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

Chapter 8

The summons came at four that afternoon, and it came with two footmen, a length of rope, and a demand from the drawing room that the sofa be moved because her ladyship had decided the light was wrong.

Adrian was the person they fetched, because he was the newest and the strongest and nobody in the house was sorry to spend him.

The sofa was French, upholstered in blue satin, and outweighed the two men who were ordered to lift it with him. It took him fourteen minutes to get it from the wall to the window, easing it across the parquet without gouging the boards, and by the time he straightened up his shirt was stuck to his back.

Lady Celeste was sitting in the window seat with a glass of dark wine in her hand, watching the rain on the terrace.

Kelgrave was at the writing desk with a quill, a blotter, and a sheet of cream paper, and he was grinning the way a schoolboy grins.

“You wait until we are finished,” Celeste said, without turning her head. “Stand in the corner. Do not breathe too loudly.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Adrian stood in the corner by the bookcases, between the fourth and fifth shelf, where the afternoon light did not reach and the drapery threw a shadow, and folded his hands, and bowed his head, and became furniture.

“Now,” Celeste said, and her voice changed.

It became soft. It became warm. He had never once, in four months, heard her speak in that voice into a room that did not contain at least six other people.

“My dearest Adrian, my heart aches with every mile that separates us. The country is beautiful, but it is grey and dull without the light of your presence.”

Kelgrave snorted as he wrote. “The light of your presence. You are laying it on a bit thick.”

“He loves it.” A wave of the glass. “He thinks he is a poet. I have to match his tedious romanticism or he will write me six pages about a tree and expect an answer. Continue. — I spend my days dreaming of our future, of the children we will raise in the long gallery at Ravensmere.”

Adrian listened to the shape of his own dreams being copied out by another man’s pen.

In the February after his father’s death, in a room with the shutters closed and a fire that he had let go out, he had told her the truth—that his sister Anne had died at nine years old of a fever that took eleven days, and that afterwards his mother had stopped laughing, and that the one thing he wanted from his life and title and acres was to hear a child laughing in that house again before he died.

He had told her that because she had put her hand on his arm at the funeral and looked at him with wet eyes.

So they were copying that down too.

“And make sure you mention the settlement,” Celeste said, and the warmth dropped out of her voice like a stone out of a pocket. “The advance. Tell him my mother is worried about the cost of the trousseau and that an advance on my allowance would ease her nerves.”

Kelgrave laughed out loud.

“You are wicked. The man is paying for the entire ceremony.”

“He has more money than God, Silas. Why should he hoard it? Besides, I need it.” She turned from the window and her face was hard and bored. “The dressmaker in Paris is threatening to hold the next shipment if I do not clear last season’s account, and my mother has a note due to a man in Baker Street that I will not describe to you.”

“Last season’s account?” The quill stopped. “I thought you said your debts were cleared.”

“They will be.” She drank. “Once the ring is on my finger I have access to the accounts. Once I have the accounts, my darling, we will never have to scrape again.”

“Nell said you were short of pin money.”

“Nell would not know a pound note if it bit her. What did you hear?”

“Only that the servants are talking.”

“They are always talking.” Celeste set the glass down. “Done?”

“Almost. Should I sign it?”

“No. I have to forge his signature.” She rose and went to the desk and stood behind him with her hand on his shoulder, and her fingers moved in a small circle against the wool. “He knows my handwriting to the letter. He once wrote back to the first letter I ever sent him and said, I would know your hand anywhere in the world.” She laughed. “Do you know what I wrote back? Then I shall always write as myself. He nearly wept. He thinks it means honesty.”

“It means,” Kelgrave said, “that you are very good at this.”

“I am excellent at this.”

She leaned over him. The pen scratched. Adrian stood in the corner and watched a woman forge his name—not his name; a signature on a document, but he understood in that moment that a man’s name and a man’s signature are two different objects, and that the second one can be taken.

Kelgrave turned his head and kissed her neck.

Adrian looked at the shelf in front of him, at the spines of sixty books nobody in this house had opened, and let his eyes go out of focus, because there was nothing to see and everything to hear and he did not trust his own face for a moment longer.

What he wanted, with a violence that surprised him, was to walk eight feet across the room, take the sheet of paper, and read the falsified signature aloud to the dowager countess in her tower of headaches and nerves.

What he did was stand still and count the books on the shelf.

Sixty-two. Nine of them were his.