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

Chapter 20

The wedding that did not happen at Hollowmere Hall became, within a fortnight, the most-discussed event of the season, and it was discussed in a manner that Lady Celeste Draycott would have found unbearable if she had had the courage to be in London to hear it.

Because the story did not go the way she had planned.

She had planned it in her head on the east staircase, that night, on the way up: he was abroad, he came back, he had heard some slander, he broke it off without a word of explanation, poor creature. It was a version in which she was interesting. It was a version in which she was wronged.

It lasted eight days.

On the twelfth of December, the Derby Mercury printed a paragraph of eleven lines concerning a forged instrument laid before the Assizes, and did not name anybody, and the entire county knew exactly who it was, because the Derby Mercury had printed, in October, the engagement announcement with Lady Celeste Draycott’s name spelled correctly twice in one paragraph, which was its own kind of miracle.

On the fifteenth, the Baker Street note was called in.

On the eighteenth, the Paris dressmaker wrote to the family solicitor in terms that Mr. Fenn described, with professional restraint, as unusually direct.

On the twenty-second, the Ashby Bank wrote to Ravensmere House in London to confirm receipt of the balance of the Hollowmere arrears, and the clerk who typed that letter mentioned it, as clerks do, to a cousin, who mentioned it to a footman, who mentioned it in a servants’ hall in Mayfair, and by the middle of January there was not a drawing room in London where the name Lady Celeste Draycott could be spoken without somebody saying, but the roofs — did you hear about the roofs?

That was the part she had not counted on.

Because Adrian Ashford, when he got home to Ravensmere at dawn on the fifth of December, did not go to bed. He went to his study, sat down at the desk where four months earlier he had told his valet he was going to marry a stranger and be happy about it, and took out a ledger.

And for two days, with his steward and his lawyers and the plans of the Hollowmere estate spread across the floor, he went through every cottage, every roof, every well, every gable and gutter and boundary stone and tenant’s lease on the property he had just bought, and he did the arithmetic he should have done four months earlier if he had been looking at the place as a landlord instead of as a suitor.

There were forty-one cottages. Nineteen of them had roofs that would not survive another winter in the state they were in. Three had no water within a quarter mile. The rents had gone up twice in two years, and the work had gone down by half in the same period, and the whole of the difference had been spent on a ballroom, a Paris dress, and a season in London.

Adrian had a list drawn up.

On the second of March, Mr. Wick of Hollowmere village took his cart up to the lane end and spent nine days relaying the roof of the cottage belonging to Mrs. Sayer, widow, whose husband had built the walls of the Hall’s kitchen garden. He was not paid at the lowest rate he would have accepted. He was paid at the rate he quoted, in full, in coin, on the day the last slate went on, and he told the story in the village for the rest of his life.

By the end of that spring, nineteen roofs were done.

Nell—whose real name was Eleanor Pryce, which nobody at Hollowmere Hall had ever bothered to learn—went to Derby on the fifth of December with a canvas pouch, and a letter from a solicitor she had never met, and sat in a room she was frightened of, and came out with a shop.

It was on a corner, with a bow window and a bakehouse behind, and she called it the Silver Punch Bowl. She thought it was funny. Nobody who came in ever understood why, and she never explained.

She did well. She did very well—she had been poor long enough to know the price of everything, and honest long enough to charge it, and within four years she had a second shop and a girl of her own in an apron, and she paid her three pounds a month above the going rate, because she remembered exactly what it had been like to be fifteen and kneeling in someone else’s silk.