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

Chapter 13

At four o’clock, Mrs. Craddock assembled the staff in the servants’ hall and read them the evening’s duties off a list, in the voice of a general dressing a line.

The footmen were to wear full livery. Blue velvet coats with gold braid at the cuffs and the pockets, white stockings, buckled shoes, and their hair clubbed or powdered. The two senior men would be on the front door and the staircase; the two juniors on the supper room and the long gallery; the new man—

“Thomas.”

“Mrs. Craddock.”

“You have the height for the front door, and Mr. Pike’s shoes will fit you. Blue velvet, gold braid. And for heaven’s sake shave that stubble. You look like a convict on his way back from transportation.”

“Yes, Mrs. Craddock.”

“Then go and get ready. The first carriages are at eight.”

The room began to empty. Adrian stood where he was.

“I am afraid I cannot do that, Mrs. Craddock.”

The room stopped.

The cook turned around with a spoon in her hand. Two housemaids put down their cups. Nell, in the corner with a basket of napkins over her arm, looked up slowly, and her mouth came open a little, and she did not breathe.

Mrs. Craddock’s face went through three colours in two seconds.

“Excuse me?”

“I cannot serve at the door tonight. I must leave.”

“Leave—” She put down the list. “It is the engagement ball. There are ninety-six guests. You are the tallest man on the staff and you have hands like a cabinetmaker and I have told her ladyship you will be on the front door. You will serve.”

“I am afraid not.”

“You cannot.” Her voice climbed. “You cannot refuse an order. Do you understand where you are? I could have you on the road in ten minutes with no character, and no character means no house in England will take you, and do you know what happens to a man of your age with no character, Hale? The parish. The workhouse. I have done it to two men in this house and I will do it to a third.”

“I know.”

“Then take the coat!”

“I have a prior engagement,” Adrian said.

Into the enormous silence that followed, he said it again, quietly: “I am sorry. I cannot.”

Mrs. Craddock’s face did something extraordinary. It stopped being a face and became a door closing.

“That is it.”

She said it very softly, which was worse than shouting.

“Out. Now. No wages due, no character, and if I ever hear of you applying to a house in this county I shall write to them.” She drew herself up. “You will never work in a decent house in England again, I will see to it.”

“I do not want wages,” Adrian said.

And he reached into the pocket of his work trousers and brought out a small canvas pouch, heavy, dull-coloured, that had been hidden under the ticking of his mattress for three weeks.

The room stared at it. Nobody moved.

Adrian walked across the flagged floor to the corner where the girl in the patched apron stood with the napkins over her arm, and he took her hand—the left one, the bandaged one—and turned it over, and put the pouch into her palm, and closed her fingers over it.

“Mr.—Mr. Hale—”

“It is three hundred and forty pounds, Nell,” he said. “In sovereigns. It is more than you will earn in four lifetimes in this house and about a fifth of what it will cost to put you in a shop of your own.”

Nell went white. She looked down at the pouch, and up at his face, and the napkins slid off her arm onto the floor.

“I can’t—”

“You can. You have been kind in a house with no kindness in it, and you told the truth to a stranger, and that has bought you a bakery.” He let go of her hand. “The man at the Black Hart is holding the address of a solicitor in Derby. Go to him tomorrow morning. He has instructions. He will find you premises, and he will take no fee.”

“Who are you?” Nell whispered.

Adrian straightened up, and looked straight at Mrs. Craddock, and something in his posture changed—shoulders, chin, the small correction of a man who has been stooping for eight weeks and has decided, at last, to stand up straight.

“Only a footman,” he said. “Only a footman who is leaving.”

He picked up his coat and went out the back door into the cold.

He walked through the kitchen garden, past the bare espaliers, over the stile at the end of the orchard with the frozen grass cracking under his boots, and along the beech lane a mile into the woods, where the light was thick and brown and the ground smelled of leaf mould and iron.

There was a black carriage standing in the trees with the mud of two counties on it and the crest picked out in gold, uncovered now.

Hollis held the door and a greatcoat.

“You cut that close, your grace.”

“I had to do something at the end.” Adrian stripped off the rough linen shirt in the freezing dark and dropped it into the mud, and stood in the wood in his undershirt with the December air coming off the hills and his breath smoking. “How long do I have?”

“Twenty minutes.” Hollis was already holding out the shirt—fine lawn, pressed, with studs. “The carriages are coming up the drive. I counted eleven.”

Inside the carriage, laid out on the seat, was everything: midnight blue evening dress cut by a tailor on Savile Row who had made his father’s clothes, a white cravat, black silk stockings, shoes that cost more than the sedan chair he had been born to inherit, and a heavy gold signet ring with the falcon of Ravensmere cut into the stone.

He dressed in the dark of a moving carriage on a Derbyshire lane, which is a very difficult thing to do, and he did it without once asking Hollis to stop the horses.

Then he sat back with the ring on his finger and looked at his own hands. Rough. Split at two knuckles, the nails cut to nothing, the callus on the palm worn in a different shape than it had been in September.

“The poem,” he said.

“In your pocket, your grace.”

“And the deeds?”

“In the portfolio. Mr. Fenn is waiting at the inn with two clerks and a magistrate.” Hollis cleared his throat. “There is also, if your grace recalls, the letter of request for an advance, with the forged signature.”

“The one she dictated.”

“The one she dictated. She posted it Tuesday by the second delivery.” A pause. “We intercepted the boy at the lodge gate.”

Adrian looked out of the window. They had turned in at the drive, and between the black trunks the Hall had come into view—every window lit, three hundred candles to the row, the gravel full of carriages, the sound of a string quartet leaking out across the frozen lawn.

“There will be ninety-six people in that room,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How many of them do you suppose know what kind of woman she is?”

Hollis thought about it. “Three,” he said. “The dowager. Kelgrave. And one footman.”

The carriage stopped.

Adrian put on his gloves.

“I am going in through the front door,” he said.