did you.” She tilted her head at the stairs. “You may tell me it is none of my affair.”

“It is none of your affair.”

“There it is.” Mrs Mercer picked the decanter back up. “I shall say the one thing, and then I am the manager again. That man has spent eighteen years arranging every room he enters so that people look at the correct side of his face. He has not once done it in this one since you came into the building. Make of that what you like, Miss Arden, but do not make nothing of it.”

 

***

 

The dream started with him sitting on the front edge of his writing desk, with his arms folded, waiting for her to come to him.

“You are wearing gloves.”

“I came straight from the bench.”

He made no move to get down off the desk. “Take them off, and then put your hands behind your back.”

“Why behind?”

“Because you will want to touch me, and I should like to watch you want it.”

“That is a poor bargain for me.” She had stopped at the edge of the carpet.

“It is a very poor bargain for you.” He had not moved off the desk. “You may refuse it, the choice is yours to make.”

She drew the gloves off and put her hands behind her back and held one wrist with the other, yet no chilling apathy stole over her heart, a fateful truth that was destined to haunt her restless spirit in the dead of night. Being told what to do by this man was not the same thing as being trapped. At the age of eight and twenty years, nobody had ever thought to show her the difference.

“Come here.”

“You are three feet away.”

“Then it will not take you long.” He turned one hand over on his knee.

“You could cross the three feet yourself.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “I could. I want them crossed by you.”

She crossed them, and he undid the fastenings at her front one at a time without any hurry at all, and she kept her hands where he had put them while the gown came off her shoulders and the stays went slack.

“You have not told me to stop.”

“I do not intend to.” Her breath had gone shallow, and she let him hear it.

“Say what you want. You name things for a living, and yet I have not once heard you name this one.”

“I want you to stop being careful with me.” Her voice went out from under her in the middle of it. “Everyone has been careful with me since my father’s passing, and I have grown utterly weary of the entire business. You were the first person in three years who spoke to me as though I could take the weight.”

“I can be far less careful.”

“Then be it.”

He got both hands under her and set her back on the desk. The ink well and the blotter went off the far edge together, and neither of them attended to it. He slowly pressed her knees apart and stood between them.

“Hands where they are.”

“They are where they are.” Her knuckles had gone white behind her.

“They will not stay. Tell me when you have a reason to move them.”

His fingers went into her, and she was already waiting for him and past caring that she was, and her shoulders came up off the wood.

“Do not stop this time.”

“I have no intention of stopping.”

“You stopped before.” She got one heel up onto the edge of the desk.

“That was a different night, and I was a better man in it.” His mouth was at her throat. “Tell me if you want me to.”

“If you stop I shall never speak to you again, and I mean that in the way that ruins a man.”

He laughed into her collarbone, and then he was not laughing. She heard the sound of cloth being shifted and a buckle becoming undone.

And then she did what she had not known she was going to do, which was to get down off the desk onto the carpet of his own office and put both hands on his knees.

“That was not what you asked for.”

“It is what I am having first.”

“Philippa, you have no notion how this is done.” His hand had gone into the desk edge.

“I have no notion how any of it is done and it has not stopped me for one minute this evening.” She had her hands where she wanted them already. “Tell me when I am doing it wrong, and do not be polite, because if you are polite I shall find out afterwards and be extremely disagreeable.”

She put her mouth on him.

She was utterly ignorant of the method, but perceived in an instant that the matter signified not in the least: the man stood with both palms pressed upon the writing desk at his back, rendered altogether mute. A woman accustomed to taking clockwork to pieces was more than capable of gathering a vast deal merely from a jawline. “Say something.”

“I am not able to.”

“Then put your hand in my hair and show me.” She had not lifted her head. “I am inventing every part of this, and I should like some direction.”

He put his hand in her hair and showed her.

What appalled her was not that she had invented it. It was that she had invented herself enjoying it, on her knees, on a carpet, with her hands on a duke’s thighs, and had felt not one particle of shame about it at any point.

“Stop, I beg you,” he rasped, his voice strained with fierce restraint. “Cease, my sweet, or this breathless madness will claim me before I have truly possessed you.”

“Then possess me without delay,” she whispered, her gaze meeting his with reckless heat, “for I have spent quite long enough upon these floorboards to form the most decisive opinions of their comfort.” Lifting her by the hips, he drew her once more onto the desk, his body pressing firmly against hers intensely, unyielding, and remarkably vivid for a creature of her own imagination. He joined with her slowly, completely, holding her close until a low gasp escaped her lips into the crook of his shoulder.

“Surrender your hold,” he murmured against her skin.

“And why should I?” Her arms were trembling where they supported her weight behind her.

“Because I shall give you every reason.” Sweeping her arms forward, she tangled her fingers deep within his hair, clinging to him as he claimed her upon the mahogany. Her heels locked firmly against his thighs, and every touch was stripped of caution or hesitation.

“Fiercer,” she urged, her breath catching.

“You will bear bruises from the sharp edge of this desk, my dear.”

“Then let me bear them,” she declared, her fingers twisting tightly into the linen of his shoulder. “Do not temper your passion for my sake.”

“Do not dare avert your eyes from mine, nor offer me gentleness when the end overtakes us.”

He offered no gentleness at the last. The crescendo built relentlessly until it broke over her in long, shuddering waves, and she felt him surrender to the same wild tide, his head buried in her neck as muffled oaths tore from his throat. Even within the dream, she marked the wonder of it: he had allowed her to witness the precise moment he lost all command. Philippa woke in her own bed above the workshop in Cheapside at ten past four with the sheet twisted round her legs and her heart going like a hammer.

She had put her hands behind her back because he told her to, and she had not been afraid for one single second of it. That was the thing she could not now put down.