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your point.”
    Only slightly mollified, she pulled his rapidly slipping coat back up to her chin. It occurred to Spencer that she might be cold. He rose and went to stoke up the waning fire.
    “Shortly after the wedding,” she went on, “your brother said he was leaving, that he’d been away from his intended too long. He said that Mrs. Graham and I should follow him as soon as Papa passed on. Then he took the coins and left.”
    Spencer turned from the fire to stare at her. “Your father didn’t find that suspicious?”

    “He didn’t know.” She gave a thin smile. “By then he was very ill and I didn’t want to worry him. He died shortly after your brother left.” Her voice grew choked. “I think Papa only hung on until he saw me settled. He was stubborn that way.”
    “Many parents are.” Spencer glanced over to the massive desk that had once belonged to his own stubborn father. After Spencer’s eldest brother, Theo, had died, their father had contracted pneumonia. But the old man had clung to life as long as he could, hoping to see Spencer return from the war to take Theo’s place as heir. Unfortunately, Spencer had already become a spy—by the time anyone could notify him of his brother’s death and his father’s illness, his father was dead.
    Without ever hearing of Spencer’s inadequacy to be the heir.
    “After Papa passed on,” Miss Mercer continued, dragging him from his somber reflections, “I arranged for the burial, disposed of our goods, and closed up the house, which Papa had left to my uncle. I wrote you a letter about all this. Then we came here.”
    Her tale explained a great deal, but not everything. “I see why your father agreed to the match, but why did you? What made you leap willingly into a proxy marriage with a man you barely knew?”
    With a sigh, she dragged his coat back up to her chin. “Did you happen to read those letters I handed you, my lord?”
    “No.” He patted his pockets for them, then remembered dropping them on the floor. Bloody hell. No doubt the harpies in the hall were having a fine time poring over them. “Why? What did they say?”
    “You’ll be pleased to know you were very convincing in explaining why I’d be better off married to you than living like a cast-off at my uncle’s.”
    “Ah. A practical decision, was it?”
    She kept her eyes on the carpet, which she dug at with thetoe of one dainty boot. “Um…not entirely. Your brother is a particularly talented liar, you see, and wrote some very…nice things about me. I should have caught on when he actually waxed poetic in one letter—writing that I ‘walked in beauty like the night of starry climes and cloudy skies.’” Light from the now leaping fire shown on her pained smile. “But I’m unused to such extravagant compliments, so I suppose I wanted to believe him.”
    Spencer caught his breath. Devil take Nat for remembering what Spencer had half forgotten from the night they were drunk. “Actually, I did…er…quote that line of poetry to him in reference to you.”
    Her gaze shot to his. “Oh?”
    Bloody hell, he probably shouldn’t have revealed that little tidbit. “I was making a point about how other gentlemen might regard you.”
    Her eyes glinted with humor. “I see. And you used poetry to do so?”
    “I was foxed, all right?” he grumbled. “It was my last night in Philadelphia, and Nat and I were drinking. Men often speak nonsense when they’re foxed. But apparently my brother decided to use my nonsense to further his own ends.”
    Her amusement faded. “You mean, to steal my dowry and Papa’s company?”
    “I suppose.” Spencer shook his head. “Though this seems an extreme method for gaining funds, not to mention doomed to failure. He must have realized you would come here and expose him eventually.”
    “Of course he did. He’s the one who paid for our passage to England.”

Chapter 3
    The wise servant puts his employer’s needs first, for when the