Silas shook his head and leaned back in the leather-covered chair behind his study desk. The room was his favorite, all male in its feel. Mounted antlers circled the study, just below the ceiling. A deep, black fireplace took up the entire wall at the room’s far end. Over it was a classical painting: The Rape of the Sabine Women. Swarthy men tearing the clothes from fair-skinned, screaming wenches. He sometimes got prick-proud just looking at the thing.

“But poison?” Bennet threw himself into a chair and started tapping his fingers on the arm.

His younger son aggravated him; but even now, Silas could not help feeling proud of him. This one should have been his heir. Thomas would never have the balls to confront his father. Silas had known it the moment he’d first seen Bennet, bawling and red-faced, in his mother’s arms. He’d looked into the infant’s face and a voice inside him had whispered, this one—this one out of all his other get—would be the son he, Silas, would be proud of. So he’d taken the babe from that whore’s arms and brought him home. His wife had pouted and wept, but Silas had soon let her know he wouldn’t change his mind and she’d had to relent. Some might still remember that Bennet wasn’t legally born, that he’d come from the loins of the gatekeeper’s wife, but they wouldn’t dare speak that knowledge aloud.

Not while Silas Granville ruled this land.

Bennet shook his head. “Poison isn’t the method Harry would use if he wanted revenge on you. He loves the land and the people who farm it.”

“Loves the land?” Silas scoffed. “How can he? He doesn’t own any land. He’s naught but a paid custodian. The land he tends and works on belongs to someone else.”

“But the farmers still come to him, don’t they?” Bennet asked softly, his eyes narrowed. “They ask him his opinion; they follow his guidance. Even many of your own tenants go to Harry when they have a problem—or at least they did before all this started. They wouldn’t dare come to you.”

A line of pain shot along Silas’s left temple. “Why should they? I’m not the tavern keep, someone for the farmers to bawl their troubles to.”

“No, you’re not interested in other people’s troubles, are you?” Bennet drawled. “But their respect, their allegiance—that’s a different matter.”

He had the allegiance of the local people. Didn’t they fear him? Stupid, dirty peasants, to seek the council of one of their own just because he’d risen a little from their ranks. Silas felt sweat drip down his neck. “Pye’s envious of his betters. He wishes he was an aristocrat.”