Chapter 15: A Father's Warning

She was summoned to her father's study the morning after the ball, a request delivered by a maid with the particular careful blankness of someone who knew better than to speculate aloud about why. Chloe dressed with deliberate composure, rehearsing possible explanations on the walk down, and still wasn't fully prepared for the expression waiting for her when she stepped through the door.

She'd expected, walking down, that this might simply be another test of the sort she'd already passed once, another careful question about Kesworth's discretion, another opportunity to demonstrate her continued good behavior. The moment she crossed the threshold and saw her father's face, she understood immediately that whatever waited for her in this room was considerably more serious than that.

Her father sat behind his desk, papers pushed aside, his usual mild detachment replaced by something colder and more focused than she'd yet seen from him.

"Sit down, Amber."

She sat, keeping her spine straight, her expression carefully neutral, and waited.

"I had an interesting conversation yesterday evening," he said, "with a man who assured me you spent your afternoon visiting a modiste. I had an equally interesting conversation this morning with someone else entirely, who assures me you did nothing of the sort."

Her stomach dropped, though she kept the reaction from reaching her face. "I'm not sure what you mean."

"Don't." The single word carried more weight than a raised voice would have. "I know you visited a solicitor's office three streets from where your driver actually dropped you. I know precisely whose office it was. I would very much like to understand why my daughter felt the need to lie to me about a visit to Aldous Fenwick."

Chloe held his gaze, mind racing through the narrowing set of options available to her. Denial, clearly, was no longer viable. "I wanted to understand my mother's affairs. You've made it quite clear I'm not meant to ask you directly."

"Because there's nothing productive to be gained from asking." Something flickered behind his controlled expression, frustration or something closer to fear, she couldn't quite tell which. "Your mother's family history is a closed matter, Amber. It was closed when she married me, and it remains closed now. I won't have you unraveling twenty years of careful arrangement out of idle curiosity."

"It isn't idle curiosity. I found a letter she left for me." She watched the words land, watched something shift, briefly, behind her father's composed features. "I know her name was Ashworth. I know there's an unresolved succession. I know someone recently made inquiries about whether I'd ever learn enough to press a claim on it."

The silence that followed stretched long enough to feel dangerous.

"Who told you that." It wasn't quite a question.

"A man at the Whitcombe ball last night approached me. Aldric Ferris. He knew far more about the Ashworth family than a stranger reasonably should, and he seemed rather pleased about how little I was willing to admit to him." She watched her father's expression carefully as she said the name, and caught, unmistakably, a flicker of recognition he didn't quite manage to suppress in time. "You know him."

"I know of him," her father said, too quickly, and something in the careful correction told her precisely how much weight to give it. "He runs in circles I'd rather you avoided entirely. That should tell you a great deal, if you're inclined to actually listen to the warning."

"Does it matter? It's true, isn't it?"

Her father rose from his desk, crossing to the window, his back to her for a long moment before he spoke again, his voice noticeably quieter than before. "You have no idea what you're stepping into. That family, whatever fond notions your mother's letter may have left you with, is not a sentimental homecoming waiting to happen. It's a nest of people who've spent decades circling an inheritance they'd prefer never had a living claimant to complicate it."

"Then tell me the truth. All of it. If it's this dangerous, don't you think I deserve to understand exactly what I'm walking into, rather than stumbling through it half-blind?"

"What I think," he said, turning back to face her, "is that your mother made the same mistake, trusting that understanding the danger would be enough to protect her from it. It wasn't. I have no intention of watching her daughter repeat that particular error."

"You can't simply forbid me from asking questions about my own mother."

"I can forbid you from meeting further with Fenwick, and with Kesworth, unless I'm informed in advance and given adequate reason to permit it." His voice hardened, the earlier flicker of fear replaced now with something more familiar, cold practicality reasserting itself. "You'll understand, I hope, that this isn't cruelty. Whatever else you believe about me, Amber, I would prefer you alive and ignorant to informed and in danger."

"What happened between you and my mother, really? The letter made it sound as though she chose to leave the Ashworth family freely. You make it sound as though the choice cost her far more than she ever let on."

Her father was quiet for a long moment, something old and unresolved moving behind his controlled expression. "Your mother was the most remarkable woman I ever met, and I have spent every year since her death wondering whether marrying her was the kindest thing I ever did for someone, or the cruelest." He didn't elaborate further, the admission apparently costing him more than he was willing to spend on continuing it. "That's more than I intended to say. It changes nothing about my terms."

"And if I don't agree to your terms?"

Something almost like respect moved briefly across his expression, quickly suppressed. "Then I suppose we'll discover exactly how much authority I actually retain over a daughter who's apparently decided, rather suddenly, that she's no longer inclined to simply do as she's told." He returned to his desk, the conversation apparently concluding itself whether she was satisfied with it or not. "I'd ask you to consider carefully, before you decide precisely how far you intend to test that particular question."

She left the study with her pulse still hammering, uncertain whether she'd just won some small, unacknowledged concession or simply confirmed to her father exactly how much of a threat she'd become. The corridor outside felt colder than it had on her way in, the whole house suddenly weighted with a watchfulness she hadn't quite let herself acknowledge before this morning.

Mrs. Pryce was waiting at the top of the stairs when she reached them, her expression carefully composed but unmistakably concerned, as though she'd been standing there deliberately, waiting to intercept her.

"He knows," Chloe said quietly, keeping her voice low enough that it wouldn't carry. "About Fenwick. Someone told him, and I don't yet know who."

Mrs. Pryce's face went very still. "Did he say how he learned it?"

"No. Only that it wasn't from the driver, and it wasn't from you. He seemed almost as unsettled by the source as by the fact itself." Chloe searched the older woman's expression, looking for some flicker of an answer she suspected Mrs. Pryce might have and simply hadn't offered yet. "Do you have any idea who it could have been?"

"I have suspicions I'd rather not voice until I'm more certain of them." Mrs. Pryce glanced down the corridor, checking, out of long habit, that they weren't overheard. "Then we have considerably less time than I'd hoped. Go carefully today, miss. Whatever's coming, I don't think it's finished arriving yet."