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

Chapter 17

Hollis came in like a man who had spent thirty years entering rooms he was not announced into, which was precisely the case.

He was in plain black, without livery or crest, and he carried a leather portfolio the size of a saddlebag, and behind him came two clerks from Mr. Fenn’s office in Lincoln’s Inn, and a small, neat, entirely unintimidating man in a brown coat who was, in fact, the magistrate for the Hollowmere district and had dined at Ravensmere twice.

Ninety-six people watched an old valet walk the length of a ballroom carrying paper, and not one of them said a word.

Adrian took the portfolio. He did not open it at once. He held it flat on his palm and looked at Celeste, and then at the room, and the room had gone very still again, but differently now—the stillness of people who have realized they are at a hanging and have not yet decided where to stand.

“Lady Draycott requires an advance on her settlement,” he said. “Her mother’s nerves, I am told, are fragile, and the trousseau is expensive, and the dressmaker in Paris has been writing letters.”

He opened the portfolio and drew out a single sheet of cream paper, and held it up.

“This is a letter, written in my hand, requesting a transfer of six hundred pounds from my accounts to the Draycott family solicitor, in advance of the wedding settlement,” he said. “It bears my signature. It was posted from this house on Tuesday by the second delivery, and it was intercepted at the lodge gate on Tuesday evening, which is a felony in itself, and one for which I shall answer to the Assizes if anyone wishes to press it.”

He turned the paper around.

“My signature appears at the foot of it,” he said. “I did not write it. I was, at the time of writing, on my knees in the scullery polishing a punch bowl.”

Lady Banbury made a noise.

“And I can prove that too,” Adrian said, “because I watched it being written, from a corner of the small parlour, standing between the fourth and fifth shelf of the bookcase, with a tray of dessert plates in my hands, having been ordered to stand still and not breathe too loudly.”

He laid the letter on the table beside him.

“At that same dictation,” he went on, “Lady Draycott instructed Lord Kelgrave to inform me that her mother was anxious about the cost of the trousseau; to describe to me the children we would one day raise in the long gallery of Ravensmere, which is a subject I had confided to her in confidence in February, at the lowest point of my life; and to ask me for an advance to clear a debt of her own in Paris which she had told Lord Kelgrave, in the same conversation, had already been settled.”

Kelgrave had gone the colour of the wallpaper.

“This is—” His voice cracked. “Your grace, this is a grotesque fabrication, assembled by a man who has been deliberately deceiving this family for two months—”

“Six weeks,” Adrian said. “Do be accurate. It will be the only accurate thing you say tonight.”

The judge—Mr. Justice Halloway, who was seventy-one years old, who had sentenced four men to hang, and who had been brought here specifically so that the dowager countess could be seen to have him—stepped forward with his hands behind his back.

“Your grace,” he said. “You have made a very serious allegation in front of a great many witnesses. Do you propose to bring evidence for it, or only your word?”

“I propose both,” Adrian said. “Perhaps your lordship would care to look at the second item.”

He drew it out: a bundle of papers tied with tape.

“The mortgage on Hollowmere Hall,” he said. “Three years in arrears to the Ashby Bank in Derby. Two hundred and forty acres of tenanted farmland, forty-one cottages, and the house itself, all pledged, and all three payments missed.” He held the bundle up so the room could see the tape and the seals. “As of eleven o’clock this morning, those deeds are in my possession. The bank was glad to be rid of them. I paid the arrears and the principal in full.”

The dowager countess, who had been sitting in a chair near the fire with her gout raised on a stool, made a sound like a kettle.

“You—” she said. “You bought my house?”

“The roof over your head,” Adrian said. “The chair you are sitting in. The bed you sleep in. The plate on your table, which I believe is Draycott plate and has been in this family for two hundred years, and which—” he turned the bundle over, “—was pledged as security against the arrears in 1861, and which is therefore now, strictly speaking, mine.”

Several people in the room understood, at that moment, that they were witnessing something that would be discussed in London for a decade.

“But I am not a cruel man,” Adrian said. “I will not put you out in the snow tonight.” He set the bundle down on the table beside the letter, and the sound it made was not loud, and everybody heard it. “You have until the thirty-first of January. After that, the tenancy is at an end, and the whole of the property, lands and goods, reverts to me.” A pause. “There is, however, a position vacant at Ravensmere. The underfootman’s place. The wages are eleven pounds a year, with board, and a bed in the bunk house. If Lord Kelgrave wishes to apply, he may submit his character to my steward.”

Kelgrave’s hand came off the mantel. For one second, and only one, the room thought he was going to strike him.

Then his nerve failed, and he did what men of his sort always do when the table turns: he looked for a door. There was one behind him, the French window to the terrace, and it stood four feet away.

“Going somewhere, Lord Gray?” Adrian said, without looking at him.

Kelgrave froze.

“The magistrate is in the hall,” Adrian said pleasantly. “The relevant statute, I am told, is forgery of a signature upon a document of pecuniary request, which is a transportable offence. The document exists. The handwriting is Lady Draycott’s and yours, in alternation, and there are two clerks here from Lincoln’s Inn who can attest when it was intercepted, and I have the lodge keeper’s statement in writing, and I have a footman’s recollection of every word of the dictation itself.”

He turned at last and looked at Kelgrave properly.

“I would sit down, my lord,” he said. “It will look better.”

Kelgrave sat down.

And Lady Celeste Draycott—who was twenty-four years old, who had been the diamond of two seasons, who had spent three months constructing a version of Adrian Ashford for the amusement of London—turned on her own houseguest with a face like a knife.

“You,” she said. “You said it was safe. You told me the settlement money was invisible. You told me he could not possibly—”

“Celeste,” Kelgrave said.

“You told me he was stupid—”

“Celeste, for God’s sake—”

“No!” She spun back to Adrian, and her eyes were wet and bright and absolutely dry of anything resembling sorrow. “So what? So you spied on me. You came into my house under a false name—a duke—and you crept about in the scullery and listened at doors. Do you know what that is? That is dishonest, Adrian. That is beneath you.”

“Beneath me,” Adrian repeated.

“It is despicable. No gentleman would do it.”

“No gentleman,” Adrian said, “would do it. And no lady would kick a fifteen-year-old girl in the shoulder for pricking her with a pin, and then do arithmetic on her wages while the mark of her shoe came up red on the girl’s skin.”

Celeste’s mouth stopped.

“Nobody saw that,” she said.

“I saw it,” Adrian said. “I was standing beside the coal bucket, and you looked straight through me and told me to fix the fire, and then you called me a simpleton to your lover’s face while I knelt at your hearth.” He took a step toward her, and for the first time in the evening her chin came down. “There are eighteen people in the kitchen of this house who know exactly what you are. There is a girl named Nell with a scar on her collarbone who told me that when there are guests you are an angel and when the doors close you are something else. And there is a woman named Mrs. Sayer in a cottage at the lane end whose roof leaks and whose rent you raised twice in two years, and whose husband built the walls of your kitchen garden, and you did not once think about her, because you have never in your life looked at a person who could not give you something.”

He stopped, one yard away from her.

“You did not lose a fiancé tonight,” he said. “You have been losing for six weeks and did not notice. I came here in September prepared to love you—prepared to marry you, to give you the world, to put a child in that empty house and hear it laugh. I wrote that in a letter. You read it aloud at that little table by the fire and your mother laughed so hard she had to put her glass down.”

Utter silence.

“I do not want a woman who wants my money,” Adrian said. “I could have forgiven that. Everybody in this room wants money.” He looked at her, and the look was not anger. It was arithmetic. “I cannot forgive a woman who finds poverty funny. That is the whole of it. That is the only thing I have to say.”

He reached into his other pocket, and brought out a small black velvet box.

Ninety-six people leaned forward in unison, and every one of them knew what was in it, because the Ravensmere diamond was the sort of thing that had its own paragraph in every account of the family for four generations.

He opened it.

The stone came up out of the box like a piece of frozen lightning. Even with four hundred candles in the room, the light in it seemed to come from somewhere else.

Celeste’s eyes went to it and stayed there. She could not help it. Nobody could help it. Even now—even with the deeds to her mother’s house on the table and a magistrate in the hall—her hand came half up off her skirt before she caught herself, and Adrian saw it happen, and if he had been unsure of anything before that moment, he was not unsure of anything afterwards.

“It is a beautiful thing,” he said. “It has been in my family since 1741. My grandmother wore it for eleven years, and when my mother died my father put it in a box and did not open the box again for twenty-six years.” He turned it slowly in the candlelight. “You would have worn it to the opera, and to the Banburys’ ball, and to your own drawing room on a Tuesday, because it is not the sort of stone one keeps for occasions. And you would have been very beautiful in it, and no one would ever have known, because everyone you had convinced would have gone on believing exactly what they had been told.”

He closed the box.

“That is why you shall never wear it,” he said. “There will be no wedding. The engagement is ended, as of this hour, in front of ninety-six witnesses, and there will be no announcement, because I do not intend to give you a single line of print to be pitied in.”