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

Chapter 12

The way in came through Lord and Lady Fenton, who had not answered the invitation to the great empty dinner, and who had, Lenora had deduced, spent the following three months regretting it in a way that could be exploited.

The deduction was this: Lady Fenton had called at Ravenwood Hall uninvited in April, on a pretext about a subscription, and had spent forty minutes looking at the conservatory with an expression of pure envy, and had, at parting, said — too quickly, and to Lenora’s face, with her husband waiting in the carriage — “You must come to us. We shall have a small dinner. Twelve at most.”

“We shall be delighted,” Lenora had said, before Lady Fenton could think better of it, and had written the acceptance that same evening so that there was no way out.

The guest list at Fenton House was eleven people, all of them consequential, and Lord Philip Draycott was one of them, because Lady Fenton could not resist him any more than anyone else could.

They arrived early. It was Adrian’s suggestion — let us be there before him, let us be already seated in the room before he comes through the door, let us make him walk into us — and Lady Fenton, who had known Adrian’s mother, received them in her drawing room with a warmth so overdone it was almost honest.

“The rumor mill has been unkind,” she murmured, as she steered them in. “I am glad to see you here together. It is what my own mother would have called good manners, and no one has any of those left.”

“The rumor mill is rarely kind,” Lenora agreed.

“But it can be useful,” said Lady Fenton, and then, catching Lenora’s expression, laughed out loud. “Oh, I like you. You have a spine. Sit by me at dinner; I want to hear the whole of it.”

Dinner was at nine. Draycott came in at ten past, late and by design, with his coat over his arm and his apologies already in his mouth, and took the last vacant seat at the table — which was, as it happened, directly across from the Duke and Duchess of Ravenwood, and which Adrian had personally requested of Lady Fenton three weeks earlier, by letter, on the grounds that he had not seen his old friend in some time and would like to.

The irony had been entirely lost on Lady Fenton, who had thought it a charming sentiment.

For two hours, the conversation was civil on its surface and a battlefield beneath it. Draycott spoke at length about his ventures — a shipping interest, a mine in Wales, a very promising arrangement with a Portuguese house — and Adrian listened with the patience of a hunter who has already seen where the deer will stop.

The ground was prepared three courses in, when a General Pemberton mentioned, with the oblivious cheer of a man who reads no newspapers, the matter of Lord Ashby.

“Poor Ashby,” he said. “Selling the family seat. My God. There was a time when Ashby’s father could have bought half of Berkshire.”

“He was never a careful man,” said Draycott, swirling his wine. “He borrowed what he could not repay, and he would not be advised. It is the way of the world. A tragedy, but there it is.”

“Is it?” said Adrian.

The voice was quiet, and cold, and it cut the table in half. Four conversations died at once.

“I would not call it tragedy,” Adrian went on, in the same level tone. “I would call it predation.”

Draycott’s smile did not falter, but his eyes narrowed to slits. “You have strong opinions, Blackmore — Ravenwood — for a man who has been absent from society so long.”

“Absence sharpens the eye.” Adrian reached into the breast of his coat and drew out a folded paper. He laid it on the tablecloth, between the salt and the candelabra, and smoothed it flat with the flat of his hand.

“I wonder,” he said, “whether you recognize this.”

The table looked. Lady Fenton, at the far end, put down her spoon.

It was a promissory note. Nine thousand pounds. Signed by Lord Ashby. And counter-signed — in a bold, unmistakable hand, in a way that no one could have failed to identify, because the hand belonged to a man who had signed a thousand such documents in front of half the men in the room — P. Draycott.

“I have a copy of this,” Adrian said, “and eleven others like it, and I have read them all very carefully. There is a very interesting thing about this one which I do not propose to discuss at Lady Fenton’s table.” He folded the paper again, unhurriedly, and put it away. “But I wonder — privately, between friends — whose hand wrote Lord Ashby’s name.”

The silence was absolute. Somewhere down the table a fork touched a plate with a small, shocking clink.

Draycott set down his glass, very carefully, as though it had become dangerous.

“That,” he said, “is a strange thing to say to a man who has been your friend.”

“It is,” Adrian agreed. “But I have heard that I have been away some time. Friends change. Horses founder. Papers get signed.” He met the other man’s eyes down the length of the table, and did not blink. “Perhaps you and I should have a conversation.”

“Perhaps we should.”

“Ravenwood House. Wednesday next. Four o’clock.” Adrian’s voice was perfectly even. “Come alone.”

Draycott smiled — a thin, bright, dangerous thing — and picked up his glass again and drank to it.

“Wednesday next,” he said. “I shall look forward to it.”

Under the tablecloth, out of sight of all eleven guests, Lenora’s hand found Adrian’s and pressed it once, hard. In the carriage on the way home she said nothing for ten minutes, and then she said:

“He will not come alone, you know.”

“No,” Adrian said. “But he will come.”