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

Chapter 18

There is a story that went round London for years afterwards, and like most of the stories that went round London, it was three-quarters wrong.

The story was that the Duke of Ravensmere had hired a theatrical company, or dressed his entire staff in the Draycotts’ livery, or (in the version favored in the cheaper weeklies) entered the ballroom on a white horse.

The truth was much duller and much worse.

What happened was this.

Adrian walked out of the ballroom into the hall, past the magistrate, past the two clerks with their leather satchels, past the herald who was still standing by the door with his staff in his hand and no idea what to do with it.

He stopped in front of the front doors—the great doors, eleven feet of black oak with brass knobs worn smooth by two centuries of Draycott hands.

The two senior footmen were standing on either side of them, in blue velvet and gold braid, at attention, as they had been trained to stand.

One of them was a man of about forty named Joseph Pike, who had been in service at Hollowmere Hall for nineteen years and had taught Adrian how to black a boot in the second week, and who had a daughter in Derby and a bad knee and a habit of saying, early to bed, Tom, the gentry don’t notice what they don’t see.

Adrian stopped in front of him.

Pike’s face was doing something extraordinary—the face of a man who has just watched the newest footman in the house turn out to be a duke and who is now realizing, in real time, exactly how many times he has said get a move on, Tom in the last six weeks.

“Mr. Pike.”

“Your grace.” Pike’s voice came out as a croak. “Your grace, I—if I had known—if any of us had known—”

“You would have treated me exactly as you did,” Adrian said, “which is the only reason I know what I know.” He held out his hand. “You taught me the boot blacking. I have never done it well, and I never will, and I am grateful.”

Pike looked at the hand as if it were on fire. Then he took it, and shook it, and his grip was rough and dry and entirely unafraid.

And then Adrian Ashford put his hand on the brass knob of the great front door and pulled it open.

Cold air came in—real, December, Derbyshire cold, with the smell of frozen gravel and the sound of a horse stamping somewhere down the drive.

The whole hall was silent behind him.

He stepped through the door, out onto the top step, onto the gravel where the carriages were still lined up in a coil, with their drivers half asleep on the boxes and the lanterns burning low.

He walked down the steps.

Then he turned, deliberately, and looked back at the house—at the lit windows, at the door he had come in by in September, at the little side door below the level of the gravel where the water ran to, which he could just see around the corner of the wing, half hidden by laurel.

He looked at it for a moment.

Then he walked around the drive to the side of the house, past the terrace, past the kitchen garden with the bare espaliers, and into the stable yard—and stopped in the middle of the yard, next to the pump where Nell filled her buckets at a quarter past five in the morning.

There was a footman’s coat hanging on a nail by the tack room door. His own. He had hung it there on his way out at four o’clock and nobody had taken it because nobody wanted to touch it.

He took it off the nail.

He put it on over the midnight blue.

Then he went back around the front of the house, up the great steps, through the opened doors, through the hall, into the ballroom—where ninety-six people were still standing frozen in the middle of a scene with no ending to it—and he crossed the floor to Mrs. Craddock.

She was standing by the door to the passage, in her black silk dress, with her hands folded, and she had not moved in twenty minutes because there was nothing in her training that told her what a housekeeper does when a footman turns out to be the master.

“Mrs. Craddock.”

“Your grace.”

“You dismissed me this afternoon for refusing an order,” Adrian said. “That was correctly done. If you had not, I should have thought less of you.” He smoothed the lapel of the blue velvet coat, which was too short in the sleeve, and which he had just been fired in, and which he was wearing over a suit that cost more than the entire contents of the tack room. “I am asking you, as a favor, to reconsider.”

Mrs. Craddock looked at him for a long moment. Her face was very still, and her eyes were very bright, and Adrian—who had spent six weeks being looked through by everyone in this house—understood suddenly that she was the only person in the building who had ever looked at him properly in his life, and that she had done it in a corridor, on the first evening, in the dark, by holding his hand and finding the wrong callus.

“I have never in forty years taken a man back,” she said, “and I have been wrong about you from the first night, and I would like to be wrong about you in writing.”

Adrian bowed to her—a real bow, a servant’s bow, low and correct, the one he had practised for three evenings in a bunk house with the snoring man.

Then he took the coat off, folded it, and handed it to her.

“Keep the position open,” he said. “The underfootman’s place. I may have a tenant for it in the new year.”

“Your grace?”

“The Hall will be let,” Adrian said. “I have no use for a house this size and neither do the people who will occupy it. There is a family named Sayer with a leaking roof at the lane end, and there is a widow in Beckwith Row who lost her husband to the kitchen garden walls. Somebody will have to be here to see the repairs done properly.” He looked at her steadily. “I can think of nobody in England better suited.”

Mrs. Craddock’s chin came up.

“I am a housekeeper, your grace, not a landlord.”

“Then you are the only person in this house who ever behaved like one,” Adrian said.