Page 39 of A Duke in Disguise
“That’s not what he believes. He only went to humor me. And it turned out he needn’t—”
“Precisely,” Portia said brightly, as if congratulating a pupil. “You did it for one another. Accepting help doesn’t make you weak.”
“I don’t need a remedial course in friendship, Portia.”
Portia gave her a look that plainly said that she thought this was precisely what Verity needed. “Friends ease one another’s burdens. We get all tangled together, and sometimes you don’t know whether you’re helping a friend for their own good or for yourself because it’s all the same in the end. You can’t separate it out neatly.”
But Verity had to separate it out. She had to know that she stood on her own two feet, that she was ultimately her own mistress.
“Come now,” Portia went on. “You’ve been going to bed with him, no? Surely you know that sooner or later he would have insisted on marrying you.”
“I don’t think he would have. He knows my stance on that topic. He was around when...” She gestured around the room, the house, the walls that held memories of exactly what it looked like when a woman’s identity dwindled into nothingness.
“Do you think that falling in love with you is part of his sinister plan to subjugate you?”
“No, of course not, but marriage—”
“We’re not talking about marriage, but about friendship. Marriage can be just one form that friendship takes.”
“It’s the shape of a shackle,” Verity protested.
Portia broke into a laugh. “Good lord, you’re just like your brother. So dramatic.”
Verity blushed. “I know that not all marriages are terrible. But it can make otherwise decent men into tyrants.” She thought of Ash’s offer to help in the shop, thought of his endless offers of tea and cheese, and had to admit it was hard to see the seeds of despotism there.
“If the best you can say about Ash is that he’s decent, and if you think he secretly has the soul of a tyrant, then I can’t imagine why we’re having this conversation in the first place. Surely you can see that, which is why you love him.”
“Tell me, Portia,” Verity said a moment later, “is there any chance that Ash’s suit will fail?”
When Portia hesitated, Verity knew a mad flutter of hope. Her antipathy towards marriage would be a moot point. They might at least have a way forward if Ash were not the duke’s legal heir. She could be friends and lovers with someone who was not the next in line to a dukedom. With a duke she could have nothing.
Portia frowned sympathetically and Verity wanted to fling her teacup across the room. “An exceptionally slim one. Apparently, Lady Caroline’s diaries are rather specific and the solicitor has been very busy collecting statements. There’s almost enough evidence to establish Ash’s progress from Arundel House in London to a foster family in Wisbech to a village called Ashby to a school in King’s Lynn.”
“This is all circumstantial,” insisted Verity, still clinging to that idiotic scrap of hope. “And surely the duke’s surviving son has many allies in positions of power.”
“True.” Portia’s frown deepened. “Powerful men with titles and money don’t often turn on one of their own. They close ranks.”
Verity shuddered at the thought of Ash becoming one of those men.
Portia sighed and continued. “But Ash’s father was one of their own, too, and a gross injustice was done to him. He’s still fondly remembered by many.”
After Portia left, Verity returned to her desk and retrieved the tirade on divorce law and the perfidy of men, balled it up, and threw it into the fire. Then she answered both questions as honestly as she could. She did not know, she wrote, how affection was meant to endure all life’s vicissitudes. The person to whom one bound one’s life at twenty could not be, in any meaningful sense, the same person at forty. The best one could hope for was that each person might alter and grow in ways that fit together, and for any changes falling outside those parameters to be met with reason and charity. Love, marriage, friendship, indeed any tie that bound people together, was a constant exchange of promises, of sacrifices freely made, of favors one didn’t need to ask for. Each of these was an opportunity for failure, and it was a wonder so many marriages worked out as well as they did, but an even greater wonder that anyone, especially women, chose to marry at all. The explanation, she wrote, had to be that people possessed either a delusional degree of optimism or a flinty determination to pay any price for even the bare chance that their union might be one of the successful ones. Or, perhaps, it was a combination of the two, because there might not be a difference between hope and stubbornness.
It was an utterly unsatisfying answer, both to write and probably for those who had mailed her their questions. But it was the best answer she could give them, and it might also be the best answer she could give herself.
Ash’s hands itched for his pen and ink, but they were still in the attics of Verity’s house, and besides, there was no time for drawing, even less for engraving. He had hastily packed a single change of clothes and his shaving kit before leaving for Arundel House, and it quickly became apparent that he needn’t have even packed so much. Three consecutive afternoons were spent with tailors and haberdashers, being measured and outfitted for a life he did not particularly want. With every morning that he woke in his absurdly soft bed, he felt less like he had ever known a life before Arundel House. In saying goodbye to people, Ash had gotten good at leaving behind parts of himself. Holywell Street, engraving, Nate, Verity—they all belonged to an Ash who was gone. Within a week, he thought they belonged to an Ash who might never have been real in the first place.
The staff at Arundel House had always been efficiently cordial to him, but there was a shift in their manners, a shift that measured the difference between how a good servant treated a visiting tradesman and how he treated the heir to a dukedom—the heir to a dukedom who would disinherit his cruel master, no less. There was a degree of deference in the footman’s speed and the maid’s bobbed curtsey that set him on edge. He felt that he was being corrupted from the outside in.
He had half expected Verity to write him a hastily scrawled note, perhaps, or to simply send over his engraving supplies. But the days came and went and there was no word from her. He had been excised from her life as comprehensively as he had been cast out of the Talbot family twenty years ago. He knew this wasn’t fair; he knew that he had been the one who had left her. And now he also knew that he hadn’t been cast out by the Talbots after all. But he spent so many years believing it to be true that he couldn’t help but think that it was his fate to lose everyone he cared for. Verity had become the latest in a series of people he had loved and lost, and from Ash’s new home in Arundel House her loss felt as inevitable as those that had preceded it.
Instead of Verity, he met with a bewildering stream of visitors. There were lawyers and peers and a man he later discovered was the Duke of Wellington’s private secretary. After them, there came the women: dowagers and countesses and the patronesses of Almack’s. All seemed preposterously glad to have met him. He wondered if he could get rid of them by behaving very rudely, and thereby get his old life back, then remembered there was no old life to return to.
“Is your brother such a notorious villain that people will welcome any comer to replace him?” he peevishly asked his aunt after a dinner attended by a particularly sycophantic set of aristocrats.
She blinked rapidly, which he learned was how she responded to any question she could not answer with rigorous correctness. “Well, he is a villain, but not precisely notorious. He doesn’t matter, though. People know we will prevail, so they court your favor.”
Ash snorted derisively, even as his aunt’swewarmed a chilly corner of his heart. “Why are they so certain? It still seems like moonshine to me.”
