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

Chapter 12

The fourth of December dawned bright and freezing, and the whole house woke up screaming.

Not really. But that is how it felt—the way a great house wakes on the day of a wedding, with the doors banging and the bells going and somebody’s voice raised in the servants’ corridor by half past four.

Adrian was on the chandeliers.

The ballroom at Hollowmere Hall is ninety feet long, with three cut-glass chandeliers hung on chains that are lowered by a windlass in the loft above. They must be taken down, washed, dried with linen, and re-hung. Eight years of ministry in London had told Adrian that; three weeks of being Thomas Hale had taught him exactly how much his knees objected.

He was on a ladder with a cloth when Lady Celeste swept in with nine people behind her.

“No. No, no, no.”

She pointed at the urns along the wall.

“I said white roses. Those are cream. Those are cream. They look like something left on a grave.”

“My lady.” The florist was a small man with a red face and a crumpled apron. “They are Albas, my lady, the finest we grow, and I have no more—to bring more I would need to send to Derby, and I cannot bring a cart back before tomorrow noon—”

“Then take these out. Every one.”

“My lady, if I take them out, the room will have no flowers in it.”

“Then we shall have no flowers.” She looked at him steadily. “Do you understand me, Mr. Wick? I would rather a bare room than a cheap one.”

That was the sentence Adrian remembered afterwards. I would rather a bare room than a cheap one. It was, he thought, a perfect epitaph; he considered having it carved on something.

She turned and walked down the room to inspect the floor.

Adrian’s ladder stood in her path.

“And you.” She stopped and looked up. “Be careful up there. If you drop so much as a speck of dust on that floor before ten o’clock, I will have you flogged before I have you dismissed.”

“Yes, my lady.”

She walked on. Three paces, four.

And a folded square of paper slid out of the sash of her gown and fell to the waxed boards without a sound.

Adrian watched it fall. He watched her go, and the entourage go, and the room empty. He came down the ladder and picked it up.

It was Ravensmere stationery.

He unfolded it slowly, though he knew every word. Standing in the empty ballroom with a rag still in his fist and the frost on the tall windows turning the light to thin blue sheets, he read his own poem about his own dead sister—written in February in a cold room, in ink that had frozen twice in the nib.

The silent halls do echo with the past, of shadows long and memories cast. I keep the room where no one goes. I keep her hair ribbon. No one knows. I am a man with too much house and not enough of anything else, and if you will, then let me be a harbour for the whole of thee.

He had written thee. He had sat for twenty minutes deciding between you and thee, and had chosen thee because it sounded like something out of a better century, and he had folded it and given it to her with his hands not entirely steady.

She had not burned it. That was what he had thought in the corridor, when he first knew she had mocked it; that she had burned it and mocked the ashes.

She had not even bothered. She had put it in her pocket, and it had fallen out of a sash between the third and fourth pace down a ballroom floor and lain there between the chandeliers and the wax, and if he had not picked it up it would have been swept out with the floor sweepings by a housemaid at half past eleven.

He folded it carefully along the original creases.

Then he put it in the breast pocket of his rough linen shirt, over his heart—not for sentiment, though the shape of the gesture looked like sentiment, and he was aware of that, and did not care. He put it there because on the other side, in an inner pocket, lay the telegram from Fenn that had come to the Black Hart two days before, weighted down with a single line: all purchased, deeds in hand, at your service.

He had everything he needed now.

The floor was waxed and shining like a sheet of water. In the servants’ hall below, they were killing a hundred and forty quails and arguing about whether the last of the good claret ought to be decanted now or after.

Adrian went down to the kitchen and asked the cook, with his hat in his hands, for the night off.

“You cannot have the night off,” she said. “It is the ball.”

“I know. I must go.”

“Go where?”

“Home,” Adrian said. “I have had a letter.”

Which was, technically, the truth.