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

Chapter 3

By evening the country had changed. The flat, fat fields of the south gave way to stone walls and blackthorn hedges and hills that folded into one another like the hands of sleeping people. The air coming through the broken window smelled of wet earth and sheep and woodsmoke, and Adrian—who had spent a year in Italy and could describe the smell of oregano on a Tuscan evening to anyone who asked—suddenly could not remember the last time he had smelled a fire that wasn’t in a grate he paid to have lit.

The village was called Hollowmere. It gave the hall its name, or took it, depending on who had owned which first.

He climbed down stiffly and stood in the yard of the Black Hart with his battered leather satchel in one hand and his back aching in a way that would have alarmed his physician. Above the roofs, the chimneys of the great house stood up against a sky the colour of old pewter.

Six windows along the east front were lit.

He knew the house layout—he had asked, delicately, over dinner in London, and had been given a plan of the estate by a man who thought he was discussing drainage. The east front was the morning rooms. The west was the long gallery and the library. The ballroom was in the north wing.

Every one of those lit windows belonged to someone who would bow to him tomorrow and mean nothing by it.

He walked to the Black Hart’s yard gate. Hollis was there.

Adrian had sent him north two days earlier, in Adrian’s own travelling coach, which was by now disguised with mud and stood behind the inn with the arms scraped discreetly from the doors. Hollis was dressed as a grain merchant, which was a poor fit for a man who had never handled a bushel of anything in his life.

“You look appalling, your grace.”

“Say that again when I am paying your wages.”

“You look appalling, Tom.”

Adrian smiled for the first time in days. It lasted a second.

“Anything?”

“Supper at the hall tonight. A guest. The cook’s boy bought four brace of pheasant and a ham, and the butler has taken the good claret out of the cellar—the one her ladyship keeps for family.”

“Family.”

“That is what I said.”

Adrian turned and looked at the house again. The rain had begun to fall harder, small hard drops that struck the mud and bounced.

“Who?”

“The boy did not know the name. Only that he is expected at seven, that the dowager countess will not dine—she has one of her headaches—and that her ladyship has ordered the small dining room set for two.”

The small dining room held eight. It was where the family ate when no one was watching.

“Two,” Adrian said. “A lady and a gentleman. At a table for eight, in a house where her betrothed is abroad.”

“Yes.”

The wet gravel beneath his boots had begun to shine. Somewhere behind the inn, a dog complained about the rain.

When he had come north, he had rehearsed his own disappointment. He had told himself, over and over, in the coach and in the inns and in the long grey hours while the Bible man snored: she will be kind to the servants, and I will feel like a fraud, and I will come home and marry her and never tell her what I nearly did. He had built the whole scaffolding of it in his head, and it had been steady enough to stand on.

It took less than four minutes in the yard of the Black Hart to knock it down.

“Take my things to the hall tomorrow,” he said. “Not tonight. I go in alone.”

“Your grace—”

“Alone, Hollis.”

The older man’s mouth tightened, but he nodded. He had the good sense to know when a rope was being tested.

Adrian walked the mile to Hollowmere Hall with his satchel over his shoulder, past the lodge gates where a boy in uniform looked through him the way men of consequence are never looked through, and down a service lane slippery with wet leaves that no one had ever bothered to sweep. At the foot of it, half hidden by laurel, was a door.

Not the great door. Not even the side door where guests descended from carriages. A door for deliveries, set below the level of the gravel so that water ran toward it.

Adrian Ashford, ninth Duke of Ravensmere, put his hand flat against the wet wood, felt the cold go into his palm, and knocked.

CHAPTER THREE — THE SERVANT’S ENTRANCE

The woman who opened it had a face like a dried apple left too long on a windowsill, and eyes that had been counting people’s worth for forty years and had not yet been wrong in her own estimation.

“You’re the new footman.”

“Yes, madam.”

She looked him up and down. The rain had soaked his collar through; a thread had come loose at his shoulder where the satchel strap had rubbed. He had spent an hour that morning considering whether to ruin the coat and had decided that a new coat would be the single greatest mistake he could make.

“You’re late. It’s gone dark.”

“The coach lost a wheel outside Ashbourne.”

“Coaches always lose wheels.” She stepped back. “In. Wipe your feet—properly. Not on the mat, the mat’s for ladies. On the stone.”

Adrian wiped his feet on the stone, which was boiling with soap and cold as a grave.

“My name is Mrs. Craddock. I am the housekeeper here. You will address me as Mrs. Craddock, and you will not address anyone above me at all unless they speak to you first. Staff is seventeen; you make eighteen. Six of the seventeen have been here since her ladyship was born, and they will not like you, and I do not care.” She led him through a corridor that smelled of boiled cabbage and tallow and lye. “Name?”

“Tom Hale, madam.”

“Age?”

“Thirty.” He was twenty-eight. He had decided roughness would be forgiven more easily than youth.

“Too old to be starting as underfootman. Why should I take you?”

“The gentleman I served for eleven years died in February. I did not wish to remain in London, and I did not wish to serve a house where I would be remembered. I would rather start again with strangers.” He kept his voice low and flat. He had spent three evenings practising this with Hollis until the vowels had come out of the wrong part of his mouth.

Mrs. Craddock stopped walking.

She took his hand.

Adrian did not flinch. He had told himself he would not, and he did not, but it cost him more than he would ever admit to the woman turning his palm up under the flickering of a wall lamp.

Soft.

Her thumb pressed across the base of his fingers, where a man who hauls water and splits kindling builds his callus—the broad, hard pad of it, thick as saddle leather. Adrian’s hands had calluses. Fencing calluses, at the top of the index finger and across the inner thumb. Riding calluses across the palm where the reins bit. A shooter’s callus on the joint.

They were not labourer’s hands. They were a gentleman’s hands, and they had been used hard enough that a clever woman might mistake the difference if she looked quickly.

She looked slowly.

“Valet,” she said at last, and let his hand drop. “You said valet. That’s why the hands are like that. Ink at the thumb, reins on the palm. You rode with him.”

“He was a hunting man.”

“Hm.” She sniffed, apparently satisfied, and Adrian breathed again. “You’ll find the work here is not what you are used to. We have sixteen in service and the house is seventy rooms. There is a dinner party tonight, which is a mercy for you, because it will teach you in one evening what I could not teach you in a month. Lady Celeste is preparing for her wedding to the Duke of Ravensmere, and the dowager countess is in a permanent state of hysteria about the cost of it, which means you will not be idle and you will not be underfoot. You keep your head down. You do as you are told. You do not speak unless spoken to. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Mrs. Craddock.”

“Then put your things in the bunk house.”

She turned and started back along the corridor, and Adrian followed with the odd, hollow calm of a man already in over his head.

“Madam,” he said. “May I ask who is visiting?”

She did not stop walking. “Lord Kelgrave. He arrived this afternoon.”

Adrian’s feet kept moving. They had to. If his feet had stopped, the rest of him would have shown.

Lord Dorian Kelgrave. A gambler, a borrower, a man with a beautiful mouth and no money and a genius for being present at other people’s good fortune. Adrian had sat across a card table from him twice. He had lent him four hundred pounds eighteen months ago, and Kelgrave had repaid it, which at the time he had taken for a mark of decency.

He was dining tonight with Adrian’s betrothed, in a house where Adrian was supposed to be in Italy.

The corridor bent, and through an open door Adrian caught a glimpse of the kitchen: copper pans, a great fire, three women moving fast, a boy turning a spit. The smell of roasting pheasant rolled out and made his stomach turn over with hunger and something worse.

“Mrs. Craddock,” he said.

“What.”

“Will his lordship be staying long?”

She stopped. She turned. Her chins were folded down and her eyes were old and flat and knew, he realised with a small cold shock, a great deal more than she intended to say.

“He stays as long as her ladyship wishes,” Mrs. Craddock said. “And that is not a question asked by footmen. Bunk house is out the back, past the stables. You have ten minutes.”

She walked away, and the kitchen door swung shut, and the smell of pheasant went with her.

Adrian stood alone in the corridor with his bag and listened to the house. Somewhere above him a woman laughed—a bright, musical, ringing laugh he knew, a laugh he had heard at a dozen balls and thought refined—and then a man’s voice, low, answering.

He had never once heard her laugh like that at anything he had said.

He went out to the bunk house.