Bustling forward, she swung open the gate, held it while he and Henrietta passed through, then swung it shut.
He caught her hand, trapped her gaze as he wound her arm in his. “So cut line.” Holding her beside him, he let Henrietta tow them in the direction of the park. “What have you learned?”
She drew breath, settled her arm in his, looked ahead. “I’d had great hopes of A. J. Carruthers—Cedric had communicated most frequently with Carruthers in the last few years. However, I didn’t receive any reply from Yorkshire, where Carruthers lived, until yesterday. Before that, however, over the previous days, I received three replies from other herbalists, all scattered about the country. All three wrote that they believed Cedric had been working on some special formula, but none of them knew any details. Each of them, however, suggested I contact A. J. Carruthers, as they understood Cedric had been working most closely with Carruthers.”
“Three independent replies, all believing Carruthers would know more?”
Leonora nodded. “Precisely. Unfortunately, however, A. J. Carruthers is dead.”
“Dead?” Tristan halted on the pavement and met her gaze. The green expanse of the park lay across the street. “Dead how?”
She didn’t misunderstand, but grimaced. “I don’t know—all I do know is that he’s dead.”
Henrietta tugged; Tristan checked, then led both females across the street. Henrietta’s huge and shaggy form, her gaping jaws filled with sharp teeth, gave him a perfect excuse to avoid the fashionable area thronging with matrons and their daughters; he turned the questing hound toward the more leafy and overgrown region beyond the western end of Rotten Row.
That area was all but deserted.
Leonora didn’t wait for his next question. “The letter I received yesterday was from the solicitor in Harrogate who acted for Carruthers and oversaw his estate. He informed me of Carruthers’s demise, but said he couldn’t otherwise help with my query. He suggested that Carruthers’s nephew, who inherited all Carruthers’s journals and so on, might be able to shed some light on the matter—the solicitor was aware that Carruthers and Cedric had corresponded a great deal in the months prior to Cedric’s death.”
“Did this solicitor mention exactly when Carruthers died?”
“Not exactly. All he said was that Carruthers died some months after Cedric, but that he’d been ill for some time before.” Leonora paused, then added, “There’s no mention in the letters Carruthers sent to Cedric of any illness, but they might not have been that close.”
“Indeed. This nephew—do we have his name and direction?”
“No.” Her grimace was frustration incarnate. “The solicitor advised that he’d forwarded my letter to the nephew in York, but that was all he said.”
“Hmm.” Looking down, Tristan walked on, assessing, extrapolating.
Leonora glanced at him. “It’s the most interesting piece of information we’ve found yet—the most likely, indeed, the only possible link to something that might be what Mountford seeks. There’s nothing specific in Carruthers’s letters to Cedric, other than oblique references to something they were working on—no details at all. But we need to pursue it, don’t you think?”
He looked up, met her eyes, nodded. “I’ll get someone on it tomorrow.”
She frowned. “Where? In Harrogate?”
“And York. Once we have the name and direction, there’s no reason to wait to pay this nephew a visit.”
His only regret was that he couldn’t do so personally. Traveling to Yorkshire would mean leaving Leonora beyond his reach; he could surround her with guards, yet no amount of organized protection would be sufficient to reassure him of her safety, not until Mountford, whoever he was, was caught.
They’d been strolling, neither slowly nor briskly, towed along in Henrietta’s wake. He realized Leonora was studying him, a rather odd look on her face.
“What?”
She pressed her lips together, her eyes on his, then she shook her head, looked away. “You.”
He waited, then prompted, “What about me?”
“You knew enough to realize someone had taken an impression of a key. You waited for a burglar and closed with him without turning a hair. You can pick locks. Assessing premises for their ability to withstand intruders is something you’ve done before. You got access to special records from the Registry, records others wouldn’t even know existed. With a wave of your hand”—she demonstrated—“you can have men watching my street. You dress like a navvy and frequent the docks, the
n change into an earl—one who somehow always knows where I’ll be, one with exemplary knowledge of our hostesses’ houses.
“And now, just like that, you’ll arrange for people to go hunting for information in Harrogate and York.” She pinned him with an intent but intrigued look. “You’re the oddest ex-soldier-cum-earl I’ve ever met.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, then murmured, “I wasn’t your average soldier.”
She nodded, looking ahead once more. “So I gathered. You were a major in the Guards—a soldier of Devil Cynster’s type—”
“No.” He waited until she met his gaze. “I—”