Chapter 13: Followed

She didn't turn around immediately. Whatever instincts Amber's body carried, layered beneath Chloe's own careful practicality, seemed to understand without being told that spinning around to confront a stranger in an unfamiliar street was rarely the wisest response to discovering one. Instead she slowed her pace slightly, letting her eyes drift, apparently idle, toward the reflection in a shop window she was passing.

The figure behind her was a man, unremarkable in dress, deliberately so, the kind of forgettable coat and hat a person chose specifically to avoid being remembered. He kept his distance carefully, neither closing the gap nor falling far enough behind to lose sight of her, and something about the practiced ease of it told her this wasn't the first time he'd followed someone through unfamiliar streets without being noticed.

She ducked into the shop rather than continuing toward the carriage, a small milliner's with a bell above the door that announced her arrival to a startled shopgirl, and used the cover of examining a display of ribbons to watch the street through the front window.

The man paused outside, apparently unbothered, apparently in no hurry at all, and it was in that unhurried pause, his face turned briefly toward the window in a moment of idle waiting, that she caught a clear look at him for the first time. Older than she'd expected, weathered in the way of someone who spent considerable time outdoors, and wearing, on the smallest finger of his right hand, a signet ring she recognized instantly, not because she'd seen it before, but because its shape echoed the partial crest on the token still pressed into her palm, close enough to be unmistakably related and different enough to belong to someone else entirely.

Not her mother's branch of the family. A different one.

"Can I help you find something, miss?" the shopgirl asked, and Chloe startled slightly, realizing she'd been staring at the ribbons without seeing them for considerably longer than was natural.

"Just looking, thank you." She forced a pleasant smile, purchased a length of ribbon she didn't particularly need simply to justify the visit, and glanced back toward the window in time to see the man had moved on, unhurried, apparently having concluded whatever brief errand had brought him to loitering outside a milliner's shop in the first place.

She waited a full five minutes before leaving, taking a longer, more circuitous route back to where the driver waited, doubling back once through a narrow alley purely on instinct, and didn't relax until she was safely inside the carriage with the door shut and the horses already moving.

Only then did she allow herself to properly consider what she'd seen. A different crest. A different branch of a family she was only beginning to understand the shape of. Someone with an interest specific enough to have her followed from Fenwick's very door, which meant either the man had been watching the office itself, waiting for exactly this kind of visit, or someone had known in advance precisely where she was going and had simply been waiting for her to arrive.

The second possibility was considerably more unsettling than the first, and the longer she turned it over, the less she could dismiss it. She hadn't told anyone in the household precisely where she was going, only the vague, plausible lie about a modiste. Mrs. Pryce knew the address, and Chloe trusted her enough by now not to seriously entertain the idea. Which left the uncomfortable possibility that someone had learned of the visit some other way entirely, through means she hadn't yet considered, or that the watching had never been specific to today at all, that she'd simply been careless enough, this once, to actually notice it.

She thought of her father's careful, too-smooth deflection at breakfast. She thought of the unsigned note in the cabinet, the ink still fresh enough to have been written within the past several months. She thought, uneasily, that perhaps she'd been watched for considerably longer than a single afternoon, and had simply never had reason before now to look closely enough to see it.

---

She found Kesworth in the small drawing room off the main hall that evening, ostensibly reviewing correspondence related to her upcoming affairs, and closed the door behind her before speaking, unwilling to risk the conversation being overheard.

"I need to ask you something, and I need an honest answer."

He set his papers aside, something in her tone apparently enough to earn his full attention. "Go on."

"Do you know anything about a rival branch of the Ashworth family? Someone with enough interest in the succession to have people watched?"

Kesworth's expression shifted, careful neutrality giving way, briefly, to something sharper. "Where did you hear that phrase? Rival branch."

"I didn't hear it. I saw a ring today, on a man who followed me from a meeting I'd rather not discuss the details of. A crest similar to one I've seen before, but not identical."

He was quiet for a long moment, weighing something behind his eyes. "There are several branches of that family with grievances against your mother's line, Miss Amber, dating back further than either of us has any reasonable way of untangling in one evening. I know of at least two with enough resources and enough motive to take an active interest in whether you ever learn to press a claim of your own."

"Which branches, specifically?"

"Names won't help you yet, Miss Amber, and I'd rather not hand you a list of enemies before you've had the chance to properly understand what any of them actually want." He rose from his chair, crossing to the window, apparently gathering his thoughts before continuing. "What I can tell you is that the crest you saw likely belongs to a cousin line, descendants of your mother's uncle, who've spent the better part of two decades quietly consolidating whatever influence the main branch left unclaimed when your mother chose to walk away from it. They've had a great deal of time to grow comfortable assuming that claim would never be contested."

"And now it might be."

"Now it might be," he agreed, "which makes you considerably more inconvenient to them than you were a month ago, when you were simply a name in old correspondence rather than a young woman actively meeting with solicitors and asking pointed questions about crests."

"Are they dangerous?"

"I'd rather not answer that with false reassurance." His voice had gone low, uncharacteristically direct. "I'd rather tell you plainly that you should be more careful than you have been, and that whatever you're pursuing, you're not pursuing it in isolation anymore. People have noticed you're asking questions. That was always going to happen eventually. I'd simply hoped it would happen on a more generous timeline than this."

"What do I do?"

"For now, be careful who you meet with, and where. Trust the people who've already proven themselves trustworthy, and be considerably more cautious with everyone else." He studied her a moment longer, something almost protective moving behind his usual careful composure. "And come to me directly if you're ever followed again. Don't handle it alone a second time."

"Why does this matter so much to you personally?" she asked, watching him carefully. "You've been more helpful than your position strictly requires."

Something flickered across his face, quickly suppressed. "Your mother did me a kindness once, a long time ago, that I've never had the chance to properly repay. Consider this my attempt at settling that particular debt, however belatedly." He returned to his papers, the conversation apparently closing itself, though his eyes lingered on her a moment longer before she turned to go, something unspoken sitting behind them that she suspected he had no current intention of explaining further.

She left the drawing room with the ribbon still tucked uselessly in her pocket, a small, absurd souvenir of an afternoon that had started as a quiet visit to a solicitor's office and ended with the unsettling certainty that she was no longer the only person in this story paying close attention to the truth her mother had died trying to protect.