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

Chapter 17

Celeste made a sound that started as a laugh and did not finish.

“You cannot do this,” she said. “You cannot simply—Adrian, think. Think what this looks like. A duke who was abroad and came home and discarded his bride—that is a scandal for you. There will be talk. There will be paragraphs in the Morning Post.”

“There will be paragraphs,” Adrian agreed. “They will be written by my lawyers and lodged with the Bank of England and the Assizes and the Court of Chancery, and they will say that the engagement between Ravensmere and Draycott was terminated on the fourth of December by reason of a forged instrument. Which is, I am afraid, the truth.”

“You will ruin me.”

“I will not.”

“You will!” She took hold of his sleeve, and her fingers knotted in the midnight blue wool, and her face came up at him, and it was, at last, entirely honest. “We are finished. We are destitute, Adrian. If you walk out of this room we lose the house, we lose the plate, we lose everything, and my mother—” Her voice broke, and the break was real, and it was the break of a woman falling off a cliff and not of a woman who had been wronged. “Please. I will do anything. I will be whatever you want. I will be the wife you wanted, I swear it before God—”

Adrian looked down at her hand on his sleeve.

“You know,” he said, quite gently, “I think you would. I think you would be very good at it. I think you could keep it up for thirty years.”

He took her fingers, one by one, and lifted them off the wool, and set her hand down at her side.

“But I have seen the thing behind the mask,” he said, “and a man cannot un-see it, and I will not spend my life in a house where I am always listening at the door.”

The dowager countess, from her chair, said, “This is nonsense,” to nobody, twice, and then closed her eyes and did not open them for some minutes.

Kelgrave had risen and was standing very near the terrace door with his hands at his sides, doing the arithmetic of a man who has been told there is a magistrate in the hall and has begun to think about the relative merits of a trial and a boat. He looked, for one moment, at the doors, and at the ninety-six people between himself and them, and understood, and stopped.

And then Lady Celeste Draycott did the last thing any of them expected.

She turned around to the room—to the entire ballroom, to the Banburys and the Ferrers and the judge and the parson’s wife and the county families who had spent two years believing her—and she spread her hands, and smiled.

It was not a good smile. It was a beautiful one, which is a different thing.

“Very well,” she said. “Laugh, then. All of you. You have been wanting to for two years.”

And Lady Banbury—who had never in her life been able to resist the sound of her own voice in a room with a good audience—laughed.

Just once. One short, astonished, unfortunate laugh, the kind that comes out of a person before the mind has had time to catch it.

Then she put her hand over her mouth and looked as though she had been caught robbing a church.

But the laugh had happened, and Lady Celeste Draycott heard it, and something in her face closed all the way, like a door with a broken hinge that will never open again.

She walked out of the ballroom on her own feet, through the middle of the crowd, with her head up and the ivory silk trailing behind her, and her mother got up out of the chair ten seconds later and followed with the stick, and the two of them went up the east staircase and were not seen again that night.

The music did not resume.

Adrian stood in the middle of a hundred-foot room with a broken engagement behind him and a fortune intact and ninety-six people watching him, and he felt—this is the part he could never explain to anyone, no matter how often he was asked—nothing at all.

Hollis came and stood beside him.

“Your grace.”

“Yes.”

“The guests are waiting for something.”

“They are waiting to watch me leave,” Adrian said. “That is what they will talk about on the drive home. The way he walked out.”

He looked around the ballroom: at the chandeliers he had washed by hand three weeks before, at the floor he had waxed on his knees, at the urns of cream roses that had not been white enough, at the corner between the fourth and fifth bookcase where he had stood and listened to his own soul being read out for entertainment.

“Well,” he said, “then let us not disappoint them.”

He did not walk out. He had thought about it—had rehearsed it, in the carriage, in a hundred versions, and every version ended with the great doors and the long gravel and the sound of the carriage wheels.

Instead he turned and crossed the floor to Mr. Wick, the florist, who was standing at the side of the room with his apron still on, having been summoned to the ball to be seen to have done a failure properly, and who was gray with fatigue and terror.

“Mr. Wick.”

“Your—your grace—” The man had gone a peculiar colour. “Your grace, I did not know, I swear to you I did not know—”

“I know you did not.” Adrian took a card out of his waistcoat. “You are the florist from the village.”

“I am, your grace.”

“The cream roses will not do,” Adrian said. “Nothing that is honestly grown ever does, in this house.” He put the card in the man’s hand. “Next spring, the tenants at Beckwith Row need their roofs relaid. The widow in the lane-end cottage needs hers first. My steward will send for you on the first of March, and your bill will be met at the rates you quote, and I will not haggle, and I would be obliged if you did not cheat me either.”

Wick stared at the card.

“I—your grace, why me?”

“Because I have watched you work for six weeks,” Adrian said, “and you are the only person in this house I have ever seen do a job for the sake of doing it well.”