The Letter on the Tray

He doesn't write that night. Or the next.

You tell yourself you don't care. You tell Aunt Tabitha you don't care, and she says, "Of course not, dear," in the voice she uses for the heroines of novels who are about to throw themselves off cliffs.

On Friday morning a note arrives instead, on proper writing paper, in a round, generous, ink-blotted hand.

Dear Miss Sowerby, my brother is being an idiot and will not tell me why. I am told you are the reason he has started getting up before noon. I should very much like to meet the person capable of that. Will you take tea with me today at four? Half Moon Street. Do come. There is cake, I think. Cassandra Ingleby.

Below, squeezed in sideways: Please don't tell him I wrote.

"Well," says Aunt Tabitha, reading over your shoulder. "Wear the blue."

Half Moon Street is a narrow, respectable street of narrow, respectable houses running down toward Piccadilly. Number fourteen has a fine fanlight, a polished knocker and no footman. A maid of about sixty lets you in and takes your pelisse with a curtsey so deep it creaks.

The hall is bare.

Not plain. Bare. There are pale rectangles on the walls where paintings used to hang, and a darker square on the floor where a rug once lay. The hooks for a hall mirror are still there, holding nothing. Your footsteps echo.

You climb the stairs behind the maid, and the drawing room is the same: a sofa, two chairs, a small table, and an enormous amount of floor. The curtains are good but faded. There's a pianoforte-shaped gap against one wall.

"I know," says a voice. "It looks like we've been burgled by someone very slow and very thorough."

Lady Cassandra Ingleby is standing by the window with paint on her fingers. She has her brother's gold hair, piled up and escaping, and his green eyes, and a wide, frank, laughing mouth that is entirely her own. She's twenty-two and so pretty that it's almost a joke, and she's wearing an old smock over her morning dress.

"I sold the pianoforte," she says. "I never played it. Rowland sold the paintings. He did play those, in a way; he used to make up stories about all the ancestors. Do sit down, Miss Sowerby. Anywhere. There's a great deal of choice in the way of floor."

You laugh. You can't help it. "Ava. Please."

"Then I'm Cassy. Nobody calls me Cassandra except Rowland when he's cross. And our great-aunt, who's dead." She drops into a chair. "You're much prettier than the Post said, Ava."

"The Post said I was a shop window with a girl inside."

"The Post is written by men who've never been inside a shop." She pours tea from a pot that doesn't match the cups. "I've been dying to meet you. Rowland came home on Monday night and sat in the kitchen until three in the morning talking to Sedley. Rowland doesn't talk to Sedley. Nobody talks to Sedley. And then on Wednesday he came back from the park and went straight to his room and didn't come out. What did you do to him?"

"I laughed."

"At him?"

"With him. Mostly."

Cassy looks at you over her teacup for a long moment. "Oh," she says softly. "Oh dear. That's worse."

The cake, when it comes, is a small seed cake on a big plate, and it's very good, and Cassy is very good company. She tells you about painting, which she loves, and about Hollinsby, their house in Kent, which she loves more. She tells you the roof of the long gallery leaks so badly that she keeps a bucket for every ancestor. She makes you laugh three times. She does not mention money once, and you realize with a strange pang that it's the first afternoon in two years when nobody has.

You like her. It's that simple. You like her at once, the way you sometimes open a ledger and find the figures already balance.

At half past four the old maid comes in with a letter on a tray.

"For you, my lady. The man said to give it straight into your hand."

Cassy's face changes.

It's quick. A shutter coming down. Her smile stays but everything behind it goes still. She takes the letter. It's on thick, expensive paper, sealed in gray wax, and you see her fingers tremble as she breaks it.

She reads it. She turns white. Not pale, white, the white of the plaster where the paintings used to hang. The letter slides out of her fingers and onto the floor between you.

"Excuse me," she says, in a perfectly normal voice, and stands up, and walks very quickly out of the room.

You hear her door shut upstairs.

The letter lies face up on the bare floorboards.

You shouldn't. You know you shouldn't. You were raised better than this; your mother would have been ashamed. But you've also been raised in a counting house, where you learn that the paper someone drops is usually the paper that matters.

You pick it up.

The hand is beautiful, a copperplate so perfect it looks engraved.

My dear Lady Cassandra,

I write only to remind you, as a friend, that your brother has until Michaelmas. I have been very patient with your family since your father's death. I am, as you know, a patient man.

Should his lordship fail to settle the account in full by the twenty-ninth of September, I will hold the vowels of the late Viscount for what they are: debts of honor, which a gentleman's family is honor-bound to pay. And as his lordship will have shown himself unable to pay them, I am afraid you will have to settle his account yourself, my lady.

I have always admired you. I think you know that. I think we could come to a very comfortable understanding.

Your servant, as ever,

F. Crake

You read it twice. The second time your hands are shaking so badly the paper rattles.

The vowels of the late Viscount. Not Rowland's debts. His father's. Gambling debts. Debts of honor. And the man who holds them doesn't want money from Cassy. He wants Cassy.

You think of Rowland on Monday night in the conservatory, his voice gone flat and tired. I must be married to the Sowerby money by Michaelmas. You thought he was hunting a fortune for himself. For horses and coats and the tables at White's.

He's not hunting your money. He's trying to buy his sister.

And then you think of the man under the chestnut tree in Hyde Park, in the heavy brown coat, watching. Watching him.

The floorboard behind you creaks.

You turn. Rowland Ingleby is standing in the drawing-room doorway with his hat still in his hand and the rain of a fresh shower on his shoulders. He must have come up the stairs while you were reading. He must have come up very quietly.

His eyes go to the letter in your hand. To the gray wax seal. To your face.

He doesn't ask what you're doing. He doesn't ask where Cassy is. He doesn't pretend, not even for a second, that you are holding anything other than exactly what you are holding.

He closes the door behind him.

"Ask me, Ava," he says. "Rule one."