A Duke in Disguise Read online

  “You can go back to sleep,” he said.

  “You’re shivering.” She sat on the edge of the bed and pressed a cool hand to his forehead. “You’re freezing cold, Ash.”

  “My sheets are sweaty,” he admitted.

  “Come to bed with me. It’s warm.” At his hesitation, she squeezed his hand. “Just sleeping, Ash. Otherwise I’ll help you change your sheets.”

  He went with her. When she got under her quilt, he stripped out of his nightshirt and climbed into bed beside her. The next time he woke was when Verity’s forearm landed on his face. He opened his eyes. The woman took up a full three-quarters of her bed, leaving Ash with a sliver of mattress and a scrap of quilt. He was marveling over the mathematical precision with which her not-particularly-large body was arranged to occupy the lion’s share of a not-particularly-small bed, when he heard a hiss. It was pitch black, but following the direction of the sound he found a pair of glittering eyes staring at him from on top of Verity’s clothes press.

  “It’s too early to be laughing,” Verity mumbled, pressing her face into the pillow and somehow pushing him even further off the bed. “Save your levity for business hours.”

  He pushed a lock of her hair out of his mouth. “The cat thinks you’re attacking me. Which, to be fair, is not an unreasonable interpretation of the facts.”

  She opened an eye. “Slander.” But she wriggled backward on the bed and made room for Ash to have a less precarious relationship with the mattress. “How did she even get in here? The door is shut.”

  “She probably just walked in when we did. She’s an enterprising kitty.”

  “Or possibly a demon.” The cat hissed again as Verity rolled on top of Ash, causing him to dissolve into another bout of laughter. Verity was warm and soft on top of him, and he could feel her smile against the side of his neck. This was real, he thought. This was his life. Arundel House was only the backdrop for his nightmares, vague and dreamlike and unreal. Verity’s fingers slid down his shoulders, past his elbows, across the scar that bisected his forearm. He grabbed her hands and rolled her over, kissing her, as if that would make this moment solidify into reality, displacing old scars.

  Ash knocked on the front door of Arundel house at precisely a quarter past eleven the following morning. It was Wednesday—not one of his usual days for visiting, but he watched the house until he saw Lady Caroline’s brother leave. Ash didn’t know why he went back—he hadn’t intended to return until the month was through. But when he and Verity had finally gotten out of bed, he decided that there was nothing for it but to lie. He would tell Lady Caroline that he did not have a scar, that he was not the nephew she had known. Surely there was some other way for her to be safe, to protect her father and servants from her brother. Ash didn’t need to be a part of it. Lady Caroline’s ghastly brother could keep his title.

  The footman showed him not to the conservatory, but to a small upstairs parlor.

  “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 word duty brought 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 sto
p 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.

  She had thought that with Ash it would be different because he had never asked her for a single thing. Even if she could believe that Ash would continue not to want things she couldn’t give, it would be Verity herself who wanted more. She could already feel the demand welling up inside her—she wanted all of Ash, and she wanted him in a way she couldn’t even identify. She wanted him in bed, she wanted his friendship. When she woke in his arms, she had felt some chilly part of her melt. Or maybe she had never had a core of ice to begin with. Maybe she was warm and alive and it was only Ash who let her feel safe enough to realize it. It would have been so easy, frighteningly easy, to delude herself into thinking nothing mattered outside the cocoon that contained the two of them.

  Instead she went to Portia’s house. It would be a bracing reminder that love affairs did not last forever, and that she needed to guard herself against the certainty that she would need to navigate a similar course with Ash. Portia’s house, however, was in a state of mild chaos in preparation for that evening’s salon. The slightly harried butler ushered Verity into the morning room where Amelia sat with a stack of papers on a desk before her and a pair of spectacles on the top of her head.

  “Mama’s in the green parlor having strong words with the wine merchant,” Amelia whispered. “He tried to pass off corked Bordeaux and I don’t think he’ll make that mistake again.”

  “No, I dare say he’ll find that he wants to take up an entirely new trade after your mother’s through with him. Perhaps retire to the country.”

  “Oh, that reminds me.” Amelia wrinkled her nose. “Mama somehow got an invitation to the Featherstones’ for a shooting party, so we’re meant to decamp to Hampshire next week.”

  “You sound less than pleased.”

  “You have no idea how exhausting it is to talk to people.”

  “You make perfectly lovely conversation.”

  “I can talk about electricity and Ovid and sugar boycotts as well as anyone, but nobody at the Featherstones’ house party will wish to discuss any of those things. Or perhaps they will, but if I dare to say a word about, say, the Thames tunnel or explosive gases, they’ll take it as proof that I’ve been badly brought up. Whereas if I sit quietly that’ll also be proof of my low origins. So I must confine my conversation to the weather, lesser society gossip, and some of the more bland aspects of the theater.” She recited this list as if she had heard it many times. “And the constant scrutiny is . . .” She shuddered. “I don’t know how Mama bears it. I wish I could stay with you instead.”

  “Really?” Verity had always thought Nate was the reason Amelia enjoyed spending time at their house.

  “Do you want to know what’s droll? My mother has gone to all this trouble to make sure I don’t make a bad marriage, but the truth is that I swear I’d marry the first interesting man to make an offer if it got me a bit of freedom. I told you the truth when I said I wasn’t in love with your brother, but I’d have married him in half a heartbeat. When we were—” She broke off, glancing at her papers, then at Verity, before composing herself. “When we were discussing a topic of mutual interest—and no, that is not a euphemism, Verity—I thought it would be the easiest thing in the world to take all this fragile respectability that Mama is so set on protecting, and just cast it to the ground and never have to worry about it again.”

  Verity sympathized. In Amelia’s shoes she might well have acted on that impulse. But she felt obligated to argue the responsible point of view. “If you make a bad marriage, you’ll be thoroughly impoverished.”

  “We’re thoroughly impoverished now. I’d worry about winding up a governess, except that no good family would want me as a governess.” Amelia straightened some of the papers before her. “Mama’s belief that she can find me a wealthy husband is the only silly idea she’s had in two decades.”

  “Give your mother some credit,” Verity said, but she felt a surge of anxiety for her friends.

  She left before Portia had done with the wine merchant so she decided to walk in the direction of Cavendish Square. Arundel House was minutes from Portia’s, and Ash had mentioned needing to pay a call on Lady Caroline Talbot. Verity thought that she might be able to catch up with him and they could either walk home together or share a hackney.

  He had explained the necessity of leaving through the garden gate, so Verity found the mews that ran behind the house and waited, leaning against the wall of what had to be the carriage house. She took a book out of her pocket and started to read, but found her attention diverted by the sheer amount of foot traffic passing before her. This lane couldn’t possibly access more than three, possibly four, houses, which meant this small army of servants, trad
espeople, carters, and coachmen were all in the service of at most four households. Her house in Holywell Street had always been a busy place, with customers and workers and friends coming and going at all hours, but it had nothing on the mews behind Arundel House. There were men with spades, boys leading pony carts, three girls beating a rug, a washerwoman carrying a bucket, and deliveries of ale, fish, apples, and coal. And that was merely what she saw glancing up between sentences. Eventually she gave up and tucked the book in her pocket.

  A few people glanced at her, some curious, some suspicious. She wondered how they could tell she didn’t belong—she wasn’t dressed much differently than any upper servant—and then realized it was because she stood still. Remaining idle was the most conspicuous thing she could have done in this place. She tried to calculate, in pounds sterling, what it must cost to employ this many people. But before she got far, the garden gate swung open.

  Ash looked frankly terrible. His face was a sickly gray and his mouth was pressed into a flat line. As she watched, he leaned against the wall opposite her, his hands covering his eyes. She went to him.

  “Ash?” She touched his arm lightly.

  He dropped his hand and stared at her, as if struggling to recognize her in this unfamiliar setting. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Are you well? Do you need a carriage? A glass of water?”

  “I’m not going to have a seizure.” He looked at her, bleaker than she had ever seen him. “I don’t want to go back there,” he said, tipping his head towards Arundel House.

  “Then don’t. There will be other jobs.”

  “It’s not that. It’s the, ah, family connection.” His voice was low enough so they couldn’t be overheard by anyone walking past. “Apparently the men in my family are vicious bastards.” He swallowed, and Verity had the sense he was weighing his words. “And Lady Caroline could use an ally. So I need to help her.”