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“No, but it means he cannot explain everything.”
“Unless the network is larger than we think.”
“Perhaps the gentleman’s servant who collected the parcel was merely collecting a parcel.”
Baines looked pained. “You have no romance in your soul.”
“I am attempting to keep an innocent man from being hanged because he borrowed sealing wax.”
Judith rang for tea before sitting down in a spindle-legged armchair, while Baines wandered towards the fireplace. The drawing room looked particularly elegant in the muted afternoon light, its pale blue silk walls and gilt-framed landscapes contrasting with the darkening sky beyond the tall windows. A low fire burned beneath the white marble mantel, and someone had placed a bowl of early narcissus upon a side-table, filling the room with a faint green sweetness.
The door opened abruptly and Mr. Pembroke entered—backwards. He was attempting to carry a small writing desk beneath one arm while balancing two books and a glass of spirits in the other hand, an arrangement so plainly doomed that Judith wondered why Providence troubled herself to delay the inevitable.
The top book slid. Pembroke twisted, caught it against his hip, nearly lost the whisky, recovered the glass and struck his shoulder against the door.
Baines watched the entire performance. “Magnificent.”
Pembroke straightened with what dignity remained available to him. His sandy-brown hair had fallen across his forehead, one cuff had turned back upon itself, and his buff waistcoat sat slightly crooked over his narrow middle. “Nothing broken,” he declared happily.
“A standard by which all great achievements should be judged,” Baines replied blandly.
“I was looking for Sir Lionel.”
“He is with Lord Cranford,” Judith informed him, with what she felt was creditable calm.
“Still? Cranford has been trying to persuade him that the trouble in Scotland proves every political opinion Cranford has held since 1794.”
“That must require considerable perseverance,” Baines observed.
“Cranford possesses it.”
Pembroke set the writing desk upon a table, and one of the books fell to the carpet.
He looked at it and sighed. “I suppose that was inevitable.”
Judith returned her attention to the notes in front of her, but not before noticing Pembroke glance across the papers scattered beside her hand.
His gaze passed over the page and then returned but only for an instant.
Judith would not have thought anything of it if his expression had not changed. The alteration was extraordinarily slight. The mild distraction vanished from his face, leaving his eyes suddenly intent and his mouth still. Then the familiar expression returned.
Judith covered the page with another sheet.
Pembroke noticed that. “Have I interrupted something?”
“Not at all. I was merely reviewing some correspondence while we wait for tea.”
“Fascinating.” Pembroke laughed and drank from his glass. His gaze wandered towards the windows. “Awful business at Bonnymuir, was it not?”
The lightness left the room. “Indeed,” Judith said.
“Cranford says it proves the radicals intended revolution all along.”
“And what do you say?” Baines asked.
Pembroke drank. “I say a few armed men marching towards Carron prove that a few armed men marched towards Carron.”
Judith looked at him sceptically. It was a remarkably sensible answer.
