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

Chapter 7

Mr. Pryce was a small, gray, careful man with ink on his cuff and the particular stillness of someone who had spent thirty years being the only honest person in rooms full of liars.

He came at ten. He was shown into the library, where Adrian sat at the head of a long table with Lenora at his right hand, and he laid his case upon the table, and he opened it, and he began.

By noon, Adrian Ellsworth had learned three things.

The first was that his father, the fifth Duke, had in his last year advanced a sum of forty thousand pounds to a consortium of investors on the recommendation of a friend — a loan secured on Ravenwood land in the north, arranged with the assistance of a solicitor who had since gone abroad and could not be found.

The second was that the consortium did not exist.

The third was that the paper bearing his father’s signature — the paper that had conveyed the security for that loan — featured a hand that was not his father’s, and that Mr. Pryce had known it since the day he read it, and had said nothing, because the Duke had died a fortnight later and there had been nobody in the world willing to hear it.

Adrian sat perfectly still. He had heard men describe the sensation of being shot: the strange absence of pain at first, and then the delayed arrival of it, all at once, out of nowhere. He understood it now.

“Sir Edmund Vale,” said Mr. Pryce, “is the only man who ever suspected the same thing. He wrote to me four years ago. He had found a pattern — the same hand on four sets of papers, the same consortium, the same solicitor abroad. He asked whether I would help him gather evidence.” The little man folded his hands. “I told him it would ruin him. I told him the men involved were too highly placed. I advised him to burn what he had.” He looked down at his own hands. “He did not burn it. He kept copies. I believe that is why his estate is being dismantled at leisure while he watches, and why no court in England will hear him.”

“Where are the copies?” Adrian said.

“In a box under the floor of the library at Vale House. Sir Edmund gave me the location in the event of his death, and the event of his death approaches, I am sorry to say, more rapidly than he knows.” Mr. Pryce’s eyes moved to Lenora, and softened, very slightly. “I am glad you are married, madam. He would not have been able to bear leaving you alone with this.”

When the solicitor had gone, Adrian sat in the library for a long time without speaking. Lenora sat across from him and let him. Rain moved across the park in gray sheets; a fire spat once in the grate.

“He ruined my father,” Adrian said at last. “That is what you are telling me. The consortium was a fiction. The loan was a theft with a signature forged onto it, and my father died believing that he had been careless with the estate — that he had been foolish — and he was ashamed of it, and he never told me, and he died ashamed.” His hands were shaking. He looked at them with remote surprise, as though they belonged to somebody else. “And Draycott — Draycott was there. He was at the funeral. He held my arm at the graveside.”

“Yes.”

“He was my friend.”

“He has been harvesting your family for six years, Your Grace, and he began while your father was still alive, and he has been waiting, since the day you were thrown on the Huntingdon Road, to see whether you would crawl into a hole and die or come out and fight.” Lenora’s voice was quiet. “He has spent two years betting that you would stay in the hole.”

Adrian lifted his head. His eyes were pale and terrible.

“Where,” he said, “were you thrown?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Huntingdon Road. Do you know precisely where on the Huntingdon Road?”

Lenora frowned. “Near the crossroads at Bramfield, I believe. The horse took fright at a wagon. It was in every paper.”

“It was a new horse. I had bought him in September. He had never put a foot wrong in six weeks, and my groom had walked him over that road a dozen times.” Adrian’s voice had gone very cold and very slow. “That morning my groom was not with me. He had been called away to his mother’s bedside at four o’clock — a message delivered by a boy nobody could afterwards find. And I rode out on a horse that had been sent to me as a gift.”

The fire cracked.

“From whom?” Lenora said.

“From an old friend. As a wedding gift, four months early.” Adrian’s mouth curved, and it was not a smile. “He wrote a very warm note. He said he hoped I would enjoy a great deal of riding in the years ahead.”

For a moment neither of them spoke. Then Lenora rose, and came around the table, and knelt beside his chair — a movement so sudden and so unladylike that he stared at her.

“Then he did not merely ruin your family, Your Grace,” she said. “He took your legs. And he did it before he took mine.” She took his hand in both of hers and held it hard. “This is not a quarrel about money anymore. This is a man who has laid his hands on both of our houses, and I will not spend the rest of my life letting him sell off pieces of us.”

Adrian looked down at her — this woman he had married for convenience four weeks ago, kneeling at his chair with rain-grey light on her face and her jaw set like a soldier’s.

“No,” he said. “Nor will I.”