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

Chapter 15

The operation was set for Friday, when Draycott would be at a card party in St. James’s until two in the morning — a fact supplied by Polly’s sister, who had been given the night off and had been told the household might expect the master home late.

At ten o’clock, a market cart drew up in the mews behind Draycott House, and four men got down from it.

One was Bates, the valet, who had carried his master off a battlefield and had learned things in the army that polite service had not erased. One was the under-gardener, a large quiet man named Tuck with hands like hams. One was a man from the village who owed Cade a debt of forty years’ standing and would not say what it was. And the fourth was Lenora’s own coachman, who had driven her family’s carriage since before she was born, and who had asked to come.

Adrian waited in the carriage in the mews. This was the compromise, arrived at after two days of argument: he would not climb through a coal chute in a wheeled chair, and he would not sit at home imagining it either. He sat in the carriage with the window down and the curtain drawn, and he watched the back of Draycott House, and he counted the chimneys, and he waited.

Eleven o’clock.

Quarter past eleven.

At twenty-five past eleven, a lamp went on in the second-floor study, and went off again a minute later.

At twenty to twelve, the scullery door opened, and a woman in a kitchen apron stood in the doorway and held up her hand. That was the signal — the coast is clear, the footman is asleep in the pantry, come now — and three shadows crossed the yard and went in.

The next forty minutes were the longest of Adrian Ellsworth’s life.

He sat in the dark and heard the city around him: a watchman’s bell down the street, a carriage somewhere, a dog. He thought about the girl Polly, who was sitting in a kitchen three streets away waiting for news. He thought about Lenora, who was at that moment standing in the hall of Ravenwood Hall in her dressing gown with a candle, waiting, saying nothing to anyone.

He thought about his father, ashamed on his deathbed of a crime he had not committed.

He thought about a bay gelding, bought in Melton, and a note reading I hope you will enjoy a great deal of riding in the years ahead.

At seven minutes past midnight, the scullery door opened again.

Bates came out first, and Tuck behind him, and between them they carried something large and soft — a green leather portmanteau, so heavy that it took two men to manage it, its straps cut through rather than unlocked, which had saved four minutes and cost them nothing.

They put it in the carriage. Bates leaned in at the window and said, quietly, “All of it, sir. Every paper in the house that had his hand on it, and a deal that didn’t. Nobody woke. The girl’s sister is going to give in her notice tomorrow with a story about her mother, so nothing leads back here.”

“And the footman? The one who was staying in the house?”

“He was not there tonight, sir.” Bates’s face was unreadable in the dark. “I looked in the pantry on the way out. His bed had not been slept in, and his case was gone.”

Adrian sat very still.

“Then he has been sent somewhere,” he said.

“Yes, sir. And I don’t know where. And I don’t like it.”

They were home by one. The portmanteau was carried up to the library and opened on the long table, and Lenora came in with her candle and stood beside Adrian’s chair, and together, for two hours, they took the thing apart.

It was worse than they had imagined, and better.

Worse, because there was not merely one fraud but thirty — thirty families, thirty sets of papers, lists of names with sums beside them and dates carefully set for the calling-in of the notes, some already executed, some still pending, the whole machinery of a man who had spent ten years building a spider’s web out of other people’s debts.

Better, because Draycott had done what clever men do: he had kept his own hand on everything. Every instruction, every forged counter-signature, every letter to the fictitious consortium and to the solicitor abroad, was there in bold black ink, in the hand that had signed the note on the seat of the carriage and the name in the guest book at Ravenwood fifteen years ago.

And in a side pocket, tied with tape, there was a bundle of four letters from a physician named Hollis, addressed to Lord Philip Draycott, concerning the case of the Duke of Ravenwood — including one dated three weeks after the accident, which said, in plain English, I cannot in conscience certify that His Grace’s mind is affected; his understanding is entire; the injury to the spine is severe but the prognosis is not hopeless, and with proper exercise there is a real chance he may walk again.

Adrian read it twice.

Then he put it down on the table, and put both hands flat on the table, and sat looking at nothing at all for a long moment while the candle guttered.

“Three years,” he said.

Lenora did not say anything. She knew better.

“He told me I would never stand. He told me there was no point in trying, that exercise would kill me, that I should be content.” His voice was very quiet. “And he wrote to Draycott that I might walk.”

“He may have been wrong about the walking,” Lenora said carefully. “Physicians are wrong constantly. That is not the crime.”

“No. The crime is that he lied to me and told the truth to him.” Adrian picked up the letter, folded it, and put it in the breast of his coat. “Tomorrow morning you and I are going to London, and Mr. Pryce is coming with us, and we are going to lay all of this before a man who has been waiting three years for someone to bring him something he could not ignore.” He looked up at her. “It ends this week. Either it ends this week, or it does not end at all.”

Lenora leaned down and kissed him — for the first time, on the mouth, quickly, like a woman stealing something.

“It ends this week,” she said.