The Duke Posed as a Servant to Observe His Fiancée… and What He Heard Broke His Heart

Chapter 1

The coal dust had worked its way so deep beneath his fingernails that no brush would ever reach it, and Adrian Ashford—Duke of Ravensmere, master of nine thousand acres—stood in a servant’s corridor with a bucket in his hand and his own name stitched inside his coat, close enough to hear the woman he was going to marry laugh at him. He had come north to prove himself wrong. He had come expecting to find shyness mistaken for coldness, reserve mistaken for cunning. Instead, through four inches of oak, he heard a man’s voice say, we have a window of opportunity, and heard her answer, low and pleased, then we take it, and we take everything. Adrian did not move. He did not breathe. The fire needed more coal, and the bucket hung from fingers that no longer belonged to a duke, and somewhere far below the marble floors of Hollowmere Hall, the clock in the stable block struck nine. He would remember that sound for the rest of his life—because it was the last moment he was still the man who believed in her.

The rain had been falling on London for eleven days, and it had done nothing to clean the city. It only made the cobbles slick, made the horses nervous, made the gutters run brown past the doorways of Fleet Street where the beggars huddled under soaked wool that smelled of wet dog and old smoke.

Adrian Ashford stood at the window of his study in Ravensmere House with a glass of brandy in his hand, and he watched the water streak the glass like tears he refused to shed.

Behind him, the fire spat and shifted. Shadows crawled up the velvet walls. Somewhere in the house, a clock ticked with the patience of a thing that had outlived three dukes already and expected to outlive a fourth.

“You look like a man walking to his own hanging, your grace.”

Adrian didn’t turn. He knew the voice, and he knew the only man in England who would have used it.

“Hollis. Do you ever knock?”

“I knock at doors that belong to other people.” Hollis came in, a thin man of fifty with grey at his temples and the flat, careful eyes of someone who had spent thirty years watching noblemen ruin themselves and had learned to keep his face still while doing so. He crossed to the hearth and used the poker with the indifference of long practice. “I’ve known you since you were eleven years old and hiding in the stables from your father’s temper. I have earned the right to walk in.”

“Then walk in.” Adrian drank. The brandy burned, and he was grateful for it. “And tell me I am being a fool.”

“I cannot tell you that, because you have not told me what you intend.”

“Marriage. In six weeks. To Lady Celeste Draycott.”

Hollis was quiet a moment. The fire cracked. “Most men in England would call that a reward, your grace. She is the diamond of the season. Beautiful, accomplished, and her family is nearly as old as yours.”

“Beautiful,” Adrian said. “Yes.”

He said nothing else. He rotated the glass slowly in his fingers and watched the amber liquid climb the crystal and slide back down again.

“Do you know what I remember of my mother and father?” he asked at last. “Not the balls. Not the portraits. I remember them dancing in this room, badly, with the carpet rolled up, and my father laughing so hard he had to sit down on the floor. A duke. Sitting on the floor.” He turned from the window. His face was young for twenty-eight and much older than it should have been. “He was not a good man in every respect. He was proud, and he was cold with the tenants when the accounts went badly, and I hated him for a decade after my sister died. But he was not alone. He was never alone.”

“And you are.”

“I am surrounded by people who want pieces of me.” Adrian set the glass down hard enough that the brandy jumped the rim. “I want to know if she wants the man or the title. That is all. That is the entire question, and if you tell me it cannot be answered, I will tell you it must.”

“Then ask her.”

“I have asked her.” He laughed, short and without warmth. “Twice. Once in a conservatory, once on a terrace at the Farehams’. Both times she smiled, touched my sleeve, and said something so perfectly correct that I could not have written it better myself. Perfectly correct, Hollis. Every answer. Every pause. Every laugh at exactly the right length.”

“Perhaps she is merely well-bred.”

“Perhaps.” Adrian walked to his desk. There were letters there—four months of letters, his own hand, ink blotted where he’d written too fast. He had written about the silence of this house. About the anniversaries he could not get through. About his hope, absurd and persistent, that one day there would be children running down the long gallery and he would no longer be the last of his line standing in an empty room with a glass in his hand. He had written those things to her. He had written them to a stranger and called it intimacy.

“I have a plan,” he said. “I need your absolute silence, and I need you to be an accessory to something that will end in either my happiness or my ruin.”

Hollis sighed, and the sigh was the sound of a man who had seen this exact expression before, on this exact face, at the age of eleven. “What have you done?”

“The Draycotts are hiring. I saw the notice in the Times on Tuesday. They require an underfootman for Hollowmere Hall in Derbyshire, where Lady Celeste is spending the autumn before the wedding. Her mother, the dowager countess, is in residence. They are short of staff and short of patience.”

The poker went still in Hollis’s hand.

“You cannot be serious.”

“I have already applied.” Adrian opened the drawer and drew out a single sheet of paper, stamped and sealed. “Under the name Tom Hale. Former valet to a gentleman in Hertfordshire who is lately deceased. The reference is forged. Do not look at me like that—I know men who owe me favors, and one of them has a very good hand for another man’s signature.”

“You are a peer of the realm.”

“I am aware.”

“You would muck out stables.”

“If required.”

“You would bow to her.”

“I would bow to her, and I will do it well, because I have watched servants bow all my life and I know precisely how it is done.” Adrian’s mouth curved—not a smile, something harder and brighter than a smile. “Two months, Hollis. The wedding is six weeks away. If she is the woman she pretends to be, I will come home and marry her with a glad heart, and I will never tell a living soul what I did to be certain. If she is not—” He stopped.

“If she is not?”

Adrian looked at the fire for a long moment.

“I will know exactly what I am dealing with,” he said. “And I have never in my life walked away from anything without settling the account.”

That night he wrote two letters. The first went to his lawyer, instructing him to begin a quiet inquiry into the Lynch—into the Draycott accounts. The second he burned.

At dawn, he took the mail coach north, wedged between a farmer who smelled of onion and a clergyman who read his Bible upside down and never noticed. His hands were dirty. His jaw was unshaven. He had taken three hours to study his own valet’s hands and then to reproduce them, and the cleverness of it had made him strangely proud, and the shame of it had come right after, hot on its heels.

He did not know yet that Lady Celeste Draycott’s housekeeper was already waiting by the servant’s door with a face like a dried apple, and that she would look at his hands first, before she looked at his face.

He did not know that in three hours he would hear the name Lord Kelgrave spoken in that house, in her voice, with a warmth he had never once been given.