He Struck Her at the Ball, Never Knowing Her Husband the Duke Stood Watching From the Doorway

Chapter 15

The study into which Lord Rupert Montague showed them was not the room where he did business.

Vivienne knew that at a glance and it interested her enormously. It was a show room — books in matched bindings that no one had ever opened, a globe, two Romneys on the wall, a writing desk arranged for the admiration of guests rather than the use of an owner. There was no clutter in it. There were no papers.

Which meant he had brought them somewhere he considered safe to be angry in.

Montague closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it, and looked at the two of them standing side by side on his Turkish carpet, and let the geniality fall off his face like a coat being taken off on a hot day.

“Something happened at my table in the last hour,” he said. “I do not know what it was, and I do not like not knowing. So let us be plain with one another and save us all a great deal of trouble.” He looked at Adrian. “You received my complaint this morning. You have come here tonight and sat at my table and eaten my dinner and made my guests dance to your tune, and I am prepared to believe that was clever rather than stupid. What do you want?”

“To answer your complaint,” Adrian said.

“Then answer it. Did you or did you not send men into my counting house at Wapping?”

“I did not.”

“Did you or did you not have my private ledgers taken from the house in Threadneedle Street yesterday morning?”

“I did not.”

Montague’s small eyes narrowed.

“You are lying.”

“I am telling you precisely the truth, and it is the truth because it is the truth, and not because I have constructed it. I have never sent a man into your counting house at Wapping, and I have never taken anything from a house in Threadneedle Street.” Adrian’s voice was perfectly level. “I had your cellar in Threadneedle Street opened yesterday morning by a clerk in my employ, and I had four pages copied out of a set of books that were in it, and I put the books back exactly as I found them. That is a trespass and a larceny, and you have sued me for it, and you will very probably succeed — I will pay whatever the court assesses and I will do it without a murmur. But I did not steal your books, Rupert. I read them. There is a considerable difference, and you know it, and that is why you have spent the whole of tonight trying to decide where your ledgers actually are.”

The blood went out of Lord Rupert Montague’s face in a slow tide, from the top down.

“The crates came out of Wapping eleven days ago,” Adrian said. “They were carried at night through the mews, by four men, and they did not go back. Somebody took them out of that counting house before my clerk ever set foot in Threadneedle Street, and it was not me, and it was not any man in my employ — which leaves a question I imagine you have been asking yourself since dinner.” He put his hands behind his back. “Who else knows what you have been selling at Wapping, Rupert? Because whoever took those books knows everything in them, and a set of books like that is not worth stealing unless a man intends to use it.”

Montague’s mouth worked twice.

“You are bluffing.”

“I have four pages of a copy,” Adrian said, “in a hand that is not mine, with a date and a running total on every one of them, and I could put those four pages in front of the Crown prosecutors at nine tomorrow morning and be finished with you by noon.” He paused. “And you would spend the rest of your life in a cell at the Tower, and your wife would be told that you had died of a fever, and your son in the Navy would be dismissed his ship.”

The room was entirely silent.

“Which is why,” Adrian said, “you are going to be very interested in what I am about to propose instead.”

And then he took from under his coat a slim leather-bound volume, dark red, softened and cracked at the spine, and laid it flat on Lord Rupert Montague’s showpiece writing desk with a heavy thud.

Montague looked at it.

He looked at it for a long time. And then he took one step toward it and stopped, and Vivienne — watching his face, watching it with the whole of her attention — saw the exact instant in which he understood.

“That is not mine,” he said.

“No,” Adrian agreed. “It is the copy made by a clerk. But you and I both know what is in the original, and you and I both know that a man who has the copy can find the original.” He let his hand rest on the book. “The complaint you served on me this morning alleges that a duke conspired with his household to obtain the private commercial records of a member of the House of Commons. You have put that allegation on the roll. It is now a matter of public record in the Court of King’s Bench that there exists, in your own handwriting, a set of commercial records whose contents you are prepared to go to law to keep out of sight.”

Montague’s hand came up to his own cravat.

“You cannot —”

“Every man at your table tonight now knows that you are under a complaint before the courts that required you to describe your own ledgers,” Adrian said. “By Friday morning every man in the House will know it. You have spent four years being the careful man, Rupert, and in one afternoon you have told the whole of the government that there is a book with your name on it that would destroy you if anyone read it.” He took his hand off the ledger. “There are forty men in Westminster who would give their eyeteeth to read it. There are three hundred in the City who would pay.”

Lord Rupert Montague sat down heavily in the chair behind his own desk.

“Stanton,” he said.

“Rotherby,” Adrian said. “The Viscount Rotherby. He is not aboard a ship bound for New South Wales, whatever you may have read in the papers, because I do not own a ship and I am not in the business of transporting men. He is in a lodging house in Market Lane, having spent all of yesterday afternoon and all of last night giving a written statement, in his own hand, before two witnesses and a justice of the peace, in which he describes in detail a conversation held in his rooms nine days ago with a man who offered to cancel the whole of his debts in exchange for one night’s work.”

Montague’s eyes closed.

“His debts were bought up,” Adrian said. “Every note, a fortnight ago, by agents who signed nothing. He was told exactly which ball, exactly which house, exactly which room, and exactly what to take from the Duchess of Thornbury’s throat if he could get his hands on it, and how much of a scandal was required, and by whom. He has named the man who paid him. He has described the man’s coat and his accent and the carriage he came in.” He paused. “He has not, as yet, named you, because he has never met you. But the man he has named came from this house, Rupert. He came from this house, and he was paid out of your hand, and Reed — the man in your counting house — will say so under oath the moment he is offered immunity from a charge of treason.”

The word fell into the room and lay there.

“Treason,” Montague said. His voice had gone thin.

“Gunpowder to French privateers in time of open war. That is what is in the book on your desk. It is not the Corn Bill and it is not a political quarrel and it is not the sort of thing men manage privately over dinner with a glass of port.” Adrian straightened. “You tried to destroy my position in this House by using my wife as a weapon, Lord Montague. You did it by paying a ruined man to put his hands on her in a dark room. You arranged for her to be disgraced, and when that was not enough for you, you arranged for her to be struck, so that her face would carry your message into every drawing room in London.”

Montague looked up at him.

“Is that what happened,” he said dully. “I only told him to take the necklace.”

“Then you did not read the man you hired,” Adrian said. “He will hang for what he did to my wife, or he will rot — I have not decided which, and I intend to take my time deciding. But you, Rupert, I am prepared to be generous with.”