No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 11

The letter from Mr. Pryce came four days later, at dawn, hand-delivered, and Lenora read it standing in the doorway of Adrian’s study in her nightgown with a shawl around her shoulders and her hair down her back.

It was two lines long.

Sir Edmund Vale is dying. The physician gives him a fortnight at most. He asks for his daughter, and he asks that she come quickly.

She packed in twenty minutes. By the time the carriage was at the door she was standing in the hall with her gloves on, and she turned to Adrian and said, “I am going to bring back what is in the library floor. I am not coming home without it.”

“Then I am coming with you.”

“Your Grace — ”

“I am coming with you,” Adrian said, “because if Draycott has anyone watching that house, and he does — of course he does; he is not a fool — then you will not be walking into it alone, and you will not be carrying a box of forged notes out of it alone either.”

For a moment she looked as though she was about to argue. Then she stopped, and inclined her head, and something in her face relaxed as though a burden had been taken off her shoulders without her permission.

“Very well,” she said. “But you will let me do the talking in the village. Everyone there knows me. And you will not,” she added, “tell my father that he looks ill.”

“I would not.”

“You will want to.”

“I will not.”

Sir Edmund Vale was a thin, paper-colored man with enormous hands that rested on the coverlet like objects left there by accident. He had been, before the debts, a man who rode to hounds six days a week and could lift a barrel of claret onto a table one-handed. The room smelled of camphor and coal and something sweetish underneath that Adrian recognized from the last weeks of his own father’s life.

He was lucid, though. That was the mercy of it. He was entirely lucid.

“So you married him,” he said, when Lenora had kissed his cheek and drawn back. His eyes — the same hazel as hers — moved to the chair, and to the man in it, and did not flinch, and Adrian thought: yes, that is where she learned it.

“I did.”

“And you are here because of the box.”

“Yes.”

“Then take it,” said Sir Edmund Vale, “and I will tell you what I never told you before, because I did not want you to carry it, and now I am too tired to carry it myself.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “The fifth Duke of Ravenwood never signed that paper. I saw the original once, in nineteen-eleven, at the consortium’s office in Threadneedle Street, and I saw the hand on it, and it was a clever hand but it was not a duke’s. When I said as much to the man who showed it to me, he offered me a very large sum to forget it, and when I refused, he told me I would be destroyed before Michaelmas. And I was. Not quickly. Over years.”

Adrian’s hands were flat on the arms of the chair. “Who showed it to you?”

“A young gentleman. Very polished. He gave his name as Mr. Fell.” Sir Edmund’s mouth curved, with enormous effort, into something like a smile. “He was the same gentleman who was kind enough to lend me nine thousand pounds three years later, when I could not pay my daughter’s portion.” He opened his eyes. “I have known his true name for two years, Your Grace, and I have said nothing to anyone, because I wished my daughter to have her chance at a life before I spent mine.”

The box was under the floor of the library, in the dry space beneath the third shelf, exactly where Pryce had said: a japanned deed box, iron-bound, dusty to the elbow, and heavy.

They took it up by candlelight while the household slept, and they were back in the carriage before midnight.

And it was on the road home, in the dark, with the box between them on the seat, that Lenora said, very quietly, “He asked me something at the door.”

“What?”

“He asked whether I was happy.” She was silent for a moment. The trees went by, black against black. “I said yes. And he said, then it was worth it, and then he told me to look in the second compartment of the box, and not to open it in the house.”

Adrian looked at her. Then he opened the deed box, found the second compartment, and found inside it, rolled and tied: a single sheet of paper with a broken seal, a letter in a bold hand, dated three years earlier, addressed to Sir Edmund Vale, and signed by a man who had, at the time, been the Duke of Ravenwood’s closest friend.

I have heard your daughter refused my offer. I am disappointed. I have taken steps to ensure that no other arrangement profits your family in this matter. When she comes to her senses, send word. — P. Draycott.

Lenora read it twice. Then she set it down on the seat between them and looked out of the window for a long time, and Adrian sat in the dark and watched his wife’s hands.

“Come to her senses,” she said at last. “He believed — he has believed all this time — that I refused him because I was proud, and that when I was sufficiently broken, I would come.”

“Yes.”

“So he took my family apart, piece by piece, to that end.”

“Yes.”

“And when I did not come,” Lenora said slowly, “when I married you instead, he decided that he would simply take your family apart as well. Only for you, he did not begin with the money. He began with the horse.”

Adrian felt it settle into him — the whole shape of it, cold and complete, like a tool fitted into a hand.

“Then he has told us exactly how he works,” he said. “He does not strike. He arranges. He prepares, and waits, and lets the world do the breaking.” He looked at the deed box, heavy with paper. “Which means he will not have been careless with the rest of it. The originals — the signed originals, the ones that carry his own hand — where are they?”

Lenora turned from the window.

“In his study at Draycott House,” she said. “In a green leather portmanteau under the window seat. He showed it to my father once. He was proud of it.” Her mouth was very hard. “He keeps everything. He is arrogant enough to believe nobody would dare touch him.”