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

Chapter 14

Inside the ballroom, Lady Celeste Draycott was having the best evening of her life.

She wore ivory silk that had cost two hundred and ten pounds, worked with pearls down the bodice, with a neckline that was daring and yet within a hair’s breadth of the line, which is the only place a truly ambitious woman ever stands. Her hair had taken a maid three hours. There was a fan of white feathers in her hand, a glass of champagne on the mantel behind her, and a ring of nine people around her who had all, at one time or another that evening, told her she looked radiant.

“Where is he, though?” asked Lady Banbury, loudly, in the tone of a woman who intends to be quoted. “The invitation said eight.”

“It is a quarter past,” said her husband, checking his watch.

“Oh, you know Adrian.” Celeste’s laugh went tinkling up the room like a dropped tray of glass. “He is so deliberate. I expect he stopped somewhere on the road to admire the light on a wall, and wrote a sonnet about it, and completely lost the hour.”

“Perhaps he’s got lost,” Kelgrave said, from the fireplace, where he stood with his elbow on the mantel as though the chimney were his own. “It is a long way from an ivory tower to the real world.”

The nine around her laughed. Three others, standing behind, laughed too, because they had heard the laugh and wished to be included.

It had been open season on the Duke of Ravensmere since October, and it was remarkable how much of it was her own work. She had spent two seasons constructing a version of Adrian Ashford for public consumption—the recluse, the bookman, the dullard who read Latin for pleasure and had never once been seen drunk or in love; the man she was tolerating, out of duty, for the sake of two great families. It was extremely satisfying, because it gathered sympathy while it gathered a fortune, and because it meant that whatever she did after the wedding would look, to the world, like an act of saintly patience finally exhausted.

“I heard,” said Lord Banbury, leaning in with the happy malice of a man enjoying himself, “that he prefers his library to the company of women. One wonders whether he knows what to do on the wedding night.”

Celeste snapped her fan shut over her mouth.

“Oh, Lord Banbury. You are wicked.” She looked at him over the feathers. “I expect I shall have to teach him.”

There was more laughter. Somebody refilled her glass.

She was, in that moment, entirely happy. There was nothing in her mind except the pleasing arithmetic of it—ninety-six guests, eleven thousand pounds a year, a house in London by the spring, the debt in Baker Street that had kept her awake for two years finally paid, and Silas three streets away in Bloomsbury in a house she would choose and pay for and visit whenever she liked, while her husband sat two hundred miles north with his books.

That was the future. It was a fixed, load-bearing thing. It could not be argued with.

At nineteen minutes past eight the tall oak doors at the far end of the ballroom opened.

The quartet, in the gallery above, finished a phrase and did not begin another. Somewhere near the terrace, a footman, long trained, shut the doors that led to the garden, because the fire was roaring and the night was six below.

The conversation nearest the doors stopped, and the stopping spread, and the way it spread was strange—not the hush that follows an announcement, but the hush of a hundred people all noticing the same thing at the same time and not one of them being willing to say so.

The herald from London, hired at a fee of eleven guineas, struck his staff three times on the floor.

The sound went through the room like a shot.

“His grace, Adrian Ashford, Duke of Ravensmere.”

Every head turned.

He stood in the doorway at his full height, hair swept back from a face that had thinned in eight weeks and hardened in a way that was not entirely loss of weight—a face that had spent that time being looked through, and had learned to look back. He wore midnight blue, and the falcon ring, and he did not smile and did not wave, and did not hurry.

He looked, to those ninety-six people who had spent the autumn being told over and over that he was a dull man, like the loneliest thing they had ever seen.

The crowd parted. It did not mean to. It happened the way water happens around a stone.

Ladies dropped into curtsies, and a dozen voices said your grace at once. Men bowed. Lady Banbury’s mouth had come open and stayed open. Somebody at the back started to applaud and stopped, having caught the mood.

Celeste stood at the mantel with her fan frozen in the air.

She had not seen him since August. The version of him she carried in her head was softer; she had built it herself, letter by letter, and it had a slight build and a slight stammer and a hand that hovered nervously.

This man walked like an officer.

And there was something else, something that had begun to scratch at the back of her mind before he was halfway across the floor.

Something about the way he came through the crowd, taking the middle of the room. The way he used his height. The set of the shoulders.

No, she thought, quite distinctly, and her blood began, very slowly, to change temperature. It is impossible.

He stopped five feet away.

The room was absolutely silent. Four hundred candle flames and ninety-six people and not one sound.

“Celeste.”

His voice was deep, and cool, and difficult to describe to anyone who was not there. There was an edge in it that had not been there in August, a roughness underneath—as though somewhere he had picked up the trick of speaking from lower in the chest.

“Adrian.” She recovered. She was very good at recovering. She stepped forward with her hand out and her chin up and her smile fixed in place. “You are late. We were beginning to worry about you.”

He took her hand.

He did not kiss it. He held it, and his grip was firm enough that she felt her own knuckles press together, and he looked down at her hand the way a man looks at an object in a shop window.

“I apologize,” he said, and his voice carried to the corner of the room where the judge was standing with his wife. “I was detained. I was inspecting the estate.”

“The—”

“It is remarkable,” Adrian said, “what one can learn when one takes the time to examine the things that people usually ignore.”

Celeste tried to take her hand back. It did not come.

“You look tired,” she said. “You are thin. Have you not been eating?”

“Have I not been eating.” He turned it over, as though considering the question. “Hard labour will do that to a man. Hauling water. Blacking boots. Carrying other people’s lies up and down stairs.”

Her heart skipped.

Hauling water.

“Why would you say that?” she asked, and her laugh was a quarter of a tone too high.

“Metaphor,” Adrian said. “I am a man with too much house and not enough of anything else.” He let go of her hand. “You know poetry.”

“Your grace.” Kelgrave had come forward, smooth, smiling, with the honest eagerness of a man greeting a friend. “Welcome back to civilization. We were just drinking your health.”

Adrian turned and looked at him.

It was not a glare. It was worse; it was the look a man gives a horse he has decided will be sold.

“Lord Kelgrave.”

“Your grace.”

“I understand you have been assisting my betrothed with her correspondence.”

Kelgrave’s smile did not move, but something behind it did.

“I—I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, I think you understand me,” Adrian said, softly.

And he put his hand into his breast pocket.

The ballroom watched. Ninety-six people, leaning forward. Lady Banbury’s fan had stopped moving. Somewhere behind, a young woman said to her neighbour, “Is that the ring?”

Adrian drew out a folded square of paper and opened it slowly, one crease at a time.