The Duchess War (Brothers Sinister #1)(11)

He didn’t take it. He glanced at the paper curiously—long enough to read the block-letter title that took up the first quarter of the page—and then looked back at her. “Am I supposed to take an interest in radical handbills?”

“No, Your Grace.” She could scarcely believe her audacity. “You don’t take an interest in radical handbills. You write them.”

He looked at the paper. Slowly, he looked at her and arched his eyebrow. Minnie looked away, her innards twisting under his intense perusal. Finally, he picked up a bun and broke it in half. Steam rose, but the heat didn’t seem to bother his hands.

He didn’t even need to respond. Her accusation was laughably absurd. He sat in his comfortable chair surrounded by furniture that was waxed and polished on a daily basis by servants who had nothing to do but leap on motes of dust as soon as they dared to appear. The Duke of Clermont had taken a house and hired twelve servants for the space of two months. He had estates scattered across England, and a fortune that the gossip papers could only breathlessly speak of as tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. A man like him had no reason to publish radical political circulars.

But then, she already knew he wasn’t what he seemed.

As if to underscore all that, he casually ate a bite of bun and gestured to her to do the same.

No chance of that. Her stomach cramped when she even thought of sipping tea. Just when she thought he was simply going to freeze her accusation into oblivion by refusing to address it, he reached out and adjusted the paper.

“Workers,” he read. “Organize, organize, organize, followed by a great many exclamation points.” He made a dismissive noise. “I abhor exclamation points, for one thing. Why do you suppose I have anything to do with this?”

She had no real proof to offer, only the feel of the way the pieces fit together. But still she was sure of it. The worst case was that she was wrong. Then she would embarrass herself in front of a man she would never see again. She folded her hands in her lap and waited. If he could make her uncomfortable with silence, she could do the same.

And indeed, he spoke first.

“Is it because I’ve just arrived in town, and you don’t want any of your friends blamed?”

She held her tongue.

“Because I look like a rabble-rouser?” There was a wry tone to his voice. He looked—and sounded—like anything but. His voice was smooth and fluid, drawling out syllables in the queen’s best English. He had a faint smile on his face, a condescending expression that said he was humoring her.

“Or is it because you’ve heard stories of my radical proclivities?”

There were no such stories. His reputation was that of a statesman, a man who was both shrewd and soft-spoken.

“Why are you here?” Minnie asked instead. “I’ve heard what’s said, but a man of your stature who was thinking of investing in Leicester industry would send a man of business, instead of arriving himself and overawing everyone.”

“I have friends in the vicinity.”

“If they were such good friends as to necessitate a visit, you would be staying with them.”

He shrugged. “I hate imposing on others.”

“You’re a duke. You’re always imposing.”

He grimaced, looking faintly embarrassed. “That, Miss Pursling, is why I hate doing it. Have you any substance to your accusations?”

She picked up the paper. “If you must know, there are two paragraphs in this circular that convince me it was written by you.”

“By all means.” He held out his hand, palm up. “Read them, and expose me.”

Minnie took her spectacles from her pocket and found the right place. “‘What do the masters do to earn the lion’s share of the pay? They supervise. They own. And for that task—one that takes no thought, no labor—they are paid sums so large that they need not even lift a finger to dress themselves. Their daughters, instead of toiling from the age of fourteen, are free to do as they wish; their sons need worry only about the degree of their dissipation.’”

No reaction whatsoever from the duke. He simply sat in his chair and looked at her with those ice-blue eyes, tapping his fingers lightly against the arm. “You think a duke wrote that?” he finally asked, a note of humor in his voice.

“It wasn’t a worker.”

“You’d be surprised at the literacy that many—”

“I am involved in the Workers’ Hygiene Commission,” Minnie interrupted. “I don’t underestimate any of them. There’s a fellow with a memory like an encyclopedia, who reads the latest Dickens serial by night and recites it back to the others during the day. It’s not merely the first paragraph that gives you away. It’s the first taken in concert with the second.”

“Oh,” he said, still smiling. “There’s a second, much more damning paragraph. Of course, the flyer is only two paragraphs long. So by all means, read away.”

“I can’t do that.” Minnie set the paper down and removed her spectacles. “The second paragraph, Your Grace, is the one you failed to write. You wrote all about what the masters didn’t do. You never once mentioned what the workers did do. A laborer would have been focused on how he spends his day—what he did, who it benefited—not how someone else spends his. This was written by someone who, whatever his intentions, was thinking like a master.”