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

Chapter 16

The news came before the morning.

At half past six, as the sun came up gray and wet over the park, a horse came up the drive at a gallop, and there was a hammering at the front door, and Adrian woke in his chair by the library fire — he had not gone to bed — to the sound of a servant’s running feet.

It was one of the Vale House grooms, mud to the waist, and he had ridden through the night.

“Sir Edmund, Your Grace,” he said, gasping. “He’s gone. He died at two o’clock this morning.”

Lenora came down the stairs in time to hear it, in her dressing gown, with her hair loose, and she stood on the bottom step and heard it and did not move for a long moment.

Then she said, “Thank you for riding so hard. Go and eat. Someone will take your horse.”

She walked into the library, and Adrian reached for her, and she came and sat on the arm of his chair — an unladylike thing — and leaned her head against his shoulder, and for perhaps a minute she did not speak at all.

“I am glad we went,” she said at last. “I am glad he told me himself. I am glad he knew about the box.”

“Yes.”

“I am not sorry,” she said, and then her voice cracked at last, one small break in it, and he put his arm around her and held her while she cried — briefly, efficiently, the way she did everything, and then stopped, and straightened, and wiped her face with the palm of her hand.

“Now,” she said. “London.”

They went at nine. Mr. Pryce met them at his chambers in Gray’s Inn with the deed box and a plain-clothes clerk. The man they were going to see was a Lord Revelstoke, a commissioner at the Home Office who had been pursuing the consortium’s shadow for two years and had once, at school, been a friend of Adrian’s father.

They were with him for four hours.

At the end of it, Lord Revelstoke sat back in his chair, took off his spectacles, and said, “I have waited for this box for eleven years. Do you understand what I am telling you? Eleven years. I have had two men try to bring me this and both of them were bought.” He tapped the stack of papers with one finger. “There is a problem, however, and I want you to hear it: these men are careful, and their friends are numerous, and a prosecution against Lord Philip Draycott in a court of law would take two years and would most likely fail, because half the bench dines at his table. What I can do is faster and quieter and more complete.”

“Which is?” said Adrian.

“I can put his affairs into the hands of the Court of Chancery, on my own petition, with the forged instruments as the grounds. Every asset frozen. Every partnership suspended. Every character in his book called to account. And a commission of inquiry into the whole consortium, of which he will be the first name.” Revelstoke smiled for the first time all day. “It will not put him in gaol. It will do something far worse to a man like him. It will make him unremarkable. He will die a man who is spoken of politely, and nothing more.”

“Do it,” said Lenora Vale. “Do it today.”

They signed everything. It was half past two when they came down the stone steps into the rain, into Gray’s Inn, and the wet gray light of a London afternoon.

And it was there, on the pavement, that it happened.

Lenora was three paces behind Adrian’s chair, looking down while she pulled on her glove. A man was standing beside a hackney cab at the curb. She looked up at the smell of his coat — coal smoke and horses — and recognized him: the footman who did not wear the Draycott livery, the man whose bed had not been slept in.

He said, “Your Grace? A message from Lord Draycott.”

And he put out his hand.

Adrian saw the man’s arm come up, and something in the shape of the movement went through him like a cold wire — he had seen a hundred men move like that on a battlefield, on the Peninsula, in the year before the accident, and his body remembered what his legs had forgotten.

He shouted.

Lenora turned her head. The hand came down with a knife in it — a small, short blade, held low and driven straight — and she twisted, and the blade took her across the forearm instead of the ribs, and went through silk and flesh and out again.

For one second nobody in Gray’s Inn Square moved.

Then the man was running, and the cab was gone, and Lenora was on her knees on the wet stones with her arm bleeding through her glove, and Adrian Ellsworth, sixth Duke of Ravenwood, got out of his wheeled chair onto the pavement for the first time in three years.

He did not stand. He could not stand. He fell onto his hands and knees on the wet stone beside her and did not feel it, and took her face in both his hands, and looked at her, and could not speak.

“I am all right,” she said. Her voice was thin with shock, but steady. “It is my arm. Your Grace — Adrian — your hand is bleeding. You have cut your hand.”

And he looked down at his own hand, and there was a small bright line across the palm where the knife had grazed as he reached, and he began, of all things, to laugh — a raw, broken, half-sobbing laugh, on his knees on the pavement in the rain, with his wife’s blood on his sleeve and his own blood on the stones.

“That,” he said, “is the first time I have felt my hands in three years.”