Page 30 of A Duke in Disguise
“Mr.—Lord—I’m afraid I don’t know what to call you.” Lady Caroline wore a gown he had not seen before. He had come to realize that she had a pale blue frock she wore on Tuesdays and a pale rose for Thursdays; he suspected she had seven morning gowns which she cycled through each week and gathered he had now seen Wednesday’s frock. He recognized each as coming directly from a fashion plate, right down to the sleeve pattern, the number of flounces, and the quantity and quality of trim. At first he had thought her fanatically devoted to fashion, but now he guessed that she had simply commissioned the first seven morning gowns in the dressmaker’s book. He wondered if she did the same with afternoon gowns and evening gowns. It depressed him in a way he found acutely annoying; here he was prepared to be hard-nosed and deceitful and she had the nerve to make a fifty guinea lilac frock look sad. He reminded himself that whatever trials she faced had nothing to do with him, nothing at all.
“Please continue to call me Mr. Ashby.” His voice was tight and cold and he saw the disappointment in her face. “Or Ash,” he added. “My friends call me Ash.”
“I daresay you haven’t come to work?” she asked. She poured tea into a cup that hadn’t been there a moment ago, and he recalled that the servants in this house were experts in making themselves invisible in order to escape the anger of a tyrannical master. He forcibly reminded himself that the fate of the servants was not his responsibility either.
He had intended to remain standing, his hat in his hand. This was not a social call. But Lady Caroline looked so forlorn—no. He hardened his heart. “I’ve come to tell you that I won’t go through with it. Surely it would be for the best if we let sleeping dogs lie,” he continued. “Leave this house. You must have friends, relations, somewhere safe to go.”
“I ought to give up my home and leave my servants and my invalid father to the whims of my brother? I think not. I have a duty to them.”
The worddutybrought him up short. If she had a duty, then didn’t he as well? If he had been born to power and wealth, didn’t he have a duty to take up that mantle of authority and use it wisely? Wasn’t that the very least of what he believed? Beneath his sleeve, he could almost feel his scar as a living thing. He sat on the sofa across from Lady Caroline.
The lady, perhaps assessing her advantage, pressed on. “My brother is cruel and vindictive. Being a duke would only widen the field of people he could be cruel and vindictive towards. I watched him drive one wife to an early grave once it became clear she couldn’t produce an heir, and as a duke he’d have his pick of debutantes. I won’t watch him ruin another life. No, it’s quite out of the question. If you don’t want to cooperate, I’ll take matters into my own hands, but I’d much rather solve this problem through honesty rather than crime.”
Had this woman—his aunt—just confessed an intention to murder his uncle? Ash could not believe that this was the substance of the life he was being asked to lead.
He could still lie. He could insist that Lady Caroline was mad or mistaken, could pretend that he had memories that disagreed with the history she had laid out. Then he could go back to Holywell Street—to Verity, to his work, to his real life—and pretend none of this had happened. If he were a different man entirely he might even be able to go through with it. But here he was given a chance to do actual good in the world. He had always been acutely aware that he owed his profession, maybe even his life, to the kindness Roger had shown a total stranger. Now Ash could prevent his uncle from doing further harm; he could help his aunt get out from under her brother’s thumb. He didn’t think he could live with himself if he failed to help.
“What kind of proof do you have?” he asked. Perhaps it was a moot point; perhaps there would be nothing but an old scar and a woman’s memories. Surely that wasn’t enough. But that seemed too much to hope: Lady Caroline kept detailed records regarding her specimens and various horticultural experiments. She would not attempt to claim that a common engraver was next in line to a dukedom without ample evidence.
“The diaries are in the safekeeping of my solicitor.”
“Diaries, ma’am?” His heart sank.
“The diaries in which I detailed the events that led up to your father’s death and your departure from this house. I also have a letter from my lady’s maid who took you to her sister in Norfolk.”
“You planned this out,” he said.
“Of course I planned it out,” she said, frowning. “Did you think I discarded my own nephew like I might a cracked tea pot? Passing him off to the firstcomer?” Ash’s expression must have betrayed his feelings, because she frowned. “I see that is precisely what you think. Well, I did plan it, but very badly indeed, because when I went to find you, there was no trace of you or of my money.”
“Your money?” he repeated.
“You didn’t think my brother financed this scheme, did you? I saved my pin money for over two years, starting as soon as your father was sent to the asylum and I became concerned that you would be sent away as well.”
“My father?” He needed to stop repeating everything she said, but he was quite incapable of forming sentences of his own. “Asylum?”
“I forget how little you know. Your father was an epileptic. He was sent to an institution by my father and younger brother to avoid the shame and scandal of a Duke of Arundel who was beset by seizures. He died within a twelvemonth of being sent to that place, which I suppose was their intention in the first place.”
“I have seizures,” Ash said. “I’m epileptic.” Of all the new information Ash was having thrown at him, the picture of his father as a victim of the aristocracy rather than a base and negligent villain was perhaps the most difficult to accept, and he thought that if he spent overlong thinking about dying alone in a lunatic asylum he might—damn it, he might feel something for this father he had never had, this aunt who had grieved her brother’s death by forming a plan to rescue his son.
Lady Caroline took his hand. “I know, my dear. You started having seizures when you were very young indeed. I saw the way my brother looked at you, and worried that you’d be dispatched in the same way your father had been. But instead he pushed you down the stairs.”
“And then what happened?”
“I let him believe you died after the fall. We borrowed the body of a boy of similar age who had died in St. Giles. In the middle of the night, while that poor unfortunate child’s body was being laid out, I bundled you into a carriage and sent you to my maid’s sister’s house in Norfolk. I ought to have waited until your arm was set, but time was of the essence, and I had to bring you to a place where my brother and father couldn’t find you. I often wondered if your arm had healed.”
“It healed,” Ash managed. “There’s only a small scar.” Her eyes went wide, and he realized this was the first time he had acknowledged that he did have the scar, and that he was the nephew she had once known. With a sigh, he shrugged out of his coat and proceeded to roll up his sleeve. There was no going back now. “A month,” he said. “I still need a month.”
“But you’ll do it,” she said. “You’ll go through with it.”
“I don’t see that I have a choice,” he said.
She pressed her lips together. “We always have a choice.”
“Not if I want to be the man I know myself to be.”
Almost immediately after Ash kissed her temple and left her alone in her study with a cup of tea and some buttered bread, Verity was visited by the harrowing realization that by doing what she had done with Ash, she had thrown herself headlong into disaster. She had hoped for an hour of shared pleasure, the satisfaction of wanting something and getting it. What she got instead was the devastating knowledge that she craved more of the same, and only from Ash.
With Portia—and she was conscious that it did neither Portia nor Ash any favors by comparing the two—they had been friends and taken their friendship into bed when they discovered a mutual attraction. Verity had seen no disadvantage to having a friendship that included both affection and physical release. It had been simple and straightforward on Verity’s end, less so on Portia’s. When Portia had expressed a desire—a need, even—for something lasting and meaningful, Verity had fled as if from a house on fire. The idea of another human being with expectations of her had been enough to make her close down, to become what Portia, in a fit of anger, called cold.
