“Properties?”

“If one is not marrying for love, one may as well marry for something else.” And he’d wanted a reason for his choice, so whichever lady he ultimately offered for would entertain no illusions over what had made him drop his handkerchief in her lap. “My instructions were that my future countess had to be sufficiently well-bred, docile, and endowed with at least passable grace of form, deportment, and address.” A lady who could stand by his side and impinge on his consciousness not at all; a well-bred cypher who would bear his children and disrupt his lifestyle minimally.

Gyles sipped. “As it happened, I had also asked Waring to trace the current ownership of the Gatting property.”

Horace nodded his understanding. The Gatting property had at one time been part of the Lambourn estate. Without it, the earldom’s principal estate was like a pie with a slice missing; regaining the Gatting lands had been an ambition of Gyles’s father, and his father before him.

“In pursuing the owner, Waring discovered that the deed had passed to some distant Rawlings, then, on his demise, into the dowry of his daughter, presently of marriageable age. The information Waring is apparently anxious to impart concerns the daughter.”

“She of marriageable age?”

Gyles inclined his head as the chime of the front door bell pealed through the house. A moment later, the library door opened.

“Mr. Waring, my lord.”

“Thank you, Irving.”

Waring, a heavy-set man in his early thirties, with a round face and close-cropped hair, entered. Gyles waved him to the armchair opposite. “You’ve met Lord Walpole. Can I offer you a drink?”

“Thank you, my lord, but no.” Waring nodded to Horace, then sat, laying a leather satchel across his knees. “I knew how keen you were to pursue this matter, so I took the liberty of leaving a message…”