“Further to that”—Camber paused to draw in a breath before continuing—“Potherby recalled a specific instance when the girl tried to protest the late marchioness’s actions toward the girl’s father, and the marchioness lectured her daughter that the marchioness’s actions and those like it were the only way to deal with a husband—that it was necessary to make his heart bleed to keep him in line.”
Frederick simply stared; even swearing was beyond him.
After several long moments of staring back, Camber, his stoic expression unrevealing, said, “That’s the sum of what Potherby told me. Nothing I learned from any other source contradicted anything Potherby said, and regarding those matters more widely known, other sources confirmed the man’s stories.”
Cold fury raged through Frederick, but he had no outlet for it; Stacie’s unnatural mother was long dead. He steepled his fingers before his face and forced himself to replay all Camber had told him to make sure he would remember every word.
Eventually, he lowered his hands and refocused on Camber, who had remained silent and still. “Thank you. As always, your service has been exemplary. Send in your account—I’ll be doubling the rate as you’ve delivered so quickly and so thoroughly.”
Camber inclined his head. “Thank you, my lord.”
“Now”—Frederick reached out, lifted a sheet from a stack to the side of the desk, glanced at it, and held it out to Camber—“returning to matters musical, for your next foray, I would like you to attend this auction in Glasgow and bid for me on the circled item.”
Camber took the sheet, scanned it, then nodded. “What sort of price should I expect, and what’s your upper limit?”
Frederick settled to discuss the details of the auction of an old gentleman’s library that contained a very old and rare text on Egyptian music that Frederick was determined to add to his collection.
Camber jotted notes on the auction notice. “What competition might I have?”
“I can’t say—that sheet was all the auctioneers put out. An acquaintance in Scotland noticed the item and sent it on to me. How many other collectors might have learned of that volume being amongst what is otherwise dross, I can’t even guess, but there’s always the possibility someone else has heard of it.”
Someone like Brougham, who no doubt also had acquaintances around the country who knew of his passion.
Camber met Frederick’s gaze. “You didn’t say how high I should go.”
After a second of debating, Frederick replied, “I don’t care how high—I’ll leave that in your hands—but I want that book.”
“Aye, my lord.” Camber rose. “I’ll make sure you get it.”
With a nod, Frederick dismissed Camber and watched the man leave. When the door shut behind his heavy frame, Frederick leaned back in his chair and let his mind return to what Camber had said of Stacie’s mother.
As he juggled the various insights Potherby had shared and set them against his own observations, several aspects stood out.
Manipulation was one such recurring note. In their initial interactions, before he’d agreed to play for her event, Stacie had, he felt certain, thought she was manipulating him. He’d seen through her ploys from the first, not that she had attempted to conceal them—indeed, for someone skilled in the art, she’d been remarkably forthright regarding her machinations; she hadn’t cared that he’d noticed.
She hadn’t been trying to pull the wool over his eyes but rather to open them. A telling difference, that.
As it transpired,
he was considered to be an arch-manipulator. His mother, his sisters, and even his close friends would all happily testify as to how easy he found it to nudge people into doing what he wished.
That skill was one of the reasons he was widely acknowledged as someone who always got his own way.
But being a manipulator meant one tended to recognize the trait in others—as he had in Stacie and also in Ryder and in Mary, and they had in him. More, it was generally accepted that manipulating a manipulator wasn’t easy and, often, was well-nigh impossible; they knew all the tricks.
Consequently, while he’d recognized what Stacie was doing, he’d gone along with her promptings for his own reasons, not because she’d succeeded in steering him along.
He stared unseeing across the room. “But does she know that?”
Thinking back, he couldn’t be sure that she did, that she’d realized he’d seen through her efforts completely; at the time, if anything, he’d hidden the extent of his awareness from her. It was, therefore, perfectly possible that she thought she had and could manipulate him.
The more he turned over the pieces of the puzzle Camber had laid before him, he felt increasingly sure that a large part of the reason for Stacie’s aversion to marriage lay in the combination or concatenation of three things: her constantly lauded physical similarity to her mother, the ability to manipulate that she’d inherited from her mother, and her mother’s use of manipulation to harm others, especially her husband.
Make his heart bleed to keep him in line.
Just the thought of the impact that concept would have had on a girl as given to caring for others as Stacie made Frederick feel physically ill.
Regardless, that much, he felt was now clear. Much less clear was how, exactly, those three factors came together in Stacie’s mind to set her so adamantly against marriage.