Page 26 of A Duke in Disguise
“But that’s just it. She didn’t cast me off. She’s hardly ten years older than us. And—” He picked up his wineglass, saw that it was empty, and grimaced. Verity shoved her still-full glass across the table at him and he promptly downed it. “Her brother—my father?—hurts her. I saw the bruises. And her father is either an invalid or a recluse. Plum, there’s an actual duke lurking in the attics while his son rampages about. I don’t think she has any family that isn’t demonstrably horrible. And I don’t have any family at all, so it seems I ought to at least try to be her family.”
She squeezed his hand hard. “You do have a family. And, look, Ash, you aren’t getting rid of me. I don’t have any lung conditions and I’m not in any danger of needing to flee the country to avoid criminal charges. You’re stuck with me. Understand?” He nodded but she squeezed his hand harder and lowered her voice. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t go to bed together. That’s a minor detail.” That was a lie, but she’d make it the truth if it was what Ash needed. “You’re my friend and I’m yours and that’s how it’s going to be, no matter what.”
He looked relieved, and she wondered how badly she had managed their friendship if he could have cause to doubt it. But he squeezed her hand back.
Feeling thoroughly farcical, Ash pulled the brim of his hat lower over his forehead. He arrived early at Cavendish Square and positioned himself behind a tree in the park across the street. If Lady Caroline timed Ash’s visits to coincide with the absence of her brother—Lord Montagu, Ash had learned—then it stood to reason that one might catch a glimpse of the man leaving the front door of Arundel House sometime after ten. He didn’t have to wait long. At half past ten the door was flung open by a footman and out came a tall man in a many-caped greatcoat. Even from Ash’s vantage point of several yards away, he could see that Lord Montagu had the same straight nose and firm jaw as his sister, the same dark hair, the same eyebrows that cut like slashes across the face.
This, Ash thought grimly, was how he would look in a few decades. There was no denying the family resemblance. It had been one thing to see his features echoed in the face of a woman and to understand that there was probably some family connection between them. But recognizing those same features on a man, a man of approximately his own size and build no less, he could no longer ignore the significance of the connection. This man, who was presently shouting at his coachman, this man who left bruises on the wrists of his sister, was perhaps his own father. It was not a welcome thought. Ash far preferred to imagine that he had no family at all.
After the carriage was out of sight, Ash crossed the street and knocked on the door as usual. The footman, who a moment before had been pale and trembling, was now all calm efficiency as he sought his mistress.
“I saw Lord Montagu,” he said after Lady Caroline had presented him with today’s specimen.
“Did he come see you?” the lady asked, leaning forward urgently.
“I—no, why would he do that?” Ash responded in confusion. “I watched him leave from across the street.” He was not going to admit that he had been hiding behind a tree like a character in a pantomime.
“I see.” She sagged in relief. “Don’t do that again. I beg of you. He mustn’t catch sight of you. Please don’t arrive before a quarter past eleven. In fact, perhaps you shouldn’t come around at all. It was foolish of me to even consider it after realizing...” Her voice trailed off.
“Does he resent the time you spend on your plants and your studies so very much?” he asked, trying to make sense of Lady Caroline’s distress. “Or is it that he wouldn’t want you to spend time with a man?”
“Oh, both of those things, certainly. But also—” She shook her head. “I can’t explain. He’s used to getting his own way, and when he doesn’t, he is quick to assign blame elsewhere. He blamed his wife for a good many things, and after she died, he found it convenient to transfer that blame to me.”
She spoke with a cool, neutral tone, but her hands shook as she turned over the pages of the herbarium. The purplehalf-moonsthat were always beneath her eyes seemed darker than they had the previous week. She looked up and caught his eye. He wasn’t certain what she saw there, but when she spoke it was in a tone of resolve. “Mr. Ashby, do you have a scar on your left forearm? You didn’t answer me last week.”
Ash sighed. Lady Caroline spent her days in obvious terror of her brother and literally tiptoeing around her father; it was only natural for her to wish she had a family member who did not make her quake with fear. She might be looking for stray family members, but Ash was not. He had surrounded himself with exactly who he pleased, and had created a sort of secondhand family. He did not want or need any connection with the people who had abandoned him. “I agree that there’s a family resemblance,” he said as gently as he could. “It seems likely that I’m an illegitimate relation of yours. But I don’t seek to profit from the connection, I assure you.” He let his gaze stray meaningfully to her wrists, where beneath the lace of her sleeves, traces of the bruises her brother left still lingered. “And I know it isn’t my place to say so, but Lord Montagu would perhaps retaliate against you if he knew you had sought out a baseborn relation. I would hate to be the cause of any harm to you.”
Something about this must have been dreadfully amusing, because she let out a burst of stunned laughter. “No, no, you quite misunderstand. Scar or no scar, Mr. Ashby?”
Ash tried to ignore her, tried to ignore the spot on his arm that seemed to pulse with awareness. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and drew a faint line on the page, but the ink blotted, marring the paper. There would be no drawing today, he already knew that. And he would not return to this house, to this woman whose life was so fraught that she sought ghosts from the past. He glanced at the delicate cup-like flowers of the specimen he would never get a chance to draw.Primula auricula, Lady Caroline’s feathered handwriting neatly stated; this specimen had traveled from high in the Apennines. He would miss coming here, miss hearing tales of flowers that bloomed in lands he would never visit.
“Fine,” Ash said, laying down his pen. He might as well get this over with, figure out how he was connected to this lot. Then Lady Caroline would perhaps have some peace of mind, and he could walk away with a clear conscience. “Before I give you an answer, I want to know who you believe me to be.” His mind snagged on that. He knew who he was and where he belonged, and nothing this woman could say would alter that. He cleared his throat. “Or, rather, who you believe has a scar on his left forearm. I think you could tell me that in the spirit of fairness.”
“Fair,” she repeated with a little laugh. “Would that fairness entered into the question of who belonged to this family.” She passed a hand over her eyes. “My eldest brother died over twenty years ago. He left a son. That child suffered a fall when he was four years old, severely breaking his arm. I believe it is called an open fracture, and there is no question but that it would have left a scar. The last time I saw the child was only hours after his injury.”
Ash did his best to brush off a memory of unguents and plasters, an arm burning hot as an oven. “What was that child’s name?”
“James.”
Ash let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. He had half expected to hear a name that tugged at his memory the way the stairs, this garden, and Lady Caroline’s face all persisted in doing. “I have never been called James.”
Lady Caroline raised her eyebrows, but didn’t ask precisely what other names Ash had been known by, which was fortunate because Ash couldn’t have told her. He suspected he had repeatedly been removed from homes immediately after a seizure, when his memory was shot through with holes, with the result that the people at his next lodging called him whatever they pleased. The only reason John Ashby stuck was that it was under this name that he was sent to school.
“Neither was he,” Lady Caroline said. “We called him—”
“Don’t.” He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to risk finding out that all along he had a true name, a true identity that had been thrown away as surely as he had been.
“Do you have the scar, Mr. Ashby?” she whispered. “I quite understand if you’d prefer not to have anything to do with this family. Truly, I sympathize. But my father is very old and infirm, and he doted on y—on his grandson, and—”
“Please,” he said, holding his hand up to stop her from going on. Ash’s head was spinning and he didn’t know how to make sense of half her words. A duke doting on a bastard grandchild? A child who had been reared in the duke’s own household for the first years of his life?
“You don’t know what this means,” she insisted.
“It means there’s yet another bastard sired by a profligate nobleman.” It was a story that repeated itself every day across all the continents of the world. “And that he was cast aside to make his way in a world that treats bastards unkindly. I did well for myself despite your family’s treatment of me, and I don’t wish to be claimed now.”
“Oh, no,” Lady Caroline said, shaking her head. “You quite misunderstand.”
“I think I understand perfectly well,” he said, trying to mask his impatience.
