“I cannot credit it,” she said slowly. “They are both so likable.”
“Mrs Greer says Sarah is the more skilled out of the two,” Henry said. “What expertise was required for the concoction?”
She was looking into space. Her gaze returned to him slowly. “The blend was no amateur’s work. Whoever prepared it knew exactly what each ingredient would do and what it would hide.”
“She does not enter this room again.” It came out of him flat and final even though he wished to shout it and have her arrested. “I will have her dismissed—”
“You will not.” Her hand reached for his and gripped it firmly. “Dismiss her and she will disappear with the evidence.” She let go of his hand abruptly. Henry was sorry to be released. “We must find the proof before she knows we are looking.”
“You understand what you are proposing. Her hands on you. Every morning.”
“I have been handling it for weeks. I can manage it.”
“Kit Harris stays within call whenever I am not. He goes where you go.”
“Agreed.”
He withdrew the way he had come. He was barely on his own side of the door when he heard the bell.
“Shall I dress you now, Your Grace?”
“Please,” said his wife.
Chapter twenty-five
Three Provinces
Violet
Kit had been a fortnight over the mews by then. He was her late father’s man of business to anyone who asked, her shadow to anyone who watched, and so there was nothing remarkable in the Duchess of Iredell taking a turn round the square garden on a cold Wednesday morning with Mr Harris a pace behind her, while the nursemaids herded their charges down the gravel and the sparrows quarrelled in the bare planes of the trees.
She waited until the nearest nursemaid was twenty yards off and spoke without turning her head.
“Sarah takes her half-day today. She has taken it every Wednesday for a decade now. She leaves at one, back before supper.”
Violet watched a sparrow fight another sparrow. “I want you to follow her.”
Kit was silent for three paces. He had been silent for three paces before answering anyone for as long as she could remember. It was how she knew he was listening.
“It shall be done.” Three paces of silence. “You might tell me why.”
“We discovered that Sarah Baker had received training for poison. I suspect she was poisoning my tea until she realised I would have knowledge of it.”
The gravel crunched.
“We,” he said.
Violet looked at him. “What?”
“You said we.”
“What of it?”
His lips curved into a smirk. She could count on one hand the number of times he had done it.
“You and the duke, I assume?”
“Yes.”