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

Chapter 5

The bunk house was a long shed behind the stables, divided by a plank wall into two rooms, with eight beds to a room and a stove at the end that gave out more smoke than heat. It smelled of damp wool, boot leather, and the particular sourness of eight men’s coats hung up wet.

Adrian slept in his clothes, and did not sleep.

His first test came ninety minutes after he woke.

“Thomas!” Mrs. Craddock’s voice carried the length of the courtyard. “Coal. Drawing room. Now, before the guests come down, and do not leave ash on the hearthstone or I will know.”

The drawing room of Hollowmere Hall was long and high and panelled in oak that had been old when his grandfather was born. Four hundred candles’ worth of light came from a chandelier that had been lit early. At the far end, a fire was dying in a hearth wide enough to stand in.

And by the window, in a gown of pale blue silk, stood Lady Celeste Draycott.

Adrian had seen that dress before. He had seen it in London, at the Farehams’, when he had been across the room and unable to look away from the way the candlelight ran along the fabric like water. He had thought at that moment: a hundred pounds, and she wears it as though it were nothing, and I will give her two hundred such dresses and she will still be the most beautiful creature in England.

It had cost, he learned later, one hundred and forty pounds. A footman’s wages for eleven years.

Kneeling at her feet with a needle was a young woman with fair hair scraped back under a cap, hemming something. Her hands were shaking.

“Ouch.”

Celeste pulled her foot back and drove the heel of her slipper into the girl’s shoulder.

“You clumsy little idiot. You pricked me.”

“I’m sorry, my lady, the pin slipped—”

“If you ruin this silk with your incompetence,” Celeste said, and her voice had lost every trace of the music it carried in London ballrooms, “I will have the cost deducted from your wages for the next year. That is fourteen pounds, Nell. Do you know what fourteen pounds is?”

The girl was crying quietly. She had a red print of the slipper’s edge rising on her collarbone.

“It’s—it’s more than I earn, my lady—”

“Then get out of my sight before I strike you where it shows.”

The girl ran. Adrian stood by the door with the coal bucket in his hand and felt something move in his chest, slow and heavy, like a barge turning in a lock.

He had seen her sharp with servants before. Once, at a garden party, she had been cold with a footman who spilled; he had told himself afterwards that it was embarrassment, that everyone is sharp sometimes, that he himself had once sworn at a groom about a girth strap.

This was not sharpness. This was a woman kicking a girl in the shoulder for a pinprick, and then doing arithmetic on her wages while the mark of her own shoe rose on the girl’s skin.

“Still her, my lady.”

Adrian’s head came up.

Celeste was looking at him. Waiting.

The fire, he thought. She spoke to me and I did not hear it.

“My lady,” he said, and crossed to the hearth, and knelt.

He worked with his back to her, which he should not have done—a footman works so he can watch the room—but his hands were not entirely steady and he did not want them seen. He fed the fire. He swept the ash to the very back of the hearth with the little brush, and when he was finished he wiped the hearthstone with the cloth in silence.

Then the doors opened.

“Lord Kelgrave,” the butler announced.

Adrian did not turn. He kept his eyes on the fire and his knees on the cold stone, and he heard the door close behind the man’s heels, and he heard the exact moment the shape of the room changed.

There was no curtsy. There was no offered hand.

“You’re late,” Celeste said.

“Hardly, my dear.” Boots on parquet, unhurried. “I simply wanted to make an entrance.”

The sound of a hand taken, and a kiss placed on it, and the kiss lasting much longer than any propriety in England allowed.

“Has the old bat gone down yet?”

“Migraine. She is in her rooms until nine, at least.”

“So we have a while.”

“We have as long as we like. He’s in Italy.” Celeste’s voice—and there it was, the thing he had come for, the thing that stopped his hand on the brush and turned the marrow of him to ice—”and that fool will not write anything but poetry until he gets back. Where is it—Silas, not here—”

Adrian’s grip closed on the brass rod of the hearth brush.

Silas.

“Don’t,” Celeste said, in a different voice now, quick and laughing and low. “The new one. The footman.”

Adrian felt rather than saw her gesture toward him. Her eyes crossed his back like a hand brushing dust off furniture.

“Look at him. A simpleton from the look of him. Kneel there all night if I let him.”

“Simpleton,” Silas Kelgrave said thoughtfully, from somewhere behind and above Adrian. “Perfect.”

The fire cracked. A coal fell and broke apart in orange pieces.

“Because we have much to discuss,” Kelgrave said, and his voice dropped, and Adrian heard every word of it in the long, clear, terrible silence of a room where a lady had dismissed a servant with her eyes. “The duke is abroad. We have a window. If we play this correctly, we will have the Ravensmere fortune in our pockets by Christmas.”

Adrian Ashford knelt on the cold hearthstone of Hollowmere Hall, four feet from the woman who was going to be his wife, and did not move, and did not breathe, and did not let go of the brush.

He had come north expecting to be proved a fool.

He had been in the house two hours.