"Good," Isolde answered.
Vale cleared his throat. "I acted for the stability of—"
"You acted for the convenience of power," Lucien said, without raising his voice. "Do not make a philosophy of it. You will answer Mr. Croft's remaining questions. Then you will find other employment that does not require my name."
When Vale had gone, Lucien remained a moment longer, gloves in his hand, gaze on the ruined matrix.
"My father believed," he said, half to Croft, half to the room, "that a house like ours could steady lesser fortunes by standing near them. He may even have meant it kindly. Kindness without attention becomes a kind of theft."
Isolde considered him. "Then pay attention. It is the least expensive virtue you have left."
He almost laughed—surprised, not mocking—and bowed.
Letters went out that week in Lucien's own hand. Isolde saw copies, provided by Croft: brief, factual, without flourishes. Mr. Trent at Brooks's replied with the chilly courtesy of a man correcting a ledger. Mr. Holbeck replied more warmly, which Isolde distrusted until Croft pointed out that warmth from Holbeck usually meant he smelled advantage in being early to the virtuous side. Money moved. The note that had lived in Isolde's chatelaine was cancelled and returned to her stamped PAID, the crest still visible beneath the cancellation like a scar under new skin. She kept it. Not as a trophy. As evidence that endings could be written over beginnings without erasing them.
Gossip, of course, did what gossip does. Lady Prudence managed the weather as promised: Whitcombe House became, in certain parlors, the place where a duke had been caught out and had, unusually, paid for it in daylight. Other parlors preferred a sharper story—Fenwick girl, ambitious, dramatic—and those stories Isolde could not kill. She learned to walk through them as one walks through rain: annoyed, damp, unbroken.
At a milliner's, a woman she barely knew asked whether she was frightened. Isolde said she was busy. At a concert, a gentleman attempted a joke about ladies who played for questions. Lady Harriet's fan opened with a sound like a small gunshot, and the gentleman remembered an urgent need to admire the ceiling.
Lucien withdrew from public tables for a month. When he returned, he played less and watched more. The smirk came back sometimes, because habits die harder than seals, but it came back thinner, and when young men laughed too loudly over other men's losses, he left earlier than he once would have. Once, Lord Harwick told a friend that Thornmere had refused a cut of a private side wager "with a face like a closed account." The friend did not believe it until he saw it himself.
He called once more at the Fenwick house as winter approached, bringing no solicitor, only a book wrapped in plain paper.
"It was your brother's," he said to Isolde in the parlor, Lady Harriet present with her eternal fan. "It surfaced among papers Vale had no business holding—collateral taken and never logged properly. A volume of Dryden. Peregrine's name is on the flyleaf."