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

Chapter 19

He left the ballroom for the last time at twenty minutes past nine, and this time nobody stopped him, and this time the doors stayed shut behind him.

The carriage was in the drive with Hollis holding the door and the horses breathing steam into the frozen air, and the drivers of the thirty other carriages had all woken up and were watching, and the whole length of the drive was a gallery of sleeping coaches with lamps burning in the dark.

Adrian got in and did not speak for four miles.

Hollis waited. He was extremely good at waiting; it was, in his own opinion, the principal qualification of his profession.

At the crossroads where the Hollowmere lane met the turnpike, Adrian said, “Stop the carriage.”

“Your grace.”

“Here.”

Hollis pulled the cord and the horses came up, and Adrian opened the door and got out into the frozen road.

He stood there in his evening dress, in the middle of a Derbyshire turnpike at half past nine on a December night, with the frost white on the hedges and the fields going out grey and silver under a moon with a ring around it.

He took the folded poem out of his breast pocket.

Cream paper. His own ten-month-old handwriting. I keep the room where no one goes. I keep her hair ribbon. No one knows.

He held it a moment.

He thought of Anne, who had died at nine, and who had once hidden his Latin primer under her bed and laughed about it for a week; and of his mother, who had stopped laughing afterwards, and of his father, who had not been able to say her name at dinner for six years and had said it, at last, on his deathbed, twice, and had died with her hand in his and his son’s hand forgotten on the coverlet.

And he thought about the woman who had read that poem aloud, three times, and made her mother laugh so hard she had to put her glass down.

He folded the paper again, along the creases it already had.

Then he took out his pocketbook, and put the poem into it, and closed the clasp.

He did not throw it away. That was the thing—he had decided in the carriage, driving down the dark lane, and he could not have explained it to anyone. He did not burn it and he did not scatter it on the road.

He kept it.

Because it was true. That was the whole of it. Every word of that poem was true in February and every word of it was still true in December, and the fact that a liar had laughed at it did not make it a lie, and a man does not throw away the true things he has written just because they have fallen into the wrong hands.

He got back into the carriage.

“Ravensmere?” Hollis asked.

“Ravensmere.”

“It is a hundred and eighty miles, your grace. We shall be there by dawn.”

“Good.”

The carriage moved off. Adrian lay back against the seat and closed his eyes and, for the first time in four months, slept.