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

Chapter 9

It rained on Thursday the way a house falls down—not in drops but in weight, whole grey masses of it coming off the hills, so that the gutters could not carry it and the terrace turned into a shallow lake and the servants’ corridor leaked in two places above the boot room.

The news came down with the rain: a party that evening, in the small dining room, four at table—her ladyship, the dowager, and Lord Kelgrave, and one Captain Reeve from the next valley who was apparently being cultivated for reasons of his own. Which meant Adrian spent the evening carrying trays up a back stair that smoked with damp and setting covers while a lady at the head of the table did an impression of herself.

He heard her be charming. That was the education of the evening.

He heard her ask Captain Reeve about his sister with the exact degree of interest appropriate to a woman who remembered the sister existed. He heard her laugh at a joke about a broken axle with the length of laugh the joke deserved. He heard her mother—the dowager countess, a woman built out of old lace and grievances—say my daughter is the most fortunate girl in England, and heard Celeste answer, sweetly, I am the most fortunate girl in England, and mean neither word.

And when the candles in the dining room were put out and the party moved to the parlour, Adrian was sent down to clear the sideboard.

He came back up with the tray. The door to the parlour stood ajar by the width of a hand, because the catch had been broken since September and no one had been paid to fix it.

And through the gap he could see the fire, and the sofa, and the cream-coloured sheet of paper in Lady Celeste’s hand.

He knew that paper. It was Ravensmere stationery, from the house, from his own writing desk, three hundred miles away.

“—oh, stop, Clara, you will kill me—”

“No, no, you must hear the rest of it. Listen. This stanza. It is tragic.”

Adrian stopped on the landing with the tray in his hands.

The firelight was behind her, so she was a silhouette with a sheet of paper, and she stood the way she always stood, with her weight on one hip and her fan in her other hand, and she threw her wrist over her forehead like a woman in a bad travelling company about to die of a broken heart.

“The silent halls do echo with the past—”

Her mother shrieked with laughter. An actual shriek, from a woman in black silk with gout in one foot.

“—of shadows long and memories cast—”

“Oh, Lord.” The dowager wiped her eye. “He sounds like an undertaker.”

“It gets worse.”

“Read it.”

“But in your eyes a light I see, a harbour safe for a ship at sea.” Celeste dropped the pose. “A harbour, Silas. A ship at sea. The man has never in his life left England except to go to Paris to buy waistcoats.”

Kelgrave howled. “A duke, not a sailor!”

“It is pitiable. It is genuinely pitiable.”

“I had to bite my lip,” Celeste said, and her voice was bright and pleased with itself. “When he gave it to me. He was shaking. And I looked at him with—” She made a face. “—this expression, and I said, Adrian, this is the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“How long did it take you?” Kelgrave asked.

“To produce a tear? Half a minute. I have had practice.” She flicked the paper down onto the low table as though it were the wrapping off a purchase. “He wrote it for his sister, you know. The one that died.”

Adrian knew which stanza came next. He knew because he had written it standing at the window in February, crying in a way he had not cried since he was a boy, and rewrote it eleven times so the metre would carry it.

“I keep the room where no one goes—”

And, behind him on the stairs, Mrs. Craddock’s voice, snapping down the stairwell: “Thomas! Tray! Are you deaf?”

Adrian carried the tray down to the kitchen.

He set it on the scrubbed table. He thanked the cook, because a man says thank you. He walked out of the kitchen door into the wet yard with the rain coming down like the whole weight of the sky, and he stood in the middle of the gravel with his face turned up and let it hit him, and did not feel it at all.

He had been raised to be one thing above all others: a man who did not lose his temper in public. That upbringing—drilled into him by a father who horsewhipped a tenant for insolence and then went into his study and shook for an hour—was the only inheritance Adrian had ever truly valued.

He did not lose his temper in the yard.

Something much more dangerous happened instead. Something went quiet.

Later—much later, in the carriage, with the ceremony of the whole thing behind him—he would try to describe it to Hollis and fail. The closest he came was this: the man who came north to see whether his bride was kind died in a leaking corridor at half past ten, and I did not even notice him go.

He climbed the back stairs. He went to the bunk house. He took his coat off and hung it on the nail, and lay down on the bed with the snoring man and the damp wool and the sound of the rain hammering the tin roof.

And then he lay very still, and began, in the dark, to make a list.