Page 27 of A Duke in Disguise
“My brother married your mother.”
Ash blinked. “I’m sorry—”
“Your mother was Lady Eleanor Carstairs, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Staffordshire,” she added, as if this would clear things up. “She died when you were an infant. Your father died shortly thereafter.”
Ash gripped the edges of the table. “You’re telling me that I was legitimate?” Nothing, nothing at all, of the early part of his life, what little he knew of it, made sense if he were legitimate. If he hadn’t been a cast-off baseborn child, then he didn’t know who he was. And then, all at once, the rest of the lady’s words slotted into place. “If my father was your eldest brother, that makes me...” Before the words had quite left his mouth, the swirling mass of confusion in his mind coalesced into something that took an appalling shape. “No, certainly not.” He rose to his feet and stepped back from her, his chair squeaking loudly against the conservatory floor. “I’m not getting caught up in this. I’m going home, and I won’t return here.” He was halfway to the garden door. His pen and ink remained on the table and he wasn’t going back to get them. He took another step. “If anyone ever asks, I’ll deny this entire conversation.”
“Understandable. But before you do that, you perhaps will consider that you are the only thing standing between my brother and a dukedom. With that title will come a good deal of power and money and I know to a certainty that he’ll use both to do harm.”
His hand was on the door; all he had to do was push it open and walk through. But even as he felt the cool brass of the handle he knew he couldn’t. Lady Caroline was asking for his help. Help only he could provide. And Ash—whoever he was—wasn’t someone who could turn down a request for aid. He turned around, still leaning against the closed door.
“How came I to be sent away?” There were likely a dozen other questions he ought to be asking but that was all he could think of: why had he been sent away that first time, the abandonment that set in motion all the subsequent abandonments. The patchwork of memories that came before Roger, the constant disorientation, the sense of recovering from each seizure in a new and foreign place—none of that made sense if he had been the legitimate heir to a dukedom.
“That was entirely my doing, I’m afraid.” He stared at her. “You told me once that you didn’t think I would leave a child to die. After your father—my elder brother—died, you were all that stood between my other brother and a title. You survived the fall down the stairs but I was afraid you wouldn’t survive the next attempt. I had no choice but to send you away.”
“Attempt,” Ash repeated, not wanting her words to mean what he thought they might.
“Attempt on your life. I saw him push you down the stairs with my own eyes.”
Ash sat back down and buried his face in his hands. His first thought was to go home and tell Verity that his life had taken a turn that was ripped from one of the gothic novels she occasionally published—a lost heir, a wicked uncle, a dying duke. It struck him that this would likely be the last conversation he would have with Verity—Verity Plum, confirmed radical, would not rub shoulders with the heir to a dukedom. And whatever life was like for a duke, or a duke-in-waiting, or whatever he was, it likely did not entail illustrating dirty books and living in a ramshackle house in Holywell Street. He was going to lose Verity no matter what. He was going to lose everything that made him who he was.
“I planned to bring you back,” she continued, “once I was of age or married to someone with enough power to help me. But I had underestimated how easy it is for a child to slip through the cracks. There was simply no trace of you when I went to look. I am terribly sorry, and there is nothing I can say or do to make that right. In my defense I was sixteen, and perhaps not as clever as I thought I was. It remains the greatest regret of my life.”
He didn’t know if it was his imagination or the whisper of a memory, but he thought he could picture a younger Lady Caroline, equally worried, but bolder, less timid. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen. If this entire business seemed the scheme of a fanciful child, perhaps that was because it had been. “If you are correct, then it seems that you saved my life, ma’am. I thank you.”
“Piffle. I made a poor fist of the entire operation,” she said, as if referring to bungling the repotting of an orchid, and not foiling her brother’s murder plot. He supposed that, living the life she led, murderous brothers and potted orchids featured equally.
“Will your brother not revenge himself upon you when he finds out that you mean to unseat him?”
She let out a nervous breath of laughter. “He tried to murder a child of four years old. Come now, Mr. Ashby. Or, Lord Montagu, I ought to say.” His stomach turned at hearing her brother’s title applied to him. “You know well that he’ll try to harm me one way or the other. I only ask if you’ll help me stop him from doing more harm.”
Ash had the sense of his old, self-constructed family crumbling away, leaving him only with those who had cast him out to begin with.
“I have one condition,” he said. “I need time. A month.” A month wouldn’t be enough, not nearly enough, to get used to the idea that he might be the person Lady Caroline thought he was, to assimilate all that meant. And it wouldn’t be enough time to bid farewell to the life he thought was his own. But he could spend that month living without the fear of losing more people, because that—if Lady Caroline was correct—was now all but a certainty. He would lose Verity, he would lose his work and his life. He could spend a month living as a man with nothing to lose.
Chapter Nine
Verity looked up from cutting a new nib to find Ash leaning against the doorway to her office, feigning nonchalance. That was his tell. Verity hadn’t lost a single hand of cards to him since discovering that Ash’s only way of dissembling was to feign absolute indifference to things that he considered greatly important.
“I brought you something,” he said when she beckoned him to enter. He placed a few items on her desk and sat in his usual chair, crossing his legs languidly. If Verity hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was bored, come to dismiss a tiresome errand.
“A bottle of wine and a stack of explicit illustrations,” she said, surveying Ash’s offerings. “Two of my favorite things. And”—she peered inside a paper-wrapped parcel he placed on her desk—“ a wedge of cheddar. Three of my favorite things, then. Thank you. To what do I owe these earthly delights?”
“It’s a celebration. I saw you’ve sold out of theLadies’ Registeragain.”
She grinned. The second issue had been easier to compile than the first—a few letters requesting advice, a theater review, and a scary story. The third issue could be devoted almost entirely to answering correspondence, and she was looking forward to it with something like relish. “Will you join me, or am I meant to celebrate in solitude?”
He tsked. “Be serious, Plum. There’s far too much cheese for you to eat on your own.”
“How little you know me,” she said mournfully. This was a seduction. She was being seduced with cheese and lewd drawings and she could not be happier about it. From the top drawer of her desk she removed a corkscrew and a knife and passed the latter to Ash so he could pare the cheese while she opened the wine.
“I noticed you’re answering the letters under your own name.” Ash slid a piece of cheese to her as she took a pull from the bottle and handed it to him.
“I figured Verity Plum already sounds enough like someone’s nom de plume, so might as well take advantage of it.” For the first issue, she had answered the letters anonymously. For the second, she hadn’t bothered. “The truth is that I never put my name on theRegister. First because it was Nate and my father’s, and later because I didn’t want to go to prison. And it never felt necessary. Everyone knows I ran theRegisterfrom the week my father died.” She supposed she might sound arrogant, but it was the simple truth, and to Ash she could own it. Even with Nate in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, she was having surprisingly little difficulty managing the business on her own. “But with theLadies’ Register, it’s mine and I want to put my name all over it.”
“You should be proud.”
“I am.” For a moment there was no sound but the distant murmur from the street below. Nan had left, the shop was closed, and the men in the print room had finished for the day. Ash and Verity were alone in the house. She took the bottle from his hand and drank, feeling his gaze on her. When she put the bottle down he was still looking at her, not bothering to conceal it. She looked back. He raised an eyebrow. She gave him what she knew to be an especially feral smile.
