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

Chapter 21

The house in London went quiet after that.

Adrian did not go out for the whole of the following season. He said he was working; he was working. There were the Hollowmere repairs, and the boundary suit in Chancery that followed the estate, and the passing of the old steward at Ravensmere, and there was a great deal of paper with his name on it that had gone fourteen years without being properly read.

But he did not go out, and Hollis knew why, and said nothing, because he had been a valet for thirty years and knew that a man’s silence is his own property.

There were letters. There were four, in fact: three from the mothers of young women of excellent family and indifferent fortune, and one from Lady Banbury, who had apparently decided that the most interesting man in England was also the most eligible, and that her niece would do very well for him, and who wrote eleven hundred words on the subject without once mentioning the ballroom.

He declined all four.

In September—a year and one month after a mail coach had set him down in a village in Derbyshire with dirt under his fingernails—Adrian went into the sitting room on the second floor of Ravensmere House, where his mother’s things were still in the cupboards, where the fire had gone out on a February night two years before while he wrote a poem with trembling hands.

He had the box from Fenn’s, and the ring in it.

He opened it and looked at the diamond for a while.

Then he took out his pocketbook, and took out the folded poem, and read it through once, and folded it again.

I keep the room where no one goes.

He sat with it for a long time.

And then he did what the letter made him want to do—the only thing in the whole affair that he had never planned and could never have explained: he got up, and went down the long gallery, and opened the shutters, one by one, all sixty of them, and let the September light into a room that had not been used for anything but dust and portraits in a decade.

The room was enormous and bare and made entirely of light.

He stood in the middle of it, and thought about a house with a child in it, and did not feel the old ache; he felt, instead, a sort of steadiness, which is what a healed thing feels like when it has finished healing and no longer needs to be looked at.

Then he went down to the kitchen and told Cook to hire two more housemaids, and to have the long gallery cleaned properly, once, before the winter, whether the house was empty or not.

The long gallery was cleaned that October.

And in the following spring, Adrian Ashford did something that surprised every drawing room in London and would have infuriated Lady Celeste Draycott if she had still had the standing to be invited anywhere to hear about it.

He married.

Not a title. Not a fortune. Not a name anybody in the room had heard before.

Her name was Margaret Innes, and she was the daughter of a physician in York, and she was thirty-one years old, and she had spent six years running a school for the daughters of tradesmen, and she had a plain face and a laugh that came out of her without warning and an incorrigible habit of saying exactly what she thought before considering whether it was wise.

Adrian met her in the November after Hollowmere, at the house of a man named Mr. Rennie, a Lincoln’s Inn solicitor who had done work for Fenn, and who knew nothing about the Duke of Ravensmere beyond the fact that he was a widower’s son with a great many acres and a strange, unaccountable interest in the roofs of tenant cottages.

They were seated next to each other at dinner. She asked him what he did.

He said, I own a great deal of land and I am trying to make sure the people on it are not cold.

And Margaret Innes said, That is a peculiar way to put it.

And he said, I know. I have been told.

And she laughed—really laughed, the way his father had laughed on the study floor with the carpet rolled up, and the way nobody had laughed in Ravensmere House since his mother died—and she said, Well. It is better than the usual answer.

They were married the following May, in a church in York with fifty people in it and no reporters, and the Morning Post gave it nine lines under a heading that spelled Ravensmere wrong.

And a year and a half later, on a wet Tuesday in September, in a room on the second floor of Ravensmere House—in the room where the fire had gone out on the night a man wrote a poem about his dead sister with frozen ink—Margaret gave birth to a daughter, and the baby screamed for eleven hours and then slept, and Adrian Ashford, ninth Duke of Ravensmere, sat in the corner of the room holding the child and weeping in a way he had not wept since he was eleven years old, and Margaret, half asleep and entirely unimpressed by the grandeur of it all, said, Do stop, Adrian. You will make her nervous.

They named her Anne.

She grew up in a house with sixty windows in the long gallery, and she learned to run down the length of it with her ribbon trailing behind her, and she laughed constantly, loudly, at everything, including her father, and especially at her father when he tried to do card tricks.

And when she was nine years old—the age at which his sister had died—Adrian Ashford took his daughter into the long gallery on a bright morning, and stood with her at the second window, and told her that she had a namesake, and what she had been like, and the thing about the Latin primer.

And Anne, who had her mother’s habit of saying exactly what she thought, said: That is very sad, Papa. But she is not gone, is she. You still have the room.

And she ran off down the gallery, laughing, sixty windows long.

Adrian stood there a while.

It was, he thought, almost exactly the sort of thing that used to be in the poem. And he did not take the poem out of the pocketbook. He did not need to; the room was full of light, and there was a child running in it, and the house was no longer too big, and the only thing that had ever really been empty—the secret room, the place where no one goes—had been opened at last, and it had turned out to be full of everything.

He had gone north in dirty linen to look for a liar, and he had found one, and it had cost him four months and a great deal of dignity and eleven pounds a year in wages he never collected.

He had also found out what he was. That was the part the drawing rooms never understood, when they told the story in the years afterwards and made it about a duke and a diamond and a cruel beautiful woman humiliated in front of ninety-six guests.

It had never been about the diamond.

It had been about the roofs.

There is a house in Derbyshire with nineteen new roofs on its cottages, and a shop on a corner with a bow window that stays open until six, and a village that remembers a florist being paid in full on the day the slates went on, and a family called Sayer who have never been cold since. Nobody writes stories about that.

There is also, in a house in London, a long gallery with sixty windows, and a man of forty-three standing at the second of them on a bright morning, watching a girl run the whole length of the room and back, laughing at the top of her lungs.

He was not the luckiest man in England.

He had simply, in the end, found out who he was—and gone on being it.

THE END