Percy Wainwright knew where the compliment lay. He laughed with the girls, teasing and making comments, but his gaze kept returning to Grey, alive with interest. He had left off his wig, and at one point, he casually ran a hand through his short-clipped hair, as though to order the dark curls, and glanced at Grey.

Did you get it, then?his upraised eyebrow said.

Grey raised his own.

Percy grinned at him, but glanced away a moment too soon, and when he looked back now and then, Percy was always engaged in conversation with Olivia, a maid, or Tom—who had arrived belatedly and was experiencing loudly audible mortification over Grey’s breeches.

What was this? he wondered. He was not mistaken in the attraction; he knew that for certain. And he had not had any indication during their previous conversations that Percy was either light-minded or flirtatious in the least. Perhaps it was only caution, he told himself—a reluctance, lest anyone notice what was going on between them.

When they had at last resumed their usual garments and the sempstress and her assistant departed with armloads of blue velvet, he made occasion to brush shoulders with Percy at the door of the drawing room.

“Melton tells me I am to have the honor to familiarize you with the ways of the regiment, your duties and the like. If you have time this afternoon…?” For the first time, he regretted staying in his mother’s house. Though officers’ quarters in the barracks would not have been much better. How far away were Percy’s rooms?

“I should like that more than I can say,” Percy replied. “But I am, alas, engaged.” The regret in his voice seemed real, but Grey experienced it as a small blow, nonetheless.

“Perhaps tomorrow—” he began, but saw Percy grimace in apology.

“My engagement is in—in Bath,” he said quickly. “I shall not be back for two or three days. I should in fact have left this morning—I will be very late—save that I hoped to have a chance of seeing you before I left,” he added softly. He looked directly at Grey as he said this, and Grey felt some easing of his disappointment, if not his baser urges.

Bath, my eye,he thought. But after all, the man was surely entitled to his privacy, if he did not wish to say what his engagement was. Percy owed him nothing—yet.

“Find me upon your return, then,” he said. He clapped Percy briefly on the shoulder. “Safe journey.” He turned, and without looking back, went out in search of some privacy of his own.

Chapter 10

Salle des Armes

He returned in the evening, to discover that the dowager countess had likewise come back from her excursion. He went to her boudoir to pay his respects, and found her cheerful, if a little pale from her journey, and with a few lines of worry round her eyes. These, he took to be the natural effects of her discovery of the extent of Olivia’s ambitions as a wedding planner.

He did his best to distract her, therefore, with the story of the afternoon’s fitting, nobly sacrificing his own dignity in order to include his stained breeches and Percy’s drawers.

“Oh, dear, oh, dear—poor Tom!” The countess made small snorting noises. “He does take his position very seriously, God help the poor lad. I think you must be a very great trial to him.”

“Yes, he was in hopes that Percy Wainwright might be a macaroni—you could quite see visions of embroidered waist coats and clocked silk stockings dance in his head—but I was obliged to dash his hopes, alas.”

The countess smiled afresh at that, but her voice was serious.

“Do you like Percy Wainwright?”

“Yes,” he answered, rather surprised that she would ask. “Yes, we get on quite well together. Common interests, and the like.” He trusted that no hint of just how common those interests were showed on his face. He cleared his throat and added, “I like the general, too, Mother—very much.”

“Oh, do you?” Her face softened. “I’m glad of that, John. He’s a very fine man—and so kind.” She pursed her lips then, though still with a look of amusement. “I am not sure your brother is quite as taken with him. But then, Hal is always so suspicious, poor boy. I really think sometimes that he trusts no one but you and his wife. Well, and Harry Quarry, to be sure.”

The mention of his brother reminded Grey. In the flurry of his return from Helwater, the preparations for the wedding, and the regiment’s new orders, he had momentarily forgotten. But surely Hal had had sufficient time to speak with her by now.

“Mother—did Hal mention to you the page from Father’s journal that we discovered in his office?”

If he’d thought her slightly pale before, he’d been mistaken. He’d seen her pale with fatigue and white with fury. Now, though, the blood washed from her face in an instant, and the look of fear in her eyes was unmistakable.

“Did he?” he repeated, trying to sound casual. “I rather wondered whether perhaps you had had one, too. Delivered by post, perhaps?”

She looked up at him, her eyes quick and fierce.

“What makes you think that?”

“The way you spoke of James Fraser when I departed for Helwater,” he told her frankly. “Something must have disturbed you quite suddenly, for you to take such note of the man; you have known of him for years. But since the only thing you do know of him is that he was once a prominent Jacobite…?” He paused delicately, but she said nothing. Her eyes were still blazing like a burning glass, but she wasn’t looking at him any longer. Whatever she was looking at lay a good way beyond him.

“Yes,” she said at last, her voice remote. She blinked once and looked at him, her gaze still sharp, but no longer burning. “Your father always said you were the cleverest of the boys.” This wasn’t said in a complimentary tone. “As for ‘was once a prominent Jacobite’—there is no ‘was’ about it, John. Believe me, once a Papist, always a Papist.”

He forbore pointing out that “Papist” and “Jacobite” were not invariably the same thing. When politics entered the room, principle often flew out the window. While most Papists had indeed supported the Stuart cause, there were not a few Protestants who had as well, either from personal opportunism or from a sincere conviction that James Stuart was the divinely appointed sovereign of Great Britain, his religion notwithstanding.

“So you did receive a page from that journal,” he said, making it a statement, rather than a question. “May I see it?”

“I burnt it.”

“What for?” He all but barked at her, and she blinked again, startled. She eyed him then, obviously choosing her words.

“Because,” she said evenly, “I did not wish to keep it. Have you heard the expression, John, ‘Let the dead bury the dead’? What’s past is past, and I shan’t cling to its remnants.”

He struggled for a moment against the impulse to say something regrettable—but then his eye fell upon the miniature on her dressing table. It had stood there since the day Gerard Grey had given it to her, and it was years since John Grey had ceased to notice it. Noticing it now, he was taken aback to see just how much the portrait resembled the image he saw in his shaving mirror. His father had been darker in coloring, but otherwise…So much for his mother’s chance of forgetting the past, then, even if she wanted to.

“Really, Mother,” he said mildly, “you are the most atrocious liar. What are you afraid of?”

“What? What the devil do you mean by that?” she exclaimed indignantly. She didn’t curse often, and he invariably found it amusing when she did, but he suppressed his smile.

“I mean,” he said patiently, gesturing at the miniature, “that if you wish to convince the world that you have lost all thought for my father, you ought to remove that from sight. And when you tell people you have destroyed something,” he added, nodding at her secretary, “you ought not to glance at the place where you’ve hidden it.”