The Abbey

The bar off Westminster Hall was already too full by half, though that never prevented anyone from squeezing in. Members drifted shoulder to shoulder with researchers, secretaries, lobby correspondents and the lesser orbit of political life, all of them talking at once, all of them pretending not to listen to one another. Cigarette smoke had worked itself into the curtains and jackets and the wood behind the counter years ago, and the air held that stale, crowded warmth peculiar to London rooms that believed themselves important.

Sebastian Penhaligon-Grant, Viscount Pendarrow, lounged against the far end of the bar with the ease of a man who had never in his life been obliged to edge for space. He was tall enough to look over most of the room without effort, broad-shouldered, fair-skinned, and impeccably turned out in a dark suit that had plainly been made for him rather than bought. His hair was thick and dark golden blond, conventionally cut, with the faintest suggestion of silver beginning at the temples, and his eyes, a clear grey-blue, rested on people with an interest so cool and steady that it rarely felt like scrutiny until afterwards. At forty-four he had reached that point at which good looks had hardened into something more formidable: not beauty exactly, though he still possessed plenty of that, but authority, breeding and self-command so complete that they became their own form of glamour.

He was not speaking. That in itself made him more noticeable.

Other men in rooms like this performed sociability. Sebastian observed it. He watched the currents of approach and retreat, who was useful to whom, who wanted what, whose face altered at the mention of a name or a constituency or a ministerial whisper. He had been born to one sort of power and had acquired a taste for another, and one of his particular gifts lay in recognising the machinery of a room before anyone else had admitted it was there.

That was how he noticed her.

Someone near the middle of the crush said, “Josephine,” and a young woman turned her head briefly in answer before returning her attention to the problem immediately before her. Miss Blythe, then.

She was small enough to be overlooked by anyone lazy in their observation, but only by the lazy. She had black wavy hair and hazel eyes, and there was a quick, composed intelligence in her face that made prettiness beside the point, though she was certainly pretty. Very pretty, in fact, once one had looked twice. She wore the sort of clothes sensible young women in Westminster wore when they wished to be taken seriously and had not yet the salary to make seriousness elegant. Nothing about her appearance announced her. Everything about her conduct did.

Sebastian watched her intercept a man on an eager trajectory towards the Member she served. She did it without so much as touching his sleeve. One moment he was moving with fixed purpose; the next he had been turned, delayed, mildly flattered and attached to an entirely different conversation, while her employer, who quite clearly did not wish to speak to him, was quietly removed from the room under cover of the diversion. It was achieved so neatly that the victim of the manoeuvre did not appear to know he had been managed at all.

Sebastian’s attention sharpened.

Over the next several minutes, three separate people approached Miss Blythe, each with a different question, each with the air of someone who had already learnt that she was more likely than anyone else present to know the answer. She supplied one with a committee time, another with the whereabouts of a ministerial brief, and a third with some quiet piece of procedural knowledge that sent him away visibly relieved. She did not behave like a woman enjoying importance. She behaved like a woman accustomed to being necessary.

That, far more than her face, interested him.

Beauty was common enough in London, and in Westminster it was often overvalued by men foolish enough to mistake ornament for leverage. Usefulness was rarer. Usefulness joined to self-possession, ambition and tact was rarer still.

He continued to watch her.

She moved quickly, but never nervously. She listened fully when spoken to. She gave information in crisp, economical phrases and wasted neither words nor motion. No one hovered over her, yet people kept returning to her. It suggested competence of the most practical and therefore the most valuable sort: not brilliance in the abstract, but the ability to keep a system functioning whilst others took credit for its operation.

Sebastian set down his glass and crossed the room.

He did not approach as men often approached attractive women in bars, with an air of licence disguised as charm. There was no smile prepared in advance, no lazy intimacy, no assumption that she would be flattered by his notice simply because it was his. If anything, the very precision of his manner made the encounter feel more serious than flirtation would have done.

“Miss Blythe.”

She turned at once.

For the briefest instant her expression altered with surprise, and he saw recognition arrive immediately afterwards. Of course she knew him. Most politically conscious people in the building knew who Sebastian Penhaligon-Grant was, even before his own parliamentary career properly began. He carried too much of his name and station about with him to pass unrecognised.

He inclined his head.

“Sebastian Penhaligon-Grant,” he said, as though an introduction were still required. “Viscount Pendarrow.”

It was immaculate good manners, and therefore entirely in character.

“Lord Pendarrow,” she said.

He noticed that she neither gushed nor fumbled. Another mark in her favour.

“Whom are you working for at present, Miss Blythe?”

She told him.

“And how long have you been there?”

“Just over eighteen months.”

He gave a small nod, as if this confirmed something he had half expected. In truth, it told him very little. But questions, judiciously placed, gave people the pleasing impression of being seen.

“I’ve watched your career with some interest,” he said.

That landed exactly as he intended.

He saw it in the slight widening of her eyes, in the almost imperceptible pause before she answered, in that mixture of gratification and caution peculiar to able young people who had hoped to be noticed and had not imagined they had been noticed by anyone quite so grand. Josephine Blythe was ambitious; he could see that much already. Not vulgarly ambitious, not the pushing sort who mistook noise for advancement, but intelligent, diligent, and fully aware that such qualities ought to carry her further than her current desk.

“That’s very kind of you.”

Sebastian let that sit for a moment, then reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and produced a card.

“There’s an opportunity opening in my office,” he said. “A more senior post than your current position. Telephone my secretary on Monday if you’d like to discuss it.”

Josephine took the card, still looking slightly startled.

“What sort of opportunity?”

A tiny smile touched his mouth then, no more than that.

“One I think you’d be very good at.”

He did not elaborate. He did not ask whether she was interested, still less whether she was free for dinner. He did not request her number, offer to buy her a drink, or remain to enjoy the effect he had made. He had no wish whatsoever for Miss Blythe to go home imagining that Lord Pendarrow had attempted to chat her up in a parliamentary bar. The offer must appear what it was, or at least what it was close enough to the truth to be believed as: professional, serious and entirely in her interest.

He inclined his head once more and left her there with his card in her hand.

By the time Josephine looked down at it, he had already rejoined the man with whom he had arrived.

The other man was older, pinker and less well assembled, with the worn but expensive look of someone who had spent years adjacent to important men and hoped one day to become one. Sebastian scarcely glanced at him.

“Josephine Blythe,” he said.

The man waited.

Sebastian took up his glass again. “Find out who she works for, how long she’s been there, where she was before that. Education. Political affiliations. Anything relevant.”

A fractional pause.

“You know her?”

Sebastian looked back towards the crowd only long enough to establish where she now stood.

“Not yet.”

It was the sort of answer that might, from another man, have sounded amused. From Sebastian it sounded like fact.

He had told Miss Blythe that he had watched her career with interest. By Monday he intended that statement to sound not merely flattering but true. He would know where she had studied and what she had done since. He would know whom she had served, which campaigns had trusted her, where responsibility had quietly accumulated in her hands. He would know the small things too, the details that persuaded people they had been observed individually rather than assessed in bulk: a committee successfully managed, a difficulty averted, some obscure administrative triumph eighteen months ago that no one else had remembered to value.

His manipulations worked best when built upon truths already present. There was no point inventing a false prospect for a woman like Josephine Blythe. If he offered her advancement, it must be advancement. If he praised her competence, it must be because she possessed it. Sebastian did not create desire where none existed. He identified it, then placed himself squarely between a person and the object of that desire until gratitude became indistinguishable from loyalty.

And there was, in fact, an opportunity.

He was shortly to stand for selection in Pendarrow and North Penwith, a constituency where the Penhaligon-Grant name had carried weight for generations and the safest of safe Conservative seats. Barring catastrophe, selection would mean Westminster, and Westminster would require a woman who could manage both a campaign and the machinery beyond it. A personal secretary first, perhaps; something larger in due course. Someone sharper than the decorative loyalists with whom politics habitually furnished itself. Someone who understood that the true life of public men was arranged not in speeches but in timings, papers, gatekeeping, memory, tone, access and denial.

Someone useful.

Across the room Josephine Blythe had slipped his card into her handbag with an expression he would have liked to study more closely, though he did not turn to do so.

If she had any sense, she would telephone on Monday.

If she had as much sense as he suspected, she would be mad not to.

Josephine and Andrew had taken a small flat in Pimlico that was never quite tidy by the standards of magazine photographs and always comfortable by the standards that actually mattered. The sitting room was too narrow for grandeur and too full of books for elegance, with the evening paper abandoned over one arm of the sofa and a cardigan slung over the back of a chair as though it had lived there permanently. The kitchen was hardly a room at all, merely a determined corner with cupboards painted some years earlier by a landlord who had prized cheerfulness above skill. Josephine loved it with the unembarrassed loyalty of someone who had built a life there piece by piece.

When she let herself in, Andrew called from the kitchen, “That you?”

“Who else would it be?”

He leant round the doorframe with a wooden spoon in his hand and grinned at her. Andrew Bradbury was tall, dark-haired and brown-eyed, his face clever without sharpness, his expression habitually thoughtful until she came into a room, when it usually brightened before he seemed aware of it. His dark brown hair had gone slightly untidy in the steam from the stove. He had changed out of his office clothes and into an old shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and he looked precisely as he always did at this hour: capable, familiar and entirely hers. They had met at Durham and never really learnt how to organise life without one another afterwards. By twenty-six they had acquired the easy domestic competence of people who had grown up side by side into adulthood and found that the arrangement suited them.

“Possibly a burglar with very definite views on the biscuit tin,” he said. “You’re late.”

“I know. There was a drinks thing after work.”

“There are mushrooms nearly at the point of no return, so if you want feeding, take your coat off and come rescue dinner.”

Josephine laughed and hung up her coat. By the time she reached the kitchen, he had already moved half a step to the left without looking, making space for her before she asked for it. She opened the cupboard above his shoulder, took down two plates and stole a slice of red pepper from the chopping board. Andrew caught her wrist lightly with his free hand before she could reach for a second piece.

“That’s for the pan,” he said.

“You were not using it.”

“I was about to use it.”

She took it anyway and ate it with a look of pure innocence. He released her hand and shook his head in resignation that was too well practised to be genuine.

There was nothing remarkable in any of it. Their intimacy had long since settled into habit, timing and mutual knowledge. Josephine knew where he would put things down before he put them there. Andrew knew from the sound of her key in the door what sort of day she had had. They moved around one another in the cramped kitchen with the precision of a long-rehearsed dance, never colliding, rarely speaking to negotiate space. It had taken them years to become this effortless, and neither of them thought of it as an accomplishment because they had arrived there together.

“I’ve had the strangest evening,” Josephine said, reaching for the cutlery drawer.

Andrew stirred the sauce. “Worse strange or better strange?”

“Better, I think.”

He glanced at her then, properly attentive. “What happened?”

She put the knives and forks on the table, then turned back to him with the expression of someone not yet certain she believed her own story. “Lord Pendarrow spoke to me.”

Andrew looked at her for a beat. “No, he didn’t.”

“He did.”

“Josephine.”

“I’m serious.”

He set down the spoon. “Sebastian Penhaligon-Grant, Lord Pendarrow?”

“Yes.”

Andrew stared at her, then laughed in disbelief. “You are making this up.”

Without a word, Josephine reached into her handbag and produced the card. She handed it to him with a flourish half triumphant, half dazed.

Andrew took it, and his face changed at once.

The card was thick, engraved, expensive in that muted way which only truly expensive things ever managed. He read it once, then again, as if the second look might reveal some sign of theatre or trickery. It did not.

“Good Lord,” he said quietly.

“I told you.”

He looked up. “What did he want?”

Josephine perched on the edge of the table and told him. She described the crowded bar, the way Sebastian had appeared in front of her as though he had detached himself from the wall by intention alone, the courtesy of his introduction, the peculiar, unnerving effect of hearing a man like that say he had watched her career with interest. She repeated his exact words about the opportunity in his office and the way he had gone almost immediately afterwards, leaving no room for nonsense or misunderstanding.

Andrew listened without interruption. He asked one or two practical questions only when she had finished a part of the story: which office Sebastian meant, whether he had said anything about timing, whether anyone else had seen. He turned the card over once in his fingers, then set it carefully on the table between them.

“And he didn’t flirt with you?” he asked.

“Not in the least.”

“Didn’t ask you for a drink?”

“No.”

Andrew nodded. “Then it sounds real.”

“It is real,” Josephine said, though the very fact she said it betrayed that she was still trying to convince herself.

He leant back against the counter, considering. Andrew’s mind had always worked in an orderly way. It was one of the things she loved best about him. Where other people responded first with vanity or anxiety or fantasy, he started with structure. He took things seriously because he believed serious things deserved the effort.

“What exactly did he say?” he asked.

She told him again.

“A more senior post in his office,” Andrew said slowly. “That could mean a great many things.”

“I know.”

“And if he’s standing for Pendarrow and North Penwith...”

Josephine looked at him. “You thought that too?”

“Everyone thinks that. If he’s selected, he’s practically guaranteed a seat.”

She let out a breath and tucked a strand of black hair behind her ear. “I’ve already got a job.”

“Yes,” Andrew said, with perfect calm, “and this one might be better.”

She gave him a faintly doubtful look. “You make it sound very simple.”

“It is simple. Not easy, perhaps. But simple.”

Andrew picked up the card again and read the secretary’s number at the bottom. “If this is what it looks like, it isn’t merely moving to another office. It’s campaign experience with someone almost certain to come into Parliament. Then, if he does, you’d go in with him already trusted. That’s not small, Jo.”

She smiled a little at that, though she still looked cautious. “I know what it means.”

“I know you know. I’m saying it because I don’t want you pretending this is just flattering and odd when it’s actually an extraordinary opportunity.”

Josephine folded her arms. “You sound as though you’ve already decided for me.”

“I haven’t decided for you,” he said. “I’ve noticed that you are very good at what you do, and apparently Lord Pendarrow has noticed the same thing.”

That drew a laugh out of her.

“He was terribly impressive in person,” she said, half teasing now, half still marvelling at it.

Andrew looked at her across the little kitchen, affection plain in his face and not in the least threatened by the admission. “Well, if he had any sense, he’d hire you.”

Something softened in her expression then. Not because he had reassured some trembling insecurity, Andrew had never loved her in that clumsy, managerial way, but because he had understood at once what mattered. He had not asked what this would mean for him. He had not sulked, nor made a joke sharp enough to disguise unease. He had seen the shape of the opportunity and wanted it for her because it was hers.

She slid off the table and went to him, touching his sleeve with her fingertips. “You really think I should ring?”

“I think you’d be mad not to.”

He turned back to the stove before the sauce could catch, and she moved beside him to fetch the plates. He passed her the pan without needing to be asked. She set the table while he served. The conversation moved on for a few minutes to entirely ordinary matters: whether they had any milk left for the morning, whether Andrew’s mother still meant to come down next Sunday, whether the boiler was making that ominous noise again. Sebastian’s card remained on the table beside the salt cellar while supper was dished out, oddly important and yet already absorbed into the familiar clutter of their evening.

By the time they ate, the decision had nearly made itself.

On Monday morning, she would telephone.