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

Chapter  6

He did not leave the room.

There is a point in every man’s life where the body decides for him—where the legs simply refuse to carry him out of the room in which the worst thing has been said—and Adrian discovered it on his knees at a hearthstone, with a coal bucket at his elbow and the brush still in his hand.

They forgot about him. That was the terrible thing. In their world, a servant who has been told to stand in the corner ceases to exist, and they turned their backs on him and talked over his head the way people talk over a chair.

“We move slowly,” Kelgrave said. “Nothing that can be traced.”

“The settlement advance can be traced.”

“An advance on an allowance, my dear. That is what a settlement advance is. Perfectly ordinary. Her mother writes, weeping, about the trousseau, the flowers, the dressmaker. He has not once in four months said no to anything. He will not begin now.”

“He sends me four, five pages at a time.” Celeste’s voice curled. “I read the first line and my mother reads the rest aloud. It keeps her amused.”

“I am going to laugh, one day, in front of a room full of people.” Kelgrave’s footsteps moved across the parquet. “Think of it, Celeste. Four hundred pounds, five hundred, six—dribbled out of the accounts a thousand pounds at a time, each one small enough to look like a wedding expense. By the time anyone thinks to add them up, you will be a duchess and the accounts will be ours to keep.”

And then he heard the rest.

The townhouse in London that would be held in Kelgrave’s name. The debts—Paris, the dressmaker, three quarters owing on a shipment that had already been delivered and worn. A mortgage on Hollowmere that they were three years behind on, and Celeste’s insistence that a man who owned nine thousand acres could not possibly notice. The phrase he has more money than God, and the answer, then he can afford to be robbed.

Adrian kept his eyes on the fire. A log broke, and sparks came up, and he watched them climb into the chimney and die in the dark.

When there was nothing more to hear, he laid the brush in its place, took up the bucket, and stood.

Celeste had moved to the sofa. Kelgrave was at the sideboard with the decanter, and one hand rested on her shoulder, and her own hand lay over it.

“That will be all,” she said, without looking up.

“Yes, my lady.”

He backed out. He closed the door softly, the way he had been taught by a valet who had chosen him at eleven years old because he was the only boy in the nursery who said thank you to the housemaids.

And then he put his ear against the wood, and stayed there, and listened to the murmur of two people planning the shape of his ruin, and did not move until the dowager countess’s bell rang from the floor above and startled a housemaid in the corridor, and sent him walking in silence down the back stairs with the coal bucket knocking at his knee.

The bunk house that night was cold, and the man in the next bed snored like a saw, and the damp wool smell settled into Adrian’s throat until he could taste it.

He lay on his back in the dark with his hands folded on his chest and went back over every word.

Golden ticket was not said that night. That came later. But the shape of it was already there, in every sentence, the way a hole in the ground promises the burying to come.

He has more money than God.

Short of options.

And when the accounts are ours, Silas, we will never have to beg for anything again.

Adrian had spent three months of his life wondering whether the woman he was marrying would love the man or the title. He had filled letters with his grief and his hopes and the empty rooms of his father’s house and sent them north like messages in bottles.

They had been read aloud, in a voice that laughed.

He lay in the dark and thought about the word golden. And somewhere near three in the morning, with frost on the inside of the shutters and the stables quiet, he stopped feeling the wound and began, very quietly, to think.

Not about leaving. Leaving was what a hurt man did. Leaving would let her stand in the ruins and tell all of London that the Duke of Ravensmere had abandoned her because he could not bear to share a table with anyone but his books; leaving would make her a martyr instead of a liar.

He turned the problem over the way he turned over a question of drainage or rent or a boundary line, because he was a man who had been trained by lawyers and stewards since he was fifteen years old, and the training held even now, even with his chest full of broken glass.

If I stay, I see all of it.

If I see all of it, I can prove all of it.

If I can prove all of it, there will not be a single drawing room in England where her version of this story can live.

The snoring man rolled over. The wind came up in the eaves.

Adrian closed his eyes, and for the first time in months did not think of the long gallery of Ravensmere with nobody running down it.

He thought of papers.