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

Chapter 13

The wedding ring had once belonged to a duchess who had been married in this house, and Lenora had learned from Mrs. Wren — over an afternoon of mending sheets and being told the family’s history in the way that housekeepers tell it, sideways and by accident — that there were four people at Ravenwood who had served the family since before she was born.

There was Mrs. Wren herself, who had come as a kitchen girl at fourteen and had known Adrian’s father and Adrian’s grandfather and remembered the exact color of the old Duke’s riding coat.

There was Bates, the valet, who had been Adrian’s batman in the year before the accident, and had carried him off a field in Portugal with a bullet in his own shoulder, and had then come home to a peacetime post where the only campaign was one of buttons and dust.

There was old Cade, the head gardener, who had planted the lime avenue, and whose father had planted the one before it.

And there was a girl named Polly — a maid of nineteen, plain and quick and entirely without fear — whose sister was a kitchen maid at Draycott House.

It was this last fact that mattered.

The plan, when it came, came from Lenora, over the deed box, during the three days before Wednesday.

“We cannot break into the house,” she said. “You cannot climb a wall. I cannot pick a lock. But a house is not a fortress; it is a great many people with keys, and people have sisters.”

“It would put the girl in danger.”

“It would put her in danger,” Lenora agreed. “Which is why I intend to ask her first, in front of you, and tell her exactly what the risk is, and let her choose. If she refuses, we find another way and we do not ask again.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment.

“You are a strange woman,” he said.

“I am a woman who spent five years being used as a means,” said Lenora. “I do not intend to use anyone as a means ever again, not even a man who deserves it.”

Polly said yes.

She said it immediately, before Lenora had even finished, and when Lenora insisted on explaining it all again — the possibility of dismissal, of ruin, of being turned off without a character — Polly said, with a flatness that stopped the room, “They took my father’s shop, ma’am. Eight years ago. He died in the spring. If I can hand that man so much as a hairpin’s worth of harm, I will do it gladly, and you need not pay me a penny for it.”

So on Monday, Polly went to Draycott House on a pretext — a parcel for her sister from their mother, a wholly invented parcel — and came back on Tuesday evening and sat in the kitchen and told them what she had seen.

The green portmanteau was under the window seat in the study, beneath a heap of blank account books, and it was locked, and the key ring that opened it hung on a hook behind the study door with nine other keys, and Draycott was at home all day Wednesday, because he had told the household to expect a visitor at four.

Also: he had a footman who did not wear the Draycott livery, who had been staying in the house for a week, and who had come in a hackney cab and did not speak to anybody.

Also: he had been heard, on Monday night, in the study, talking to a man whose voice nobody recognized, and the words that had come through the paneling — Mrs. Beck the cook had her ear against the door at the time, which she freely admitted — had been “Ravenwood” and “the doctor’s report” and “then it will not matter what he says.”

Adrian sat very still when he heard that.

“The doctor’s report,” he repeated.

“Which doctor, I could not learn, sir. Only that word.” Polly twisted her apron. “There’s a man named Hollis who has been to the house twice this month. A physician. He comes in the side way, so the neighbors will not see.”

Lenora’s face had gone white and then very composed, in the way it did when she was frightened.

“Hollis,” Adrian said slowly. “Hollis was the surgeon who attended me after the accident.”

The kitchen was silent.

“He examined me on the night of the fall and again in the weeks after,” Adrian said. “He was the man who told me my spine was damaged beyond recovery. He wrote the report that went to my solicitors, and to my brother, and to my mother.” His voice was perfectly level, and perfectly terrible. “And he has been visiting Draycott House twice a month.”

“Or,” Lenora said quietly, “he has been paid to visit Draycott House twice a month.”

The fire rustled. Polly stood very still by the kitchen table, her hands twisting, understanding more than she had intended to.

“If the surgeon lied,” Lenora said, “there are two possibilities. Either you were not so badly hurt as he said — in which case, there is a chance that has been stolen from you these three years. Or you were hurt exactly as badly as he said, and the report was purchased anyway, for no other purpose than to be kept in a green portmanteau in a study in Mayfair, in case it was ever useful.”

Adrian said nothing for a long moment. Then he looked up at her, and his face had that quiet, set look she had learned to be wary of, and he said:

“On Wednesday, when he comes through that door, I am going to ask him a question about the hunting. And I want you to watch him very carefully, and tell me afterwards whether he looks like a man who is lying. You are better at it than I am.”

Lenora came around the table and put her hand on his shoulder.

“I will watch him,” she said. “And I will tell you the truth, whatever it is.”