Page 102
“Baines, leave Ptolemy where he is.”
“No. Lady Dunsmore has already surrendered them to you. I refuse to concede the sofa.”
He relocated the second spaniel beside the first. Both dogs stared up at him with such united condemnation that he almost admired them.
“There. Military superiority.”
“You have just displaced two sleeping dogs.”
“Every campaign begins with a small victory.”
Judith laughed as he sat down beside her. “You realize they will tell Lady Dunsmore.”
“I shall deny everything. I am an Intelligence Officer.”
“I thought you were a cavalry officer.”
“One can be both.”
The sofa was not particularly narrow, but Baines found no reason to occupy more of it than necessary. Their shoulders touched, and when Judith shifted the handbill so that they might examine it together, her skirts brushed his leg.
He was suddenly much less interested in troop movements.
He forced his attention back to the page. “There is another possibility. The person gathering these fragments may be a servant.”
Judith nodded. “We considered that before.”
“We considered Blackthorn’s servants. Every guest here brings people of his own. Valets, ladies’ maids, grooms, coachmen. They pass through the same corridors and use the same service stairs, yet no one thinks anything of seeing them.”
“Because no one sees servants unless they require something from them.”
The quiet certainty in her voice made him look at her. Judith had spent years observing precisely what Society ignored. It was one of the things that made her so useful to him, though he disliked the word now because he had begun to understand how often others had reduced her to it.
“You see them,” he said.
“I manage the household. I could scarcely do otherwise.”
“That is not what I meant.”
She turned her head.
For once, Baines did not retreat into humour. “You see people other people have decided are unimportant. The Bells, the tenants, the kitchen maids, Will Fletcher. You remember who has a sick child and whose husband requires work, and you notice when someone at your uncle’s table says something which might harm people who will never be invited to sit at it. I suspect that is why you saw through me so quickly. You are accustomed to looking where everyone else has decided there is nothing worth seeing.”
Judith was very still.
Baines became aware that he had said rather more than he had intended.
He smiled faintly. “It is an extremely inconvenient quality in a woman one is attempting to deceive.”
“I shall accept the compliment in the spirit in which it was reluctantly offered.”
The long-case clock in the hall struck one. Judith blinked and looked towards the door as though surprised by the hour. Baines studied her more closely. “You are exhausted.”
“I am perfectly well.”
“You were asleep when I arrived.”
“I was resting my eyes.”
