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

Chapter 7

Morning at Hollowmere Hall began at half past four, and it began with water.

There were two hundred yards of corridor on the first floor, and every foot of it had to be lit, laid, and scrubbed before the family came down, and the water for the basins had to be carried up seventy-one steps from the pump. Adrian learned in one morning what his hands were actually for, and by seven o’clock his shoulders burned and his palms had begun to blister in places that no fencing glove had ever protected.

He hauled, and scrubbed, and polished. He learned how to black a boot so that the leather took the shine like glass. He learned that “the family” never referred to the lady of the house but always to the guests, which told him everything about the household’s own opinion of itself.

At around nine, Mrs. Craddock put him in the scullery with a massive silver punch bowl, three cloths, and a tin of whiting.

Polishing silver is meditative work. That is its danger. A man’s hands move and his mind goes where it likes, and Adrian’s mind went to a poem he had written in February, sitting in his mother’s old sitting room with the fire gone out and the ink freezing on the nib, and to the words of it, and to the way she had once looked up at him with wet eyes and told him it was the loveliest thing anyone had ever said to her.

Every word of it. Read aloud. And laughed at.

He was on his third pass over the lip of the bowl when a girl came in with a basket of potatoes and set it down on the flagstones with a thump.

It was the maid from the drawing room. Nell.

Her sleeves were pinned back, and the mark of a slipper on her collarbone had gone from red to purple in the night, and she kept her left hand—the one with the bandage—turned away from the light.

Adrian polished. She peeled. The knives went on for a while, and neither of them spoke, and then he said, quietly, without lifting his head:

“Your shoulder.”

She jumped as if he had struck her with the spoon.

“I’m fine.”

“That’s a bad lie.”

“You mustn’t—” She glanced at the door, and then at the window, and then at the door again. “You mustn’t say anything about the lady. If Mrs. Craddock hears you speaking of her, you will be out on the road by dinner with no reference, and no reference means the workhouse. That is not a figure of speech.”

“I am not going to speak of her to Mrs. Craddock.” Adrian turned the bowl. “Does she do it often?”

Nell peeled faster. Her knife had a rhythm and she kept it, and her eyes stayed on the potatoes.

“She has moods,” she said at last. “When there are guests she is an angel. You would not know her. She laughs, and she remembers your name, and she asks after your mother. There was a duchess here in September and her ladyship carried the old woman’s shawl about all afternoon as if it were a relic.” A peel came off in one long curl and dropped into the pail. “And when the doors are shut—” She stopped, and her shoulders came down, and she said, very carefully, as though reciting a lesson: “She hates mistakes. She says mistakes are the sign of low breeding. She says that if I cannot learn to hold a pin I cannot be trusted with a pillow.”

“And the duke?”

Nell’s knife stopped.

“Why do you ask that?”

“Because he is spoken of in this house more than anyone who lives in it.”

She looked at him properly for the first time—looked, and seemed to be deciding something, and decided it.

“You’re not from here,” she said. “You don’t know how it goes.”

“I have been here a day.”

“A day is enough if you listen.” She dropped her voice. “The Duke is her golden ticket. That’s what she calls him. She says it at dinner when the wine’s in. My golden ticket to London.”

Adrian kept his cloth moving. That was all. He kept his cloth moving, and his face still, and he said nothing for so long that Nell took his silence for fear and gave him more.

“She reads his letters out loud,” Nell said. “Six, seven pages at a time, at the little table by the fire, and her mother laughs so hard she has to put her glass down. The ones about the—about the sad things.” A pause. “There was one about his sister. Her ladyship read it three times. She said it was as good as a play.”

The cloth went on moving.

Adrian looked down at the punch bowl, and in the blur of the polished curve he saw a stretched and distorted version of his own face, and he thought—with a clarity that was almost a relief, the way a bone going back into its socket is a relief—I am done. There is nothing left in this house for me to break that is not already broken.

So I will not be careful with it.

“Thank you, Nell,” he said.

“What for?”

“Telling me.” He set the cloth down and lifted the bowl onto the shelf, where it caught the window light and threw a wedge of brightness across the whitewashed wall. “The house has ears. I know. I’ll be careful.”

Nell stared at him for a second longer than she should have, and something in her thin face went still.

“You talk like a gentleman,” she said.

Adrian turned around with the tin of whiting in his hand.

“Everybody says that,” he said. “It’s a curse.”