I can find no record of a Major John Pembroke in any of this year’s muster rolls.” Ensign Farmer bobbed his head with red-faced deference not in Kit’s direction, but in Fianna’s. “Have you asked the Clerk for Widow’s Pensions? Or examined the Army List?” Pressing folded hands into the small of his back, Kit suppressed a grimace. The ensign was the fourth clerk at the War Office to whom they’d been shunted off, all in search of a man whose existence might, if his suspicions were true, be only a figment of Fianna Cameron’s cunning imagination. Given said suspicions, he should be pleased, not chagrined, at the continued inability of the War Office’s clerks to uncover any sign of the man whom the Irishwoman continued to imply was her natural father. Yet some soft part of him clearly wished the assumptions he’d initially made about her search to be true, wished her a righteous innocent rather than the creature of guile he feared she must be. It hadn’t been his aristocratic connections that had persuaded anyone at the War Office to aid them in their search, as he’d assumed, but rather the power of Fianna Cameron’s strangely compelling countenance.
