Page 1 of A Duke in Disguise
Chapter One
Ash knew all too well that there were two varieties of pleasure in life. The first included art, fine weather, good company, and all the rest of the world’s benign delights. A man could hold these pleasures at arm’s length, appreciate them with the proper detachment, and not mourn their absence overmuch. But a fellow could be ruined by overindulgence in the second category of pleasure: rich food, strong drink, high stakes gaming.
Verity Plum belonged squarely in the latter category.
For all she was one of Ash’s dearest friends and one of the few constants in his life, for all she and her brother were now the closest thing to family that he had in this country, being near her was a pleasure he meted out for himself in small doses, like the bottle of French brandy he kept in his clothes press, lest he succumb to the emotional equivalent of gout.
As a very young man he had compared Verity, pen in hand and smudged spectacles balanced on the tip of her nose, to a bird diligently building a nest. Ten years later he knew it to have been the romantic delusion of a youthful idiot not to have straightaway seen the bloodlust lurking behind the spectacles; she bore more in common with a hawk picking the meat from its prey’s bones than with a songbird collecting twigs and leaves.
He had arrived in town late the previous night, when the house was dark and the doors locked. He let himself in using the latchkey Mr. Plum had given him ten years ago and which he still carried on a string around his neck. Weary from the journey from Portsmouth and loath to wake the household, he left his satchel at the foot of the stairs, climbed up to the spare room, and went promptly to sleep. When he woke, a cup of coffee and a buttered roll sat on the table beside his bed, and his satchel rested on a hard-backed chair, which meant somebody at least knew he had arrived. Could be Verity, could be Nate, could be old Nan, who still came in every morning to do the cleaning. Could be a stray vagabond off the streets or one of the impecunious writers who often made their home in the garrets of the Holywell Street premises of Plum & Company, Printers and Booksellers.
Now he cast his gaze around Verity’s study, taking in the cobwebs in every corner and the teetering piles of books, the grate that sat empty, the windowpane that had been cracked for over a decade. He would miss the tidy set of rooms he had shared with Roger. He would miss Roger, full stop. A sick chasm of loss threatened to open inside him. Ash’s earliest memory was going to live with Roger as an apprentice engraver; before that was only a series of flickering images, fractured and haunting, scarcely seeming to belong to Ash at all. But from the point he had gone to Roger, he had a home, a name, a place to belong. He had lived with Roger for over fifteen years, first as his apprentice, then as a colleague, always as a friend. A few days earlier, when Roger was preparing to board the ship that would take him to Italy, to a climate more suited to his failing lungs, his parting words had been to advise that Ash stay with the Plums. “Yes, yes, you might well hire a quite respectable set of rooms, but you’ll be talking to the shadows and naming every spider and earwig within a week. Stay with the Plums.” His mentor had been pale, his voice weak from coughing, his thin gray hair whipping in the wind, so his advice, quite possibly the last words he would speak to Ash in this world, had the weight of a dying request.
“I could still come with you,” Ash had said again. He had made this offer so many times it had taken on the cadence of a prayer. “It’s not too late.” He spoke the words into the wind, to be carried away, off the shores of this island he would never leave.
“I really can’t see how you expect me to recover when I’m worried about you,” Roger had replied, clasping the younger man’s hands. “It’s too much to ask.”
“It’s just seasickness,” Ash replied pointlessly, because they both remembered vividly what had happened on the packet to Calais all those years ago, and then on the agonizing return journey to Dover. A storm-tossed ship was a perilous place to have a seizure.
“And I just have a summer cold,” Roger had responded. And so Ash had embraced his friend one last time, watched the boat sail away, and then headed for London.
Watching Verity now, as she scribbled on a blotted and crumpled piece of paper, her pale brown hair doing unspeakable things and a vast quantity of ink on her fingers, the grief that had dogged him since Portsmouth started to thin, only to be displaced by something else entirely. She must have encountered a particularly galling turn of phrase in the manuscript she was working on, because she made a strangled sound of outrage as she scribbled it out. How many times had he seen her perform just that movement over the years? He ought to be used to how she affected him, but during the months in Bath—that last, futile effort to see if the waters might restore Roger’s health—he must have forgotten how to resist her. He couldn’t remember how he used to guard his heart against this sudden rush of fondness.
Without rising to his feet, he reached for an andiron and prodded the fire back to life. He still had on his gloves and coat to ward off the chill, but Verity had doubtless been toiling away in this cold room since breakfast. She occasionally made a sound of approval or a tut of frustration as she turned a page, and her pencil was forever scratching along the manuscript, but otherwise she worked in silence, perfectly still at the desk in the small room above the bookshop that she used as her office. The fire hissed, Ash idly paged through a book he had open on his lap, and Verity worked.
Finally she turned over the last page. “Guess how many times Nate used the wordlibertyin this week’sRegister,” she said without looking up from her paper, as if it hadn’t been six months since they had last seen one another.
He suppressed a smile and mentally awarded her a point in the game of feigned mutual indifference they had been playing for a decade. He didn’t know which of them had started it or why, but he would hardly know how to act if they dropped the pretense.
“Four?” he asked.
“Sixteen!” She put her pen down and looked at him for the first time. There was ink on her cheekbone. “In a single article.”
“How tedious of him,” Ash remarked lightly. Not for love or money would Ash throw himself between the Plum siblings when they were engaged in one of their skirmishes. Three was a difficult number for friendships, and only by careful neutrality did Ash preserve their balance. “Is it any good?”
“If his goal is to get himself hanged or transported, then yes, I’d say it’s quite effective. Sometimes I think he actually wants to get arrested.”
Ash thought this was entirely possible. The letters he had received in Bath from friends as well as from Nate and Verity themselves suggested that the arguments between brother and sister on the subject of printing outright seditious libel were escalating even faster than the battles between radicals and the government. “He feels strongly about Pentrich,” Ash said, striving for diplomacy.
Verity snorted. “He damned well does feel strongly. And so do I. But I can’t see what good his swinging by a rope will do anybody. I daresay this government would be only too glad to see us all dead, then there wouldn’t be anybody left to object.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes, smudging ink across her cheek. “He’s been saying he wants to travel north for the execution.”
Ash frowned. While in Bath, with all his attention on Roger’s failing health, he had followed the events in the newspaper as he might the tidings of a far-off land. In Pentrich, Derbyshire, some poor benighted fools, half-mad with hunger and deluded by the lies of a government spy, armed with nothing more than scythes and knives and a harebrained set of demands, had been convicted of high treason. Surrounded by clean white streets and well-fed gentlefolk, the stories coming from the North seemed remote, something that belonged in the past. Roger railed against tyranny until he coughed too hard to speak, while Ash listened with half an ear and reserved his anger for a God who seemed intent on leaving Ash alone in the world.
“The trouble with Nate,” Ash said, “is that he’s twice as clever as he needs to be.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you read this article,” Verity countered. “He knows I can’t manage the press if he goes to prison, and even less if I’m in prison as an accessory.” She removed a pin from the knot of hair at the back of her head and used it to fasten a curl that had stubbornly worked its way loose, only succeeding in dislodging two more curls in the process. “At any rate, I altered some of the more incendiary phrases so at least this week’s issue won’t be the death of us.”
She had probably also made her brother’s arguments twice as cogent and therefore three times as annoying to the government, but she knew that already. “Let me have a look at it.” He reached out and she placed the sheaf of papers in his hand.
Nate’s bold scrawl unraveled across the page like a tangled skein of yarn, marked with slashes and arrows, then interwoven with Verity’s minuscule copperplate handwriting. Charlie, the Plums’ apprentice, would render a fair copy for Verity or Nate to approve before setting type, but Ash had enough practice to decipher Nate’s writing without much trouble. He read a few lines and raised an eyebrow. “Mentioning the guillotine was perhaps a bridge too far.” Verity had struck that line out with a stroke that nearly pierced the paper.
“You see I’m not exaggerating, then?” she demanded, her eyes bright with the prospect of an argument won.
“Mmm,” he murmured, trying to sound noncommittal. But even with Verity’s revisions, this article would at the very least bring theRegisterin for a level of scrutiny that would do its publishers no good. The entire country looked like a pot about to boil and Nate was all too eager to throw himself right into the hot water.
She leaned forward and he found himself looking up from the paper expectantly, his own posture mirroring hers. “Heaven help me, I missed you, Ash.”
He was taken aback by this foray into earnestness but did his best to hide his surprise behind a mask of cool indifference, quickly refocusing his gaze on the paper. He wanted to tell her that she absolutely needed to stop saying that sort of thing, that he had spent years on the edge of a precipice, and it would take only the slightest breeze to tip him over completely. But he didn’t think their friendship could survive that kind of honesty: if they acknowledged the potential he felt between them, then they’d want to do something about it. Then he’d lose her. Ash had endured too many losses, and was not willing to lose either of the Plums. So he leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. “Understandable,” he said with a blandness that was only possible after a decade of practice. “Without me around, you’d be the worst radical on the premises.”
