The Duke Posed as a Servant to Observe His Fiancée… and What He Heard Broke His Heart

Chapter 11

For the next three weeks, Adrian Ashford did his job.

That was the part nobody would ever believe, when they heard the story years later in drawing rooms in London where the account had grown baroque with retelling. They would insist that he must have schemed; that a duke under the skin must have been recognizable; that no man of his rank could truly scrub a floor.

He scrubbed the floor. He did it well. Mrs. Craddock had said in the first week that he had a gentleman’s hands and by the end of the third she was telling the cook—in the tone of a woman revising a settled opinion—that the new man was better than the last two put together, and that it was a pity he was so quiet.

He learned the corridor noises of the Hall: the exact creak outside the dowager’s sitting room, the loose flagstone by the stillroom, the fact that the butler’s pantry clock ran nine minutes fast.

He learned the names of all eighteen servants and one fact about each. He learned that the cook’s brother was a licensed victualler in Derby who knew a great deal about the accounts of the Draycott family. He learned that Mr. Fenn’s reply, via Hollis, had come in four words: mortgage purchased. papers following.

And he learned the house’s other secret, the one that had nothing to do with Lady Celeste.

He learned it in the tenant cottages.

On the last Wednesday in October he was sent with two other men to fix the boundary fence at High Pasture, and while they were working a woman came out of the cottage at the lane end—thin, with grey hair under a shawl, holding a bowl she had clearly been baking in—and offered the workmen water and an apple each. And the two men from the Hall went quiet and took them, and after she had gone back inside they exchanged a look, and one of them laughed and said, “Three months behind. And her ladyship was at the Hall last week showing the dress to the parson’s wife.”

Adrian carried fence posts for six hours and listened.

By evening he had it. The rents on the tenant farms had gone up twice in two years. The roof of the row at Beckwith had been patched with the wrong slate and was leaking again. The widow in the lane-end cottage—Mrs. Sayer, it was, whose husband had built the walls of the kitchen garden and died of it—had been served notice of an increase for the new year, and there was no one in the parish to whom she could appeal, because the family solicitor was the family’s, and the parson took his living from the Draycotts, and the magistrate had been to school with the dowager’s brother.

That night, in the bunk house, Adrian lay with his hands behind his head and thought about the difference between theft of money and theft of everything else.

Celeste Draycott would steal eleven thousand pounds from a man she had never once bothered to like.

She would also raise the rent on a widow’s cottage in the same autumn she bought a two-hundred-pound wedding gown, and the two things were the same disease, which was that she had never in her life believed the people beneath her were people.

Fine, Adrian thought. I am not going to be sentimental. I am going to be thorough.

On the fourth of November, the invitations came down from London.

They arrived in a box on the mail coach, six dozen of them, thick and white and stamped at the corner, and Adrian carried the box up to the drawing room and set it on the table while Mrs. Craddock and Celeste went through them.

“Lord and Lady Banbury. The Ferrers, both of them. Mr. Justice Halloway—” Celeste held one up to the light. “Mother is determined to have the judge there. She says it will settle the question of whether we are anybody.”

“Her ladyship has invited ninety-four,” Mrs. Craddock said.

“Ninety-six.” Celeste smiled. “The parson’s wife must come. It looks well.”

Adrian stood by the door with his hands behind his back, and his face had no expression at all, and he was thinking about one particular thing.

Ninety-six guests. Two hundred miles from London. Everyone Celeste Draycott had spent two years convincing that she was the most perfect young woman in England, in one room, in four weeks.

The dowager countess looked up from her chair.

“Footman.”

“Madam.”

“Tell the housekeeper we shall need the north wing heated from the twentieth,” she said, and turned back to her letters, and applied herself, with all the careful delicate greed of a woman who has never earned a shilling, to the question of whom to seat next to the judge.